My journey with Linux started in my first year of college when I encountered tools like Git, GitHub, Maven, Jenkins, and others. I first worked with Windows. With Linux, I had a completely different kind of environment to work with. I began my Linux journey with virtual machines.
After spending two years with Linux in virtual machines, I decided to use Linux on my primary computer. I learned about Linux system architecture, filesystems, and created a script that adds users to Linux-based operating systems. You may find links to that article and all of my published articles on my Enable Sysadmin profile (Kshitiz Saini).
Another KubeCon is just around the corner and, due to popular demand, we’re hosting Operator Day again! Designed for KubeCon, but free and open to all.
Last year, thousands of you joined us to get hands-on training from Ubuntu’s experts, so this time around we’re making the workshop even more elaborate and interactive!
Operators simplify everyday application management on Kubernetes. Learn how to use them, how to create them in Python, and how to evolve from configuration management to application management. We’re working to create a community-driven collection of operators for everything that’s integrated and tested everywhere.
The startup recently raised $40 million in venture funding and now has a product ready to make Istio palatable for enterprises.
Katherine Druckman chats with Petros Koutoupis and Kyle Rankin about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), the benefits of contributing to the projects you use, and why you should be a FOSS fan as well.
This time, we have System76 working on their own desktop environment based on GNOME, Arch Linux adding a guided installer, Google winning its court case against Oracle on the use of Java in Android, and Facebook is leaking data online, again. Become a channel member to get access to a weekly patroncast and vote on the next topics I'll cover
An uncommented timelapse while inking this page 6 of episode 34 of my webcomic Pepper&Carrot ( https://www.peppercarrot.com/ ). During the process, I thought about activating the recorder and I even put a webcam so you can see what I'm doing on the tablet too. I'm not doing it for everypages; because you can imagine the weight on disk about saving around 10h of videos like this; and also how it is not multi-tasking: when I record, you don't see me open the door to get the mail of the postman, you don't see me cleaning temporary accident of a cat bringing back a mouse at home, you don't see me typing to solve a merge request issue to merge a translation of Pepper&Carrot.
When Apple first released their new M1-based hardware, a small fraction of the Linux community was up in arms. Why? Because that community tends to prefer installing their favorite open-source operating system on Apple laptops. So upon launch of the new Apple Silicon-based hardware, it became clear that the usual route to getting Linux installed wouldn't work.
And thus a movement was put into motion to successfully install Linux on M1-based hardware. One company, in particular, Corellium, set out to make it happen. This company had a leg up on this, thanks to their virtualization platform having been a provider of security research with particular insights into how operating systems function on Apple ARM CPUs.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.4.267 kernel.
All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Back in early 2018 were patches proposed for selectable platform support when building Intel's kernel graphics driver so users/distributions if desired could disable extremely old hardware support and/or cater kernel builds for specific Intel graphics generations. Three years later those patches have been re-proposed.
The patches then and now are about allowing selectable Intel graphics "Gen" support at kernel configure/build time so that say the i8xx support could be removed or other specific generations of Intel graphics handled by the i915 kernel driver. This disabling could be done if phasing out older hardware support, seeking smaller kernel images, or other similar purposes. The patches don't change any default support levels but leaves things as-is and simply provides the knobs for disabling select generations of hardware.
Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a security module for the Linux kernel developed by Openwall. The latest release adds compatibility with Linux kernels up to soon to be released 5.12, support for building LKRG into kernel images, support for old 32-bit x86 machines and more. Loading the LKRG 0.9.0 module will cause a kernel panic and a complete halt if SELinux is enabled.
A while ago I worked on improving Logitech G15 LCD-screen support under Linux. I recently got an email from someone who wanted to add support for the LCD panel in the Logitech Z-10 speakers to lcdproc, asking me to describe the process I went through to improve G15 support in lcdproc and how I made it work without requiring the unmaintained g15daemon code.
Intel's engineers working on their open-source Linux-based Compute Runtime stack just released their latest version.
Intel Compute Runtime 21.15.19533 is the new release for this open-source compute stack for their graphics hardware to expose OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero functionality.
The main change with v21.15.19533 is exposing Level Zero 1.1 support. Last month was the release of oneAPI Level Zero 1.2.3 with Level Zero 1.1 specification support as an incremental step forward for this low-level Intel interface for interacting with the bare metal hardware. The initial Level Zero 1.1 headers and loader came back in January.
With Mesa 21.1 now branched for this collection of primarily OpenGL/Vulkan open-source drivers for Linux, feature development is on for Mesa 21.2 that will debut in Q3. One of the first major changes to land for Mesa 21.2 is the beginning of the graphics compiler support for Intel's forthcoming Xe-HP high performance graphics processor.
For GTC21 week NVIDIA has released version 11.3 of their CUDA toolkit.
CUDA 11.3 is bringing CUDA Graph enhancements, new stream priorities, Steam-ordered memory allocator enhancements, new APIs, support for virtual aliasing across kernel boundaries, and also support now for the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS point release. CUDA 11.3 also ships improvements to the NVIDIA C++ Standard Library (libcu++), various compiler improvements, and more.
Given that the new RDNA2 GPUs provide some support for hardware accelerated raytracing and there is even a new shiny Vulkan extension for it, it may not be a surprise that we’re working on implementing raytracing support in RADV.
Already some time ago I wrote documentation for the hardware raytracing support. As these GPUs contain quite minimal hardware to implement things there is a large software and shader side to implementing this.
There still is much work left to be completed but Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has made its first baby steps towards ray-tracing support with Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" series hardware.
RADV lead developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen announced his "first rays" progress in being able to provide RDNA2 Vulkan ray-tracing with the RADV driver. After hacking on the functionality the past few weeks, Bas hit his personal milestones including a fully recursive Fibonnaci shader and a ray-traced cube...
Want to make some ambient sounds? Try Blanket, an open-source tool with modern user interface.
Blanket is an application for playing ambient noises, which boosts your productivity, helps you stay focused or fall asleep.
The lightweight application comes with sounds like rain, storm, waves, train, city, coffee shop, fireplace, pink and white noise, and many others. Each sound has a volume slider that you can adjust, this allowing you to mix various sounds as you wish. You can also add your own custom sounds.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Subversion on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, The Apache Subversion (SVN) is a free and open-source version control system used to manage and track changes in files and directories. Any time you change, add or delete a file or folder that you manage with Subversion, you commit these changes to your Subversion repository, which creates a new revision in your repository reflecting these changes. You can always go back, look at and get the contents of previous revisions. SVN supports several protocols for network access: SVN, SVN+SSH, HTTP, HTTPS. If you are behind a firewall, HTTP-based Subversion is advantageous since SVN traffic will go through the firewall without any additional firewall ruleset.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Apache Subversion on a CentOS 8.
Need to find your Linux MAC address but can’t figure it out? We can help! Follow along as we go over the different ways you can discover your network adapters’ MAC address on Linux!
This post will show you how to setup Docker on Alpine Linux. You will also see how to: add Portainer to make container management a breeze and use Docker to start and stop containers.
Today we are looking at how to upgrade your Linux Apps from Debian 10 to Debian 11 Testing 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.
Diskonaut is a simple terminal disk space navigator created using Rust and supports Linux, macOS and Windows. The usage of the app is very easy, specify an absolute path in your file system, or run it in any directory you want. It will scan the directory and convert it to memory, allowing you to explore its contents. It also allows you to check space usage even during the scanning process.
When the scan is complete, you can navigate the subdirectories of interest and get a visual representation of a tree map of what consumes your disk space. diskonaut allows you to delete files and directories and as a result tracks the amount of space you have freed up in the process. It also supports keyboard shortcuts to facilitate navigation.
Hello! This week I started building some choose-your-own-adventure-style puzzles about debugging networking problems. I’m pretty excited about it and I’m trying to organize my thoughts so here’s a blog post!
Bash script programming is a sequence of executable commands, carrying out numerous commands at once, task performance automation, and administrative tasks customization. Generally, all Linux users must acquaint themselves with the basic knowledge of bash script programming because of the importance it offers.
This tutorial explains how you can enable your Deepin GNU/Linux version 20 upwards on your computer (codenamed Apricot) to install more software. This done by setting up the repository (central of software on the internet) so the user has the correct configuration. The result is you can later search, download, and run software you wish on your Deepin computer. You are required to be able to edit text in administrator mode to practice this. For experienced persons, you may want to go to Sources.list section right away.
This tutorial will take you through installing your own ISPConfig 3 single server setup using the ISPConfig auto-installer. This installer follows the old Perfect Server guides but is more modular and easy to follow. If you want to set up a multiserver setup with dedicated servers for each service instead, see the Perfect Multiserver guide.
This guide works for both Debian 10 and Ubuntu 20.04. We will use the hostname server1.example.com. Replace it where necessary.
There are many commands in Linux and for this reason many people are worried about using the terminal. For this reason, today we will look at one of the main commands in Linux, the CD command. We will learn its most basic ways to use it and try to make your Linux experience more enjoyable.
What is the cd command? The cd (change directory) command was developed with the main purpose of changing the directory we are working in to move to another, if necessary. This cd command is a system integrated command, a.k. no external program or application is required, as it is executed directly by the Linux Shell. The cd command is available in all current Linux distributions.
Looking for a dedicated Podcast app on Ubuntu Linux then try out Elementary OS’s Vocal Podcast that is available to install on most of the Linux system using Flatpak packages. Of course, we can use major music players for podcasts but the dedicated ones have their own perks because of various handy features.
In this video, I am going to show how to Install freeBSD 13.0 plus XFCE desktop and some basic applications.
When you divide gaming into two eras, then you get gaming before the advent of Discord and after the advent of Discord. It has changed how gamers used to communicate during a game. It’s not that there was no messaging app earlier, but Discord made it extremely easy to create communities and upgraded team communication very quickly.
Today Discord has become a go-to app for team communications. One can create a Discord server and allow its members to use text or voice for sharing information. Or even create private channels to only allow certain members to join.
IDLE stands for Integrated DeveLopment Environment. It is an IDE for Python, written in Python language itself and based on Tkinter with bindings to the Tk widget set. IDLE is most suitable for beginners as it is easy to use and not feature overloaded. Hence, it is very popular in educational environments.
Ping is a computer program for network administration used to check the availability of active devices on the Internet or local networks. The name ping comes from sonar terminology. Ping works on the principle of echo, sending a message via ICMP protocol to a remote computer. The message contains a “request” for a response from the host. In this process, the time from the transmission of the message to the time of its receipt by the original computer (two-way) is measured and any packet loss is recorded. The test results are printed on the screen in the form of statistical messages.
Let’s start with an example to check the connection to the google.com host. To do this, we just need to type in a terminal ping google.com, but because the program will not stop the ping alone we have to do stop it manually. To do this we must use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the timezone on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, By default, when a server is provisioned a default timezone will get configured automatically with the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). You can change the timezone later using the below method.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step set or change timezone on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Mosquitto is a lightweight message broker that supports the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Mosquitto is widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) and telemetry applications, where a fully-featured message broker like Red Hat AMQ would be unnecessarily burdensome. Mosquitto also finds a role as a message bus for interprocess communication in distributed systems. Because it avoids complex features, Mosquitto is easy to tune and handles substantial application workloads with relatively modest memory and CPU resources.
There are essentially two stages to making Mosquitto available on Red Hat OpenShift. First, you need to containerize the application in a way that is broadly compatible with OpenShift. Part of containerization involves installing the container image in a repository, from which OpenShift can download it. Second, you need to deploy the containerized image in a pod, providing whatever properties and configuration are necessary for the specific installation. The first half of this article shows how to build Mosquitto into an image suitable for use in a container. The second half will show you how to configure and deploy the Mosquitto image on OpenShift.
If you are a Fedora Linux enthusiast or a developer working with multiple instances of Fedora Linux then you might benefit from the DNF local plugin. An example of someone who would benefit from the DNF local plugin would be an enthusiast who is running a cluster of Raspberry Pis. Another example would be someone running several virtual machines managed by Vagrant. The DNF local plugin reduces the time required for DNF transactions. It accomplishes this by transparently creating and managing a local RPM repository. Because accessing files on a local file system is significantly faster than downloading them repeatedly, multiple Fedora Linux machines will see a significant performance improvement when running dnf with the DNF local plugin enabled.
I recently started using this plugin after reading a tip from Glenn Johnson (aka glennzo) in a 2018 fedoraforum.org post. While working on a Raspberry Pi based Kubernetes cluster running Fedora Linux and also on several container-based services, I winced with every DNF update on each Pi or each container that downloaded a duplicate set of rpms across my expensive internet connection. In order to improve this situation, I searched for a solution that would cache rpms for local reuse. I wanted something that would not require any changes to repository configuration files on every machine. I also wanted it to continue to use the network of Fedora Linux mirrors. I didn’t want to use a single mirror for all updates.
This week I needed to prepare some files for the buyers of my book Deployment from Scratch. I use various git repositories for the content and case studies, and I needed to create archives for the current release quickly.
Luckily, I found out this is much easier than I made it to.
QED Games just released their first full title with Tactical Troops: Anthracite Shift, a top-down turn-based tactical combat game with "the feeling of 80's sci-fi movies".
Across a 20 hour single-player campaign you command a troop of elite soldiers across a grid-less map, while you also explore the dangerous planet Anthracite. With no grid the movement system really does look good, and if you're a fan of turn-based tactics this looks like a really good choice to pick up. Across the campaign you fight through 41 missions against local fauna, bandits, robots and other well equipped soldiers.
Howdy Godotters! It's time for another brief update on the status of Godot on the Web.
If you read through the last post, you already got the spoiler that Godot 3.3 is getting experimental virtual keyboard support on the Web. This has been a highly requested feature, but also a hard one to implement (as you might also guess by the fact that most engines, even famous ones, do not support that). It is still in experimental state, and comes with limitations, but should be enough to allow your users to insert their high-score name, or simple chat messages.
Building a city in the skies and defending it with towers, while you also ride an airship - Sky Fleet definitely blends a number of things together and it sounds great.
Total War: ROME REMASTERED is the upcoming release from Feral Interactive and Creative Assembly that replaces the original and brings it to Linux too and there's a lot improved with it.
Not only is it the first Total War to come with full cross-platform online play out of the box for Linux, macOS and Windows plus improved visuals and more it's also bringing in plenty of Quality of Life enhancements to improve the overall experience. These QoL improvements include: an enhanced camera, campaign map vibrancy, both classic and remastered rule-sets, new merchant options, sixteen new playable factions and a whole lot more.
Wasteland 3 from inXile Entertainment is set to expand on June 3 with the first expansion Wasteland 3: The Battle of Steeltown and it sounds like it's going to be full of action.
"The towering factory complex of Steeltown manufactures all the tech that keeps Colorado running and the Patriarch in power—trucks, armor, weapons, and robots. But deliveries from Steeltown have stopped cold, and all the Patriarch is getting from Abigail Markham—Steeltown's leader—are excuses. When he sends the Rangers to investigate, they find the place is a powder keg with the fuse already lit. The workers are striking, bandits raid with impunity, and nobody is allowed through the gates, not even on the business of the Patriarch. Without help, Steeltown could crash and burn for good, and take Markham with it—but maybe that's just what it needs."
Jupiter Hell, the awesome roguelike from ChaosForge continues getting regular Early Access upgrades and the gameplay continues getting a bit deeper with this latest 0.9.8 "Message" update.
Ready for some lore? How about their first iteration of a quest-like system? Well, both are in now in the Message update. Spread throughout the game you can now interact with special terminals to get some lore text, as well as information on items, events or other content that is available later in the levels - so this will affect which branches you pick when you progress through the game. There's also a Journal now to follow, intermission screens between moons to show off your stats, exotic weapons now have their own dedicated perks and more.
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Jupiter Hell still continues running amazingly well on Linux, with thanks to their use of Vulkan it performs great!
Get ready to explore space, mine some rocks and lose yourself in the hard sci-fi game ÃâV: Rings of Saturn which just expanded the demo in a very big way.
"For a few months now we’ve been thinking about the best form of ÃâV: Rings of Saturn demo. We’ve concluded that, having the whole product done, we want a gamer to see its quality, but not by playing the limited version. Therefore, ÃâV: Rings of Saturn, a hard sci-fi, top-down physics-based space mining simulator is available for free on Steam for everyone." — Kodera Software
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Back in May 2020 the developer reported the percentage of Linux sales was good too, with the developer mentioning recently how "Linux players are awesome" due to their bug reports and it seems Linux sales are still doing well.
Remember Kate? It's the default text editor in KDE Plasma environment and it is going to become a lot more awesome.
Nothing concrete yet, I've not started to work on it. But after a break of several months, I'm now considering learning Rust, and incrementally rewriting gedit in Rust.
In recent months the Zorin OS community has started to get more nervous by the day about news from the Zorin OS development team. There were many rumors about the expected release date and of course about what the latest Zorin OS would have to offer. The last update of Zorin OS in September 2020 was 15.3, which was still based on the older Ubuntu 18.04, but focused on strengthening the core essentials of the operating system. But at that time Ubuntu itself was of course already on 20.04, so intuitively that felt like outdated technology for many users, even though this update contained a lot of new technology. Zorin OS 15.3 was powered by the 5.4 kernel, it had performance, stability, and security improvements, support for more hardware, and the latest security patches. So, it was far from outdated. But this week I finally received the fantastic news that the beta version of my favorite Linux distribution is available, so I couldn’t resist downloading and installing Zorin OS 16 Beta immediately and giving my first impression. So, here is a first look at what is new in Zorin OS 16 Beta.
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To conclude this article, I would like to wish you a lot of fun trying out Zorin OS 16 Beta. I think the Zorin team took their time to come up with something great. Test it yourself and share your findings with the Zorin team, so they can guarantee a perfect distro when the final version will be released later this year.
The Zorin team are making some bold claims with the release of the Ubuntu-based Zorin OS 16 Beta that anyone can go ahead and try out now. It sure does look slick!
Featuring a brand new look for their GNOME-based desktop, Zorin OS 16 is quite easy on the eyes - as long as you like everything bright that is. With a sleek white look it's definitely eye-grabbing, along with a blue accent which you can customize. Zorin OS definitely screams "look at me!".
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Interestingly, their monetization model for supporting their work is a little like another Ubuntu-based distribution elementary OS. You can pay to download it, or pay nothing. However, Zorin OS does it a little differently. They offer up for normal desktop users a Core (free) download with the usual stuff and a Ultimate (paid) edition that comes with a few extras.
If you love the look of Windows 10X but don't want to run it on your PC, you may be in luck. An upcoming Linux distro looks to emulate the look and feel of Windows 10X while keeping the features people enjoy from Linux. The Windows10X-esque update will be available in Zorin OS 16 Ultimate, which will be available as a stable release this summer.
We don't have many images of the upcoming Zorin OS 16 Ultimate, but the one we do have shows off a centralized Start Menu along the taskbar. Zorin also states that the distro will adapt well to computers with touchpads, mice, or touchscreens.
A new major stable release for FreeBSD landed as version 13. The release adds OpenZFS support along with a performance boost.
System76 recently unveiled their plans to debut a new desktop, dubbed "Cosmic", along with Pop!_OS 21.04 this coming June. I can't wait that long, so I decided to check it out right now. In this video, I show-off the current in-development version of the Cosmic Desktop as of April 16th, 2021.
Do you want to try out the latest GNOME 40 in openSUSE? This is how you can try it right now.
Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution are in for a treat this weekend as the software repositories have been populated with the core packages and apps from the recently released GNOME 40 stack.
More and more distros that are offering the GNOME desktop environment on their repositories or as part of a live/installation ISO are now trying to upgrade the packages to the GNOME 40 release, which arrived last month with a major design overhaul to the Activities Overview, as well as various improvements to the GNOME Shell UI and most of the core GNOME apps.
While openSUSE/SUSE is known for their friendliness towards the KDE desktop, this week's openSUSE Tumbleweed updates have made GNOME 40 available on this rolling-release distribution.
GNOME 40 released near the end of March with many big improvements from GNOME Shell changes to continued Wayland enhancements, atomic mode-setting, input handling being done in a separate thread, initial adoption around the GTK4 toolkit, and a lot of other work.
Two openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were released since last week’s blog.
The snapshots brought the much anticipated GNOME 40 as well as an update of KDE Frameworks 5.81.0, Plasma 5.21.4 and several other packages.
The 20210414 snapshots was a monster; the amount of packages updated in the snapshot was ginormous. The update to GNOME 40 brought some significant changes to the desktop environment. New visual changes with rounded corners, and gestures like a three-finger swipe to move between workspaces were among the improvements in the release. The app launcher is more customizable and more intuitive to navigate with a mouse. Another desktop environment that was updated in the snapshot was Plasma 5.21.4, which had color scheme fixes and a fix for a broken keyboard configurations with single layout on Wayland. The release also set the preferred aspect ratio to “21:9” over “64:27” with KScreen. KDE Frameworks 5.81.0 added high-brightness and low-brightness Breeze Icons and the user interface builder Kirigami fixed a potential crash in the SizeGroup. Even Xfce had in update in the snapshot; this update in the xfce4-settings 4.16.1 package fixed scaling and updated translations. Dependencies were update in the upgrade to nodejs15 15.14. There was a minor fix for the cups printing package and xterm 367 updated some patches and improved responsiveness of the terminal. Linux Kernel 5.11.12 arrived in the snapshot and had several Advanced Linux Sound Architecture fixes and a commit for a nosy driver with Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)2021-3483. Both ruby2.7 and ruby3.0 received minor updates to fix an XML vulnerability and GStreamer 1.18.4 fixed mpeg-2 video handling and a memory leak. Several YaST packages also had updates.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro is a modern system primarily designed for edge computing. The main features of SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro are predictability and reliability, thanks to the read-only root file system and transactional updates. The read-only file system ensures that the system cannot be altered during runtime and that the system behaves the same way after each reboot. Transactional updates enable you to update the system without influencing the running system and always provide a rollback.
For SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.0, we have currently released the following documentation (a huge “thank you” goes to Jana Halackova for the docs and Lukáš Kucharczyk for the release notes)...
After I left you and Tumbleweed in the capable hands of Richard for two weeks, it is good to be back. The week has seen a slightly lower count of published snapshots, but only because openQA was nice enough to find bugs that we did not you having to fight with. So, we only released two snapshots (0408 and 0414). As usual, the large gap means a few snapshots were tested in between, and things accumulated.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! The Final freeze is underway. The F34 Final Go/No-Go meeting is Thursday.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
If you're looking for a suitable CentOS replacement in advance of its Red Hat support sunsetting, we've done the research to help you find the Linux that fits.
In June 2009, I was given the opportunity to work in Fedora Infrastructure as Mike McGrath's assistant so that he could take some vacation. At the time I was living in New Mexico and had worked at the University of New Mexico for several years. I started working remote for the first time in my life, and had to learn all the nuances of IRC meetings and typing clearly and quickly. With the assistance of Seth Vidal, Luke Macken, Ricky Zhou, and many others I got quickly into 'the swing of things' with only 2 or 3 times taking all of Fedora offline because of a missed ; in a dns config file. I
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All in all, it has been a very good decade of working on a project that many have said would be 'gone' by next release. However, it is time for me to move onto other projects, and find new challenges that excite me. Starting next week, I will be moving to a group working with a strong focus on embedded hardware. I have been interested in embedded in some form or another since the 1970's. My first computer memories were of systems my dad showed me which would have been in an A-6 plane. From there I remember my dad taking me to see a friend who repaired PDP systems for textile mills and let me work on my first Unix running on a Dec Rainbow. Whenever I came home from those visits, I would have a smile and hum of excitement which would not leave me for days. I remember having that humm when in 1992, a student teacher showed me MCC Linux running on an i386 which we had been repairing from spare parts. I could do everything and anything on that box for a fraction of the price of the big Unix boxes I had to pay account time for. And recently I went to a set of talks on embedded projects and found myself with the same hum. It was a surprise for me but I found myself more and more interested in it as the weeks have gone by.
I was offered a chance to move over, and I decided to take it. I will still be in the Fedora community but will not be able to work much on Infrastructure issues. If I have tasks that you are waiting for, please let me know, and I will finish them either by myself or by doing a full handoff to someone else in Infrastructure. Thank you all for your help and patience over these last 11+ years.
Vehicles that drive themselves using new forms of power. Traffic signals that talk to cars. Highways and city streets with zero accidents and zero congestion. From changing lifestyles to concerns about climate change, a number of trends are converging to transform yesterday’s science fiction into today’s reality. Recently, automakers along with governments and technology companies have joined in a dash toward the future of mobility. In one example, the picturesque landscape near Limerick, Ireland has become a hotbed for automotive and smart city innovation.
A new Future Mobility Campus Ireland (FMCI) on the outskirts of the town of Shannon is planned to include a collaborative testbed spread across eight miles (12km) of public roads. It is also planned to incorporate smart junctions and connected car parks with shared vehicle parking and electric car charging stations. The initiative is set to feature smart links to a 280-mile (450km) stretch of connected highway and a managed air traffic corridor for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)— drones—from Shannon airport.
Debian 11 continues inching closer towards release and it looks like the developers maintaining the "Devuan" fork won't be far behind with their re-base of the distribution focused on init system freedom.
The Devuan fork of Debian remains focused on providing Debian GNU/Linux without systemd. Devuan Beowulf 3.1 is their latest release based on Debian 10 while Devuan Chimaera is in the works as their re-base for Debian 11.
Want the world/your Zoom colleagues to know how excited you about Ubuntu 21.04, which is released on April 22?
If so, check out a hip new t-shirt from the French-speaking Ubuntu community. They produce tie-in tees for new Ubuntu releases, and the upcoming ‘Hirsute Hippo’ is no exception. With “official” Ubuntu t-shirts no longer available to purchase it’s great that custom endeavours like this shirt are available.
The front of the purple shirt has custom artwork “interpreting” the ‘Hirsute Hippo’ codename. I can’t get poetic about it because it is literally what it says: a hirsute hippo! The left sleeve carries the “Ubuntu-fr” association.
Raspberry Pi enthusiasts may be interested in a new modular, touchscreen, pocket sized Raspberry Pi power device created by Seeed Studio in the form of the reTerminal which will soon be available to preorder sometime towards the end of April 2021 priced at $195. The pocket Linux terminal is capable of running the official Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu, or custom Linux distributions built with the Yocto Project or buildroot.
Eurotech’s rugged, vehicle-ready “BoltGate 10-12” IoT gateway runs Linux on a TI AM335x and features an LTE CAT1 modem plus 2x LAN, WiFi/BT, GNSS, 2x CAN, isolated DIO, and optional LoRaWAN, UPS, and DAQ.
Eurotech announced a multi-service IoT gateway for rolling stock, automotive, heavy duty vehicles, and rugged industrial applications. The LTE CAT1-equipped BoltGate 10-12 follows earlier BoltGate models including the smaller, Apollo Lake based BoltGate 20-31. It has the same 1GHz, Cortex-A8 Texas Instruments Sitara AM335x SoC as the company’s DynaGate 10-12.
Unexpected Maker has launched a follow-up to the ESP32 based TinyPICO board with TinyS2 board equipped with an ESP32-S2 WiFi processor featuring 4MB flash and 2MP embedded PSRAM.
The new board is still designed with a LiPo battery charging circuit, comes with an onboard RGB LED, and while it is compatible with TinyPICO form factor, it has become a little longer with a 41 x 17.8mm footprint to accommodate for extra I/Os.
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TinyS2 ships with the latest version of CircuitPython and a UF2 bootloader, similar to the one found on Raspberry Pi Pico, which makes the board appear as a USB flash drive on your computer and allows you to just copy your code or directly edit it on the drive. Alternatively, you could also program it with MicroPython, the Arduino IDE, or the ESP-IDF C/C++ framework. You’ll find the PDF schematics and documentation on the product page.
NXP i.MX 8M Mini 14nm Cortex-A53/M4 processor has been around for a couple of years, and several SoM-based development kits are available including Variscite Symphony starter kit, HummingBoard Ripple SBC, or congatec conga-SEVAL007010 evaluation board.
Beacon EmbeddedWorks’ Zoom i.MX 8M mini development kit is based on the company’s i.MX 8M Nano System on Module (SOM) and offers features not found on most other devkits or single board computers such as power usage monitoring and control through their Wattson power measurement application.
Pine64 has posted specs for a “Quartz64 Model B” SBC with the quad -A55, NPU-equipped Rockchip RK3566, up to 8GB LPDDR4, optional eMMC, WiFi/BT, GbE, MIPI-DSI and -CSI, 3x USB, and 40-pin and M.2 expansion.
In February, Pine64 revealed a Quart64 Model A SBC modeled roughly on the RK3399-based RockPro64, but with Rockchip’s 1.8GHz, quad-core, Cortex-A55 RK3566. At the time, the company listed some basic specs for a smaller, Raspberry Pi sized Model B based on the same RK3566 SoC. Pine64 has now posted full specs.
Ricardo was one of the first Brazilian community members, contributing for more than 10 years, a good friend, and a mentor to other volunteers.
His work was instrumental on the Firefox OS days and his passion inspiring. His passing is finding us sadden and shocked. Our condolences to his family and friends.
Below are some words about Ricardo from fellow Mozillians (old and new)...
Support for QUIC and HTTP/3 is now enabled by default in Firefox Nightly and Firefox Beta. We are planning to start rollout on the release in Firefox Stable Release 88. HTTP/3 will be available by default by the end of May.
With Firefox 88 in flight, we are pleased to welcome the long list of developers who’ve contributed their first code change to in this release, 24 of whom were brand new volunteers!
On April 3rd, as part of a broader strategy change at Mozilla, we moved our existing mailing lists (dev-l10n, dev-l10n-web, dev-l10n-new-locales) to Discourse. If you are involved in localization, please make sure to create an account on Discourse and set up your profile to receive notifications when there are new messages in the Localization category.
We also decided to shut down our existing Telegram channel dedicated to localization. This was originally created to fill a gap, given its broad availability on mobile, and the steep entry barrier required to use IRC. In the meantime, IRC has been replaced by Element (chat.mozilla.org), which offers a much better experience on mobile platforms. Please make sure to check out the dedicated Wiki page [1] with instructions on how to connect, and join our #l10n-community room.
Work on getting Rust compiled on M1 hardware started last year in June already, with the availability of the first developer kits. See Rust issue 73908 for all the work and details. First and foremost this required a new target: aarch64-apple-darwin. This landed in August and was promoted to Tier 21 with the December release of Rust 1.49.0.
2020 was a year to remember, because of LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary and the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted our lives, hindered travel and canceled community meetings
[...]
We were planning LibreOffice events in Asia and Latin America, as in 2019, and a LibreOffice Conference in Germany, in the lovely medieval city of Nuremberg. We were also planning to attend conferences in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America, to celebrate LibreOffice’s 10th anniversary.
We were planning local meetings of native language communities, to engage new volunteers, and talks at local events, to advocate the use of LibreOffice and the Open Document Format. We were planning meetups with other community members, for a chat over food and drinks, as we have been used to doing on a regular basis over the last 10 – or even 20 – years (in the OpenOffice.org project).
Unfortunately, since March 2020 we have been forced to spend most of our time at home, to protect each other from COVID-19. Although our community has not been hit severely, we have suffered from the pandemic like anyone else, to the point that we will not remember 2020 as the year of the 10th LibreOffice anniversary, but as the year of the big lockdown.
Not to be confused with Assembly programming, the GNU Assembly is the new platform for a number of GNU toolchain projects like GCC, GNU C Library, GnuCOBOL, and other packages as a neutral home.
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary software format that all browsers can run directly, safely and at near-native speeds, on any operating system (OS). Its biggest promise, however, is to eventually work in the same way everywhere, from IoT devices and edge servers, to mobile devices and traditional desktops. This post introduces the main interface that should make this happen. The next post in this series will describe some of the already available, real-world implementations and applications of the same interface.
As you may have already seen or heard, Qt Quick 3D introduces support for 3D particles in Qt 6.1. Similarly to instanced rendering , also 3D particles module is a technology preview in Qt 6.1 and will be fully supported in Qt 6.2. In this blog post we'll go through things every developer & designer should know about the new 3D particles, so please continue reading. With the visual elements such as particles, it is always beneficial to actually see what you can do with them. The video below goes through some demos from our Testbed application, included as part of the Qt 6.1 examples.
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Two different logical particle types are supported: SpriteParticle3D for 2D texture particles and ModelParticle3D for 3D model particles. Model particles actually use instanced rendering to allow rendering thousands of particles, with full Quick 3D materials and lights support. Logical particle will define the common appearance of the particles. One important property is maxAmount , which is used for allocating the data for particles. Qt Quick particles don't have this feature, but instead they automatically grow the data based on emitRate, lifeSpan and bursts. Requiring it to be defined allows us to optimize the memory usage and to modify the emitRate and lifeSpan without reallocations
SystemTap (stap) uses a command-line interface (CLI) and a scripting language to write instrumentation for a live running kernel or a user space application. A SystemTap script associates handlers with named events. This means, when a specified event occurs, the default SystemTap kernel runtime runs the handler in the kernel as if it is a quick subroutine, and then it resumes.
SystemTap translates the script to C, uses it to create a kernel module, loads the module, and connects the probed events. It can set probes at arbitrary kernel locations or at user space locations. While SystemTap is a powerful tool, loading the kernel module requires privilege, and this privilege can sometimes be a barrier for use. For example, on managed machines or in containers that are without the necessary privilege. In these cases, SystemTap has another runtime that uses the Dyninst instrumentation framework to provide many features of the kernel module runtime only requiring user privilege.
Buffer overruns are by far the most common vulnerability in C or C++ programs, and a number of techniques have come up over the years to detect overruns early and abort execution. The _FORTIFY_SOURCE macro, provided by the GNU C Library, helps mitigate a number of these overruns and is widely deployed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This article on the Red Hat Security blog is a good introduction to _FORTIFY_SOURCE.
In the GNU C Library’s 2.33 release, we added a new level for _FORTIFY_SOURCE to improve the protections the macro provides. Here we take a closer look at the internals of _FORTIFY_SOURCE in GCC and explore the need for this new level.
Traditional debugging forms a hypothesis about what is going wrong with the program, gathers evidence to accept or reject that hypothesis, and repeats until the root cause of the bug is found. This process is time-consuming, and formulating useful hypotheses often requires deep understanding of the software being debugged. With the Pernosco omniscient debugger there’s no need to speculate about what might have happened, instead an engineer can ask what actually did happen. This radically simplifies the debugging process, enabling much faster progress while requiring much less domain expertise.
To demonstrate the power of this approach we have two examples from well-known and complex software projects. The first is an intermittently crashing node.js test. From a simple stack walk it is easy to see that the proximate cause of the crash is calling a member function with a NULL `this` pointer. The next logical step is to determine why that pointer is NULL. In a traditional debugging approach, this requires pre-existing familiarity with the codebase, or reading code and looking for places where the value of this pointer could originate from. Then an experiment, either poking around in an interactive debugger or adding relevant logging statements, must be run to see where the NULL pointer originates from. And because this test fails intermittently, the engineer has to hope that the issue can be reproduced again and that this experiment doesn’t disturb the program’s behavior so much that the bug vanishes.
In the Pernosco omniscient debugger, the engineer just has to click on the NULL value. With all program state available at all points in time, the Pernosco omniscient debugger can track this value back to its logical origin with no guesswork on the part of the user. We are immediately taken backwards to the point where the connection in question received an EOF and set this pointer to NULL. You can read the full debugging transcript here.
In the closing thought in my last post I postulated the need to find idioms. That worried me a bit because finding things that are not there (yet) is no easy feat. By chance that day Hacker News linked to an article with well written and explained Python code. We can’t quite translate idioms from one language to another. But if we can steal ideasborrow features from other languages, maybe we can take inspiration for idioms too.
The article by Bart de Goede kindly links to a github repo, where we can find the following piece of code.
If you’re worried that your phone has become the centre of your universe, you’re not alone. Dr Suwen Tan is battling an identical demon.
For four seasons, the TV series Search Party has used its cast of New York millennials as a microcosm of imperfect generational behavior. Its main character, Dori Sief (Alia Shawkat), is a directionless late-twentysomething whose lack of ambition or professional qualifications have kept her life in banal stasis. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Drew Gardner (John Reynolds), is a prototypical Midwestern “nice guy” whose passivity and sensitivity are mercurial and fraught. Her other two college friends—Elliott Goss (John Early), a queer man-about-town, and bubbly actress Portia Davenport (Meredith Hagner)—are equal parts clueless and self-involved. Together they represent the well-educated, financially comfortable, self-satisfied urbanites who are the implicit subjects of myriad anti-millennial opinion pieces and Twitter threads. If avocado toast (the convenient political symbol, not the food item) could be personified, it would resemble Search Party’s ensemble.
Thankfully, cocreators and showrunners Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers are not in the business of taking stale hipster potshots, nor are they interested in painting their characters in a single negative shade. It’s crucial for Dori and her friends to not be outsize caricatures, that their behavior not be inherently representative of any larger trend. While the show’s humor is frequently at their expense, it springs from the crew’s distinctive characterizations. Their flawed perceptions, their shortsighted reactions, and their desperate justifications for their own imprudent behavior are presented honestly and appropriately exploited for entertainment. While their reckless sense of self-possession makes them compelling to watch, especially when they’re being awful, this quality eventually reveals the nonexistence of any true identity in the bunch. Still, they aren’t so straightforwardly contemptible as to render any potential downfall an easy victory. Satire requires good targets, but it also demands a rigorous gaze.
With just a year until the next presidential election, Macron is neck and neck€ in the polls€ with Marine Le Pen. The ENA abolition looks, therefore, as if it’s part of a strategy to reconnect with “the people”. It’s easy to forget, given the pandemic, but before France entered lockdown in March 2020, it had been experiencing the most sustained anti-elite movement for generations in the form of the€ gilets jaunes€ (yellow vests) protests. Macron has certainly has not forgotten this.
The president does not want to dispense with the idea of an elite school altogether but to build something that allegedly works better. A new school called the Institut du Service Public, a kind of “public management school”, will replace the ENA. Unsurprisingly, Jean-Louis Debré, once a close ally of Jacques Chirac, declared that this was a “populist” measure (by which he meant it was pandering to public opinion).
For policymakers, the big obstacle to global promotion and restoration of small-scale farming (leaving aside the lobbying power of agribusiness) is allegedly that, “it can’t feed the world”. If that claim were true, local food systems would be bound to leave people hungry and so promoting them becomes selfish, short-termist, and unethical.
Nevertheless, this purported flaw in sustainable and local agriculture represents a curious charge because, no matter where one looks in global agriculture, food prices are low because products are in surplus.
U.S. health officials have delayed a decision on whether to resume the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine after reports of blood clots in six women who received doses. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease physician and professor of medicine at the UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital, says it’s “prudent” to investigate reports of blood clots but notes the issue “is very rare” and unlikely to cause more than a temporary delay. She also says it’s important to raise “vaccine optimism” by continuing to tout the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines. “Eventually we are going to get back to the normalcy of not masking and distancing. We’re just in this twilight period right now because we are not fully vaccinated,” she says.
"Facebook and Instagram have zero credibility and have proven time and time again that their priority is profiting off their manipulative and addictive tactics to keep users scrolling."
A coalition of 36 organizations and 64 experts in child development and the impact of technology sent a letter Thursday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discouraging the ongoing development of an Instagram specifically designed for children ages 12 and under.
"The lack of political will to adequately respond to the pandemic is killing Brazilians in their thousands," the international medical charity said.
Doctors Without Borders on Thursday denounced what it called the Brazilian government's "failed Covid-19 response," warning of a "humanitarian catastrophe" anf t in the South American nation whose pandemic death toll is second only to the United States and calling for a "science-based reset."€
Recently, the Linux Foundation Events team sent out a survey to past attendees of all events from 2018 through 2021 to get their feedback on how they feel about virtual events and gauge their thoughts on returning to in-person events. We sent the survey to 69,000 people and received 972 responses.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (smarty3), Fedora (libpano13, python3.8, and seamonkey), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, gstreamer1.0, thunderbird, and x11-server), Oracle (libldb and thunderbird), SUSE (grafana and system-user-grafana, kernel, and openldap2), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-5.3, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-raspi2-5.3, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and linux-oem-5.6).
Five years ago, the DOJ and Apple engaged in a courtroom fight over device encryption. The DOJ wanted Apple to craft a backdoor so the FBI could search a phone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. It was a work phone owned by Syed Farook, who was killed during a shootout with law enforcement. That it was a work-issued phone suggested it wouldn't contain much useful evidence or information. But the government insisted it would and attempted to secure an order forcing Apple to do what the DOJ wanted.
On Thursday, April 15, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a new sanctions executive order “targeting the harmful foreign activities of the Russian Government.”
Congressmember Ro Khanna of California says hundreds of billions of dollars in annual defense spending could be better used on diplomacy, humanitarian aid, public health and other initiatives. He’s one of 50 House Democrats who signed a letter to President Joe Biden in March urging a “significantly reduced” Pentagon budget, which has grown to over $700 billion. “The Pentagon increases make no sense,” says Khanna. “If you’re ending the forever war in Afghanistan … then why are we increasing, at the same time, the defense budget?” Khanna also discusses the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed war in Yemen, a major U.S. arms deal with the United Arab Emirates and more.
"It's about time we bring home our troops and end this trillion-dollar war in Afghanistan," said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.).
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna on Thursday welcomed President Joe Biden's announcement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan but urged the president to take further actions to end "forever wars."
Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna says President Joe Biden’s plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan is a “courageous” decision. “I’m very glad that we have a president who has finally recognized that this is not a militarily winnable war,” says Khanna. President Biden announced this week he plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, bringing the longest war in U.S. history to a close. Khanna says he is open to a U.N. peacekeeping force, as some have suggested, to ensure Afghanistan does not fall into deeper chaos once American troops leave. “Withdrawing militarily does not mean that we can stop engaging,” says Khanna.
No matter what the White House and the headlines say, U.S. taxpayers won’t stop subsidizing the killing in Afghanistan until there is an end to the bombing and "special operations" that remain shrouded in secrecy.
When I met a seven-year-old girl named Guljumma at a refugee camp in Kabul a dozen years ago, she told me that bombs fell early one morning while she slept at home in southern Afghanistan's Helmand Valley. With a soft, matter-of-fact voice, Guljumma described what happened. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
WASHINGTON ( Jacobin) — Just as talks between the United States and Iran were taking place last week in Vienna, a cyberattack was carried out on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Reports are that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, was behind the attack that blacked out the facility just one day after Tehran launched new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, and as US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Israel speaking about the United States’ “ enduring and ironclad” commitment to the Jewish state.
As the saboteurs of diplomacy hope for a violent escalation, let’s keep in mind—and hope Iran agrees—that the best revenge would be a revived JCPOA.
Just as talks between the United States and Iran were taking place last week in Vienna, a cyberattack was carried out on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility.€ Reports€ are that the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, was behind the attack that blacked out the facility just one day after Tehran launched new advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges, and as US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was in Israel speaking about the United States' " enduring and ironclad" commitment to the Jewish state.
Making sense of a viral military.
Herd immunity? Don't count on it. Not if that "herd" is the U.S. military.
There’s no secret memo in the Pentagon stipulating that every human being must be dead before the troops can “withdraw with honor.” And if they were all dead, the very last thing any troops would do would be to withdraw. But there are mountains of memos, secret and otherwise, declaring it counterproductive to slaughter innocents and sanctioning the slaughtering of innocents. There’s madness on top of contradiction compounded by nonsense, and this sort of stuff is not random. It comes from somewhere.
Sometimes I marvel at the relentless racist police murders in the United States. That many police officers cannot really have mistaken their guns for their tasers or coincidentally just happened to attack people of similar appearance. What’s going on?
A sequence of events have been viewed cumulatively as suggesting that this was no error of engineering so much as plain sabotage.€ Israel was again the central agent of perpetration, a not implausible accusation given its relentless efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.€ The latest came last November, when Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was slain by a gun operated by artificial intelligence.€ At this feat, Brigadier-General Ali Fadavi was almost admiring in description: the gun had “focused only on martyr Fakhrizadeh’s face in a way that his wife, despite being only 25 cm away, was not shot.”
Itamar Eichner of YNet was happy to indulge in questions regarding the latest incident at Natanz.€ Was the politically troubled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raising a toast with officials of Mossad, the IDF and Shin Bet ahead of Independence Day auspicious?€ And why did US Defence Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III pay a visit to Israel on April 11, the day the attack took place?€ Defence analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, also of YNet, suggested that it was “reasonable to assume that the problem … might not have been caused by an accident, but by deliberate sabotage intended to slow the nuclear race accelerated by the negotiations with the US on removing sanctions”.
After a long and shameful history of police violence against Black people, the George Floyd murder case might finally bring about some justice.
Every lawsuit tells a story. Some are only about the immediate parties and participants. Others present "big pictures" about our basic institutions, our political and moral values, and, for better or worse, our concepts of justice.€
So, unlike in the handful of cases where charges were brought against police officers for killing a Black or Brown person, the prosecutors this time did not pretend to follow the demands of the ill-informed public to bring charges of first degree or second-degree murder that would set a bar for conviction so high, it could not be met. That is a favorite strategy of prosecutors when conviction is not what they are looking for.
The prosecutors in the Derek Chauvin case did the opposite. They stacked the charges in a way that would make it impossible to escape a conviction. And everyone fell in line because the stakes were so high. Could the Shining City on the Hill, whose leadership was now associated with the “decent” Democrats, render justice for the killer of George Floyd? The answer to that question was going to be an emphatic yes. The press committed to gavel-to-gavel coverage and everything was ready for one the greatest show trials of U.S. history.
Daunte Wright was pulled over by police officers on Sunday afternoon. The reason the police gave for the stop is that he was driving with expired registration tags on his license plate. The time was roughly 2 pm. Within minutes of being pulled over, Wright was dead.
What happened during those minutes is still being pieced together, but the essential horrors were captured on video. As the officers from the Brooklyn Center police approached Wright’s car, they noticed that he had an “illegal” air freshener dangling from his rearview mirror. They then ran his plates and found that he had $346 of outstanding fines and an arrest warrant for misdemeanor offenses. At this point, Wright was scared enough to call his mother. But before he could finish the call, the officers removed Wright from his vehicle, and as one officer fumbled for the handcuffs, Wright panicked and attempted to get back into his car. Another officer, Kim Potter, then decided to electrocute him, but instead of pulling out her Taser, she pulled out her gun and shot Wright to death. He was 20 years old.
Ten months after George Floyd died with Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck, jurors in Chauvin’s murder trial were told that the former Minnesota police officer knelt on Floyd’s body for nine minutes and 29 seconds—43 seconds longer than previously reported. Prosecutor Jerry Blackwell noted that during the first four minutes and 45 seconds, Floyd shouted 27 times that he could not breathe; in the 53 seconds that followed, Floyd went “completely silent and virtually motionless” as he experienced seizures; and for three minutes and 51 seconds, despite one of his own officers informing him that Floyd had no pulse, Chauvin remained atop his unresponsive body. For the entirety of the nine minutes and 29 seconds that the defense and prosecution agree that Chauvin kept Floyd pinned beneath his knee, Floyd was not only unarmed but handcuffed. “He was completely in the control of the police,” Blackwell said in his opening statement. “He was defenseless.”
Chauvin’s defense team is, essentially, charged with making the unjustifiable seem justified. By convincing jurors that the near 10 minutes Chauvin spent leaning his full weight into Floyd’s neck was a “reasonable use of force” applied by a “reasonable police officer,” it hopes to create reasonable doubt about his guilt. Defense attorney Eric Nelson and a dozen cocounsel are being paid more than $1 million by Minnesota’s largest police union. (Chauvin was fired by the Minneapolis Police Department after footage of Floyd’s killing spread across social media, and several officers are testifying on behalf of the prosecution.) Their apparent strategy? To put witnesses, first responders, and Floyd himself, rather than Chauvin, on trial.
According to the findings, based on a thorough investigation and interviews with hundreds of eyewitnesses, 19 of the guests were unarmed civilians whose killing constitutes a war crime.
Unlike the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and other countries, the French war in Mali receives little media coverage outside the limited scope of French-speaking media, which has successfully branded this war as one against Islamic militants.
President Biden’s plan to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by September 11 is a welcome and long-overdue action. The decision was made politically possible by two things. First, by what CNN described as Biden’s reason for withdrawing the troops: the fact that “there is no military solution to the security and political problems plaguing Afghanistan.” And second, by the crucial reality that thousands of people across this country understood right at the very beginning of the US war, and millions more have figured out in the almost 20 years since.
The idea that there is no military solution and that therefore the war is doomed to fail is nothing new. From the former UN secretary general and the US State Department to former President Donald Trump and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to dozens of generals, analysts, and TV pundits, the understanding that there is no military solution in Afghanistan, and indeed no military solution to terrorism—the original US rationale for invading the country in 2001—is an old story. Biden himself, as a senator and as vice president, at various points urged an end to the war, sometimes yelling at high-ranking military officials who were trying to feed him an overly optimistic line.
The claim is silly on its face. The US military is great at moving people. Eight months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, US Marines waded ashore at Guadalcanal. Five months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US had moved 697,000 troops to the theater of operations for what became Operation Desert Storm. For any competent commander, moving 2,500 troops from Point A to Point B is a weekend hobby project, not a major undertaking. All Biden had to do was give the order.
On February 13, the White House leaked a new date: September 11, 20th anniversary of the attacks that President George W. Bush cited as casus belli for what was supposed to be a short, sharp war to liquidate al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but quickly turned into a 20-year failed (and deadly) “nation-building” project.
On this planet of ours, America is the emperor of weaponry, even if in ways we normally tend not to put together. There’s really no question about it. The all-American powers-that-be and the arms makers that go with them dream up, produce, and sell weaponry, domestically and internationally, in an unmatched fashion. You’ll undoubtedly be shocked, shocked to learn that the top five arms makers on the planet — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — are all located in the United States.
Put another way, we’re a killer nation, a mass-murder machine, slaughter central. And as we’ve known since the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, there could be far worse to come. After all, in the overheated dreams of both those weapons makers and Pentagon planners, slaughter-to-be has long been imagined on a planetary scale, right down to the latest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) being created by Northrop Grumman at the cost of at least $100 billion. Each of those future arms of ultimate destruction is slated to be “ the length of a bowling lane” and the nuclear charge that it carries will be at least 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That missile will someday be capable of traveling 6,000 miles and killing hundreds of thousands of people each. (And the Air Force is planning to order 600 of them.)
"Conservation is simply not enough anymore. We need restoration."
Ecologists and environmental advocates on Thursday called for swift action to reintroduce species into the wild as scientists at the University of Cambridge in England found that 97% of the planet's land area no longer qualifies as ecologically intact.
"There are no winners in a nuclear war, and the U.S. should never start one."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Adam Smith on Thursday reintroduced legislation to establish that "it is the policy of the United States to not use nuclear weapons first."
"Our resources should go to helping the American people get through this crisis—not providing giveaways to the very people responsible for polluting our water and lands."
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ilhan Omar introduced legislation Thursday that would eliminate dozens of tax loopholes, subsidies, and other federal giveaways to the fossil fuel industry and cut off U.S. support for international oil and gas projects that are contributing to the global climate crisis.
"Every year America stalls... we miss the ever-narrowing window to address the climate crisis and ensure a livable planet."
A study released Thursday morning by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley finds that declining battery costs and technological advances mean it is possible for all new car and truck sales in the U.S. to be electric by 2035—an achievement that would prevent thousands of premature deaths, bolster the fight against climate change, and save consumers trillions of dollars.
"Postal banking must be part of American's future."
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was joined€ by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic lawmakers on Thursday in calling for the U.S. Congress to implement postal banking pilot programs in rural and low-income urban neighborhoods, where millions of households cannot access or afford standard banking services.€
U.S. billionaire pandemic profit balloons to $4.56 trillion, a 55 percent increase.
The wealth of US billionaires has steadily grown over the last thirty-one years.€ But a third of $4.3 trillion in billionaire wealth gains since 1990 have come during the last 13 months of the pandemic.€ €
Russia’s State Duma Committee on Physical Culture and Sport has supported a proposal to provide tax and financial assistance to FC Akhmat Grozny, the U.S.-sanctioned, professional soccer club linked to Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
At the end of 2020, 17.8 million people in Russia were living below the poverty line, according to preliminary estimates from the Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat).
Wendy Chun-Hoon is one of the many fresh faces coming in to the federal government with the new Biden administration. She is the new director of the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor, but she spent her prior career fighting for economic justice in a variety of nonprofits. Before joining the administration she served as executive director of Family Values @ Work, an organization that advocates for paid leave policies at the county, city, and state level, which she helped found just as California became the first state to enact its own paid family leave program. When she realized that many of the paid leave policies she was fighting for could exclude her and her female partner, she developed the Family Justice Network to fight to make these policies inclusive of many different kinds of families. We discussed the economic crisis facing American women and the kinds of policies they need to recover. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Bryce Covert
"Congress should act to restore taxes on the wealthy and limit further democracy-distorting concentrations of wealth and power."
After seeing their fortunes surge during the deadly coronavirus pandemic, America's 719 billionaires are now collectively worth $4.56 trillion—making them over four times wealthier than the roughly 165 million people in the bottom half of U.S. society combined, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness.
Owners’ equivalent rent went up 0.2 percent in March, up 2.0 percent year-over-year. It had been rising over 3.0 percent in pre-pandemic months.€ The sharpest slowing of rental inflation is in the West. Owners’ equivalent rent had been rising more than 4.0 percent year-over-year, but now it is down to just 1.6 percent.
+ A big jump in energy prices pushes the overall Consumer Price Index (CPI) up 0.6 percent in March. Core CPI rises by just 0.3 percent. Year-over-year, overall and core CPI are up 2.6 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively.
Last week, Biden nominated David Chipman to be head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the premier federal firearms enforcement agency. Biden complemented that announcement with a call for a national red flag law to entitle police to preemptively confiscate firearms from citizens suspected of being a threat to themselves or others.
Chipman was a 25-year ATF agent and a key official at the 1994 federal trial of the Branch Davidians who survived the ATF and FBI assaults the prior year. Many federal agents posed for grisly “victory photos” in the rubble of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas, home after it burned to the ground during an FBI assault. One photo allegedly shows Chipman proudly holding a rifle in front of the wreckage where scores of children died shortly before. The White House and Chipman’s current employer, the antigun Giffords organization, did not respond to repeated email requests to confirm or deny that Chipman is the federal agent in that photo; the Daily Mail and many online sites have tagged Chipman as the agent. In a Reddit public question and answer session in 2019, Chipman sought to spur support for an assault weapons ban by falsely claiming that the Davidians shot down two federal helicopters that were attacking their compound.
As of Wednesday, another long-entrenched congressional Democrat will be facing a challenge from the left, in a wave that has been building over the past few years. Rana Abdelhamid, a nonprofit leader and community organizer, announced that she’s taking on Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney in New York’s 12th Congressional District primary, the second primary challenge unveiled by Justice Democrats for the 2022 cycle, after Nashville’s Odessa Kelly.
Maloney, a 28-year incumbent and chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, barely survived her previous primary challenge, receiving 43 percent of the vote in a rematch against Suraj Patel, an attorney and former Obama campaign staffer. She eked out a win, in part, because the progressive vote was split between Patel and democratic socialist Lauren Ashcraft. Now, New York progressives are making the case that the district is ready for a young political outsider, who has experienced economic dislocation firsthand, to represent them in Congress.
It seems like every few months a new social media app comes on the scene, promising to be the "free speech" social media app that says it won't "censor" (by which they mean moderate) anything. And those of us who have been in this space for more than two seconds laugh. Because every single internet service that allows third party speech sooner or later realizes that moderation is not optional -- it's necessary to keep any site running. At a basic level, it starts with spam. Leaving up spam makes a site unusable. After that, there are things that you are legally required to remove, including child sexual abuse material and (in some cases) copyright infringing material.
Roman Anin says part of his job is knowing to expect a visit from the authorities at any moment. When federal agents showed up at his Moscow apartment last week, however, he wasn’t immediately sure why they’d come. Officials searched his home for almost seven hours, working until midnight, before questioning him for a few hours more. It was only the next day when he learned that a separate team had also raided the iStories newsroom on Friday. The searches are part of an investigation into a case of alleged privacy invasion “committed through abuse of office.” Anin is currently listed as a witness, but he believes he could face felony charges himself. The trouble stems from an investigative report Anin wrote in 2016 when he was still a reporter at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, where he revealed that Olga Sechina (then Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin’s wife) owned one of the most expensive luxury yachts in the world. Meduza spoke to Anin about the raid on his home, why this case has suddenly returned, and what it means for other investigative journalists in Russia.
On Thursday, April 15, a Moscow court handed down a one-year suspended sentence to opposition figure Lyubov Sobol for trespassing on the property of Konstantin Kudryavtsev — one of the FSB agents implicated in poisoning Alexey Navalny. Kudryavtsev didn’t testify in the case and he wasn’t present during the trial; his family members, who were considered the victims in the case, testified instead. Following the verdict, Sobol declared the proceedings “a classic Putinist trial” and asserted that she plans to challenge the ruling. The opposition politician also insisted that she still plans to run in the parliamentary elections this fall.
Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (the FBK) has released a new investigation into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “most secret” official residence — a luxury lakeside mansion located near the town of Valdai. According to the report, the residence is part of a massive property that’s only partially state-owned. The FBK claims that the mansion itself is located on land that Russia’s Presidential Administrative Directorate leases from “Praym LLC” — a company allegedly belonging to Putin’s “personal banker” Yuri Kovalchuk.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter helped right-wing populists take power. Can they now help rein them in?
One insidious way to torture the detainees at Guantanamo was to blast music at them at all hours. The mixtape, which included everything from Metallica to the Meow Mix jingle, was intended to disorient the captives and impress upon them the futility of resistance. It worked: this soundtrack from hell did indeed break several inmates.
Russia’s Sverdlovsk Regional Court has classified the criminal case concerning the deadly raid on the home of Yekaterinburg resident Vladimir Taushankov as “top secret.”€
The head of the state's ACLU accused Oklahoma lawmakers of "attempting to silence the voices of their constituents and criminalize vital calls for accountability and racial justice."
Dismissing warnings from civil liberties defenders, the Republican-controlled Oklahoma Senate on Wednesday approved a pair of bills the state's ACLU said would "chill dissent, and silence and criminalize Oklahomans who want to exercise our First Amendment right to peacefully protest."
Israeli state violence manifests in several ways—police killings, home demolitions, displacement and detentions—but each is grounded in the same colonialist ideology spanning decades.
"Congress must stop ignoring the unjust and blatantly cruel mistreatment of Palestinian children and families living under Israeli military occupation."
The U.S. human rights group Jewish Voice for Peace Action on Thursday endorsed a bill introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum that would place conditions on the billions of dollars in annual military aid given to Israel in a bid to stop its government from using the funds to kill, torture, imprison, displace, or otherwise harm Palestinian children and families.€
Brooklyn Center, Minn.—On the corner of 63rd & Kathrene, small white candles spell out Daunte Wright’s name. In a residential portion of Brooklyn Center, a suburb just north of Minneapolis, a tall Black Power fist stands over a stop sign, under a utility pole. Two heart-shaped balloons tied to its top bob in the rain.
Flowers have been stacked carefully around the memorial—dots of color against a dreary backdrop. Despite the drizzle, a group is gathered in the street. News cameras circle Mike Elliott, the city’s first Black mayor, and Wright’s family. But journalists are asked to give them space.
However disappointing is the Amazon defeat, it signals something more telling.€ During the fin de siècle and the early-20 th century, large corporations cornered whole segments of America’s economy using predatory pricing, exclusivity deals and other anti-competitive practices to undercut smaller local businesses.€ And numerous strikes were defeated, often leading striking workers injured, arrested or killed.
After the economic panic of 1893, a growing number of Americans questioned the capitalist system. Between 1897 and 1904, a total of 4,227 firms merged to form 257 corporations. The largest merger combined nine steel companies to create U.S. Steel. By 1904, some 318 companies controlled nearly 40 percent of the nation’s manufacturing output. A single firm produced over half the output in 78 industries.€ These corporations became known as “trusts” – and they have returned with a vengeance.
"This bill marks a new era where Democrats finally stop conceding the Supreme Court to Republicans."
Democrats in the House and Senate on Thursday introduced legislation to expand the number of seats on the U.S. Supreme Court from nine to 13, a proposal hailed by progressive advocacy groups as a critical step in combating the conservative takeover of the high court and protecting key constitutional rights.
For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that's never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see the kind of customer satisfaction scores that are alien to large private ISPs, they frequently offer better, faster service at lower, more transparent pricing than many dominant broadband providers.
"Truth is under siege, and Big Tech platforms have become too big to care—they must be reined in."
Citing a "crisis of online misinformation" that threatens to undermine democratic institutions and public health in the United States, a coalition of more than two dozen organizations on Thursday called on President Joe Biden to curb the power of Big Tech platforms by appointing to federal agencies "leaders committed to enforcing our nation's antitrust laws to the fullest degree."
The language of diplomacy and other governmental communications is very nuanced, like the British Queen's spokespersons saying she's "not amused" when she's actually outraged. The Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice ("DOJ-ATR") has taken this concept to a higher level. In what could be described as a digital form of body language, the Biden Administration's DOJ has unequivocally dissociated itself from the Trump Administration's position on standard-essential patent (SEP) enforcement without saying or writing a single word: just by relegating a link to a document (with the PDF remaining in the same place as before) to a long list of links that is, for the most part, merely an archive. Parts of that archive are little more than the dustbin of DOJ-ATR history.
Look at it this way: if a colleague of yours had a picture of her sweetheart on his desk, but all of a sudden decided to put it into a dark storage room, wouldn't that tell you something?
On September 10, 2020, less than two months before the election Donald Trump lost, Qualcomm-aligned Antitrust Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim tried to use his remaining time in office--he was going to leave anyway, and he knew what the polls said--tried to deal one final blow to net licensees of SEPs. He supplemented, updated, and appended the DOJ-ATR's 2015 Business Review Letter (BRL) to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). An IEEE standard all of us use in our everyday lives is WiFi (IEEE 802.11). IEEE has been a strategically important forum at the forefront of how standard-setting organizations could set more specific rules governing SEP enforcement than, for example, ETSI, whose FRAND pledges (which must be interpreted under French law wherever in the world they are enforced) come with a lack of clarity that is fully intended (though some interpretations are still clearly less reasonable than others).
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded rapidly in the last decade, particularly with respect to product development and data analytics.
In a recent test of Australia’s patent system, IP Australia decided that a patent cannot be granted where an AI system is identified as the inventor on the basis that it is not possible to identify the patentee for the purposes of section 15(1) of the Patents Act 1990 (Cth) (Patents Act).
While the decision is consistent with patent office decisions in other jurisdictions, it may be problematic since it has the potential to disrupt investment and stifle innovation due to the uncertainty about which, if any, intellectual property rights subsist in technology created by AI systems.
On Tuesday I listed a number of standard-essential patent (SEP) infringement cases brought by VoiceAge EVS against Apple, Lenovo, Motorola Mobility, and Nokia trademark licensee HMD in Munich. Two of the patents-in-suit have been asserted against all those parties, but there are also three cases against Apple over different patents. Those three cases will all be decided by the 21st Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Tobias Pichlmaier).
I had already mentioned that a first hearing in case no. 21 O 13503/20 would take place on April 28 unless the COVID pandemic necessitates a postponement. I've meanwhile learned from the court that the patent-in-suit in that case is EP2707687 on a "transform-domain codeblock in a CELP coder and decoder." CELP stands for code-excited linear prediction, a linear predictive speech coding algorithm.
On April 13, 2021, Unified Patents filed two challenges in Japan against patents owned by Mitsubishi, JP6768017 and JP6768110. The two patents have been designated as essential in the SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools.
On April 13, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidation request for CN100581260 owned by IP Bridge. CN100581260 has been designated as essential in the SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools. It is related to patents that have been designated as essential to HEVC Advance as well.
The USPTO refused to register the mark CHROMAFUSION for plastic protective sleeves for trading cards and gaming cards, "having an opaque side and a translucent side" ... " for use in card game competitions and tournaments," finding confusion likely with the registered mark CHROME for trading cards.
After completing a growth equity round of $50m, Plex has announced plans to become a one-stop-shop for movies and TV. The goal is to at least partially solve one of the most annoying problems in today's legal streaming market by placing all content in a single searchable interface. By default, this will also include users' 'pirate' libraries, an interesting proposition that could yield results.
The Canadian Government is exploring different options to tackle online piracy through new legislation. One of the proposals is to make it easier for copyright holders to obtain injunctions to block pirate sites and have these deindexed by search engines. Through a newly launched public consultation, lawmakers ask for input on these and other anti-piracy measures.
Lila’s made it her mission to use policy and technology to democratize access to culture and knowledge. She’s a vocal advocate for libraries and archives—and the people they serve. Earlier in Lila’s career, she worked at Creative Commons, where she and I were colleagues.
