Liam Breck joins Doc Searls and Dan Lynch on FLOSS Weekly to discuss email of today. Given its role as a massively popular way to commit cybercrime, it's easy to see email as a problem that needs a solution. That's what Breck sees, and why he has created MNM Mail, which he calls "a legitimate email replacement: a client, a server, and a simple protocol between them... designed for everyone." In this episode Liam joins Doc Searls and Dan Lynch, explaining how mnm works, why the world needs it, and how developers and business folk can join in to help improve it and drive adoption.
github update, cameras, smart watches, hammocks
This is just a Nate-echo-chamber of ideas but if you are interested in more thoughts and opinions in discussion with other Linux and open source enthusiasts, subscribe to DLN Xtend, a podcast with the Destination Linux Network where I have a chat with my co-hosts Matt and Wendy on a gambit of subjects.
Ruby has gone off the rails this week, and Wes is here to explain what’s happened.
Plus emails into the show send Chris into a full Linux panic.
The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux provides the latest open source innovations, key optimizations, and security to cloud and on-premises workloads. It is the Linux kernel that powers Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Linux on Intel/AMD as well as Arm platforms.
What's New? The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 Update 2 (UEK R6U2) for Oracle Linux is based on the mainline kernel version 5.4. By actively monitoring upstream check-ins and collaboration with partners and customers, Oracle continues to improve and apply critical bug and security fixes to UEK R6. This update includes several new features, added functionality, and bug fixes across a range of subsystems.
UEK R6U2 can be recognized with a release number starting with 5.4-17-2102 and is an update to the upstream mainline kernel v5.4.83. UEK R6U2 includes upstream LTS bug fixes, with additional patches to enhance existing functionality and provide some minor bug fixes and security improvements.
Oracle continues advancing their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" as the company's modified Linux kernel build offered to Oracle Linux users as an alternative to its Red Hat Compatible Kernel for their RHEL-based OS. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 Update 2 is out to end Q1'2021 with various new features.
Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 continues to be based on the upstream Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series rather than Linux 4.18 as found in the RHEL8 and Oracle's "Red Hat Compatible Kernel" (RHCK) offering. UEK R6U2 adds in the new slab memory controller proposed last year that can provide major savings on slab memory use. R6U2 also has NVMe storage improvements and a number of improvements to Linux file-systems like Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS. This kernel also back-ports the vDPA driver for the Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx devices. There are also updated storage device and network drivers for code they previously back-ported to their UEK kernel.
We have recently announced the availability of our new mailing list platform that will eventually take on the duties currently performed by vger. Off the bat, there were a few questions about how it works under the hood — especially regarding DMARC-friendly cofiguration.
Following last week's release of the Fedora 34 beta I've begun trying out this latest Fedora Linux build on a variety of test systems. Here are some preliminary figures of Fedora 34 against Fedora 33 stock and updated configurations when running on an AMD Ryzen 5000 series system with Radeon graphics.
For the first of my benchmarking from Fedora 34 (beta) is a look at Fedora Workstation 34 Beta against Fedora Workstation 33, both when installed out-of-the-box and then Fedora 33 re-tested with all current available stable release updates.
More than 4 months ago, AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 series launched, and I wrote an enthusiastic Windows-based review here at Forbes. Team Red had finally, triumphantly entered the high-end GPU market and was competing head-to-head with Nvidia. The in-house reference designs were also beautifully built, so that didn’t hurt my recommendation.
What you won’t find here is my Linux review, because I didn’t do one. However, I did produce a somewhat divisive video that bemoaned the extensive hoops anyone not using Ubuntu LTS had to jump through to get these cards recognized and working on the penguin side of things.
Fedora 34 Beta was release so needed to test, my first move was to upgrade my HP probook machine following the dnf system-upgrade steps works with no issue and my machine came up to Fedora 34 with any issues. To my surprise since have not been on the loop of release, the machine seems faster, it is an old notebook, but works. Love the new Gnome 40, seems faster than before and more comfortable.
After that upgrade repeated the same treatment on my Mac BookPro with the same results boot faster, nice and smooth interface from Gnome 40, have to give to Gnome team, excellent work.
Do you need to format a USB device to Fat32 on your Linux PC? Can’t figure out how to format a filesystem? We can help! Follow along as we show you how to How to format a USB device to Fat32 on Linux!
For this process, you need:
1. Ubuntu operating system (the OS for the transaction)
2. LinuxLive or LiLi (a software to help install the Ubuntu OS on your flash drive; ensure to download the latest version)
3. BitAddress (the software to generate the paper wallet)
Step 1: Install Ubuntu on your flash.
Download the LiLi software, open it and insert your flash drive. Ensure that you select the correct drive. Click refresh if the drive is not coming up on the system. Click on ISO/IMG/ZIP and then select the Ubuntu ISO file. Choose only “format the key in FAT32.” A lighting bolt option will appear. Click on it to start the format and installation process.
The first step in making changes or reading some information from a PostgreSQL databank is to establish connections. On the other hand, each link generated overhead utilizing procedure and storage. That’s why a device with minimal resources (read, storage, hardware) can support the limited aggregate of connections. Once the limited aggregate has gone far beyond a point, It should continue hurling errors or denying connections. Within PostgreSQL.conf, PostgreSQL is doing a decent job of limiting links. In this tutorial, we’ll look at the different forms of states that PostgreSQL links can have. We’ll show you how to determine whether the link is active or has been inactive for a long duration, wherein case it can be disconnected to free up the links and resources.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Audacity 3.0 on Ubuntu 20.04.
As many people out, in the last months I have participated in more remote video conferences than most likely in my whole life before. In those months I improved the audio and video hardware, the lighting, learned new shortcuts for those tools, and in general tried to optimise a few parts.
One of the problems I encountered on this journey was the selection of the correct microphone. The webcam, which luckily I got already before the pandemic, has an integrated microphone. The sound quality is ok. But compared to the microphone in the new headset the sound quality is awful. The problem was that whenever I plugged-in the webcam, its microphone will be selected as the new default. So I had to manually change the sound setting every time I plug and unplug the webcam.
How do I copy a file with a colon punctuation (:) name in it.
It is difficult for a new Linux user to monitor users or groups’ names with their Ids/Gids. In Linux distributions, an id is a command-line tool that is used to display the real and effective user’s Id and group’s Ids.
The real id is the one that owns the system; it points towards you if you’re an account owner. The effective id is similar to Real id but with some limitations.
You don’t need to download or install the id command utility, as it is a built-in tool in Linux-like systems.
The best way to display the running process in a system is to display them as a tree hierarchy. In a Linux system, “pstree” helps visualize processes hierarchy which is a less complex way to display running processes.
The “pstree” command is one of the Linux commands that merge branches through square brackets and display the process as a tree. The root of the tree could be “init” or “pid”.
In Unix-like systems, the “nproc” command is a tool that is used to count the number of available processing units available to the current processes. It also counts the total number of installed processing units present in a system.
This command is helpful when the CPU is overloaded with various kinds of processes, and you need to display the number of available processing units for the new process.
The “nproc” is a built-in command in a Linux system that can also be used to diagnose the system.
The pwd is a helpful command for Linux users who are inexperienced and might get lost in the middle of directories.
The pwd is an abbreviated form of “Print Working Directory,” or we can call the Current Work Directory. It displays the name of the current directory with the root path.
It is the most frequently used built-in shell command by Linux system administrators.
There's a lot of these X11 menu builders out there but Jgmenu does it quite differently to the others, rather than doing it through scripting the menu is defined by the data passed into it which leads to a very flexible system.
FreeRADIUS is the most widely-deployed, open-source, and free RADIUS implementation. It works as a daemon (operates in the background) in Unix and Unix-like servers. FreeRADIUS is used mainly for
The RADIUS protocol allows you to authenticate users over a network, authorize them for various actions, and monitor their usage of the network. This framework is referred to as AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting).
According to a survey result, FreeRADIUS is used to authenticate over one-thirds of the users on the internet.
By default, FreeRADIUS has a command line interface, and any changes are made by editing the configuration files that are highly customizable. Since it’s open-source, you can even make changes in the code of the software.
In this article, we will discuss how to install FreeRADIUS and daloRADIUS on Debian 10.
In Linux operating system, “od” is a useful command that converts the input in multiple formats with octal format by-default. As we all know, Octal has a base-8 number used to present binary numbers in a short form.
Linux developers utilize the “od” also known as Octal Dump, to debug scripts.
The “od” is an efficient command that helps to understand the complex data which is not human-readable.
If you use Linux and take the Cisco “Introduction to Packet Tracer” course, you’ll need to install the Packet Tracer application on your computer. The trouble is, Cisco doesn’t do a great job teaching users how to get the app working. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up How to install Cisco Packet Tracer on Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Godot Mono 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.
7 days to die is an early access survival horror video game. It is set in an open world and has many survival elements similar to games like Minecraft. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play it on your Linux system!
Tcpdump is a free and open-source wireless data-network packet analyzer that works on the command-line interface. It is the most commonly used CLI tool to analyze network traffic. Tcpdump allows users to see, read, or capture network traffic transmitted over a network attached to the computer. It is useful in System Administration, Monitoring Network Traffic (for issues or otherwise).
Originally, it was written in 1988 by four Network Research Group workers at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. It was organized eleven years later by Micheal Richardson and Bill Fenner in 1999, who created the tcpdump site. Tcpdump works on all Unix-like operating systems. The windows version of Tcpdump is called WinDump and uses WinPcap, the windows alternative for libpcap.
Throughout data processing and analysis, histograms support you to represent frequency distribution and gain insights easily. We’ll look at a few various methods for obtaining frequency distribution in PostgreSQL. To build a histogram in PostgreSQL, you can use a variety of PostgreSQL Histogram commands. We will explain each one separately.
Initially, make sure you have PostgreSQL command-line shell and pgAdmin4 installed in your computer system. Now, open the PostgreSQL command-line shell to start working on histograms. It will immediately ask you to enter the Server name which you want to work on. By default, the ‘localhost’ server has been selected. If you don’t enter one while jumping to the next option, it will carry on with the default. After that, it will prompt you to enter the Database name, port number, and username to work on. If you don’t provide one, it will continue with the default one. As you can view from the image appended below, we will be working on the ‘test’ database. At last, enter your password for the particular user and get ready.
As in the 9.2 Version, PostgreSQL added a quite basic JSON datatype. Underneath the cover, the JSON type of data is text, with a check that perhaps the layout is correct JSON input similar to XML. Eventually, the team found that the volume of JSON processing and specialized searching needed in PostgreSQL would’ve been difficult or rational to enforce over a textual type of data. Hence, they created a binary representation of the JSON datatype with a complete range of operators and methods. Here comes the JSONB data type. The JSONB datatype is indeed a versatile binary storing layout with complete processing, indexing, and search capability. As a result, it pre-processes JSON information to an inner layout, which has only one value per key and ignores additional whitespace or depression, or you may say indentation. Within this guide, you’ll learn how to interact with the JSONB data form in PostgreSQL, as well as some handy operators and methods for dealing with JSONB data.
PostgreSQL formatting methods include a useful collection of tools for translating different data types (date/time, integer, floating-point, numeric) to formatted strings and translating formatted strings back to unique data types. Henceforth, sometimes we need to convert time zones as well. The timing is always recorded in UTC in PostgreSQL timestamps for time zone data form, but it is displayed by default in the browser, session, or user’s local time. One of its helper functions we’ve come to rely on is the TO_CHAR() method, which allows timestamps and timestamps with timezone, among other forms, and enables you to arrange the pieces of a timestamp however you like. A timestamp, a double-precision, the duration, a number, or a numeric value can all be converted to a string using the PostgreSQL TO_CHAR() method. There seems to be a single-argument method, ‘to_timestamp’, that takes a double-precision argument and transforms from Unix epoch to timestamp using time zone. We’ll show you how to do something about this in this post. Let’s take a closer look at to_char() first.
You must be familiar with data entry in any database management system. While entering data, you may don’t have time, and you need to ignore gaps in your data or want some consistent series of records. In this situation, PostgreSQL generate_series is applicable to achieve the required goal. As the name indicates, the mechanism of this function contains either 2 or 3 inputs. i.e., generate_series allows you to generate a sequence of records with a starting point, terminating point, and incrementing value (optional). It mainly works on two data types. i.e., Integers and timestamps. To create a sequence of dates, the generate_series function is utilized in different ways.
After months of internal debate, we have decided to deal once and for all with a hot topic and the source of much criticism. Godot is being rebranded in order to gain wider appeal and acceptance.
[...]
Since Godot was open sourced, we received countless amount of criticism from a small vocal minmajority of the community, pointing out the lack of professionalism of the Godot logo. Have you ever read comments from community members like these?
If you like to play games a lot, you probably already own a controller. For the GNOME desktop environment, someone developed an extension that shows you the controller’s battery remaining power percentage on the top panel, near the system tray area.
The extension supports Sony Dual Shock 4 and Dual Shock 3 controllers, works with multiple controllers at the same time, and shows controller color too. Gamers will find it very useful if they want to see how much battery power is left in the controller, so they can charge it when needed.
With KDE Gear 21.04 there will be a new plugin available for Kate: Git Blame.
Every body knows it is a lot of work to go through bug reports and fix the bugs. As we all know lazy developers (that is the good type) do not want to do tedious work and try to automate boring tasks. This is where the git blame plugin comes in.
Feed the plugin a crash-dump of an application and provide the git repository of the application sources. The plugin will then, using AI, go process the crash-dump and locate the crash location and the reason for the crash. The plugin can pinpoint the commit (and committer) that introduced the crash. Hens, git blame The plugin can also suggest a fix for the crash. The results where actually surprisingly good. In around 70% of our test cases, the algorithm could generate a good working fix for the crash. The rest needed minor modifications to make them work properly.
First some background. While I dig the look of GNOME 40 and its new horizontal paradigm the ‘dock’ is tucked away on the overview screen by default.
This isn’t new for GNOME Shell, of course. The dash (the proper name for the favourites bar) has been situated on the left-hand side of the Activities screen since …Well, since GNOME 3 began!
And in GNOME 40 the dash now sits along the bottom by default which is a change many are thrilled to see — however, as mentioned, it only appears in the Activities screen, as this gif shows...
Linux is not a limited platform as it has multiple operating systems for multiple works and provides amazing support to the users. We will consider MX Linux and Ubuntu as popular and offer outstanding facilities to the users. We will consider every single aspect of these Linux distros so that you can get complete information about MX Linux vs. Ubuntu without having any trouble choosing between the two.
The Linux distros list is very long as there are multiple types of Linux distros that work to satisfy every beginner and advanced level user’s requirements. However, Linux enthusiasts always get confused in choosing a particular Linux operating system for their requirements. If you are one of them, then don’t worry; we cover complete information and side by side comparison of different Linux OS. We have provided complete information on MX Linux Vs. POP!_OS to help you choose one of these Linux distros according to your requirements.
Considering the complete lack of bugs in urpm and in the RPM package format, which we’ve grown tired of, The Executive Committee has approved the switch to Debian package manager, apt.
We will rebuild Cauldron to adopt the .deb package to have it in place for Mageia 9.
We will also adopt the Arch Installer, ditch Mageia Control Centre for raw conf files, and will also suppress urpm, rpm, dnf, pagure, iurt and mock.
Infra will be migrated to a fork of Debian build system.
When Red Hat decided to kill the stable CentOS in favor of rolling release CentOS Stream, it created a sort of revolt.
The adamant sysadmins who preferred a decade old distribution instead of the goodness of the latest software and updates didn’t like this democratic decision of Red Hat. They foolishly looked for CentOS alternatives despite Red Hat repeatedly telling them that CentOS Stream is for their own good.
Fedora is an odd bird these days--not in what it delivers, but where it sits in the Red Hat family tree. It's almost an outcast; a desktop in a world of servers. With RHEL and CentOS draining the marketing coffers dry, Fedora never seems to get the love it deserves from Red Hat. That's especially disappointing when a new release comes out (even in beta) that is as good as Fedora 34. By all measure, the upcoming release of Fedora 34 should have its business parent salivating at the thought of not only one of the more solid releases to date but one of the first releases to get GNOME 40.
A company called Xinuos has announced a lawsuit against IBM and Red Hat that has a familiar echo to it. "Xinuos alleges that the IBM and Red Hat conspiracy has harmed the open-source community and specifically Xinuos’ OpenServer 10 product, which is based on FreeBSD, an open-source UNIX-based operating system and alternative to Red Hat’s Linux-based open-source operating system, RHEL. 'By dominating the Unix/Linux server operating system market, competing open-source operating systems, like our FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, have been pushed out of the market.'" The full text of the suit [PDF] is available for those wanting the details.
Believe it or not, SCO's ancient and long disproved copyright claims that Linux was copied from Unix are returning in a new lawsuit by Xinuos vs IBM and Red Hat.
The Fedora Project announced the Beta release of Fedora 34 last week. As usual, I downloaded it and started trying it out on various of my systems right away. There are a number of interesting points both in the release announcement and in my own experience with it so far...
Debian is a great operating system in its own right, but also, it makes for an excellent base for other Linux distributions as well. For example, Ubuntu is probably the most well-known Linux distro and it is based on Debian. There are countless other operating systems, such as Netrunner, that stand on Debian's figurative shoulders.
The prettiest and most exciting Debian-based operating system, however, is deepin. This Chinese-developed Linux distribution is probably the most beautiful desktop operating system on the planet; it is arguably better than both Apple's macOS and Microsoft's Windows 10 in the style department. deepin has what some consider the most beautiful and intuitive user interfaces.
Derived from Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa), Linux Lite 5.4 aims to bring more Windows users to the GNU/Linux and Open Source ecosystems by updating the Help Manual to make it even easier to learn how to use Linux Lite, updating the icon theme, adding new wallpapers, and fixing various bugs.
The Help Manual now features a new “Installing Software – From a Terminal using APT” section so you can learn how easy is to install additional package, libraries, and whatnot directly from the terminal emulator using Debian/Ubuntu’s APT package management system.
Linux distros are developed to provide excellent compatibility, features, and advanced administrative options. However, it is always confusing to choose one of these Linux distros that can fulfill the requirements as there are multiple types of Linux OS available online. We have covered some of the most important information on two famous Pop!_OS and Linux Mint. By the end of the article, you will get all of the required details upon Pop!_OS vs. Linux Mint to help you choose one of these Linux OS.
Gnome has been designed as a desktop environment for Unix-based Operating Systems. It gives you a convenient, user-friendly interface and allows users to select appearance from numerous desktop designs. Gnome helped to make the best and focused working environment computing experience for the new user. According to news, Gnome 40 arrives in March 2021, a month before releasing a new Ubuntu 21.04.
As we all know, Ubuntu always comes-up with Gnome features like Ubuntu 20.04 adopts features of Gnome 3.38. But now, Ubuntu 21.04 won’t follow the trend as the upcoming release of Ubuntu 21.04 has decided to change its plan. Ubuntu 21.04 will be continued to Gnome 3.38 with GTK3.
Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has written a blog post outlining new notifications that try not to be annoying but also remind users that they need to perform software updates to keep their computer secure. The details arrive a little over a month since Lefebvre pointed to stats that show some users were not applying security updates and in some cases, people were even running end of life versions of Linux Mint.
The Linux Mint team prides itself on its users controlling their computer rather than the other way around. New Mint versions only ever introduce conservative changes so that the whole operating system doesn’t need to be relearned and users are also given complete control over when, how, and which updates are installed; unfortunately, this mindset has led to some users running outdated, vulnerable software.
PostmarketOS is a Linux distribution designed for smartphones and tablets that’s been under development since 2017. The operating system can at least boot on 250 different devices, but until recently the only officially supported device was the PinePhone.
With the release of postmarketOS 21.03 Beta 2, that number is up to eleven, with support for new devices designed to run Linux, like the Purism Librem 5 smartphone and Pine64 PineTab tablet as well as older phones and tablets that originally shipped with Android (or in a few cases, Linux-based operating systems).
A phone that snitches on you and sends a trove of personally-identifying data back to the vendor every few minutes, even if it’s idle, is not on your side. A phone that’s on your side helps you snitch on them. A phone that’s on your side honors your opt-out requests and ideally requires you to opt-in to anything that risks your privacy. A phone that’s on your side doesn’t collect your data, it protects it.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is one of the most creative individuals that we’ve come across in the history of humankind. In 2018, when he was stuck in traffic — the next thing he did was build an underground tunnel and started selling hats. After selling 50,000 hats, he eventually got bored of hats and started selling flamethrowers, and he sold 25,000 of them.
At this point, it’s safe to assume that Elon Musk can do anything, right? Right. The world’s richest man is now aiming to develop an open-source, Linux-based operating system for smartphones, and it’ll be called DogeOS. Yes, you heard that right. DogeOS will compete with the likes of Android and iOS.
LibreOffice 7.1.2 is here about a month after the first point release in the LibreOffice 7.1 series, which was officially launched two months ago with major changes like a new Additions Dialog for searching, downloading, and installing extensions, as well as a new dialog that lets you select the User Interface flavor of your choice at first start.
LibreOffice 7.1.2 is a bugfix release that addresses a total of 61 issues across all core components of the office suite, including Writer, Calc, Impress, and Draw, in an attempt to make it more stable, reliable, and suitable for enterprise deployments.
It seemed like love was winning over hate towards the end of March 2021. A letter written by free software users voicing support for Richard Stallman appeared to had gained a very solid lead over a very different vicious hateful letter filled with long-debunked lies, character assassinations and çâ¢Â½Ã¥Â·Â¦ drivel which was written by GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern with a little help from Joan Touzet, Elana Hashman and Molly de Blanc.
The count stood at 4860 signers voicing support for Stallman and 3082 signers participating in a cruel dark-ages style witch-hunt mob against an elderly man who spent his life fighting for and promoting free software.
It looked like Richard Stallman had overwhelming support. But looks and be deceasing. It turns out that many of those who are against Stallman had not been counted.
Molly de Blanc, who serves on the board of directors at the Open Source Initiative, discovered two suitcases full of mail-in signatures against Stallman late Wednesday night. The suitcases were magically discovered after everyone else, including legal observers, were told to go home.
GNOME Foundation Executive Director Neil McGovern was pleased with the magically discovered suitcases full of support.
Years ago there was a huge argument on why Linux was licensed as GPLv2 only, without the option to relicense under GPLv3. Of course, by then, Linux had had thousands of authors, and they would all have to agree to change license… so it would have been impossible even if it were wanted. But yes, some people decried several terms of GPLv3 not being aligned with their views of freedom.
Well, so… if the FSF board manages to have it their way, and get everybody mark them as irrelevant, they will still be the stewards of the GPL. Thousands of projects are licensed under the GPL v2 or v3 “or later”. Will we continue to trust the FSF’s stewardship, if it just becomes a board of big egos, with no respect of what happens in the free software ecosystem?
My suggestion is, for all project copyright holders that are in a position to do so, to drop the “or-later” terms and stick to a single, known GPL version.
Of the deeper thoughts I might give to this moment, I have given them elsewhere. For this blogpost, I just want to speak of feelings... feelings of hurt and hope.
I am reaching out, collecting the feelings of those I see around me, writing them in my mind's journal. Though I hold clear positions in this moment, there are few roots of feeling and emotion about the moment I feel I haven't steeped in myself at some time. Sometimes I tell this to friends, and they think maybe I am drifting from a mutual position, and this is painful for them. Perhaps they fear this could constitute or signal some kind of betrayal. I don't know what to say: I've been here too long to feel just one thing, even if I can commit to one position.
So I open my journal of feelings, and here I share some of the pages collecting the pain I see around me:
The irony of a movement wanting to be so logical and above feelings being drowned in them.
The feelings of those who found a comfortable and welcoming home in a world of loneliness, and the split between despondence and outrage for that unraveling.
GIMP 3.0 still isn't out yet but the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing new point releases with additional feature work until that GTK3 version of this image editor / Photoshop alternative is ready.
GIMP 2.10.24 is another update bringing some minor new features in the absence of GIMP 3.0. GIMP 2.10.24 has support for being able to snap GIMP's different tools to guides, grids, and vectors outside of the canvas area. Besides the off-canvas point snapping, another big feature of GIMP 2.10.24 is expanded metadata support, including GeoTIFF metadata tag support. Also significant for GIMP 2.10.24 is a "Negative Darkroom" feature for simulating enlargement prints from scans of photo negatives.
At one end of the spectrum, he continued, you have the GNU General Public License, or GPL. "Anyone who modifies your software [and distributes it] will have to contribute back." This is great from the "encourage to contribute back" perspective, but "in a lot of environments, the GPL is outright banned, which by definition would restrict the kinds of contributions you get." So, for example, Google restricts use of Affero GPL code because "The license places restrictions on software used over a network which are extremely difficult for Google to comply with."
By contrast, with a highly permissive BSD license, he went on, "You have the ultimate freedom. You can do whatever you want with the software." This would be great except, "Companies aren't incentivized to contribute back in the same way" as with the GPL.
For Artillery, it was important to find middle ground between these two licensing philosophies. Because of its use of the MPL, he said, Artillery attracts "contributions from employees of some big corporations...because they know that they can build on top of Artillery without infecting the rest of their code base….So you get this really nice and clean separation." This separation has resulted in a budding community growing up around Artillery with dozens of external contributors and an expanding portfolio of third-party libraries/extensions.
In Germany, the currently proprietary Luca-App, developed by the start-up Nexenio has caught the attention of multiple regional governments. The app’s purpose is to enable contact tracing at public venues and events, such as restaurants and concerts. Unlike the government-procured Corona-Warn-App (CWA), Luca does not use Bluetooth-assessed proximity to determine infection risk, but a QR-code enabled check-in with a phone’s camera at the entrance of a venue.
JavaScript frameworks seem like death and taxes; inevitable and unavoidable. I'm sure that if I could be a fly on that wall every time someone started a new web project, the very first question they'd ask is, which JS framework are we using? That's how ingrained the role of JS frameworks are in the industry today. But that's not the way it needs to be, and actually, it needs to stop.
A wanderer for a good part of his life, Bolaño’s work reflects the uncertainty of his existence.€ Likewise, it quite often points the reader towards what is reasonably understood to be the cause of his wanderings over the last thirty years of his life—the overthrow of the socialist government of Chile’s Salvador Allende by the fascist forces of Augusto Pinochet.€ Bolaño was arrested by the fascists and spent seven days in detention, only to be “rescued” by two of his former classmates who were prison guards.€ Although this historical tragedy is not literally present in many of Bolaño’s works, its spectre lends a darkness to them all.€ Even then, that darkness is underscored with a humorous but cynical view of this world humanity has made.€ Whether the tale takes place in the Mexican wild lands south of the US border, in the streets of Santiago, Chile or somewhere in between, the fact of dark forces is present; sometimes those forces are characters in these tales and sometimes it is just their presence which is felt.€ Poets and prostitutes alike are not spared.€ Nor is the author himself.
This is especially the case in the most recent collection of Bolaño’s works to be released posthumously in English.€ Titled Cowboy Graves ,€ the three novellas that make up this book are interrelated.€ Most describe a family as seen primarily through the son’s eyes.€ The political struggle of Chile in the early 1970s is very much part of the story, as is the relationship between the parents who live in two different countries for part of the year.€ The coup of 1973, which saw the Left in Chile destroyed and on the run, acts as a main protagonist in the collection, darting in and out of the narrative.€ The stories tell of departures and arrivals, soldiers and politics, sexual adventures, twisted love and murder.€ The result is a feeling of dislocation and separation, as if the only way the narrator can survive is to be outside of the story he is living.€ The disassociative nature of these novellas is reminiscent of a journey outside one’s mind.€ Outside looking in, if you will.
Like many great TV shows, Painting With John teaches its audience how to watch it. John Lurie—writer, director, musician, and star of the series—introduces a general blueprint in the first episode designed to ease viewers into his reflective, playful worldview. The show opens with serene drone footage of an unnamed Caribbean island’s natural landscape, right up until the drone, piloted by Lurie, suddenly crashes. Following the opening credits, Lurie sits at his desk and paints with watercolors while recounting stories from his life. Sometimes he recalls scenes from his childhood years or young adulthood. Other times he describes encounters with various strangers and celebrities (Barry White, Anthony Bourdain, Zach Galifianakis, etc.). Meanwhile, photographer and editor Erik Mockus films Lurie’s painting process in close-up so we can witness the colors mixing and blending on the canvas while he speaks. Painting With John also features whimsical sequences of Lurie at play—dancing, fooling around with a branch that resembles an elephant trunk, rolling tires down a hill—and brief scenes with his longtime assistant, Nesrin Wolf, and aide Ann Mary Gludd James. (They’re credited as cast members in the series.) Lurie’s own music plays throughout each episode, and still photographs of his paintings appear alongside the end credits. A meditative tone pervades this six-episode series, from Lurie’s narration to the warm imagery of the island where he lives to the act of painting itself, sinuously edited together to create the feeling of an eccentric relaxation tape passed among friends.
To state the obvious , Painting With John isn’t an instructional painting show in the PBS tradition, and thus Lurie doesn’t present any of this material in a straightforward manner. Instead, he frequently interrogates the show’s premise, which is ostensibly a man at a desk talking about life while he paints. He probes this framework partly to undercut the egotism of the enterprise and partly to illustrate the creative artifice upholding all nonfiction. By exposing the strings and wires behind the show, he evinces humility instead of basking in an unexamined self-importance.
The city of Youngstown, Ohio, is cracking down on a company that touts itself as the maker of the world’s first self-chilling beverage can, saying it hasn’t lived up to its pledge to hire workers and bring economic development to the city’s long-suffering East Side.
The move follows an investigation last year by The Business Journal, based in Youngstown, Ohio, and ProPublica, which found that little had happened after the city gave the company behind the Chill-Can a $1.5 million grant to help develop a $20 million research and manufacturing campus. It was one of the largest awards of its kind in city history.
The March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview that Steve Rendall conducted with journalist Robert Dreyfuss about Iraq War intelligence, originally aired February 27, 2004 . This is a lightly edited transcript.
A look at realities in Honduras and Guatemala suggests her goal is unattainable.€ That’s because past U.S. policies and actions in the region, interventionist and exploitative, contributed to the very life-threatening conditions Harris is targeting. To succeed, the Biden administration must grapple with a dark legacy fashioned by the United States itself.
In Honduras presently, 62 percent of the population live in poverty, 40 percent in deep poverty. The impact of the pandemic and of hurricanes during 2020 caused 700,000 more Hondurans to fall into poverty and 600,000 more to lose jobs. Estimates of Hondurans facing food insecurity range from 1.3 million – with 350,000 close to starvation – to€ € 2.9 million .
On April 15, Major League Baseball will celebrate Jackie Robinson Day. Every player will wear number 42 and Commissioner Rob Manfred will extoll the legacy of Robinson breaking the MLB’s Jim Crow color line in 1947, while also patting his league on the back for being, as his predecessor Bud Selig put it, “a leader in the civil rights movement.”
This ceremony is always awkward, given the paucity of Black American managers and execs. It’s also awkward because the reality of integration on the field but erasure in the front office drew the explicit ire of Robinson himself, who spoke out about this gap just before his death almost 50 years ago.
"The Command's Twitter manager, while in a telework status, momentarily left the Command's Twitter account open and unattended. His very young child took advantage of the situation and started playing with the keys and, unfortunately, and unknowingly, posted the tweet," Stratcom official Kendall Cooper said in a letter Thalen posted on line.
Hard iron materials will be shipped across the sea from the US and then transported to Kajaani via truck. The second stage of delivery is expected to be completed by Autumn.
Once assembled, LUMI will have multiple applications in a wide range of fields, including AI, astrophysics and climate studies. It could even play a key role in mitigating the effects of the ongoing coronavirus crisis and predicting future pandemics.
A recent COVID post elicited the comment that we were just a "ray of sunshine." Following in this tradition, this post concerns a recent report, in PLOS Biology, that the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (which causes COVID-19) evinced the development of a "highly efficient human pathogen" (to quote Billie Eilish, "Duh!").
The paper, entitled "Natural selection in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in bats created a generalist virus and highly capable human pathogen," was reported by an international team* of researchers. It was known prior to this work that SARS-CoV-2 and the virus that caused the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 (which these authors term "SARS-CoV-1" to avoid confusion) arose in bats, and that SARS-CoV-2 is particularly infective in humans, inter alia, for having a furin protease cleavage site (Arg-X-X-Arg/ Arg-X-Arg/Lys-Arg) in its Spike protein, which facilitates protease-related binding to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) because furin is expressed in human lung tissue. The interesting conclusions drawn by these authors is that mutational adaptations that facilitate human infection by the virus occurred prior to the jump from bats to humans, which accounts (at least in part) for the rapid dissemination/infectivity in the pandemic because the virus did not require long-term incubation to achieve the species switch typical of other zoonotic viruses.
State exams are held for school leavers at the end of the mandatory period of education (Põhikool) in the Estonian language, or Estonian as a second language, math, and an exam on a subject of the student's choice.
The government had said last month that graduating high school will not be dependent on exam results for the 2020/2021 academic year.
Everyone wants the best education possible for their kids. But it’s hard to find enriching activities that don’t involve setting them in front of yet another screen. And teaching them the fundamentals of STEM seems nearly impossible when you’re limiting screen time. And according to data from Engineering For Kids, STEM workers earn 26-percent more than people without a STEM background. So if you want to give your young children a competitive edge without adding more screen time, you need to know about Learn With Mochi, an award-winning screen-free game that teaches coding for kids ages three-to-nine.
Only 1 in 3 students has access to online learning platforms, compared with more than half in other countries across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A €5 billion ($5.9 billion) federal digitization plan, the Digital Pact for Schools, passed two years ago has been slow to pick up steam. It’s only with the pandemic that a public spotlight has been turned on the effects of abysmally poor digitization levels, and the accompanying lockdown has prompted a radical rethinking of the need for digital infrastructure and teacher training.
“We Germans are programmed to have an organized system that constantly thinks in hierarchy, but we forget the world has moved forward at great speed,” says Matthias Kostrzewa, digitization officer at Ruhr University’s Professional School of Education in Bochum. The pandemic “has been a magnifying glass to show the problems we had not just in schools, but all areas of society. And it’s accelerated the bureaucratic work [of digitization].”
The British firm, which was acquired by GPU vendor Nvidia in a deal announced in September 2020, mostly designs chips for smartphones, tablets and smart devices.
Arm said on Tuesday the new architecture was being introduced in response to what it characterised as "global demand for ubiquitous specialized processing with increasingly capable security and artificial intelligence".
Care workers are more essential than ever, but most don’t get a living wage or even a single sick day. It’s time to fix that.
The pandemic has dramatically exposed the vital role that care workers play in our society. As child care centers and schools closed and nursing homes became COVID-19 hotspots, families have strained to juggle work and other responsibilities while taking care of loved ones.
The pandemic exacerbated an already dire housing situation, with millions struggling to find and keep shelter.
One year ago, the CARES Act was signed into law. Three weeks ago, President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan. Both acts mark historic legislation providing necessary immediate relief to millions of Americans, and as the vaccine rollout continues with the smell of spring in the air, images of post-pandemic life arise—that is, if one is privileged enough to escape the far-reaching implications of a deadly global pandemic.
New Mexico parents worrying over the health of an extremely preterm baby have another reason to be concerned: Their state government provides almost no oversight of the care provided by neonatal intensive care units.
Thirty-one states, including neighboring Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah, have laws or rules requiring oversight of neonatal intensive care hospitals, according to a 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. Some of these states make sure that hospitals provide care at the levels they claim to, and some periodically review data on patient admissions, transfers and outcomes to identify potential problems.
Likewise, the UK’s Brexit rollout has also been on life-support, if not in a hospital bed immediately adjacent to the EU’s— sisterly/brotherly love between the two not quite being what the doctor has been able to prescribe.
When it comes camouflaging their respective debacles with spin and PR, the UK has an easier time of it, since all it needs to do is cast Brussels as the villain responsible for its Brexit plight.
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. [1] 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 New York judge has ordered the state to provide COVID-19 vaccines to all incarcerated people, saying that officials “irrationally distinguished between incarcerated people and people living in every other type of adult congregate facility, at great risk to incarcerated people’s lives during this pandemic.” Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of the Alliance of Families for Justice, says advocates have been pushing the state “since the beginning of the pandemic to prioritize the health and safety of incarcerated people,” but those efforts were met with silence. “It’s unfortunate that it took court intervention in order to make the state do what it’s supposed to do,” says Elijah. She also addresses calls for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign a bill passed by lawmakers called the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term ( HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, that would end the excessive use of solitary confinement.
Cisco introduces passwordless authentication by DuoNew Delhi: Cisco Secure on Wednesday introduced passwordless authentication by security platform Duo, enabling users to skip the password and securely log into cloud applications via security keys or platform biometrics built into modern laptops and smartphones.
UPDATED Many consumer victims of ransomware scams fail to get access to their data even after they pay off extortionists, according to a survey by Kaspersky.
The poll found that close to half (46%) of UK ransomware victims paid the ransom to restore access to their data last year, yet an unfortunate 11% of victims who shelled out did not have their stolen data returned.
Whether they paid or not, only 18% of 1,006 UK victims surveyed were able to restore all their encrypted or blocked files following an attack.
Internationally the picture is still worse with more than half (56%) paying off extortionists and nearly one in five of whom (17%) failing to get their data back even after paying out.
Persistence is achieved via a new registry key. Any shortcut created to the location pointed by a subkey Startup will launch the service during logon/reboot.
The zero-day bugs, four in total, had been targeted in live attacks well before patches were released for them on March 2, with exponentially more adversaries picking them up over the past three weeks, despite the availability of additional mitigations.
The number of unpatched Exchange installations has dropped significantly, going from roughly 80,000 on March 14 to fewer than 30,000 on March 22.
Once again, it's time to end encryption... for the children. That's the message being put out by the UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). And that message is largely regurgitated word-for-word by Sky News:
In January this year, Facebook-owned WhatsApp caused a huge uproar by unilaterally asking its users to accept new terms allowing it to share more private information with parent Facebook for advertising and commercial purposes. What added to the outrage was that if you lived in an EU region, they would not be able to do it, it would be forbidden under their General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), raising strong demand for urgency in similar Indian data protection law.
Facebook today published a blog post detailing Fairness Flow, an internal toolkit the company claims enables its teams to analyze how some types of AI models perform across different groups. Developed in 2018 by Facebook’s Interdisciplinary Responsible AI (RAI) team in consultation with Stanford University, the Center for Social Media Responsibility, the Brookings Institute, and the Better Business Bureau Institute for Marketplace Trust, Fairness Flow is designed to help engineers determine how the models powering Facebook’s products perform across groups of people.
The post pushes back against the notion that the RAI team is “essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization [on Facebook’s platform],” as MIT Tech Review’s Karen Hao wrote in an investigative report earlier this month. Hao alleges that the RAI team’s work — mitigating bias in AI — helps Facebook avoid proposed regulation that might hamper its growth. The piece also claims that the company’s leadership has repeatedly weakened or halted initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
Match Group — which owns dating and hookup platforms including Tinder, OKCupid and Match.com — is trying to make it easier to obtain data on potential partners. The company announced this month that it will help users run background checks on potential dates. Tinder users will be the first to receive the feature, which will allow them (for a fee not yet determined) to obtain public records on a match, based only on first and last name, or a first name and phone number.
That data, provided by a nonprofit company called Garbo, will include “arrests, convictions, restraining orders, harassment, and other violent crimes” in order to “empower users with information” to protect themselves. Garbo’s website also indicates that it accepts evidence submitted directly by users, “including police reports, orders of protection and more,” though it’s not clear whether this capability would be integrated into its partnership with Match.
What Myers does with this deceptive summary of U.S. policy is what I find most striking.
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."
Janine Jackson interviewed Guns Down America’s Igor Volsky about ending gun violence for the March 26, 2021, episode of CounterSpin . This is a lightly edited transcript.
More than 500 people have been killed in Burma during protests against the February 1 military coup that toppled Burma’s democratically elected civilian government. At least 141 people were killed over the weekend alone, when soldiers opened fire on civilians demonstrating against military rule in dozens of cities and towns across the country. Children were among the dead, including a 5-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, according to Amnesty International. Burmese troops also fired on a funeral service for a 20-year-old student protester. “We wake up to more bad news every morning, more deaths,” says Aron Aung, a Burmese student studying at the New York Institute of Technology, who also describes how women are helping lead the resistance.
The comparison is quite apt if we remember the long-anticipated shift in Britain’s foreign policy and Johnson’s conservative Government’s pressing need to chart a new global course in search for new allies – and new enemies.
Xi’s words in 2019 signaled a new era in Chinese foreign policy, where Beijing hoped to send a message to its allies and enemies that the rules of the game were finally changing in its favor, and that China’s economic miracle – launchedunder the leadership of Deng Xiaoping in 1992 – would no longer be confined to the realm of wealth accumulation, but would exceed this to politics and military strength, as well.
"Trans rights are human rights," said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, "and on this #TransDayOfVisibility, I'm pleased to announce we've updated DoD policy on the open service of transgender individuals."
Reversing one of former President Donald Trump's most egregious civil rights rollbacks, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday—International Transgender Day of Visibility—that it would soon allow openly trans people to serve in the U.S. military.€
The black-and-white videos show ghostly images of men in combat gear sheltering behind ruined walls in the crosshairs of Taliban snipers, who under cover of darkness pick them off one by one. While the Taliban have been known to use thermal-imaging technology for night-time combat for years, the Afghan insurgents are increasingly publishing sniper videos online as part of an apparent propaganda effort. An investigation by the France 24 Observers shows that most of the videos feature thermal scopes that are commercially available for civilian use.
"I reported them all up the chain and I can't remember one person that got in trouble, ever," Barfield said. "Nothing ever happened."
Frustrated, Barfield spoke to reporters about his experience. His superiors reprimanded him for talking to the press without prior authorization, he said, and he left his military work in 2006. Today, he works as a civilian police detective.
Barfield's assertion that there were dozens of White supremacists and other extremists in uniform is "overwrought," said David S.C. Chu, who was the undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, overseeing recruitment and career development, from 2001 to 2009.
An ambitious Indonesian project to create a single database of the country's land area and stop conflicts is destined to flounder unless it includes maps created by indigenous communities, advocates said on Wednesday (March 31).
The One Map policy, rolled out a decade ago and meant to be completed by late 2020, aimed to merge 85 thematic maps of the sprawling archipelago's 34 provinces into one map, with local communities involved to help settle conflicting claims.
But to date, the One Map portal is accessible only to government authorities and does not include maps created by indigenous groups, said Ms Rukka Sombolinggi, secretary general of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (Aman).
For two days, hundreds of insurgents in the gas-rich region had been laying siege to the coastal town of Palma, firing indiscriminately at civilians, hunting down government officials and setting buildings ablaze as security forces tried in vain to repel them.
The violence sent thousands of people fleeing, with some rushing to the beach, where a ragtag fleet of cargo ships, tugboats and fishing vessels was ferrying people to safety.
But at the hotel, with daylight hours dwindling, the local residents and foreign gas workers who remained faced an impossible choice: Either wait inside, defenseless, for a promised evacuation in the morning, or try to make it to the beach.
In a desperate dash, dozens of people crammed into a 17-vehicle convoy and left the hotel for the oceanfront.
Only seven vehicles completed the trip.
There are other signs that the French armed forces are in the midst of a generational transformation. In January the general staff quietly established ten working groups to examine the country’s readiness for high-intensity war. French generals reckon that they have a decade or so to prepare for it. The groups cover everything from munition shortages to the resilience of society, including whether citizens are “ready to accept the level of casualties we have never seen since world war two”, says one participant. The spectre of high-end war is now so widespread in French military thinking that the scenario has its own acronym: HEM, or hypothèse d'engagement majeur (hypothesis of major engagement). The presumed opponents are unnamed, but analysts point not only to Russia, but also Turkey or a North African country.
The following was originally published as part of The Dissenter Newsletter. Daniel Hale, who blew the whistle on the United States government’s targeted assassination program that includes drones, pled guilty to transmitting and retaining “national defense information” in violation of the Espionage Act. The guilty plea by Hale makes him the first whistleblower to be convicted under the Espionage Act during President Joe Biden’s administration. A change of plea hearing was held on March 31 in the Eastern District of Virginia, around a week before Hale was scheduled to go to trial. Judge Liam O’Grady permitted Hale to remain under supervision by a probation officer until sentencing on July 13. Though Hale pled guilty, prosecutors from the Justice Department opposed canceling the trial altogether and refused to dismiss the four remaining charges. Hale’s attorney questioned why this would be allowed. O’Grady seemed to recognize the four remaining charges criminalize much of the conduct already covered in Hale’s plea. Often this is referred to as charge stacking. Yet the judge permitted the government’s extraordinary and unusual request, leaving open the possibility of a trial if prosecutors are unhappy with sentencing. Under President Barack Obama, CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou was targeted in the Eastern District of Virginia with an Espionage Act prosecution. He wound up pleading guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in order to ensure he only went to prison for 30 months. “I’m disappointed that Daniel Hale’s case was continued in the Biden Justice Department,” Kiriakou shared after learning Hale changed his plea. “I had hopes that Biden’s Justice Department appointee would recognize the public service that Daniel Hale provided when he revealed illegality and abuse in the drone program.” Since Hale is not permitted to offer a public interest defense, Kiriakou added,”That’s an injustice.” “So I hope Judge O’Grady recognizes the good in what Daniel Hale has done and gives him the lightest possible sentence.” Hale was part of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2012 and identified “targets” for kill and capture. From December 2013 to August 2014, he was a contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The U.S. government targeted Hale for prosecution after he disclosed documents in 2014 to Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill for his “Dirty Wars” project, which included a book and a film. The information he revealed also helped the Intercept publish the “Drone Papers.” Hale€ appeared€ in the 2016 documentary “National Bird.” He wore a pin supporting U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and followed CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s prosecution. The FBI raided his home on August 8, 2014, while the film was in production. He was charged in March 2019 with violating the Espionage Act and other related offenses, and in May, he was arrested. It is unclear why the Justice Department took several years to charge Hale. At the change of plea hearing, O’Grady did not believe Hale posed a flight risk, since he was present at the proceedings. But he was particularly concerned with Hale’s mental health and urged him to notify his probation officer if he felt like hurting himself. Hale, who apparently survived a motorcycle accident recently, told the court he was living with supportive people, who for some time allowed him to share space and without paying rent. He is doing chores and cooking meals for his roommates while quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A list of documents in the superseding indictment against him points to what Hale allegedly exposed. Prior to the “Drone Papers,” a€ report, “Watch Commander: Barack Obama’s Secret Terrorist System, by the Numbers” was published by Scahill and Ryan Devereaux. It exposed how “nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group.”
"As in past years, commodity-driven deforestation was the leading cause of tree cover loss."
Intentional deforestation as well as drought-induced wildfires made more frequent and severe by the climate crisis drove a significant acceleration of global rainforest loss in 2020, with new figures released Wednesday showing that 12.2 million hectares of tree cover were destroyed in the tropics last year.
The UK’s new plan to control immigration has alarmed human rights groups. A Latin American example could offer hope instead.
Troubling signs that the White House won’t go big enough in the fight against climate chaos.
Mainstream media and many large environmental organizations were bullish on President Biden’s early climate actions, but several recent moves, including the announcement of his woefully insufficient infrastructure package, raise significant concerns about the administration's willingness to take the actions necessary to avert climate chaos. If Biden is serious about tackling climate change, he needs to do more than spend relatively small amounts of money on renewable energy; he will need to directly take on the fossil fuel industry, rather than trying to work with and accommodate oil and gas interests.
The bush fires that ravaged Australia between 2019 and 2020 were so huge that they spewed as much smoke into the stratosphere as a large volcanic eruption, with serious consequences for the environment, according to a study published Thursday (March 18) in the journal Science.
The stratosphere is the second layer of the atmosphere, right above the troposphere - where we live.
Overall, more than 10 million acres of primary tropical forest was lost in 2020, an area roughly the size of Switzerland. The institute’s analysis said loss of that much forest added more than two and a half billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, or about twice as much as is spewed into the air by cars in the United States every year.
"A climate action approach that seeks to partner with Wall Street without also holding it accountable is no longer credible in 2021."
Just days after he suggested the private sector, not government, will lead the fight against the climate crisis, 145 organizations sent a letter Tuesday urging U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry to use his position to help end "the flow of private finance from Wall Street to the industries driving climate change around the world—fossil fuels and forest-risk commodities."
The New York Democrat also explained how the U.S. carceral system and foreign policy relate to the nation's immigration system.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to social media Tuesday night with a detailed reminder of the root causes of Central Americans and other migrants seeking asylum at the United States' southern border.
"Biden has pledged to cut carbon emissions 50% and decarbonize our electricity sector, but this proposal won't even come close."
President Joe Biden's rollout of a $2.26 trillion infrastructure and climate spending blueprint on Wednesday was met with an icy response from progressive advocacy groups and environmentalists, who argued the proposal in its current form is inadequate to the task of combating the climate crisis by overhauling the nation's polluting energy and transportation systems.
The move, said Administrator Michael Regan, "will ensure the agency receives the best possible scientific insight to support our work to protect human health and the environment."
In a move aimed at restoring the role of science at—and public trust in—the Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator Michael Regan announced Wednesday that more than 40 advisers appointed by former President Donald Trump will be fired from the agency.
"Cleaner and lower-cost wind and solar, coupled with battery storage, will drive fossil fuels out of the market."
The nation's transition from dirty to renewable energy is "nearing exponential growth"—a shift set to usher in "transformative"€ impacts within a handful of years.
Divestment shouldn’t be a difficult choice for our school. Other universities, pension funds, banks, and asset managers have continued to divest from the fossil fuel industry in droves, with institutions controlling more than $14.5 trillion worth of funds joining the movement in whole or in part. In the last year alone, the New York State Common Retirement Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, and Oxford, Cambridge, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Rutgers Universities have all committed to partial or full fossil fuel divestment.
That they’ve done so during the COVID-19 pandemic is further proof to us that divestment is the right move both morally and financially. With a federal administration and unprecedented public momentum set on the decarbonization of our economy, there’s no turning back the clock on the era of fossil fuels. Big Oil’s reign is coming to an end — the industry knows it, which is why it’s fighting tooth and nail to survive — and investors who remain stuck on bygone energy forms will find themselves exposed to significant risk as the economy decarbonizes.
A panel set up by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment has proposed a blueprint for phasing out the use of peat as an energy source.
The panel handed over its report to Minister of Economic Affairs Mika Lintilä (Cen) on Wednesday.
According to the government programme, the energy use of peat must be at least halved by 2030 due to its high greenhouse gas emissions. The proposals will next be considered by the cabinet.
Batteries have come a long way in 30 years. In the early 1990s the storage capacity needed to power a house for a day would have cost about $75,000. The cells themselves would have weighed 113kg (250lbs) and taken up as much space as a beer keg. Today the same amount of power can be delivered at a cost of less than $2,000, from a 40kg package roughly the size of a small backpack.
New video footage of a young male jaguar on a ranch in northern Sonora has given conservationists hope that North America’s only big cat could soon be seen in greater numbers in northern Mexico and the southern United States.
Researchers captured footage of a jaguar dubbed “El Bonito” (The Beautiful) on four cameras since December 2020.
The only debt problem our government has in this time of immense national need (and extremely low borrowing cost) is that we're not incurring enough of it—for the right purposes.
Usually, the Powers That Be swat away the kind of big-ticket reforms our country needs by haughtily asserting a few hoary economic fables they dress up as immutable "truths."
"Democratic moderates are holding climate policy hostage to get a tax cut for the rich."
A small but potentially influential group of House Democrats on Tuesday threatened to oppose an emerging climate and infrastructure package if it does not restore a tax deduction that overwhelmingly benefited the richest households in the country.
"The American model of health reform—throwing money at private insurers—cannot solve it."
A new study released Wednesday morning shows that nearly 50 million Americans would be unable to afford quality healthcare should the need for treatment suddenly arise, a finding seen as further evidence of the immorality of a for-profit insurance system that grants or denies coverage based on a person's ability to pay.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, Putin’s administrative directorate has spent billions of rubles on quarantining everyone who comes into contact with the Russian president, according to a new report from the BBC Russian Service. Pilots, healthcare workers, and even World War II veterans have all been put up in hotels in different parts of Russia to self-isolate on the government’s dime before coming into close proximity with Putin. The Kremlin’s spokesman says these expenses are all part and parcel of implementing quarantine measures.
"This is not nearly enough," the New York Democrat said of Biden's $2.26 trillion proposal.
With President Joe Biden expected to unveil the first part of his jobs and infrastructure plan from Pittsburgh later on Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is warning that the White House's $2.26 trillion proposal does not come close to meeting the scale of the unemployment, inequality, and climate crises facing the nation and world.
The 2020 bonus pool for 182,100 securities industry employees could pay for more than 1 million jobs paying $15 per hour for a year.
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.
Wall Street pay v. the minimum wage
Wall Street bonuses and gender and racial inequality
"Try living on subminimum wages plus tips."
In an attempt to garner more congressional support for the Raise the Wage Act—which would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and end the subminimum wage for tipped workers—One Fair Wage challenged lawmakers on Tuesday to "step into the shoes of a tipped worker as a 'Server For An Hour.'"
Russia’s Federation Council has approved legislation allowing President Vladimir Putin (and former President Dmitry Medvedev) to run for the presidency in two more elections.
Right out of the chute, it’s almost impossible to read their comments without laughing. As Lee reporter€ Tom Lutey wrote in his excellent and in-depth article, Daines claims: “Earmarks are a swampy, corrupt D.C. practice that promotes pay-for-play behavior. This toxic culture does nothing but allow Washington elites to fund their pet projects on the Montana taxpayer’s dime, which is why I have introduced legislation to permanently ban this corrupt practice.” Meanwhile, although Rosendale refused to be interviewed, his office unleashed this gaseous bubble: “Rep. Rosendale campaigned on draining the swamp, not becoming a part of it.”
Mind you, this blather comes following four long years of the former occupant of the White House supposedly “draining the swamp.” Of course it’s rather common knowledge that no administration in recent history has contained as many swamp creatures as Trump’s, which was rife with industry lobbyists running agencies they routinely opposed for their corporate clients. But hey, no need to face the truth when it’s so much easier to just keep repeating the lies.
One advocate said the law is "rooted in racial and economic justice, in an effort to repair harms while also setting a new standard for anti-racist, class-conscious, and gender-expansive policymaking."
Just hours after New York's state lawmakers passed landmark legislation that not only legalizes recreational adult use of marijuana but also includes key equity and justice provisions, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law early Wednesday, paving the way for cannabis storefronts to start opening as early as next year.
A top adviser to former President Donald Trump pressured agency officials to reward politically connected or otherwise untested companies with hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts as part of a chaotic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the early findings of an inquiry led by House Democrats.
Peter Navarro, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant and trade adviser, essentially verbally awarded a $96 million deal for respirators to a company with White House connections. Later, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were pressured to sign the contract after the fact, according to correspondence obtained by congressional investigators.
Neve Gordon and Mark LeVine explain why the IHRA definition of antisemitism has been so successful.
Was Albert Einstein an anti-Semite? Was Hannah Arendt? These questions may sound ludicrous. Yet, according to the definition of anti-Semitism that more than 30 countries — including the United States through the Biden Administration —recently adopted, these€ two leading intellectuals could very well be labeled as such. This is due to an open letter they sent on December 4, 1948 to the New York Times, claiming that the right-wing Herut Party in the newly formed State of Israel was " closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."
Tempe, Ariz.—Over the past several weeks, we’ve all heard the news about what is happening at the border. Most of the headlines and commentary in the media have painted a picture of a “surge” of migrant children crossing the border on their own. They talk about this “security crisis” at the border over and over again. After hearing these news stories, it’s hard not to think that the United States is being invaded by brown children. Which we know is not the reality, but with the amount of coverage this issue gets and the type of narrative that the media focuses on, it’s hard for the public to see it through a different lens: through the lens of humanity.
At a personal level, watching and reading these news stories is deeply painful. I too, came to this country as a child. I was lucky enough to be able to come with my mother and siblings, but know very well the experience of having to cross the border in search of a better future. For many years as a kid, before I became involved in the immigrant rights movement, I saw the same images and rhetoric on TV. I knew they were talking about people like me—but I didn’t see myself in those images. I never saw my humanity reflected in those stories. We were being called “illegal,” “aliens,” “invaders”—I can go on and on.
The White House announced recently that Vice President Kamala Harris would take charge of the Biden administration’s “efforts to deter migration to the southwestern border by working to improve conditions in Central America.” The effort would oversee an infusion of billions of dollars into the “ravaged economies” of the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America ( NTCA), comprising the nations of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
If it’s not clear why Microsoft would go out on a limb to challenge the state on this particular issue, there are a few things you should probably know: [...]
The frigate captain was arrested on spying charges after a "clandestine meeting" with the Russian late on Tuesday in Rome, according to a police statement.
Special operations police stopped both men but only the Italian was arrested. He is accused of passing on "confidential documents" in exchange for money.
The Russian, an embassy official, avoided custody thanks to diplomatic immunity, police said.
Amazon has previously used this handle for its so-called Amazon Ambassadors - real employees who are paid by the firm to promote and defend it on Twitter.
Why it matters: China is using debt contracts to place it at a geopolitical advantage not only to its debtors, but also to all other rich nations.
How it works: Chinese debt contracts differ from standard boilerplate in three main ways.
We had just noted that should Donald Trump ever launch his rumored social media website, it would undoubtedly rely on Section 230 despite the fact that Trump insisted that Section 230 must be repealed and even tried to block military funding if the law wasn't taken away.
Given what followed, festival organisers might have preferred one of Sierra’s other suggestions: a work that would have involved vast amounts of cocaine.€ Social media outrage followed.€ People purporting to speak for the offended, while also counting themselves as offended, railed and expectorated.€ Festival curator Leigh Carmichael tried to be brave against the howling winds of disapproval.€ “At this stage we will push on,” he told ABC Radio Hobart on March 23.€ “Provided we can logistically make this work happen, we will.”€ He acknowledged that, “These were very dangerous topics, they’re hard, they hurt.”€ For criticisms that the work was being made by a Spanish artist, Carmichael was initially clear: to make work taboo for people from specific localities could constitute “a form of racism in itself.”€ Then inevitable equivocation followed.€ “This artist is about their experience and whether a Spanish artist has the right to weigh in, I don’t know.”
Within a matter of hours, Carmichael’s position had collapsed: Sierra’s project was cut and put out to sea.€ “We’ve heard the community’s response to Santiago Sierra’s Union Flag.”€ Grovelling and capitulation before this all powerful community followed.€ “We made a mistake, and take full responsibility.€ The project will be cancelled.€ We apologise to all First Nations people for any hurt that has been caused.€ We are sorry.”
Another day, another state house deciding that it needs to jump into the business of content moderation. This time it's California, and this bill (1) is not nearly as insane as many other states and (2) appears to be coming from well meaning people with good intentions. It doesn't make it a good bill, however. It was announced this week in a somewhat odd press release from Assembly Majority Whip Jesse Gabriel, who declares it to be "groundbreaking" as well as a "bipartisan effort to hold social media companies accountable for online hate and disinformation."
Good news: it’s wrong.
Bad news: the court might not see that, which is why EFF, along with group of small tech companies and advocates, filed an amicus brief to help explain the law and the stakes of the case for the internet.
The facts here are pretty ugly. The plaintiff is a reporter who discovered that an image of her caught on a surveillance camera was being used in ads and shared on social media without her permission. She’s suing Facebook, Reddit, Imgur and a porn site for violating her publicity rights, The district court dismissed the case on Section 230 ground, following strong precedent from the Ninth Circuit holding that the IP carveout doesn’t include state law publicity claims. Hepp appealed.
The MSM call to ‘censorship’ appears to be part of an effort to control the rules of online readerly engagement in social media platforms — especially Facebook and Twitter, the Big Mouths of the Net — currently underway, but which stretches back to the clarion call moment years ago when a list of “fake news” sites (alternative journalism)€ was pushed by WaPo (Bezos, CIA), with sites whose writers often vociferously criticized mainstream coverage events.€ The list went over the line, including trenchant publications like Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, and Counterpunch.€ There appears to be a “move” on the way we should scouting out for.
Still, I was mildly struck by the irony of Greenwald rightly savaging the MSM attacks on Substack, given the commentariat on his site that will come at you like white sheet blood cells if you even question his information or its intentions.€ I mean, they swarm you and beat you down and down, man. So, yeah, irony. But as is almost always the case with the guy, he knows what he’s talking about, and he is consistently and welcomely, adversarial.
EFF, joined by the Brennan Center for Justice and the Pennsylvania Center for the First Amendment, said in a brief filed today that a rule the Supreme Court established in the 1960s allowing schools to punish students for what they say on campus in some limited circumstances should not be expanded to let schools regulate what students say in their private lives outside of school, including on social media.
“Like all Americans, students have free speech protections from government censorship and policing,” said EFF Stanton Fellow Naomi Gilens. “In the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court carved out a narrow exception to this rule, allowing schools to regulate some kinds of speech on campus only in limited circumstances, given the unique characteristics of the school environment. Interpreting that narrow exception to let schools punish students for speech uttered outside of school would dramatically expand schools’ power to police students’ private lives.”
In B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District , the case before the court, a high school student who failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad posted a Snapchat selfie with text that said, among other things, “fuck cheer.” She shared the post over the weekend and outside school grounds—but one of her Snapchat connections took a screen shot and shared it with the cheerleading coaches, who suspended B.L. from the J.V. squad. The student and her family sued the school.
It’s easy to decry cancel culture, but hard to turn it back. Thankfully, recent developments in my area of academic specialty—artificial intelligence (AI)—show that fighting cancel culture isn’t impossible. And as I explain below, the lessons that members of the AI community have learned in this regard can be generalized to other professional subcultures.
Do social media and big tech companies have too much power when it comes to blocking political candidates from using their platforms? According to a bill backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, the answer to that question is "yes," a position that has prompted no small amount of debate among state lawmakers.
The bill, titled House Bill 7013, looks to take action against “social media platforms for unlawful practices related to censoring or de-platforming,” statewide candidates, specifically impacting big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Amazon from removing candidates from their platforms.
He was among the first crop of Indian actors to jump on to the OTT bandwagon, way back when those platforms had not even entered the Indian market. And even today, Purab Kohli continues to work in such content, and his next, Out of Love’s second season, will be released soon.
As the OTT craze picks up among actors and audiences alike, he recalls, “I did a show for a major streaming platform in USA in 2014. It was so early in the day that I didn’t even see it when it released since we didn’t quite understand what [Internet] distribution was in India back then! We did not even have the [Internet] speeds to stream YouTube videos, let alone having such a buffet of platforms to choose from.”
The 42-year-old, who starred in the show Sense8, tells us that the popularity of this medium hit him later when people abroad recognised him.
Most punishment of speech in China goes unnoticed: Only a fraction of such “offenses” are mentioned in police notices or referenced in international coverage.
But since October 2019, a young web sleuth surnamed Wang has been creating a database of cases in which people were punished for online or offline comments critical of the central government. Based on media reports and court records, Wang has documented nearly 2,000 speech crimes in a public Google spreadsheet, arguably one of the few comprehensive records of these “crimes” in China. Censorship makes finding information on such cases a challenge, and the risks associated with creating a database like Wang’s are a deterrent for most.
So how much is “a few,” exactly? According to a tally compiled by longtime Rogan followers, Spotify scrubbed at least 40 episodes from The Joe Rogan Experience as part of its $100 million exclusive deal with the podcaster (we also double-checked the tally and indeed found the episodes missing). Those episodes aren’t available on Spotify currently, and never made it onto the platform.
Almost immediately after Spotify started transitioning episodes, a number of Rogan followers discovered some glaring omissions. At first, fans noticed that interviews with more controversial guests like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos were omitted, though neither Spotify nor Rogan offered any comment on the matter.
Just because your service provider is willing to notify you of the government's (perhaps unexpected) interest in all your digital belongings doesn't mean there's someone standing between you and the government's flimsy piece of administrative paper.
Republicans who failed to overturn the 2020 presidential election are now trying to prevent future electoral defeats through voter suppression.
In the US, the right-wing voter suppression efforts reached a level not seen since the era of segregation, when white supremacists in the South had passed laws to deny Black Americans the right to vote and threatened everyone who dared to resist with violence.
How the security-and-surveillance business in the heart of the EU, besides violating fundamental rights, uses exiles as a research lab, funded by European public funds.
Russian President Vladimir Putin had talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel via video conference on Tuesday, March 30, the Kremlin reported.€
Having learned about Alexey Navalny’s deteriorating health “from social networks,” members of the Vladimir region’s prison watchdog group visited the opposition politician in Pokrov’s Penal Colony No. 2 on March 27. According to the head of the local Public Monitoring Commission (ONK), which is tasked with overseeing the observance of prisoners’ rights, Navalny asked for help obtaining an injection to treat pain and inflammation, though at the time he could walk on his own. Allegedly, the jailed opposition figure didn’t make any other requests. Following these statements, Navalny — who has developed back pain in prison and started experiencing numbness in one of his legs — conveyed via his lawyers that he had told the commission about a “bunch of complaints,” including the fact that he has yet to receive a diagnosis or his MRI results. Navalny called the commission’s members “a bunch of crooks and liars.” In response, the local ONK’s deputy head asserted that Navalny was “feigning” health problems. Meduza looks into the members of the Vladimir region’s public monitoring commission and investigates why there are so few real human rights defenders in these prison watchdog groups.
Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny has announced a hunger strike to protest the conditions of his imprisonment in Penal Colony No. 2 (located in the city of Pokrov, in the Vladimir region).€
Yet that is actually only a distant tip of a huge iceberg. When we study the incidents of police operations (in which killing is too often a result) over the past few decades, we find several levels of irrationality, for which law enforcement remains extraneous. From a civil society perspective, they go so far beyond what could be considered training that, as behavioral traits, they could only be considered cultural. Here’s a brief window into what that means.
*On March 12, 2017, in an Atlanta suburb, Demetrius Hollins was stopped by two Gwinette County cops while driving. Hollins is black, a 21 year old university student. He questioned being stopped, and one cop started yelling. Hollins reached for his phone, and the cop yelled that there will be no phone calls. “Nobody is going to know about this.” He ordered Hollins out of the car. When Hollins stepped out with his hands up, the cop threw him to the ground, and began beating him. After being handcuffed, and while still lying on the ground, the second cop came over and kicked him in the face.
Between Dominican Republic and the world—We’ve yet to find my uncle.
On September 18, 2020, my stepfather’s elder brother boarded the yola. It was the tail end of hurricane season, which had left 700,000 people without electricity and a reported 1.5 million without safe, drinkable water. Painted an auspicious ocean water blue, the boat, said to be undetectable at night by La Armada de Repùblica Dominicana, held within its interior a gaggle of men who’d paid thousands of dollars in hopes of fleeing the island for the United States.
We get an update on political prisoners Mumia Abu-Jamal and Sundiata Acoli, who contracted COVID-19 but have yet to be released. Acoli is a former member of the Black Panther Party who is now 84 years old and has been in prison in New Jersey for nearly half a century, even though he has been eligible for parole for almost three decades. He was denied parole again in February. His crime involved the killing of a state trooper. Last year, he contracted COVID-19 and was hospitalized, and he reportedly has early-stage dementia. We speak with his longtime advocate, Soffiyah Elijah with Alliance of Families for Justice, about whether he will live long enough to appear before the parole board again, and what could happen when his case is reviewed later this year by New Jersey’s Supreme Court.
Over the weekend, one parody account, in particular, caught the attention of reporters and Amazon detractors across Twitter: @AmazonFCDarla. Darla’s profile picture looked fake, but the language used in her tweets was eerily similar to that used by real Amazon employees. Publications like Gizmodo quickly debunked Darla’s account. Her profile picture appeared to have been created by an artificial intelligence program like This Person Does Not Exist. Her account was created in March with no tweets dating back to the beginning of Amazon’s ambassador program. And Darla’s tweets were half-baked “in the way that a troll might tweet,” Gizmodo said.
The bottom line: "Corporations have to stand up — there is no middle ground," Chenault said. "This is about all Americans having the right to vote. But we need to recognize the special history of the denial of a right to vote for Black Americans. And we will not be silent."
The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is entering its third day. Chauvin faces murder and manslaughter charges for killing George Floyd last May by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. On Tuesday, jurors heard chilling testimony from eyewitnesses, including Darnella Frazier, who was just 17 years old when she used her cellphone to film the killing of George Floyd. Her image was not broadcast on the court television feed because she was a minor at the time of his death.
He was drawn to the commotion by the police car, and quickly became upset when he saw Mr. Chauvin’s knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. It appeared to be a blood choke, he testified, referring to having seen the hold render people unconscious as a fighter. He grew so frustrated at the officers that he began yelling obscenities at them.
Mr. Williams then took a highly unusual step: He called the police on the police.
“I believe I witnessed a murder,” he told a 911 operator, according to a recording of a call he placed that evening that was played in court. On the witness stand, Mr. Williams wiped his eyes as the recording played.
In August 2014, Levi Frasier filmed Denver cops beating a suspect during an arrest for an alleged drug deal. The officers punched the accused six times in the face, and when a woman approached the scene screaming, a different cop clutched her ankle, tossing her to the ground—all captured on film.
The officers didn't take kindly to the latter point. After the arrest, they surrounded Frasier, searched his tablet without a warrant, and attempted to delete the resulting video. In doing so, a federal court this week acknowledged that the officers violated the First Amendment, with the judges noting that the city's police training had taught the officers as much: There's a constitutional right to record government agents making a public arrest.
In early March, Senators pushed the Biden FCC to update our fairly pathetic definition of broadband, which is currently anything 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. The Senators proposed something closer to 100 Mbps in both directions, a definition mirrored in a new broadband bill recently introduced in the House.
The plan would prioritize funding for “broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives,” and sets aside specific amounts for broadband infrastructure projects on tribal lands. Some Republican lawmakers have previously said municipalities that build their own networks are squeezing out competition and proposed a bill that would outlaw the practice.
The Biden plan is headlined by traditional transportation infrastructure. It promises to revitalize 20,000 miles of roads and fix 10,000 crumbling bridges. But the sprawling package also includes funding for targeted to both aging cities (replacing all lead pipes in the nation’s water lines) and flyover country (including bringing broadband Internet to the more than 35 percent of rural Americans who lack access to it). The package seems intentionally crafted for bipartisan appeal. It does not mention high speed rail, but it does include “$80 billion to address Amtrak’s repair backlog.”
Sources from BenevolentAI and IBM say the UKIPO’s stance on possible reform shows the UK wants to be a leader in AI
US manufacturer Ranpak sued Storopack for patent infringement at Mannheim District Court at the end of 2014 (case ID: 7 O 210/14), over paper cushioning systems used in packaging. One year later, the court ruled that Storopack infringed the patent with some of its repackaging machines. However, the patent had already expired in the middle of the year.
Thus, Ranpak did not obtain injunctive relief, only damages. Storopack had to disclose its accounts dating back to 30 December 2004.
On 1 April 2021 the EPO launches its new web-based filing service Online Filing 2.0 [1]. The service is accessible via the EPO's website with a smart card registered for this service.
The tool allows the filing of European patent applications, international (PCT) applications and other documents relating to such applications or to patents deriving from such applications in PDF format. International applications can also be filed in XML format. It covers all procedures before the EPO, including those before the boards of appeal.
[...]
During that phase, documents in DOCX can be transformed into XML before filing, by means of WIPO's converter, which is integrated in the Online Filing 2.0 software.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has issued a notice on the 24th of March informing that the oral proceedings before examining and opposition divisions will continue to be held by videoconference in accordance with the applicable decision of the President of the EPO without requiring the agreement of the parties. The notice will apply with immediate effect until the Enlarged Board of Appeal has announced its decision regarding the legality of the mandatory oral proceedings by videoconference.
The EPO had last year initiated a pilot project which allowed oral proceedings in opposition cases to be carried out exclusively by videoconference so as to avoid a backlog of cases during the pandemic. Video hearings were earlier granted only under “exceptional circumstances” were made mandatory by the EPO in November 2020. The November 2020 notice clarified that videoconferenced oral proceedings before opposition divisions would become mandatory, and consent of the affected parties would not be required.
A new edition of the European Patent Office (EPO) Guidelines for Examination (‘the guidelines’) came into force on 1 March 2021. Relevant to life sciences, this edition includes a new subsection detailing EPO practice with respect to the interpretation of terms relating to amino or nucleic acid sequences, as well as a new section on the examination of claims to antibodies.
[...]
Firstly, they confirm that when an amino acid or nucleic acid sequence is defined by using percentage sequence identity language, this is determined by the number of identical residues over a defined length in a given alignment. If no algorithm or calculation method for determining the percentage of identity is defined, the broadest interpretation will be applied using any reasonable method known at the relevant filing date.
In addition, it is confirmed that amino acid sequences can also be defined by a degree of similarity, expressed as a percentage of similarity. Similarity is considered broader than identity, as it allows conservative substitutions of amino acid residues having similar physicochemical properties over a defined length of a given alignment. The percentage of similarity is determinable only if a similarity-scoring matrix is defined. If no such matrix is defined, a claim referring to a sequence displaying a percentage of similarity to a recited sequence is considered to cover any sequence fulfilling the similarity requirement as determined with any reasonable similarity-scoring matrix known at the relevant filing date.
Finally, for amino acid sequences, the guidelines now state that if a percentage of homology is used by the applicant as the only feature to distinguish the subject matter of a claim from the prior art, its use is objected to under Article 84 EPC unless the determination or calculation of the percentage of homology is clearly defined in the application as filed. However, for nucleic acid sequences, homology percentage and identity percentage are usually considered to have the same meaning.
The one lesson learned in 2020 is that not even a pandemic can stop patent litigation. This again is proving to be true as the world starts the recovery process, patent disputes have not skipped a beat. In fact, the first quarters numbers are in-line with the previous of 1,256 combined patent litigation and PTAB disputes. While litigation remains high, the PTAB appears to be taking a 7% decrease versus last year. This is partially due to the fact more companies are using the re-examination process due to the uncertainty of discretionary denials.
[...]
Samsung, again, is the most prolific PTAB filer (59 filings) and at the same time are the most targeted defendant in patent litigation (10 cases as first-named defendant).
On Monday, March 29, the US Federal Trade Commission formally abandoned its antitrust lawsuit against telecoms company Qualcomm, bringing the four-year battle to a close.
With the deadline for filing a petition for writ of certiorari at SCOTUS having passed, FTC acting chair Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said the commission had decided not to file an appeal because of the “significant headwinds” facing the organisation.
“The FTC’s staff did an exceptional job presenting the case, and I continue to believe that the district court’s conclusion that Qualcomm violated the antitrust laws was entirely correct and that the court of appeals erred in concluding otherwise,” she said.
“I am particularly concerned about the potential for anti-competitive or unfair behaviour in the context of standard setting, and the FTC will closely monitor conduct in this arena.”
[...]
Judge Alan Albright announced on Sunday, March 28, that he would transfer VLSI Technology’s second jury trial against Intel to the court in Waco, which sits in the Western District of Texas. The trial will take place on April 12.
The parties were supposed to have the trial at the Austin courthouse, but the building was closed because of COVID. The lawsuit involves US patent numbers 6,366,522 and 6,633,187.
It comes four weeks after Intel’s $2.2 billion loss to VLSI in Waco.
The jury at the District Court for the Western District of Texas ruled that Intel infringed patents belonging to VLSI, awarding the Fortress Investment Group subsidiary $1.5 billion for US patent number 7,523,373 and $675 million for number 7,725,759.
VLSI Technology v Intel was the second patent jury trial to take place in Albright’s court since his appointment in 2018. It was also the first plaintiff victory.
Albright's first jury trial, MV3 v Roku, ended in December 2020 with a win for the defendant.
Intel is not the only big tech company to see a major loss in a Texas district court recently. On March 19, a jury in the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled that Apple owed Personalized Media Communications $308.5 million for infringing a digital rights management patent.
Summary: For years, Google and YouTube have included a trusted flagger program by which certain entities that have shown they “are particularly effective at notifying YouTube” of content violations are given more powerful tools with which to do so.
The Russian operator of YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com can be sued in the US, a Virginia federal court has ruled. The court denied a motion to dismiss, concluding that fighting the case in Virginia is not an excessive burden for the defendant. The denial is good news for the major record labels, who want the YouTube rippers to be held accountable for copyright infringement.
Revenue generated by pirate site operators in Russia is down for the third successive year. According to a new report by cybersecurity firm Group-IB, the market is now worth around $59m, down from a high of $87m in 2018. Enforcement action by BREIN, the MPA and ACE in 2019 disrupted the market but pirates have been quick to adapt, offering new systems and deploying countermeasures.
The 77-year-old Ivors Academy and the 128-year-old Musicians’ Union relayed the warning in a newly launched campaign entitled “Composers Against Buyouts.” Said campaign’s announcement blog post begins by highlighting a trio of statistics on the subject, including that 35 percent of media composers have accepted buyouts or work-for-hire agreements and that some 41 percent have “had to give away more of their mechanical rights than they wanted to.”
Stat number three – “64 percent believe the commissioning environment is coercive” – leads into a brief introduction and a 43-second-long animated clip, which compares royalty deals to buyouts. Then, the multifaceted document plugs an April 21st “Composers Against Buyouts” launch event as well as a single-page “Fair Commissioning Manifesto.”
