You needn't pick sides when it comes to Linux and Windows anymore. If you want to work on Linux and game on Windows then you have options available to you in 2021. That list just got a little bit bigger as Nvidia now makes it possible to hand your Linux system's Windows VM a whole card's worth of GeForce graphical grunt.
Nvidia has now enabled GPU passthrough support (in beta) for Windows virtual machines on GeForce graphics cards. This effectively means it's possible to run a Linux machine and then run a virtual Windows machine within it, and hand that unfettered access to a graphics card.
Specifically a GeForce graphics card, too, and not one of Nvidia's more pricey enterprise grade GPUs. That's a big step for Nvidia, as it had previously kept most virtualisation functions out of the hands of owners of gaming cards, offering them up instead with its Quadro, Tesla, and other enterprise cards.
Nvidia's touting it as a win for gamers that wish to primarily use Linux.
As of today, I’m happy to announce that all of the pull requests to make OBS Studio able to run as a native Wayland application, and capture monitors and windows on Wayland compositors, landed.
I’ve been blogging sparsely about my quest to make screencasting on Wayland a fluid and seamless experience for about a couple of years now. This required some work throughout the stack: from making Mutter able to hand DMA-BUF buffers to PipeWire; to improving the GTK desktop portal; to creating a plugin for OBS Studio; to fixing bugs in PipeWire; it was a considerable amount of work.
But I think none of it would matter if this feature is not easily accessible to everyone. The built-in screen recorder of GNOME Shell already works, but most importantly, we need to make sure applications are able to capture the screen properly. Sadly our hands are tied when it comes to proprietary apps, there’s just no way to contribute. But free and open source software allows us to do that! Fortunately, not only OBS Studio is distributed under GPL, it also is a pretty popular app with an active community. That’s why, instead of creating a fork or just maintaining a plugin, I decided to go the long hard route of proposing everything to OBS Studio itself.
By enabling the auto-login feature in Linux Mint, we can easily log in to the Linux Mint system on boot without providing the password. Therefore, once you have enabled the auto-login, there is no need to provide the password for the boot time authentication.
In this post, we will focus on enabling the auto-login feature on Linux Mint 20.
Cron is a software utility or Linux command also recognized as a Cron job used to schedule tasks or jobs to be executed after a fixed interval of time in the future. The Cron jobs are mostly used for scheduling tasks on the server for automating the administration and system maintenance tasks. The Cron jobs can be scheduled to run every minute, hour, day, or month and we will learn how to run a Cron job after every 10, 20, or 30 minutes in this post. Let’s start.
Flatpak is a repository of software and packages just like a snap store. The snap store is supported by Ubuntu, while the Red Hat backs Flatpak. Flatpak is growing and becoming really popular amongst the community because it provides the complete package along with its dependent packages. Although Flatpak is similar to Ubuntu’s snap store, the snap store is not supported by most of the Linux operating systems as compared to the Flatpak.
Flatpak allows the developers to create a complete application package that includes all the required libraries and dependent packages to run the application. The developer just has to build the application once, and then he can use it and run it in any Linux operating system without making a single change. Flatpak applications run completely on their own and do not have to do anything with the system, so it is possible to run the same application on a system multiple times.
Developers require a platform that allows them to create/test their applications and help them find and fix the issues. The platforms and stacks offer a solution package consisting of an HTTP server, a database management system, and interpretation support to some CGI scripting languages like Perl, PHP, or Python.
We cover one such platform that emulates web-server-like environments on a local system, i.e., XAMPP/LAMPP. There is numerous other software available as well, but XAMPP takes the lead due to the offered features. XAMPP provides an appropriate testing environment that facilitates and speeds up the developmental process. This tutorial will learn to install, configure, and use XAMPP/LAMP on a Linux system.
AWS CLI (Amazon Web Service Command Line Interface) is an open-source command-line utility tool for managing Amazon web services. AWS CLI is a utility tool provided by AWS to manage resources. AWS API is directly accessible through AWS CLI. Using AWS CLI utility, you can create scripts for automating Amazon Web Services.
AWS CLI is available in version 1 and version 2. AWS recommends using AWS CLI version 2. If you already version 1, suggest to uninstall it or create symlink/alias with a different name.
Most Ubuntu users like to use their native language as their primary input language when running their system. The Ubuntu Settings Utility allows you to add your native language as a keyboard input source. This input source language can be configured to be used as your default keyboard layout. This layout indicates that everything you type on your keyboard will be perceived by your Ubuntu system based on the selected keyboard layout.
This article describes how you can change the layout of your keyboard to match your preferred input language on the desktop and it also describes how to change it in the terminal (see the chapter about changing the keyboard layout on Ubuntu server towards the end of the article). We ran the commands and procedures mentioned in this article on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
SQLite is a lightweight, small and self-contained RDBMS in a C library. Popular databases like MySql, PostgreSQL, etc. works in the client-server model and they have a dedicated process running and controlling all the aspects of database operation.
But SQLite has no process running and has no client-server model. SQLite DB is simply an file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.db extension. Every programming language has a library to support SQLite.
SSH tunneling commonly known as SSH port forwarding is a technique of routing local network traffic over through encrypted SSH on remote hosts. Routing network traffic via SSH tunnels ensure high level of data encryption and security, especially for unencrypted network protocols such as FTP. This is very useful especially when connected to unsecured networks.
SAML is a standard for logging users by allowing the Identity Providers to pass login credentials to the Service Providers. There are several advantages to this single sign-on (SSO) standard over signing in using usernames and passwords, like you do not need to type credentials in, and no one has to remember passwords and renew them. Most organizations are now aware of user identities as they log into their Active Directory. Using this data to log users into other programs, such as web-based applications, makes sense, and one of the most sophisticated ways to do this is to use SAML. The customer’s identification is moved from one location (identity provider) to another (service provider) using SAML SSO. This is achieved by the exchange of XML documents that are digitally signed.
End-users can use SAML SSO to authenticate to one or more AWS accounts and gain access to particular positions thanks to Okta’s integration with AWS. Okta administrators can download roles into Okta from one or more AWS and allocate them to users. Moreover, Okta administrators may also set the length of the authenticated user session using Okta. AWS screens containing a list of AWS user roles are provided to the end-users. They may pick a login role to assume, which will determine their permissions for the length of that authenticated session.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable automatic updates on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Automatic updates in Ubuntu are not only a security feature but also meant for user convenience. As we have mentioned, it is a by default enabled feature that keeps your system up to date, but it is also annoying for many users due to the errors. You can disable these auto-updates but update your system manually as it is essential to maintain your data security in the system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Icinga 2 on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Icinga 2 is a free, open-source, and most widely used monitoring system that can be used to monitor the health of networked hosts and services. With Icinga 2 you can monitor CPU load, Memory usage, Disk usage, IMAP, POP3, SMTP, HTTP, Routers, Switches, and many more.
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 the Icinga 2 monitoring server on a Debian 10 (Buster).
If you need to use the bash terminal to create directories on Linux, the best way to do it is with the mkdir command. What is “mkdir?” It stands for “make directory,” and it’s one of the most valuable tools on all of Linux. With it, you can create folders anywhere on Linux.
There’s no need to install “mkdir” to use it on your computer. In fact, it comes pre-installed on every single Linux operating system out there today. A Linux OS probably couldn’t function without it!
Do you need to get VMware Workstation Pro 16 working on your Ubuntu PC but don’t know how to do it? We can help! Follow along with this guide as we show you how to install VMware Workstation Pro 16 on Ubuntu.
Note: VMware Workstation Pro 16 will expire after 30 days of evaluation if you do not purchase a software license. For more information on how to purchase a software license for VMware Workstation Pro 16, click on this link here.
The full form of rsync is remote sync. rsync is a command-line program for syncing files. It is used to sync files from your computer to a remote computer, from a remote computer to your computer, from a folder to another folder on the same computer, from your computer to your external hard drive, from a remote computer to your external hard drive, etc. It can also be used to make incremental backups.
This article will show you how to enable rsync on your Synology NAS and sync files from your computer to your Synology NAS. So, let’s get started.
If you dual boot Windows and Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution, you might have noticed a time difference between the two operating systems.
When you use Linux, it shows the correct time. But when you boot into Windows, it shows the wrong time. Sometimes, it is the opposite and Linux shows the wrong time and Windows has the correct time.
That’s strange specially because you are connected to the internet and your date and time is set to be used automatically.
A zombie process in Linux refers to those already dead processes but, in one way or another, are still present in the process table of the system. The loophole is that, for some reason, this process was not cleaned by the parent from the process table. Usually, this happens after the completion of the execution process.
The usual way of operation in Linux is that after a process completes its execution, it notifies its parent, which is responsible for removing the process from the table. Unfortunately, the parent is unable to remove the process from memory in cases where the parent cannot read the child’s status. This is how it comes to be that we have dead processes in the process table. These are what we are calling the zombie processes.
Laravel, written in PHP, is a popular MVC framework for developing web applications. Laravel makes it easy to develop dynamic web apps with powerful built-in tools such as database systems, routes, controllers, authentication system, and a lot more.
Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework. It was first released in June 2011. With each new release, Laravel is making it easier to implement complicated features without wasting too much time. From scaffolding to providing helper methods to build advanced features such as authentication, Models for making database queries, controllers to write request logic, and Views to render blade templates or even supports Inertia for building frontend with React or Vue.
Currently, Laravel 8.x is the latest release. For a quick start, Laravel provides Laravel Breeze (optional) to scaffold the entire authentication system that includes login, register, and a password reset system.
If you are a PHP developer, Laravel is a genie for you. The huge community and well-explained documentation is always there if one needs any help. To further save time in coding popular features, search for packages already coded by somebody in the community. Use Packalyst, a huge directory to find Laravel packages built by the community. From interacting with a third-party API to implementing different authentication systems, multiple packages are available for all kinds of needs.
Today we are looking at how to install Sonic the Hedgehog Time Twisted 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.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
For troubleshooting, bug fixes, and many other reasons, you may need to know the version of the operating system. Particularly when it comes to the configuration of software repositories or installation of any software, it is extremely important to get the right version of the software so that the solution is compatible with the operating system version. This article shows you various methods for determining the version of CentOS.
We shall take “ping a specific port” to mean that you want to verify a specific port’s status for a given IP address. This is useful for troubleshooting why a service is not working properly.
This article will show you how to verify a specific network port’s status by using Netcat, Nmap, and Nping.
The pass command empowers you to take full control of your password management tasks on Linux.
SSH keys are commonly used without a passphrase. This is especially true when automating tasks because no human is expected to be available to type in the passphrase. Nevertheless, the use of SSH key passphrases is recommended for interactive users. This will add an extra layer of security in case the private key is stolen or accidentally disclosed.
Time for another round-up of news for Stadia, the cloud gaming / game streaming service from Google with plenty more games coming along with some out now. There's also a reveal of what you will get in April with Stadia Pro.
Another promising game engine with lots of big features is Flax, available free with the source available (but not Open Source) has a huge new release out with improvements to their Linux support.
The big highlight for us here of course is their new Linux Editor, so now you can build and export games using a full Linux development environment. Using Vulkan for the rendering this is the full experience they say with "live scripting with C++/C# hot-reload, Visual Code integration, scenes editor, game cooking, terrain editing, foliage editing, and much more" giving it feature parity with the Windows editor.
Quake II RTX from Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA continues expanding with a brand new update out now. It's not a huge one but it does continue to expand the Ray Tracing support for Vulkan.
In addition to already supporting NVIDIA's own VK_NV_ray_tracing extension and the more recent vendor neutral VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline extension, they've now gone further to support Ray Tracing with the VK_KHR_ray_query extension API now too.
Paradox Interactive has announced the Leviathan expansion for Europa Universalis IV is due to release on April 27. This will be the first release from Paradox Tinto, their newer Barcelona-based studio.
One of the highlights of Leviathan is the ability to use diplomatic favours to gain benefits from other nations. If you post a diplomat to curry favour in a foreign nation, you will slowly build up enough diplomatic power to request material aid, changes in alliances and even the return of core provinces.
Ready for another game that will make time vanish? Goblinz Studio have announced that Legend of Keepers releases on April 29. Blending together dungeon management, monster management, a little strategy and some rogue-lite mechanics Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Master is already great with the current Early Access build.
With the full release two new modes will be available with Ascension and Endless along with a tease of some other extra content for the big 1.0.
Available now in Early Access, Mage Drops mixes together the sports game Golf with a platformer to create quite a nice casual experience you can try now.
"Combining elements of golf and minigolf-like games with puzzle platforming and a twist of fantasy magic, Mage Drops evolves the hit-and-wait formula of golf by adding magic: shots can be influenced mid-flight and elements of the world can be influenced like pinball bumpers, flippers, moving platforms and more!"
GNOME 41 this autumn will be shipping with libadwaita, the successor and GTK4 port to GNOME's libhandy that will help to define the visual language and user experience for GNOME applications.
Libadwaita aims to help unify GNOME applications and advance their human interface guidelines while still allowing GTK4 to advance and be used by developers independent of GNOME.
Looking ahead, libadwaita will likely be used by GNOME GTK4 applications for providing better integration or a more unified UI/UX across these GNOME applications. While Adwaita has been the GNOME "visual language" for a while, the new Libadwaita library will be "the missing code" to it.
GNOME 41 will come with libadwaita, the GTK 4 port of libhandy that will play a central role in defining the visual language and user experience of GNOME applications.
For the past 20 years, GNOME has had human interface guidelines — HIG for short — that are followed by applications targeting the platform.
Implementing the HIG is a lot of manual work for application developers. This led to lots of verbose copypasted UI code, full of slight interpretation variations and errors, making applications hard to maintain and full of visual and behaviorial inconsistencies. The fact these guidelines are not set in stone and evolve every so often made these inconsistencies explode.
Like the EndeavourOS test, the Garuda Linux experience left me deeply frustrated. I didn't achieve anything, and yet I spent hours fighting the system, trying to figure out what to do, and sweating a pint of blood just to get the basic stuff working. Like, in this case, a separate, new Firefox profile. How difficult can this be? Why does a browser profile have to be enmeshed so heavily with a dozen other packages and tools? The concept breaks the whole idea of the simple portability of Firefox profiles, and also presents a user with a no-choice option.
There are also rough edges everywhere, the ergonomics aren't good, the system is hyperactive. The desktop should be a pleasant background, not in the wallpaper sense, which allows you to focus on your applications and productivity. If you have to mind it all the time or be painfully aware of its behavior, the OS becomes a burden. Like the terminal colors or the ZSH tweaks. Anyway, nothing much else to say really. You read it, or you didn't, you think I'm an idiot or not, and life moves on. Another day, another sliver of my soul crushed. On a sad note, Dedoimedo out.
Manjaro Linux is one of those Linux distributions which is slowly evolving to reach great heights of Linux desktops. Manjaro 21.0 was released a while back and hence it's time for a Manjaro 21.0 review.
Google Chrome browser from Google, inc. has been updated to 89.0.4389.114. Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, and was later ported to Linux.
GIMP is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized tasks.
Sigil is a multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor. It is designed to edit books in ePub format.
The first stable release of AlmaLinux, the drop-in CentOS replacement, has arrived on schedule. AlmaLinux is an open source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aims to fill the void left by Red Hat’s move to divert its resources to the CentOS Stream distro.
Proposed by server OS vendor CloudLinux, AlmaLinux backs the new Linux distro with a financial commitment of a million dollars a year, and promises to develop and foster an open source community around the project.
“So, after about 4 months since the decision to steer CentOS in a different path, you now have a 1:1 binary compatible drop-in replacement, with a very long support timeframe,” write the AlmaLinux developers in the release announcement.
At the start of the year CloudLinux announced AlmaLinux as a 1:1 fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In ending out Q1, as promised this CentOS alternative is now available for download.
Following the announcement last year that CentOS 8 would be discontinued EOY2021 in favor of focusing on CentOS Stream as the future upstream to RHEL, "Project Lenix" by CloudLinux was started as one of the new RHEL/CentOS alternatives.
After several months of hard work, this community-focused, RHEL8 binary compatible distribution is available for download. CloudLinux Inc is said to be sponsoring AlmaLinux with $1M USD annually.
Good news, Enterprise Linux users! AlmaLinux stable version has been officially released!! Cloud Linux team has released AlmaLinux beta version a month ago. The stable release was planned for the end of the Q1 2021. The AlamaLinux OS team is dedicated and punctual. As promised, the first stable version of AlmaLinux is out yesterday. Go ahead and test it. If everything is OK, deploy it on your production servers.
Today, we’re pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Engineered to help deliver enterprise-ready innovation and drive digital transformation from the datacenter to the edge and beyond, RHEL 8.4 Beta adds new capabilities and enhances existing features to further refine RHEL as a consistent foundation for the open hybrid cloud.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 continues the company's work on improving their hybrid cloud capabilities, system administrative and management enhancements, and more. There are also select new/updated packages and various kernel features back-ported to their Linux 4.18 based kernel.
AlmaLinux is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated Linux distributions of 2021.
In a recent announcement, it looks like the first stable release for AlmaLinux is here. Perhaps, a worthy CentOS replacement that you’ve always wanted?
CentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.
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The CentOS GNU/Linux distribution, which is very popular on the server-side, has been following Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) stable releases since its inception in on May 14th, 2004. Those who wanted to use RHEL without a RedHat license, or additional licenses in the case of many RedHat customers, could install CentOS and get something that was binary compatible and almost entirely identical. The branding and a few other minor details were all that separated CentOS from RHEL. That changed with an announcement titled CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream", written by RedHat asset Rich Bowen, in December 2020.
CentOS is no longer a 1:1 clone of RHEL. It is, instead, now based on RHEL beta versions. At least two projects started their own CentOS forks in response to that change: Rocky Linux, lead by CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer, and AlmaLinux, developed by CloudLinux Incorporated.
The AlmaLinux project, sponsored by CloudLinux, has issued its first stable release along with details of a new open-source foundation set up to manage the project.
The AlmaLinux project, originally codenamed Lenix, was started soon after Red Hat informed the world that CentOS would be replaced by CentOS Stream.
Both are related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the commercial build, but whereas CentOS is a downstream community build, Stream is a late upstream build.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10.8 “Buster” update, Deepin 20.2 is here with updated kernels to Linux 5.10 LTS for those who want a long-term supported kernel, as well as Linux 5.11 for those wanting bleeding-edge features and top-notch hardware support. Both kernels are included by default and you can choose which one you want to use from the boot loader thanks to Deepin Linux 20’s dual-kernel capabilities.
Also improved in this release is the File Manager, which received support for changing unmounted disk names, enhanced full-text search to help you find the files or folders you’re looking for more quickly using English letters and numbers, redefined “Time accessed” and “Time modified” items in the file vault, support for displaying information more clearly, and optimized file operations.
There is no argument that Linux has the longest list of operating systems to satisfy everyone’s requirements. However, as a beginner, people always get confused about which one is best and provides convenient features for their system. The article considers Elementary OS and Linux mint to provide a side-by-side comparison. If you need a middleweight operating system, you can choose one of these Linux distros by reading our given details.
A couple of months ago, the Linux Mint devs discovered that many Linux Mint users don’t regularly update their installations, leaving them vulnerable to attacks, and others run older Linux Mint versions that reached end of life and are no longer receiving updates.
After receiving some negative feedback from users who didn’t understand the changes that they wanted to implement in Update Manager to make users update their systems on a regular basis, the Linux Mint devs decided to implement a new notification system for updates through a pop-up dialog (just like Ubuntu).
JingOS is a Linux distribution designed for tablets, with a touch-friendly user interface designed to resemble iPadOS or Android. The operating system is based on Ubuntu Linux and KDE’s Plasma Mobile user interface, but it features a custom home screen, status and quick settings tools, settings utility, file browser, and more.
After an initial release earlier this year, the software is under active development and today the team released JingOS v0.8 which is the first build to support over-the-air updates, include an app store, and other improvements.
Collaborative and Agnostic Database, Documentation and Guides to configure Open-Source Friendly Switches, Routers and Firewalls. Designed to be easily shared with others.
Google has a firm grip with their products and services ubiquitous on the desktop. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are questions about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetized and attached to Google’s ecosystem. In this series, we’ll explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We’ll recommend open source solutions.
DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) is not exactly a new technology, and it is something that is supported by all of the big-name browsers.
Google has already implemented the privacy and security boosting feature in the Windows, macOS and mobile versions of its Chrome browser, and now the company is working to bring it to Linux.
With the platform attracting a very security-minded groups of users, the only surprise here is that it has taken Google this long to bring DoH to Chrome for Linux. Once implemented, the change means that both DNS queries and DNS responses will be securely transmitted over HTTPS. But the Linux implementation is set to differ slightly from versions of the browser for other platforms.
By default, LibreOffice uses the ODF (OpenDocument) format, but it’s able to competently handle Microsoft Office document formats. You can export to PDF, too.
LibreOffice works best as an offline, single-user desktop office suite. A server service, LibreOffice Online, is available if you want to create your own collaboration server for employees, but it’s a significant challenge to implement compared to public cloud-based options from Google, Microsoft, and Zoho.
2 years ago, known Thought Criminal Richard M Stallman was falsely accused of defending rape in an Orwellian smear campaign, orchestrated by mainstream media at the behest of proprietary software vendors. 36 years fighting for your digital freedom, cancelled. It was so vicious that he resigned from his post as president of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF did nothing to protect or defend him. However, you can defend him!
On 21 March 2021, FSF board of directors re-instated Richard Stallman. In response, the media started a new smear campaign. A petition was created, calling for the forceful removal of RMS and the entire FSF board of directors. RMS has been wrongly accused of sexism, transphobia, ableism and a whole host of things intended to discredit him. Do not listen to any of it. Richard Stallman’s political notes and articles paint the picture of a man who has staunchly campaigned against bigotry in all its forms!
In response, we, the Free software movement, started our own petition. We wish for RMS to remain in his post, and for the FSF to hold their ground. We call for the FSF to defend Richard Stallman’s honour and his legacy. Richard Stallman is a human being, whose right to free speech was heavily suppressed. We must demonstrate our support of him to the FSF, loudly and clearly.
If you support Free Software, believe in freedom of speech, freedom of community and social justice (true social justice, where a person is treated with dignity and not cancelled just for their beliefs), sign your name here:
Coming six months after the GIMP 2.10.22 update, which is probably already installed on your GNU/Linux distribution, GIMP 2.10.24 is mostly a bugfix release that improves support for various image file formats like file BMP, DDS, HEIF, JPEG, PDF, PNG, PSD, PSP, and TIFF.
However, the most important changes in GIMP 2.10.24 is off-canvas point snapping, allowing you to snap various tools to grids, guides, and vectors, outside or inside the canvas area, and support for importing and exporting GeoTIFF metadata, which provides georeferencing information embedded within a TIFF file used by map makers.
Also, I realize the cause I’m describing here is not as urgent as global warming, racism, Middle Eastern refugees, or many other issues. Nevertheless, it’s an issue concerning infrastructure, about how we do things, and it can be addressed in parallel with other issues. Moreover, I think almost every ailment we have today goes back to disempowering ordinary people, and that also is a big part of what software freedom is about.
Owning your own copyrights in open source is possible provided you’re careful. The strategies outlined above are based on my own experiences (all in the US) as a contract employee from 1995-2008 there after as a regular employee but are not the only ones you could pursue, so ask around to see what others have done as well. The main problem with all the strategies above is that they work well when you’re negotiating your employment. If you’re already working at some corporation they’re unlikely to be helpful to you unless you really have a simple own time open source project. Oh, and just remember that while the snippets I quoted above for the contract case may actually have been in contracts I signed, this isn’t legal advice and you should have a lawyer advise you how best to incorporate the various points raised.
With a groundbreaking resolution, Dortmund has committed itself to the use of Free Software. With an overwhelming, cross-faction majority, the city council has paved the way for "Public Money? Public Code!” In the future, software developed or commissioned by the administration will be made available to the general public.
Back in February, the city council approved a motion previously submitted by the SPD, Bündnis90/Die Grünen, CDU, Die Linke+ and FDP/Bürgerliste. In the future, Free Software is to be used wherever possible and software developed or commissioned for development by the administration is to be made available to the general public. Dortmund is thus following the principle of "Public Money? Public Code!" - code paid for by all should be available to the people! The minutes of the meeting published today show with what unity the council stands behind the principle: The motion passed unanimously. (Although the FDP/Bürgerliste abstained from the vote due to a different amendment on a different point, but introduced the motion and is still in favor). The result was made possible by the consistent efforts of the DO-FOSS initiative, which also supported the "Public Money? Public Code" campaign of the FSFE.
Not everyone loves the piercing sound of Pharoah Sanders’s saxophone. It’s a sonic signature so polarizing that, in his 50-year career, he’s become something of a bête noire among listeners and critics alike. In the mid-1960s, as jazz transitioned from straight-ahead bebop and hard bop, Sanders, along with saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, helped pioneer a frenetic blend of spiritual jazz that, through shrieking horns and loose rhythmic structure, was meant to summon higher powers. The idea, it seemed, was to blow the sax so hard that the music reached God’s ears.
This technique had its detractors: New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett once likened Sanders’s playing to “elephant shrieks” that “appeared to have little in common with music.” Dennis Hunt, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, called it “primitive” and “nerve-wracking.” Neither Coltrane nor Ayler would live to see this strain of jazz become popular: Coltrane died of liver cancer in 1967; Ayler died three years later under mysterious circumstances. The Holy Trinity of spiritual jazz had been winnowed to one: Sanders, the Son to Coltrane’s Father and Ayler’s Holy Ghost.
"The Covid-19 pandemic has been a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe."
National leaders from around the world Tuesday released a joint statement—also signed by the head of the World Health Organization—calling for the creation of a new international treaty that would better equip human society for future pandemics by forging lasting institutions and principles around public health cooperation, data and research sharing, and equitable access to medicine and treatments, including vaccines.
On March 28, the environmentalist lawyer Steven Donziger spent his 600th day under house arrest in his New York City apartment—and Martin Garbus, the legendary attorney who is part of his defense team, warns that he could end up being confined for an astonishing five years. Donziger says that Chevron, with the help of two federal judges, is persecuting him, because in 2013 he helped win a $9.5 billion case in Ecuador against the oil giant for contaminating a stretch of the Amazon rain forest.
On March 29, the US Appeals Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit turned down Donziger’s motion to be released on bail while awaiting trial for contempt. Donziger’s attorneys argued before the court earlier in the month that he was not a flight risk, but the three-judge panel rejected their plea, keeping Donziger at home, monitored by an ankle bracelet. Donziger’s contempt trial before federal judge Loretta Preska is due to start on May 10.
Reverse the strict racist immigration policy of his predecessor and open the gates just a little to newcomers, and they will come. By the thousands, many of them unaccompanied children and teenagers.
Biden administration officials should have known that to relax restrictions immediately on refugees only would invite them to swarm toward the border in hopes of being let in. Humane treatment is good, of course, but it encourages a reaction that creates problems for a host country, in this case a surge of people with few places to put them.
Vincent knew his Bible well from Belgium with the miner men He knew that Noah built his ark From cypress, among other things, And waited for the rain to come The deluge washing over them For 40 days they floated, then Released a crow to look for land The crow brought back a message that As far as she could fly she saw an endless sea, no shores at all no consolation; isolation, desolation only was the message of the crow and so When forty of those crows arrive They bear that message Forty times Above the wheat fields of€ Auvers-sur-Oise
An Ohio college professor who resisted his school’s orders to go along with transgender students’ preferred pronouns has won his First Amendment case before a federal appeals court.
In a unanimous ruling, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Shawnee State University violated Prof. Nicholas Meriwether’s rights of free speech and free exercise of religion by punishing him for resisting school rules that forced him to address students in the terms of their choosing.
Disinformation techniques used to influence elections and peddle illicit pharmaceuticals are being harnessed to promote contract cheating services on universities’ websites, research has found.
Hundreds of university websites have been infiltrated by [crackers] aiming to steer unwitting students into essay mills’ clutches, according to preliminary studies by US experts.
Content ghostwritten by the essay mills, complete with embedded hyperlinks, has been grafted on to universities’ student service web pages. Links to legitimate services have been rigged so that they redirect to contract cheating companies, while university chat sites have been peppered with recommendations for essay mills.
All the bastards who wanted to legalize weed in the late Sixties and early Seventies weren’t Jewish. They were also Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, agnostics and atheists. Some worshipped at the shrine of cannabis. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the oldest and the most efficacious pro–pot force in the word, has never been solely a group made up of Jews.
Mr. Nixon had a problem with Jews that was of his own making. He also had a problem with marijuana, also of his own making. Under the Nixon’s administration’s Controlled Substances Act, marijuana was listed as a “Schedule 1” drug with no medical value and the potential for maximum abuse. Fifty years later, it’s still a Schedule I drug, and illegal by federal law, though at last count “adult” use is permitted in 12 states and the District of Columbia and also permitted for medical use in 13 states.
Leaders from dozens of countries around the world have signed onto a joint statement calling for the creation of an international treaty that would address pandemics that will come about in the future.
A new poll of attitudes toward covid vaccinations shows Americans are growing more enthusiastic about being vaccinated, with the most positive change in the past month occurring among Black Americans.
The British government, like most neoliberal regimes, refused to take the measures necessary to slow and halt community transmission, it failed early on to provide health care and social care workers with adequate PPE and other resources which could have saved the lives of hundreds of frontline staff who died as a result. It contracted private businesses to carry out essential activities, most with little or no relevant experience, for example, instead of equipping the community-based GP system of the National Health Service to take charge of ‘track and trace’, the government dished out €£37 billion to Serco to manage part of the system. In public health terms it has been disastrous; but measured by Boris Johnson’s celebrated standards of capitalism and greed it is has indeed excelled. The greatest beneficiaries of Britain’s response to the pandemic have been the private corporations making huge profits. Around 2,500 Accenture, Deloitte and McKinsey consultants are on an average daily rate of €£1,000, with some paid €£6,624 a day.
Johnson has now laid out a road map for reopening the economy. As a result, even the most optimistic scenario predicts a third wave between September 2021 and January 2022 resulting in at least 30,000 additional deaths in Britain. These deaths are preventable. But it precisely because the British government is driven by the capitalism and greed that it insists that we have to learn to ‘live with the virus’ so that the business of business can continue.
"There are many millions of seniors who would be very, very grateful if we did that right now."
Congressional Democrats are reportedly aiming to use a forthcoming coronavirus recovery package to lower the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 60, a development that comes days after Sen. Bernie Sanders publicly advocated for the proposal as a way to expand healthcare coverage for seniors amid the deadly pandemic.
Britain's vaccination rate has far outpaced the rest of the West. The triumph belongs to its National Health Service.€
Dr. John Lister watched in horror as the United Kingdom's Covid- 19 mortality rate climbed above 1€ per 1, 000, one of the highest death rates in the world since the start of the pandemic. So, when the 71-year-old Briton was informed he would receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine in late January, he could hardly contain€ himself.€
People in high-income countries that represent 16 percent of the world’s population have received 56 percent of doses.
We're a year into the pandemic, and thanks to vaccines, it appears we may finally have an end in sight. But, as is too often the case, vaccine distribution has been anything but equitable.
"We need a people's vaccine, not only to protect people in the world's poorest countries, but to ensure that people all over the world who've already been vaccinated aren't put at risk again."
Epidemiologists from dozens of countries around the world issued a loud warning Tuesday that failure to ensure global administration of Covid-19 vaccines within the next year—at the very latest—could allow vaccine-resistant variants to spread among unprotected populations to such an extent that current shots are rendered ineffective.
"We are not out of the woods yet, but these numbers are incredibly encouraging and a major morale booster for frontline caregivers who have been working tirelessly for more than a year to protect our residents."
New Covid-19 cases have plummeted by 96% in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities since late December, a report published Tuesday by the industry group American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living revealed.€
A New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica investigation found that the tiniest, most premature babies born at Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque died at higher rates than they did at a hospital a few miles away, Presbyterian.
The for-profit Lovelace and nonprofit Presbyterian are New Mexico’s largest maternity centers.
It was morning shift change at Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In the neonatal intensive care unit, the lights were dimmed, as usual. People spoke in hushed tones typical of the NICU. But an arriving clinician knew immediately that something had gone wrong.
A “crash cart” carrying resuscitation equipment was positioned next to a newborn incubator, the enclosed cribs that keep preterm babies warm. Nurses stood nearby with grim expressions.
Fatal overdoses were marching upwards before the pandemic. But they leapt in the first part of last year as states locked down, according to provisional data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from synthetic opioids—the biggest killer—were up by 52% year-on-year in the 12 months to August, the last month for which data are available. Those drugs killed nearly 52,000 Americans during the period; cocaine and heroin killed about 16,000 and 14,000, respectively (see chart). Once fatalities are fully tallied for 2020, in a few months’ time, it is likely to be the deadliest year yet in America’s opioid epidemic.
A growing chorus of advocates wants to weaken some of the intellectual [sic] property [sic] protections for coronavirus vaccines, which they say will quickly expand global supplies. But critics say the move wouldn't work, and would set a bad precedent.
Open-source the vaccines. That's the message being sent by the People's Vaccine Alliance, a coalition that includes Amnesty International, Oxfam, and UNAIDS.
Why it matters: Manufacturing capacity needs to be scaled up dramatically — and cutting out the need for laborious, expensive and secretive negotiations with vaccine patent holders could help.
The basic idea of government-funded research should not be hard to grasp since the government already funds a large share of biomedical research. The National Institutes of Health gets over $40 billion a year in federal funding, with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) and other government agencies getting several billion more. This puts the government’s total spending in the $45 to $50 billion range, compared to a bit over $90 billion from the industry. So the idea that the government would fund research really should not be that strange.
Most of the public funding does go to more basic research, but there are plenty of instances where the government has actually funded the development of new drugs and also done clinical testing. But under the current system, most of the later stage funding does come from the industry and is funded through patent-monopoly pricing. Relying on open-source, government-funded research for later-stage development and testing would be a major change.
A security professional at Ubiquiti who helped the company respond to the two-month breach beginning in December 2020 contacted KrebsOnSecurity after raising his concerns with both Ubiquiti’s whistleblower hotline and with European data protection authorities. The source — we’ll call him Adam — spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution by Ubiquiti.
On Jan. 11, Ubiquiti Inc. [NYSE:UI] — a major vendor of cloud-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as routers, network video recorders and security cameras — disclosed that a breach involving a third-party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. Now a source who participated in the response to that breach alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a “catastrophic” incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication.
[...] On March 30, 2021, well known cybersecurity analyst Brian Krebs reported that “a source who participated in the response to that breach” is alleging that Ubiquiti “massively downplayed a ‘catastrophic’ incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication.” [...]
Just two days ago (Sunday, March 28), hackers were able to breach the internal Git repository of the immensely popular PHP programming language used by almost 80% of all websites on the Internet, and have added a backdoor to the PHP source code. According to a message that the PHP team posted on its mailing list late Sunday night, the malicious code was added to the PHP source code through the accounts of two core PHP team members, Rasmus Lerdorf and Nikita Popov, neither of whom were involved. Popov stated in this message: “We don’t yet know how exactly this happened, but everything points towards a compromise of the git.php.net server.”
Although Google announced this was coming, the company has been sparse with details about the trial until now. We’ve pored over blog posts , mailing lists , draft web standards , and Chromium’s source code to figure out exactly what’s going on.
EFF has already written that FLoC is a terrible idea .€ Google’s launch of this trial—without notice to the individuals who will be part of the test, much less their consent—is a concrete breach of user trust in service of a technology that should not exist.
Below we describe how this trial will work, and some of the most important technical details we’ve learned so far.
Lots of plain view jurisprudence relies on the fact that if it can be observed by random people -- not just by law enforcement -- then there's no Fourth Amendment issue. If airplanes can pass over someone's land, surely police helicopters can do the same thing without undoing expectations of privacy.
On March 8, Twitter sued Paxton in federal court. The social media giant claims that Paxton is abusing his authority by seeking to harass and intimidate Twitter in retaliation for its exercise of First Amendment rights. Twitter seeks an injunction on the Texas AG from initiating any action to enforce its investigatory document demands. And Twitter's suit is picking up support from others. For example, in a case that's not even a month old, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other advocacy organizations have already filed an amicus brief that warns that government efforts to enforce viewpoint neutrality will carry the temptation to compel platforms to carry speech.
That's a real concern, and a reason why Hollywood should be weary of efforts to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But the subject isn't the only thing that's notable about Twitter's suit; The present whereabouts of this case is just as interesting and meaningful.
Twitter is suing in a federal court in San Francisco. In other words, home turf for the tech company rather than the conservative heartland.
Specifically, Buchanan demonstrated how he could hide both MP3 audio files and ZIP archives within the PNG images hosted on Twitter. The reason he was successful is because while Twitter strips unnecessary data from PNG uploads, they don’t remove trailing data from the DEFLATE stream inside the IDAT chunk if the overall image file meets the requirements to avoid being re-encoded, he explained.
The standoff has forced many to contemplate a simple but important question: Could we survive in a world without Google and Facebook?
The simple answer is yes. Whether you want to live without them is another matter altogether, and unbundling your life from Google and Facebook may not be easy.
However, there are many alternatives to the individual products and services offered by both tech giants, many with robust privacy policies around collecting and using personal data, which have been a source of concern with both Google and Facebook over the years.
Here are just some of the options, most of which are available as both websites and mobile apps.
We speak with Salvadoran American journalist Roberto Lovato about how decades of U.S. military intervention in Central America have contributed to the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border. Some 18,000 unaccompanied migrant children are now in U.S. custody, according to the latest figures, and more than 5,700 are in Customs and Border Protection facilities, which are not equipped to care for children. This comes as a record number of asylum seekers are arriving at the southern border, fleeing extreme poverty, violence and climate change in their home countries. “You have the ongoing epidemic of U.S. policy and the crisis that is not of migration as much as it’s the crisis of capitalism, backed by the kind of militarism and militarized policing that you see not just in the United States, but in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, on and on,” Lovato says. “The border is the ultimate machete of memory. It cuts up our memory so that we forget 30 years of genocide, mass murder, U.S.-sponsored militarism and policing, failed economic policies.”
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
As the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin continues, we speak with Minneapolis civil rights lawyer Nekima Levy Armstrong, who says prosecutors in the case clearly established that “the actions of Derek Chauvin played the most critical role in cutting off the air supply of George Floyd,” leading to his death, while the defense appears to be resorting to a strategy of victim-blaming. “I was really dismayed to see them try to deflect blame to bystanders and to blame George Floyd himself for his own death,” says Armstrong, a former president of the Minneapolis NAACP.
The twentieth anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon now approaches. On September 11, 2021, Americans will mark the occasion with solemn remembrances, perhaps even setting aside, at least momentarily, the various trials that, in recent years, have beset the nation.
Twenty years to the minute after the first hijacked airliner slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, bells will toll. In the ensuing hours, officials will lay wreathes and make predictable speeches. Priests, rabbis, and imams will recite prayers. Columnists and TV commentators will pontificate. If only for a moment, the nation will come together.
Before jumping to that conclusion, let’s remember that considerably more people favor abolishing nuclear weapons than oppose it. Public opinion surveys—ranging from polls in 21 nations worldwide during 2008 to recent polls in Europe, Japan, and Australia—have shown that large majorities of people in nearly all the nations surveyed favor the abolition of nuclear weapons by international agreement. In the United States, where the public was polled in September 2019 about the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, 49 percent of respondents expressed approval of the treaty, 32 percent expressed disapproval, and 19 percent said they didn’t know.
Nevertheless, surprisingly large numbers of people remain unready to take the step necessary to prevent the launching of a war that would turn the world into a charred, smoking, radioactive wasteland. Why?
“Ours is the cause of freedom. We’ve defeated freedom’s enemies before, and we will defeat them again.… [W]e know our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured… My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” —George W. Bush, November 8, 2001
In the immediate wake of 9/11, it fell to President George W. Bush to explain to his fellow citizens what had occurred and frame the nation’s response to that singular catastrophe. Bush fulfilled that duty by inaugurating the Global War on Terror, or GWOT. Both in terms of what was at stake and what the United States intended to do, the president explicitly compared that new conflict to the defining struggles of the 20th century. However great the sacrifices and exertions that awaited, one thing was certain: The GWOT would ensure the triumph of freedom, as had World War II and the Cold War. It would also affirm American global primacy and the superiority of the American way of life.
In March, it became clear that the United Kingdom, one of the opponents of the TPNW, had decided not only to look the other way but walk in the opposite direction.€ The threshold of British nuclear warheads is to be increased to 260, though the authorities maintain an intentional ambiguity about the exact number.€ This reverses a decision arrived at a decade ago, which promised to cut the maximum threshold for nuclear warheads from 225 to 180 by the middle of this decade.€ In the words of the Defence Command Paper of the Ministry of Defence, titled Defence in a Competitive Age , “Some nuclear-armed states are increasing and diversifying their arsenals, while increases in global competition, challenges to the multilateral order, and proliferation of potentially disruptive technologies all pose a threat to strategic stability.”
Such a direction is very much at odds with public support for Britain joining the TPNW.€ A poll conducted in January for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament found that 59% of the public expressed support for signing the treaty, including 50% of conservative voters and 68% of Labour voters.€ The policy also breaches undertakings made under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue efforts to disarm.€ Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, decried the decision as “toxic masculinity on display”, “irresponsible, dangerous and violates international law.”€ UNA-UK’s Head of Campaigns Ben Donaldson remarked that the UK government could best “invest in measures to combat climate change and pandemics, not trigger a dangerous new arms race.”
On the domestic front, the response to the new administration (and especially its $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill) has been a collective sigh of relief — as well as much praise, as well as fierce partisan Republican attacks — when it comes to the reform agenda being put in place domestically. In the realm of foreign affairs, however, criticism has been swift and harsh, owing to several early administration actions.
On February 25, at the president’s order, the U.S. launched an airstrike against an Iranian-backed militia in Syria, killing 22. On February 26, the administration released an intelligence report pointing the finger at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, only to follow up with an announcement that, while there would be sanctions against individuals close to the prince, no retaliation against him would follow. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof called the absence of strong retribution against MBS akin to letting “the murderer walk,” setting an example for other “thuggish dictators” in the years to come.
Afghanistan’s tortuous peace process has entered a desperate endgame that threatens to force women back to the margins of society and undermine gains they’ve made over the last two decades if the Taliban end up with a place in government.
Despite plenty of evidence that women’s involvement is critical to securing an enduring end to conflicts, Afghan women fear they’re being sidelined; even the drafted U.S. peace plan downgrades the role of women in post-war Afghanistan. While United Nations Resolution 1325, which seeks to entrench women’s participation in peace processes, stresses women’s “equal participation and full involvement,” the United States’ plan refers simply to the “meaningful” participation of women.
The group doesn’t hide its pride at having compelled its principal adversary for 20 years, the United States to negotiate with the Taliban and, last year, to sign an agreement to completely withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021. In exchange, the Taliban agreed to stop attacking foreign forces and to sever ties with international terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.
Three female polio vaccination health workers were gunned down in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, officials said on Tuesday. Two volunteers and one supervisor were killed in two separate locations a day after a polio vaccination campaign kicked off.
Numerous assassinations have taken place in the country's urban centers since peace talks began between the government and the Taliban in late 2020.
EU officials told the Turkish government on Monday that it must "urgently" resume accepting migrants from Greece, where thousands are being held in camps
The bloc struck a deal with Ankara in 2016 that it would take back asylum seekers from Greek islands who had their applications rejected.
In just three years, an Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique has killed an estimated 2,600 people. Last week's attack on the town of Palma, which lasted days, should worry neighboring countries, experts say.
The jihadist group issued a statement on its Amaq news agency boasting of “killing dozens of Mozambican armed forces and the Christians”. The accompanying picture showed a group of insurgents celebrating the capture of the hub town of Palma, which serves Africa’s biggest gas project.
"The physical trends are ominous, but at the very least, there's going to be one hell of a fight."
A few years ago, I was invited to become involved in something called the George M. Ewing Canandaigua Forum in my hometown, Canandaigua, up in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. The Forum’s named after the late George Ewing, for many years the editor and publisher of our local newspaper, The Daily Messenger. He was a fellow of many interests, worldly yet always remaining committed to his community. Those interests are reflected in the work of the Forum.
Deforestation and certain types of reforestation usually undertaken for commercial palm plantations are linked to increasing outbreaks of infectious disease, said a new study.
The study offered a new look at how changes in forest cover potentially contribute to vector-borne diseases--such as those carried by mosquitos and ticks--as well as zoonotic diseases, like Covid-19, which jumped from an animal species into humans.
The expansion of palm oil plantations in particular corresponded to significant rises in vector-borne disease infections, said the study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
Read a book from one of our book lists or a recent article about light pollution or dark skies. Whether you’re interested in astronomy, wildlife, or lighting, there’s something for everyone.
Electric vehicles are catching on in many countries, notably the Nordic states – and Scottish tides are powering cars there.
Last week’s press conference by President Joe Biden, his first since taking office, was a deliberate exercise in calm. It was not, unfortunately, a similarly deliberate exercise in fact-seeking. This was not entirely the fault of the president; the folks he shared that room with seemed to have lost the tether on their job description after four years of enforced mayhem.
"People who spend their careers studying our economy are in widespread agreement that climate change will be expensive, potentially devastatingly so."
While scientists and campaigners continue calling on world leaders to pursue more ambitious policies to cut planet-heating emissions based on moral arguments and physical dangers, a U.S. think tank released survey results on Tuesday that make a clear economic case for sweeping climate action.
"This goal is both technically feasible and necessary—now we need action."
Over 1,000 scientists urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday to pursue a "robust target" of slashing the nation's "emissions by at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 and transitioning to a net-zero emissions economy no later than 2050."
For nine years, the U.S. Bureau€ of Land Management has wrangled through an update to oil and gas permitting procedures for the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico. The update was sparked by decades old changes in drilling technology already used in an area that gained notoriety for having one of the largest€ methane hot spots€ on the planet — because of leaking oil and gas€ wells.
Volkswagen accidentally posted a press release on its website a month early on Monday announcing a new name for its U.S. operations, Voltswagen of America, emphasizing the German automaker's electric vehicle efforts.
A spokesman for the company declined to comment on the release, which was dated April 29 and has since been taken down.
A person familiar with the company's plans confirmed the authenticity of the release to CNBC. They asked to remain anonymous because the plans were not meant to be public yet.
While low-wage workers are still waiting for a raise in the minimum wage, Wall Street employees enjoyed a 10 percent bump in their bonuses in the first year of the pandemic, according to new data from the New York State Comptroller.
Progressives across the country joined President Biden in celebrating the passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP), hailed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as “the most significant piece of legislation passed [for working people] since the 1960s.” But now comes the hard test. As Sanders admitted, the rescue plan was “emergency” legislation, with most of its benefits expiring within a year. Will Biden and the razor-thin Democratic majorities in Congress be able to finally bury the conservative era of market fundamentalism that has so clearly failed?
It is no small surprise that Biden appears intent on making the effort. Before becoming president, the lifelong moderate typically eschewed boldness for compromise. But this week he will roll out an expanded budget and a bold public investment plan designed to produce millions of jobs by rebuilding decrepit infrastructure, beginning the transition to meet the threat of climate change, and addressing other domestic needs from child care to health care.
"The American people should be able to trust that the senior leadership of the Social Security Administration will advocate on their behalf—not needlessly and cruelly obstruct the delivery of survival checks."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, added her name Monday to the growing list of lawmakers and advocacy groups calling on President Joe Biden to fire two Trump-appointed Social Security Administration officials for allegedly sabotaging the effort to deliver relief payments to millions of seniors and people with disabilities.
"Today's crisis of unemployment requires a federal response at least as bold as they designed to pull America out of the Great Depression and usher in the New Deal."
With the pandemic-induced economic emergency far from over as weekly jobless claims and long-term unemployment remain sky-high, descendants of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and key members of his Cabinet published an open letter Tuesday morning urging President Joe Biden to embrace a "New Deal-scale" public jobs program to help end the crisis and set the stage for an equitable recovery.
With the pandemic-induced economic emergency far from over as weekly jobless claims and long-term unemployment remain sky-high, descendants of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and key members of his Cabinet published an open letter Tuesday morning urging President Joe Biden to embrace a “New Deal-scale” public jobs program to help end the crisis and set the stage for an equitable recovery.
"This crisis is far from over, and families deserve certainty that they can put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads."
As President Joe Biden prepares to unveil the initial phase of his "Build Back Better" plan on Wednesday, 21 members of the Senate Democratic caucus on Tuesday called on him to include recurring direct payments and other benefits in the jobs and infrastructure proposal for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic.
After pressure from progressives and some centrists, the White House is considering expanding the infrastructure bill, increasing spending to $4 trillion and raising tax increases to $3.5 trillion , The Washington Post reports . The initial version of the White House’s bill contained $3 trillion in spending and $1 trillion in tax hikes to help pay for it.
We speak with Salvadoran American journalist Roberto Lovato about how decades of U.S. military intervention in Central America have contributed to the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the border. Some 18,000 unaccompanied migrant children are now in U.S. custody, according to the latest figures, and more than 5,700 are in Customs and Border Protection facilities, which are not equipped to care for children. This comes as a record number of asylum seekers are arriving at the southern border, fleeing extreme poverty, violence and climate change in their home countries. “You have the ongoing epidemic of U.S. policy and the crisis, that is not of migration as much as it’s the crisis of capitalism, backed by the kind of militarism and militarized policing that you see not just in the United States, but in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, on and on,” Lovato says. “The border is the ultimate machete of memory. It cuts up our memory so that we forget 30 years of genocide, mass murder, U.S.-sponsored militarism and policing, failed economic policies.”
Former President Donald Trump has launched a new website that promotes himself heavily as a “magnificent” leader, failing to contextualize that ambitious claim with the numerous scandals, two impeachments, and hundreds of thousands of deaths from coronavirus that occurred under his tenure.
"Millions of us are depending on Congress to take this once-in-a-generation opportunity and deliver the jobs, care, and justice we so urgently need, and we intend to make them deliver."
When U.S. President Joe Biden heads to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to unveil the first part of his long-awaited and already hotly debated infrastructure plan, he will be greeted with four billboards from grassroots advocates urging the administration to "go big" and "go bold" on economic recovery, in part by supporting the THRIVE Act.
Across Europe and the United States, the 1800s was the century of the battle for universal suffrage.€ Democratic movements pushed for everyone to get the right to vote, including women, the indigent, and people of color. While the battle for universal suffrage began in the nineteenth century, apparent victory did not occur until the twentieth century.€ In the United States, by the early 1970s federal laws and constitutional amendments achieved nearly universal suffrage, and enforcement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act significantly overcame the racial barriers that many states still maintained to prevent people of color from voting.
But while the arc of American history has been an expansion of voting rights—an effort former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall referred to as expanding who was included in the promise of the Constitution’s “We the people”—there has also been a counter effort to suppress voting rights.€ After the Civil War, the Republican Party embraced voting rights for the newly freed male slaves, while the Democratic Party opposed it.€ When the 1876 disputed presidential election, Democrats conceded the election to the Republicans on condition that Reconstruction end.€ This ushered in a 100-year-long Jim Crow era where literacy tests, grandfather laws, poll taxes, felon disenfranchisements, and outright lynching suppressed voting rights for African Americans.
The American political system is fundamentally off.
As a frequent observer of foreign elections, I'm an even more frequent recipient of quips to the effect that "They should send observers over here." It started in earnest following Florida's 2000 presidential election hanging chad fiasco and has never really let up.€ And each time I explain to the quipster that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—a group in which the U.S. plays a leading role, despite its name—does actually send observers to our elections. It's just that no one here pays much attention to what they say (not, mind you, that I feel certain that greater attention is paid elsewhere either). To be fair, though, contributing to the relative obscurity of the group's observations and recommendations is the fact that it is a deliberative body and its 2020 report did not appear until three months after the election, when the news cycle had long since moved on to other things.€
Republican-controlled state legislatures across the US are enacting new restrictions on voter participation that target non-whites. Since the Civil War, the white supremacist culture—embraced by a shrinking minority in America—has always based its power on violence and voter suppression.
America is two cultures in one nation. The first culture brought slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, "Jim Crow" laws enforcing white supremacy, and former President Donald Trump's bullying, lying, and cruelty, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The second culture brought emancipation, the civil rights movement, President Barack Obama, and now the election of Joe Biden. The white supremacist culture—embraced by a shrinking minority in America—has always based its power on violence and voter suppression. This is why the current battle over voting rights is a battle for America's future.
A leading opposition figure said the country "can't overcome" Covid-19 with Bolsonaro, because "he is the crisis incarnate."
Brazil's political stability was in doubt Tuesday after the heads of all three military branches resigned following President Jair Bolsonaro's dismissal of his defense minister, one of six Cabinet officials who have recently left or been forced out of an administration whose popularity has plummeted amid soaring Covid-19 deaths in South America's largest nation.€
You know you’re in for a hard sell when the New York Times ( 3/29/21) publishes an article under the headline “An Alliance of Autocracies? China Wants to Lead a New World Order.”
As I'm sure most people are aware, last week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee held yet another hearing on "big tech" and its content moderation practices. This one was ostensibly on "disinformation," and had Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey as the panelists. It went on for five and a half hours which appears to be the norm for these things. Last week, I did write about both Zuckerberg and Pichai's released opening remarks, in which both focused on various efforts they had made to combat disinfo. Of course, the big difference between the two was that Zuckerberg then suggested 230 should be reformed, while Pichai said it was worth defending.
Vladimir Putin’s “candid” photo ops in “informal settings” are hard to€ take seriously. It’s even more difficult to believe that the president’s entourage doesn’t understand this — it’s almost as if they’re deliberately dreaming up meme-able news stories. Why do they do it? Mocking the authorities, after all, is one of the anti-Kremlin opposition’s prized weapons. Humor not only allows challengers like Alexey Navalny to look down on government officials; it also helps his supporters to overcome their fear of the state. In this article, Meduza “Ideas” section editor Maxim Trudolyubov tries to understand how society can use political humor to promote radical change (and why even the Russian authorities allow themselves to become a laughingstock).
In early 2018, police officers in St. Petersburg charged three suspects with fraud, claiming that their I.T. firm overcharged for the development of 3D models for Russia’s Project 636 “Varshavyanka” submarine. State officials say the design experts pocketed roughly 100 million rubles ($1.3 million) in a 400-million-ruble ($5.3-million) deal. A year later, one of the suspects, “Novit Pro” founder Valery Pshenichny, was found in his remand prison cell, dead, mutilated, and apparently raped. The authorities ruled it a suicide. In a special report, Mediazona correspondent Lena Vladykina spoke to family members and attorneys to learn how dubious fraud allegations led to such violent ends. Meduza summarizes the story here.
Chechen police are pressuring the relatives of jailed opposition activists Ismail Isayev and Salekh Magamadov to murder them in an “honor killing,” the human rights organization Russian LGBT Network told Meduza on Tuesday, March 30.
The Interior Ministry’s northern Moscow department has begun an inquiry into talk show host Vladimir Solovyov’s comments comparing Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny to the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler. This was confirmed in a police response to State Duma deputy Valery Rashkin from the Communist Party (KPRF), who requested an investigation into Solovyov’s remarks for “rehabilitating Nazism.”
The new measures, which bypassed Hong Kong's legislature and were imposed directly by Beijing, are the latest move aimed at quashing the city's democracy movement after huge protests.
"President Xi Jinping signed presidential orders to promulgate the amended annexes," China's official Xinhua news agency said in a short report.
Hong Kong's 7.5 million residents are still not sure what the new law contains with no details yet published.
In a 1902 article, Eugene V. Debs described his journey from young labor organizer to militant socialist. We reprint it here in full.
Eugene Debs’s leap from moderate labor reformer to socialist firebrand is still shrouded in some mystery. Why exactly did a man who had once fiercely opposed strikes not only begin to lead them but start to view class struggle as the key to winning a more democratic and just society?
The most persuasive answer is that Debs was forged in the crucible of labor-capital conflict. While we don’t have many letters from those years and are thus left guessing about Debs’s internal life, we do know that he began to move left in the mid-1880s (after being involved in union politics for about a decade), edged further left over the subsequent years (founding the American Railway Union, an industrial union, in 1893), and by January 1, 1897 was ready to publicly declare himself a socialist (following the volcanic 1894 Pullman Strike, for which he was jailed).
The following is Debs’s account of his evolution, first published in New York Comrade in 1902. Although the specifics of his story should be taken with a grain of salt (Debs was never the most reliable narrator), his essay makes clear that the catalyst for his evolution was anything but abstract theory.
Parler -- the social media cesspool that claimed the only things that mattered to it were the First Amendment and, um… FCC standards -- has reopened with new web hosting after Amazon decided it no longer wished to host the sort of content Parler has become infamous for.
Despite all the nonsense that dominates so much of the public discussion on the subject, free speech in the age of big social media platforms is a vital topic with a lot of nuances, and there are many people with important perspectives on it. One such person is EFF Director of International Freedom of Expression Jillian York, whose new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism offers an exploration of the topic rooted in personal experience and years of activism — and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internet content moderation and its impact on free expression around the world.
The letter, which was sent to every member of parliament, notes that the draft would allow national authorities to order [Internet] companies to remove online content within one hour without judicial oversight, even if the content is hosted in another EU state. It also reiterates concerns that platforms may resort to automated tools in order to comply – such as upload filters that prevent information from being published.
Thanks to the work of the European Parliament’s negotiations team, an extended debate and the involvement of civil society, a number of problematic issues of the proposal have been addressed during the trilogues between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.
However, despite the outcome of the last trilogue negotiation, the final text of the proposed Regulation still contains dangerous measures that will ultimately weaken the protection of fundamental rights in the EU. It also has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for online content regulation worldwide.
The proposed Regulation is headed for a final vote in the plenary of the European Parliament in April 2021. We urge the Members of the European Parliament to vote against the adoption of the proposal for the following reasons: [...]
On 25 March, 61 human rights and journalist associations sent a joint letter to Members of the European Parliament, urging them to vote against the proposed Regulation on addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online.
The coalition considers that the proposed regulation as it stands now has no place in EU law, as it poses serious threats to freedom of expression and opinion, freedom to access information, the right to privacy, and the rule of law.
The Hong Kong International Film Festival has scrapped its opening-night world premiere of Where the Wind Blows, a widely anticipated crime thriller directed by local industry veteran Philip Yung.
The festival said in a statement that the cancellation was made "upon request from the film owner" due to "technical reasons." Over the past several years, such references to vague "technical problems" have become a common euphemism for last-minute censorship complaints by China's increasingly repressive film regulators.
Chairman of Karnataka Chalanachitra Academy Suneel Puranik said on Saturday that if the contents of cinema being streamed via Over The Top (OTT) platforms went unchecked it might require invoking the provisions of censorship on such movies.
Speaking on ‘exploring the Indian identity through cinema’ at the third edition of Mangalore Lit Fest organised by the Mangaluru Literary Foundation, he said that only a handful of persons now produced cinema for OTT platform. A close observation revealed that they are being produced with a “hidden agenda” and they are “one-sided”.
They could certainly influence some among the audience who are weak minded. Many of the movies do not bother about Indian identity and are a threat to the Indian identity, he said.
On January 29, the Three-Self Patriotic Association and Christian Association of Qingdao City, Shandong Province, published a copy of the notice relating Restrictions on Churches in China’s Shandong Province: A ban on live broadcasts as well as releases of preaching audios and videos. Two days earlier, the United Front Work Department of the Shandong Provincial Party Committee issued a notice prohibiting Christians in the province from using the [Internet] to broadcast Christian activities.
Shandong Qingdao’s Three-Self Patriotic Association and Christian Association's notice to each jurisdiction on January 14 states that in accordance with the State Council and the National Health Commission of China, officials have passed down essential instructions on the [COVID-19] outbreak situation in various regions. In accordance with the unified requirements of Shangdong Qingdao’s Provincial Party Committee and United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Municipal Party Committee, all Christian churches and gathering venues in Qingdao will be closed on January 14, and all church activities suspended.
Sharing her views on the content being aired on OTT, Rashmi says, “I feel censorship hampers the quality of content somewhere because makers are compelled to play safe, keeping them from telling their stories freely. Most of the platforms are careful while producing content so that they don’t put anything offensive out there. Moreover, all web shows come with their own disclaimers and ratings.”
Ever since the OTT platforms have been brought within the purview of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) by the government, there have been rising concerns in the streaming sector that curbs will be introduced by the Ministry on the OTT content through its own set of rules and regulations. But the question looming in everybody’s mind is how far is the curtailment of entertainment forms justified?
It's not sure why journalists keep having to do the wireless industry's job, yet here we are.
In a telephone interview, Wang told CPJ in unsparing and graphic detail about the mistreatment she experienced, and her advice for journalists who continue to work in China amid state repression. It is not possible for CPJ to independently verify Wang’s account, but it is in line with details of prison abuse in China documented by Human Rights Watch.
According to an article in POLITICO based on interviews with unnamed “law enforcement officials,” the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering expanded use of airline reservation data€ to target travelers€ for more intrusive searches:
We’ve recently discussed what’s wrong with the no-fly lists (there are several, created and maintained by different, although interlocking, entities, for different ostensible purposes) and why they shouldn’t be used like this or in most of the other ways that they are now used.
As Gary Leff puts it in his View from€ the Wing travel blog:
President Nayib Bukele, who promised survivors and families of the victims at the end of 2019 he would collaborate and open the military archives to help bring justice, is currently blocking access to the documents and evidence requested by the judge overseeing the case.
Furthermore, in his attempt to stomp out criticism and discredit the work of Judge Jorge Guzmán, human rights activists, survivors and lawyers collaborating in the judicial process, the president assured that the investigations and requests for access to the military archives are part of “a show” mounted by his detractors.
Ending the death penalty should be part of comprehensive justice reform in the United States and part of our current reckoning with racial inequality.
In July 2020, the Trump administration ended a 17-year moratorium on the federal death penalty. By the time the president exited the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, 13 inmates had died at the hands of a federal executioner in the span of just six months.
Biden's plan actually promotes an old economic development model that has long benefited U.S. corporations. It also aims to impose a distinctly militarized version of "security" on the people of that region.
Joe Biden entered the White House with some inspiring yet contradictory positions on immigration and Central America. He promised to reverse Donald Trump's draconian anti-immigrant policies while, through his " Plan to Build Security and Prosperity in Partnership with the People of Central America," restoring "U.S. leadership in the region" that he claimed Trump had abandoned. For Central Americans, though, such "leadership" has an ominous ring.
The president, said one leading advocate, "is demonstrating his commitment to building a diverse bench of qualified, fair-minded judges with a commitment to equal justice under the law."
Critics of the GOP effort to remake the U.S. judiciary under former President Donald Trump on Tuesday welcomed President Joe Biden's first slate of judicial nominees—11 candidates who, according to the White House, reflect his "deeply held conviction that the federal bench should reflect the full diversity of the American people—both in background and in professional experience."
Members knocked on doors, made thousands of calls and texted to get the word out about the importance of the election and the important issues in the DA race.
On December 5, 2020, New Orleans elected its first ever progressive District Attorney, who was a criminal defense lawyer for over 20 years before being elected, replaced former DA Leon Cannizzaro, described by New Orleans papers as a traditional tough on crime prosecutor. An unprecedented coalition of grassroots justice organizations came together over a year before the election, as The Peoples DA Coalition, to help make it happen.
The piece seemingly conflates the crowdfunding of legal fees with “crowdfunding hate,” an argument that needs some unpacking.
The justification for banning right-wing extremists from using online platforms to raise funds for a legal defense is made from a concern that such donations will be used for activities that promote hate, violence, or racial intolerance. And yet, the determination of what constitutes such activities is meant to be left to online platforms and service providers. That is, the behavior that people are demanding that these companies regulate is not, in most cases, illegal. Without guidance from the law, the companies are left to make subjective decisions about who should be allowed to use their services—decisions that are increasingly informed by public pressure.
There is a long history of corporations denying services to a wide range of actors, and we’ve documented what happens when corporations are left to decide who is or isn’t worthy of raising funds.€
It is the workers, in fact, who are thinking outside the box. Recognizing the challenges of mounting a traditional union recognition campaign at a corporation that has unlimited resources to interfere in a union election by exploiting loopholes in the National Labor Relations Act, they have opened union membership to all Alphabet workers, including the temps, vendors and contractors upon which Google increasingly relies. Instead of focusing on winning formal recognition, they are systematically building power within the company through a transparent, democratic, worker-led process.
In announcing the formation of their union, the Alphabet workers called on Google to live up to its values, and I realized that I also need to live up to mine, so I am no longer a registered lobbyist for Google. But I have not given up hope that tech companies will update their thinking and encourage their employees to join unions.
Here are four ways that doing so could strengthen tech companies and improve tech policy-making: [...]
Her case is not unusual. Records reveal a growing mountain of water debt in New York. In two of the state’s largest water systems, tens of thousands of customers are in millions of dollars of debt.
The state currently has a moratorium on water shutoffs, but that expires at the end of the month. A coalition of advocates for water affordability is pushing the legislature to extend the moratorium — and to strengthen its protections for New Yorkers in water debt.
Presented with the data, Rob Hayes, the director of clean water at the Environmental Advocates of New York, said that it showed the depth of the crisis facing New Yorkers behind on water payments.
Chinese authorities in Tibet have recently intensified their crackdown on the spread of politically sensitive information, monitoring online news-sharing and stopping Tibetans in the streets to check mobile phones for forbidden content, Tibetan sources say.
The move expands tightened restrictions put in place around the March 10 anniversary of a failed 1959 Tibetan uprising against rule by China, which marched into the formerly independent Himalayan country nine years before, a Tibetan living in exile told RFA.
Bailey, who still works for Amazon, believes that was part of a corporate strategy to silence organizers, and in May 2020 he filed a charge against Amazon to the NLRB alleging that the company had violated labor law by retaliating against him for protected, concerted activities. The board found merit to the allegations and filed a federal complaint against Amazon.
This month, a year after Bailey staged the walkout, Amazon settled. Under the terms of the settlement, Amazon was required to post a notice to employees, on physical bulletin boards and via email, reminding them of their right to organize.
The vote by nearly 6,000 Amazon workers on the unionization campaign at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse concluded on Monday. The results of the vote, which will determine whether the Retail, Warehouse and Department Store Union (RWDSU) is certified as the collective bargaining agent at the warehouse, are expected to be released by the National Labor Relations Board later this week.
A World Socialist Web Site reporting team spoke to Amazon workers at the warehouse Monday, along with other workers and residents at a nearby shopping area about the vote and broader issues facing workers.
The criminal trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin opened Monday, ten months after George Floyd’s death ignited an eruption of mass multi-racial demonstrations that spread to every continent. Deliberations are expected to go on for three to four weeks.
Last May, Chauvin pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as Floyd was handcuffed and held to the ground by two other officers. Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and third-degree murder. If convicted of the most serious charge, he could face 10.5 to 15 years in prison.
Drugs have long been used to justify racist police-perpetrated violence, and the trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for the alleged murder of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner last May is, thus far, no different.
The trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin has begun in Minneapolis, where Chauvin is charged with second- and third-degree murder, as well as manslaughter, for killing George Floyd in May 2020 by kneeling on his neck for over nine minutes. The death of Floyd, who was a 46-year-old Black man and father originally from Houston, Texas, sparked international protests calling for racial justice. We air excerpts from the first day of the trial, including opening statements from special prosecutor Jerry Blackwell and Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, and dramatic witness testimony from the Minneapolis 911 dispatcher, Jena Scurry, who alerted a police supervisor after seeing live surveillance footage showing officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for an extended period of time, and Donald Williams, a mixed martial artist, who described seeing Derek Chauvin using what he called a “blood choke” on Floyd.
In celebration of Women’s History Month 2021, Howie and Angela did a series of weekly streams on different topics related to the struggles and activism of Black Americans. We would like to thank all of our guests for the honor of speaking with us and our audience.
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Howie and Angela will be discussing the other side of reproductive justice, specifically whether Latinas have full access to their reproductive choice. This discussion is not to the exclusion of any other population, but it’s serving to shed some light to the entire spectrum of discussion. Howie and Angela will be joined by Annie Martínez (CO), an attorney, former Green candidate and past president of the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association; Olguie Robles-Toro (NY), a former member of the Young Lords and activist in the Bronx’s Puerto Rican community, and Karena Acree-Paez (CA), veteran immigration law worker and member of Tele-Jaguar Chicano Media Collective. Because of the sensitive nature of this topic, comments will be moderated. Thank you.
When you look at communities in the aggregate, you would be hard-pressed to find a single large American city where you couldn’t turn a profit with fiber.
They were wrong. To explore just how wrong, EFF and the Technology Law and Policy Center have published our newest white paper€ on the effects of these decisions. The research digs into New York, which decided to retain power at the local level and see what we can learn from the state as we look to the future. The big takeaway is that large cities that do not have local franchise authority are losing out because they lack the negotiating leverage needed to push private fiber to all city residents, particularly low-income residents.€ €
Franchises are basically the negotiated agreement between broadband carriers and local communities on how access will be provisioned—essentially,€ a license to do business in the area. These franchises exist because Internet service providers (ISPs) need access to the taxpayer-funded rights of way infrastructure such as roads, sewers, and other means of traveling throughout a community (and notably it would be impossible for ISPs to try to bypass the existing public infrastructure). ISPs also benefit because these agreements conveniently lay out a roadmap for deploying broadband access. The public interest goal of a franchise is to come to an agreement that is fair to the taxpayer for creating the infrastructure.
By now it should be clear that DRM is essentially an arms race that will never be won by producers and publishers of content. While the fall of even the most vaunted DRM platforms has shown how useless those platforms are, the more consequential outcomes of DRM tend to be the way it bricks the products people bought or else limits the use of those products once the DRM is no longer supported. In sum total, it's very clear that DRM is very much anti-consumer, while failing completely at being anti-pirate.
At the heart of any conspiracy theory is that some group secretly controls the government to manipulate our lives. That belief goes back to the beginning of our nation.
Past conspiracy theories have shaped national politics
World Trade Organization (WTO) members, including the US, are discussing a TRIPS waiver for intellectual property rights associated with COVID vaccines and treatments. The US has historically been opposed, but President Biden’s newly confirmed US Trade Representative Katherine Tai promised during confirmation to fully consider the issue.
The IPIRA Conference is an initiative created in 2019 to provide a forum for IP researchers to discuss their papers and works-in-progress with other academics, practitioners, and policy makers. The Third IPIRA Conference was organised in cooperation with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Academy, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the following academic institutions: the Ahmad Ibrahim Kulliyyah of Laws, International Islamic University Malaysia; the Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia; Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University; Texas A&M University School of Law; and the Faculty of Law, University of Geneva.
The Organisers of the Third IPIRA Conference were assisted by a group of distinguished academics serving as Scientific Committee and by several research centres and universities in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Africa, and the Americas acting as Supporting Institutions. The international composition of the Scientific Committee and the Supporting Institutions reflects the mission of the IPIRA Network, which is to promote worldwide interactions between IP and Innovation researchers sharing an interest in Asian Law, Comparative Law, and International Law.
WIPO Director General Daren Tang delivered a Key Note address at the opening of the Conference, which featured several parallel sessions, in which presenters focused on a variety of topics, including Geographical Indications of Origin, Artificial Intelligence and New Technologies, IP and Fundamental Rights, IP and Technology Management, Trademarks, Enforcement and Dispute Resolution, IP and Health, and Plant Varieties, Patents, and Biodiversity. The various parallel sessions were attended by other presenters and attendees who provided valuable comments and feedback.
[...]
The Third IPIRA Conference was again a very successful event! Although the Conference was held online, over 300 presenters and attendees gathered and enjoyed three and half days of “IP IPIRA Festivities”, which included two outstanding cultural evenings! The IPIRA Network very much looks forward to hosting everyone again, hopefully in person, at the Fourth IPIRA Conference in 2022! Information and venue will follow in late Summer.
The new vision statement of the Trilateral offices has been agreed, which originates from the 38th Trilateral Conference in December 2020. During the virtual conference, the heads of the European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO) and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) committed to jointly develop the new future direction for the Trilateral Co-operation.
For the most part, Certificates of Correction are boring, simple, and quite common. 35 U.S.C. €§ 254 & 255 provide for correction of minor mistakes by the PTO and applicant respectively. PTO mistakes are fixed when a mistake is “clearly disclosed by the records of the Office.” For applicant-mistakes, the correction is allowed for “clerical or typographical nature, or of minor character” made in good faith. Larger mistakes should be corrected via Reissue. Errors can also be corrected as part of a reexamination or AIA trial (such as inter partes review). In most cases applicants prefer the certificate of correction route because the procedures and approval process tend to be much more patentee friendly. And, the minor corrections are more likely to have retroactive effect against past infringers.
The PTO grants the vast majority of requests for correction. The most common denials are based upon the patentee’s failure to submit the correct forms.
Tiffany P. Cunningham has been a partner at Perkins Coie LLP in Chicago, Illinois since 2014. She is a member of the Patent Litigation practice and serves on the 17-member Executive Committee of the firm. Ms. Cunningham serves as trial and appellate counsel for large multinational companies, as well as small enterprises, and individuals in complex patent and trade secret disputes.
In March 2020, across Europe, governments implemented the first coronavirus lockdown suddenly, and with little prior warning. As such, Europe’s courts and patent offices scrambled to retain control of their procedures. They quickly implemented functional new systems to allow a suddenly-disparate workforce to continue with business as usual.
Now, after a year of staying at home, Europe’s patent litigation firms, patent attorney firms and patent courts are adjusting to a new way of working.
Proceedings at the European Patent Office are being held almost exclusively via video link, with the Administrative Council recently approving new legislation to ensure the continued participation of all parties in video hearings. In the major patent hubs of Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France and Italy, courts are finding workarounds to ensure litigation can go ahead. Behind the scenes, administrative staff and clerks are working with main players, such as judges, to ensure minimal bumps in the road.
The beginning of the pandemic looked very different, as one European patent lawyer remembers. “Everything stopped, everything closed. We were concerned, because the courts postponed all hearings.” But, as it turned out, the courts and patent offices were better prepared than anyone might have guessed. Most patent proceedings were even able to continue, albeit under new circumstances.
In sum, the rapid adaption in Europe of its patent courts, offices and firms points towards a flexible system already adapting to further future challenges.
[...]
However the appetite for exclusive video conferencing is waning. In some jurisdictions, the judicial bodies took so long to implement a functioning system that parties are losing interest. With an ease to the pandemic tentatively in sight, a move towards hybrid hearings in such as in London or Munich could be the next option.
Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Simon Sunatori and Priyanka Kalra, who split a cash prize of $3,000 for their prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 9,632,727. The patent is owned by Unification Technologies, LLC, a subsidiary of Acacia Research Corp., a well-known NPE. The '727 patent generally relates to managing data stored on non-volatile storage media over the provision of solid-state drive (SSD) devices. This patent has been asserted in district court 3 times this year against companies such as Micron, HP, and Dell.
Well, here's a fun one. Over the weekend, the musician Lil Nas X announced that, along with MSCHF, he was selling "Satan Shoes." From the beginning this was all just a silly publicity stunt that more or less played out probably exactly as those involved expected. If you don't know what MSCHF is then it's worth reading up on the organization that claims it's based on "structured chaos" and only ever so often randomly drops some kind of offering for sale, usually in limited quantities that get lots of attention and sell out quickly. As was summarized in a Business Insider article about MSCHF last year:
California's Franchise Tax Board has suspended the corporate status of adult entertainment company Malibu Media. The Los Angeles company, which is known for suing alleged BitTorrent pirates, failed to meet its tax obligations. In light of this development, an accused file-sharer now wants the company's CEO Colette Pelissier to be added to a pending countersuit.
The popular and entirely legal Steam Database has found itself in a precarious position following two erroneous DMCA notices from SEGA. Steam Database's host is being asked to suspend the platform due to a claimed lack of response to the first notice. This prompted the site to take down entirely legal content in an effort to address the problem.
