Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at NASA’s JPL joins us again to share technical details you’ve never heard about the Ingenuity Linux Copter on Mars. And the challenges they had to work around to achieve their five successful flights.
I often get people asking me about Linux in real life. It can be tough telling people about Linux that have no idea about it. Here's how I handle that situation.
Otherwise titled Figure out the differences between two apt repositories. Recently I've had a few packages that I often use but were missing from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. One is ckermit and the other is gnash, both of which I 'converted' to a snap. (In air quotes because I just converted the 18.04 deb). This made me wonder if I could figure out a list of that are present in Ubuntu 18.04, but absent in Ubuntu 20.04. As apt and dpkg are standardized tools and and package formats, we can use a few shell tools to parse the package lists and compare them side by side. This post shows you how to do the comparison yourself and I discuss the removed packages a bit. Some are version increments (like gcc-6 in Ubuntu 18.04 but gcc-7in Ubuntu 20.04), and some are packages that were combined into one instead of split up (like ltsp in Ubuntu 20.04 but a bunch of seperate ltsp-$postfix packages instead in Ubuntu 18.04). Many others are just replaced by newer versions (python-ceph vs python3-ceph). The list of differences is provided as a download, both ways.
PhpMyAdmin is a web interface through which a user has direct access to a MySQL or MariaDB database. H/she can use this graphical tool to interact with the database without having extensive knowledge of the commands used for the databases. It translates the selected function into the corresponding commands and applies them to the server or a special database.
If you have ever used some hosting service then you would already be familiar with it. Because in WHM CPanel PhpMyAdmin comes as the default GUI application to manage databases.
Gimp is normally used to create or manipulate images files, but can also work with PDFs if you understand how it works and what it's limits are.
If you want to run an application, there are two ways of doing it: on a physical computer, or on an abstraction of a computer. The two most common forms of abstraction are virtual machines (VMs) and containers. But what’s the difference between these two forms of abstraction?
To answer this question, let’s take a look at VMs and containers in more detail.
One of the challenges (among the many advantages) of being a sysadmin is running tasks when you’d rather be sleeping. For example, some tasks (including regularly recurring tasks) need to run overnight or on weekends, when no one expected to be using computer resources. I have no time to spare in the evenings to run commands and scripts that have to operate during off-hours. And I don’t want to have to get up at oh-dark-hundred to start a backup or major update.
Instead, I use two service utilities that allow me to run commands, programs, and tasks at predetermined times. The cron and at services enable sysadmins to schedule tasks to run at a specific time in the future. The at service specifies a one-time task that runs at a certain time. The cron service can schedule tasks on a repetitive basis, such as daily, weekly, or monthly.
In this video, we are looking at how to install ONLYOFFICE on Deepin 20.2.
A terminal pager, or paging program, is a computer program used to view (but not modify) the contents of a text file moving down the file one line or one screen at a time. Some, but not all, pagers allow movement up a file. A popular cross-platform terminal pager is more. More can move forwards and backwards in text files but cannot move backwards in pipes. Less is a more advanced pager that allows movement forward and backward, and contains extra functions such as search.
Some programs incorporate their own paging function, for example bash’s tab completion function.
A Quota is a built-in feature of the Linux kernel that is used to set a limit of how much disk space a user or a group can use. It is also used to limit the maximum number of files a user or a group can create on Linux. The filesystem where you want to use quota must also support quota. Some of the filesystems that support quota on Linux are ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, etc.
In this article, I will show you how to use quota in a multi-user environment on Ubuntu. So, let’s get started.
We are glad to welcome Leo and Mark to the Google Summer of Code 2021.
Mark will work on improving Catalyst, our release building tool. Leo will work on improving our Java packaging support, with a special focus on big-data and scientific software.
SUSECON Digital opened its event with previews of upcoming versions of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Rancher.
“If we’re doing code development, then we’ll be doing that on a development robot out here in the lab,” he said on Wednesday.
“Once we’re happy with some of the code changes we’re making, we’ll be pushing them up to GitHub, where the CI/CD processes will kick off and build those changes into fresh Debian changes.
“We have a staging robot also out in the carpark, so once those packages have been built up into a new Docker image, we’ll pull it down onto the staging robot, and we’ll spend multiple days testing.
Ubuntu’s flagship operating system is hardly a thing of a novelty since we had been anticipating its release for a good while. In April 2020, Canonical officially announced the release of the next iteration of its Ubuntu operating system which is the long-term support 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
The recommended minimum system requirements are a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 25 GB free hard drive space, and 4 GB RAM.
For a clean installation, you need either a DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media. Internet access during the installation will be helpful so that you can download any recent updates at once. Of course, it’s possible to download and install any of the Ubuntu flavors as we did here.
Tidelift, the premier provider of solutions for managing the open source software behind modern applications, today announced the schedule for Upstream, a free, one-day virtual event that brings together developers, open source maintainers, and the extended network of people who care most about their work.
United by a vision to make open source work better for everyone, attendees will have the opportunity to meet the maintainers behind the open source tools they use every day and learn from industry experts developing with open source at scale.
A surge in crypto-mining abuse on GitLab has prompted the DevOps platform to mandate that even customers with free accounts must include payment card details in order to use its pipeline services. The San Francisco-based company says it has introduced the measure in part because the problem was creating “performance issues”.
“Recently, there has been a massive uptick in abuse of free pipeline minutes available on GitLab.com and on other CI/CD providers to mine cryptocurrencies,” said GitLab in a blog post announcing the change.
Awards of up to EUR 5000 are available for finding security vulnerabilities in Element, Moodle and Zimbra, open source solutions used by public services across the European Union. There is a 20% bonus for providing a code fix for the bugs they discover.
A new set of bug bounties were launched on 11 January 2021 using the Intigriti bug bounty platform. The bounties funded by the Commission’s ISA€² programme focus on open source software widely used by European Public Services.
A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene proving an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages.
Johannes Ranke, who uses and stresses inline via his package mkin, updated the loading/unloading of DLLs which, following updates in R-devel, was failing some tests. As luck will have it, this new version appears to still fail on two of the platforms we do not actually have easy access to so another version may be coming “shortly”.
We’re happy to announce six students that will work on Fortran projects under the Google Summer of Code 2021 program:
On the 16th of March 2021, Oracle started offering open-source Java 16 (Java SE 16) and Java 16 Development Kit (JDK 16) to all developers and enterprises, which is the seventh feature release as a part of the six-month cadence.
According to the Oracle Critical Patch Update Schedule, JDK 16 will get at least two quarterly updates before Oracle releases JDK 17 (source). Thanks to this high level of predictability, Java developers will easily adapt to the innovation.
Mark Bittman writes the way he cooks: The ingredients are wholesome, the preparation elegantly simple, the results nourishing in the best sense of the word. He never strains; there’s no effort to impress, but you come away full, satisfied, invigorated.
From his magnum opus, How to Cook Everything, and its many cookbook companions, to his recipes for The New York Times, to his essays on food policy, Bittman has developed a breeziness that masks the weight of the politics and economics that surround the making and consuming of food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his latest book, he offers us his most thoroughgoing attack on the corporate forces that govern our food, tracking the evolution of cultivation and consumption from primordial to modern times and developing what is arguably his most radical and forthright argument yet about how to address our contemporary food cultures’ many ills. But it still goes down easy; the broccoli tastes good enough that you’ll happily go for seconds.
Richard Wagner was an anti-Semite. This wasn’t just ugly, of-the-times bigotry or part of a sad and private hang-up, but a blood-and-body-consuming dimension of his being. As per the usual pageantry that comes with hate, his loathing took on enduring and complicated expressions, was pathetically pseudoscientific, a product of some combination of transference, projection, and fear, and is, in hindsight—but also was, during his lifetime—a character trait that left his name and work rank with the spice of rot.
Imagining Manhattan flattened As Rotterdam was — as Gaza is being Humbaba was guarding the Great Cedar Forest — the source Of fresh air, clean air, cool air A condition of health, air: The most vital Water and earth, And fire stands for energy Empedocles, who stares at seas And sees these elements As elements of health, says: Cities and societies That can’t, or won’t, deliver these, Enabling ease, Are symptoms of the great disease And, as such, are both ethically And legally invalid
The research shows how access to nature in cities increases physical activity, and therefore, overall health.
Lack of physical activity in the US results in $117 billion a year in related health care costs and leads to 3.2 million deaths globally every year. It may seem like an intuitive connection, but the new research closes an important gap in understanding how building nature into cities can support overall human well-being.
"You're spending all this money to make sure you make money rather than spending money to... help patients," the California congresswoman told AbbVie's Richard Gonzalez.€
The American family is shrinking. And not necessarily by choice. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that births in the United States fell by 4 percent in 2020. The pandemic is likely compounding this decline, but the trend began long before the current crisis: Last year’s Census showed that the US population increased by just 7.4 percent in the 2010s—the slowest rate of growth since the 1930s.
Elective genetic screenings before and during pregnancy are safer and more available than ever.
Tests, known as noninvasive prenatal tests, or NIPTs, involve a draw of the expectant parent’s blood. Other tests, called carrier tests, are done before a person gets pregnant to screen for genetic abnormalities. Some common NIPT companies include Progenity, Natera and Harmony. Providers promise to predict the risk for chromosomal abnormalities, without risk to the fetus.
We cannot end the threat in the United States without ending it everywhere.
"Twenty million is a depressingly tiny figure compared to the global need," said one expert.
The idiocy and mendacity of this announcement, at a time when only 36% of Americans have been fully vaccinated€ (about half the rate required to stop the disease’s spread) is stunning.
Wearing a mask is not a burden, it doesn’t prevent someone from speaking, from going about routine business, even, as I have discovered over this past year, from running.€ What it does do is prevent the spread of disease. Why the unseemly rush to do away with mask requirements?
In filming his new BBC programme What Are We Feeding Our Kids? which airs this week, Dr Van Tulleken, a father-of-two whose wife, Dinah, is a fashion journalist, put himself on an 80 per cent ultra-processed food diet for four weeks in a real-life experiment.
“It had a catastrophic impact on every aspect of my health and my life,” Dr Van Tulleken says. “My libido, piles, heartburn … everything got worse. I was anxious, depressed – and it was all self-perpetuating.” Sleeping was a struggle, too as was always feeling hungry. Dr Van Tulleken explains that UPF is designed to trick the body into overeating: “Things like monosodium glutamate (MSG) send a signal to your brain telling you this is nutritious. But when you digest it is there is nothing there – so you keep eating.”
The diet, he estimates, aged his body by 10 years, but more disturbing was the impact on his mind. MRI scans taken after the experiment confirmed that the junk food had rewired his brain; strengthening the appetite and reward neural pathways into patterns more familiar with a drug addict.
Sudan on Tuesday banned travelers arriving from India and imposed new coronavirus restrictions including closing schools, as coronavirus cases rise.
Computer Viruses have been around for quite a while now, with almost all being spread through the internet or physical drives. The main objective of these viruses is pretty well known. Sneaking into the system, stealing, and destroying victims' personal data are a few of the destructive traits they possess.
Many users worldwide have been victimized by virus attacks, and there's a possibility you might be next.It will probably help if you are well informed about its types and effects. But first, what is a computer virus?
“If you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said during a White House news conference last week, referencing the Colonial [crack].
But the nation’s electric grid is far from secure itself. The ice storm in Texas left some parts of the states in the dark for over a week. California utilities have been forced to disrupt power on several occasions due to storms or to prevent equipment from setting wildfires. The state also faced rolling blackouts a few years back due to energy supply shortages.
Much of the electric grid has been in place since the 1950s and 1960s, according to industry data, with some sections actually dating back to the late 19th century.
When this problem is discussed, people regularly quote the statistic that 85% of US critical infrastructure is in private hands. It’s a handy number, and matches our intuition. Still, I have never been able to find a factual basis, or anyone who knows where the number comes from. Paul Rosenzweig investigates, and reaches the same conclusion.
Buried in the Times story is the commonplace assertion that public-private coordination is necessary because 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector. The Times isn’t unique in its reliance on this data point as a guide to policymaking—leaders like FBI Director Christopher Wray and Sen. Angus King have also publicly referred to it in recent days. It’s not clear exactly why the Times invoked the figure, but presumably this statistic is offered to contrast the American reality with that of other nations. All of the critical infrastructure in, China, for example, is controlled by the state; and it seems plausible (given the generally greater state role in the economy) to believe that even in other Western democracies, such as France or Germany, the state has direct control over a greater portion of the national infrastructure than it does here in the United States.
The difference matters. Form follows function, and the structure of the laws, regulations, and guidance a country puts in place will depend greatly on how researchers think the market is structured. Focus on the private sector is at the heart of the reported decision of the Biden administration to focus some of its forthcoming executive order on setting regulatory standards or guidelines for private-sector cyberdefense.
Some quick thoughts on ransomware as a tractable problem.
In the sample that was found, RunDLL32 is used to execute some JavaScript. Not a brand new technique but not very common (a retro-search on VT returned less than 50 samples!). To execute some JavaScript code, just call the DLL that provides JavaScript engine features: [...]
You’d think with all the recent discussion about consent, researchers would more carefully observe ethical boundaries. Yet, a group of researchers from the University of Minnesota not only crossed the line but ran across it, screaming defiantly the whole way. In response, the Linux Foundation, which is the core of the open-source community, took the unprecedented step of banning the entire University of Minnesota from contributing to the Linux kernel.
[...]
Alternatively, they could have worked with the Linux Foundation to conduct this research as a controlled experiment. Getting the consent of that Foundation means that the admins would know which submissions were subversive, allowing them to be filtered before going live. While both of these options reduce the risk of a vulnerability making through to a live product that people depend on, it still skirts the ethics of what then amounts to a social experiment on individuals who donated their time and skill in good faith. This is undoubtedly better than the path they chose but still not completely ethical. Experimenting on or with human behavior is always a tricky proposition.
As it is, the path they chose and their reasoning behind it harkens back to the earliest days of technology, when the line blurred between good-faith security testing and cybercriminal. This was the impetus for legislative intervention and a code of ethics within the hacking / cybersecurity community. Ethics are the critical line that divides a hacker / White Hat from a bad actor / a Black Hat.
[...]
Much like in the realm of security, the scientific community also subscribes to a set of ethical guidelines about how they conduct their research. Specifically, at UMN, they have an Institutional Review Board (IRB), which outlines what research with human subjects is acceptable and is intended to review and approve studies with human subjects.
Apparently, the IRB at UMN does not consider the Linux Kernel developer community to be humans as, according to the research paper, they provided an exemption to the team. I am not sure how researching how a development team reacts to subversive behavior is not a study of humans or human behavior. However, my expertise is cybersecurity for a reason. We also should consider the possibility that the IRB at UMN might have been misled.
The fact that UMN has recently launched an investigation seems to support that possibility.
Styra Inc., the startup behind a ubiquitous piece of open-source software used to secure containerized applications, has raised $40 million in funding to help it double its headcount this year and win more customers.
Battery Ventures led the round, the startup disclosed in its funding announcement today.
Styra’s open-source Open Policy Agent tool is downloaded more than a million times per week by developers for a total of 75 million downloads to date. The tool, which the startup commercializes with a paid version for enterprises, helps developers manage application authorization. That’s the technical term for preventing unauthorized access to applications and their data.
Industry’s First Enterprise-Grade Distribution of the Popular CNCF Project Crossplane Arrives, Bringing the Kubernetes-Powered Universal Control Plane Approach to Platform Teams Everywhere
"When it comes to putting people before profits, Facebook has forfeited the benefit of the doubt, and we strongly urge Facebook to abandon its plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids."
Time Magazine released its inaugural list of the 100 Most Influential Companies, featuring an array of large and small corporations that “are helping to chart an essential path forward.” Disturbingly, among its choices of “disruptors” is Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition start-up known for illicitly scraping Americans’ images and demographic information from social media and selling the data to law enforcement. By celebrating a company that engages in illegal mass surveillance, Time is complicit in the degradation of our privacy and our civil liberties.
In support of this decision, Hamburg’s Commissioner, Johannes Caspar, explicitly mentioned some of the major privacy failures of Facebook. These included Cambridge Analytica, and the recent leak of 533 million personal data profiles. Caspar singled out one concern in particular: using profiling to influence voter decisions in order to manipulate democratic decision-making processes. “With nearly 60 million users of WhatsApp [in Germany], the danger is all the more concrete in view of the upcoming federal elections in Germany in September 2021, which will create desire to influence voters on the part of Facebook’s ad customers”, according to the Hamburg Commissioner. The press release concludes:
Google is rolling out a significant change as a part of their page experience ranking algorithm in June 2021.
From the release of the Core Web Vitals and the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News. Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.
You can now safely ignore Google AMP when building a more diverse and more exciting web without any artificial restrictions set by the adtech giant.
"Now, the Biden administration and legislatures across the country must further protect communities from the dangers of this technology by ending its use by law enforcement entirely."
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to request for comment about why the ban was being extended. In a statement provided when the ban on law enforcement use was first issued, Amazon said it hoped Congress would use the year provided by the moratorium to implement rules surrounding the ethical use of facial recognition technology. Part of its statement read:
We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested.
Civil liberties advocates have long warned that inaccurate face matches by law enforcement could lead to unjust arrests, as well as to a loss of privacy and chilled freedom of expression.
Amazon's extension, which Reuters was first to report, underscores how facial recognition remains a sensitive issue for big companies. The world's largest online retailer did not comment on the reason for its decision.
Some of France’s most sensitive state and corporate data can be safely stored using the cloud computing technology developed by Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft, if it is licensed to French companies, the government said on Monday.
The comment, part of strategic plan laid out by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire and two other ministers, acknowledges U.S. technological superiority in the field and contrasts with previous calls from European politicians for fully homegrown alternatives.
Sentiment analysis is a way to predict what the behind of the text (reviews or comments) means, whether it means positive, negative, or neutral. Sentiment analysis is another feature of the NLP. Most of the companies want to know about the feedback of their products from the customers. So, they asked customers to fill the feedback form, comments on the ads (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Then the companies collect these feedbacks or comments to figure out what the customer thinks about the company products, and on behalf of that, the companies will target the customers.
Our country continues to expend nearly half its discretionary budget on its military might. That leaves only half for everything else. The perennial explanation given to defend this lop-sided priority is that the military guards our national security.
If only that were true!
"President Biden cannot have true credibility advocating for other countries to respect human rights if he does not prioritize closing Guantánamo."
He calls people losers so he can’t be one. The thought of that label just makes him undone. But history’s verdict won’t be any finer: He’s not just a loser but also a whiner.
Collapsed buildings’ blocks and gaping holes in Alwehdah Street where there was normal life a week ago are traumatic sights, triggering memories of those earlier atrocities.
Today there are hundreds of injured people to be cared for in our crowded hospitals which are desperately short of many supplies because of the years of Israeli siege. Huge efforts are ongoing by the community to search for people under the wreckage of the buildings.
The supporters of “containment” believe that such a policy worked against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and thus could be retrofitted against China.€ The Soviet Union, unlike China, was somewhat self-contained with an economy that was not relevant to international economics and an overall foreign policy that found itself surrounded by hostile Communist states, including China.€ A policy of containment will not work against the more vital and stable€ China, but this aspect of the proposition will be discussed in a future oped.
It is foolish to believe that the United States could easily withdraw political and military resources from the Middle East, which has been our “briar patch” since we adopted a policy of one-sided support for Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967.€ For the past six decades, no international issue has preoccupied the attention of U.S. presidents as much as the Middle East.€ The renewal of violence between Israel and the Hamas government is a reminder of the harm that stems from Israeli unwillingness to pursue Palestinian self-government; the policy of “apartheid;” the racist legislation introduced by left-wing Labor governments in the 1970s to deny Palestinians their ownership rights; and—the ultimate Catch-22—its policy of demolishing houses built without permits that the Israelis refuse to issue.
if President Biden intends to Go Big at home, he will need to Go Big in changing U.S. policies abroad as well.
I was reminded of astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s reaction when he gazed back at the Earth from the moon: “It was [a] beautiful, harmonious, peaceful-looking planet, blue with white clouds, and one that gave you a deep sense… of home, of being, of identity. It is what I prefer to call instant global consciousness.”
A couple hours after my own peaceful moment of global consciousness, Juan Carlos appeared at the side of a dirt road. I was by then driving in a desolate stretch of desert and he was waving his arms in distress. I halted the car and lowered the window. “Do you want some water?” I asked in Spanish, holding out a bottle, which he promptly chugged down.
1) It’s right next to China which much of the U.S. government is eager for some sort of fight with.
2) Its Constitution (imposed by the U.S.) bans war, and the U.S. has been hard at work pressuring Japan to violate that bit since about 10 seconds after it was adopted.
With no cease-fire, let alone peace talks, in sight, and with Israel’s army having invaded Gaza, the death toll is bound to be very high. Yet both the caretaker Benjamin Netanyahu government in Tel Aviv and the Hamas leaders in Gaza may see benefit in keeping this war going. Wouldn’t be the first time political leaders preferred war to peace.
The latest violence comes on the heels of two auspicious events: Netanyahu’s inability to form a new government, and a Human Rights Watch report that calls Israeli treatment of Palestinians “crimes against humanity.”
"It was bad enough when Palestinians in Gaza weren't able to get vaccinated, but now to reportedly lose their only coronavirus testing lab is...€ beyond words."
The Minnesota Democrat warned the munitions sale "will undercut any attempts at brokering a ceasefire."
"Looks like even this little step toward transparency was shut down from the top."
"Today, the people of Palestine are once again going on strike for their liberation—and calling on the world to join them."
From the outset, some clarification regarding the language used to depict the ongoing violence in occupied Palestine, and also throughout Israel. This is not a ‘conflict’. Neither is it a ‘dispute’ nor ‘sectarian violence’ nor even a war in the traditional sense.
Ayesh Atta arranges rings of long, light yellow Jasmine flowers into necklaces to give to the protesters and passers-by of his Mina Street flower shop in the coastal city of Hodeida. In the past, the 34-year-old Ayesh preserved the flowers in an icebox to sell in distant markets for Eid al-Fitr at a substantial profit. Now, despite desperately needing money, he’s decided to distribute the Jasmine necklaces for free to people who have taken to the streets in front of his shop in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
It is therefore entirely appropriate that on the same day that the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was exploding this week, an inquest in Belfast was reporting on a mass killing by the British Army in Belfast half a century earlier.
This was what became known as the Ballymurphy Massacre which took place between 9 and 11 August 1971, when 10 Catholics were shot and killed in the working-class district of Ballymurphy in west Belfast. The British government and army claimed for years that the dead were IRA gunmen or had been throwing petrol bombs. But the inquest determined this week that all the dead were innocent civilians – and the army’s actions were “unjustified”. Boris Johnson has apologised unreservedly for the killings.
The increasingly deadly hostilities have no effect on Israel halting encroachment on land in the disputed occupied West Bank or the apparent ethnic cleansing of annexed East Jerusalem that the Palestinians hope to claim as their state, with the eastern half of the Holy City as their capital. The annexation is not recognized internationally.
Most troubling, a first since before the founding of Israel, are the fiery demonstrations inside Israel by Israeli Palestinian citizens and attacks against those Palestinians by far-right Israeli Jews. It’s a bad omen.
[...]
But stubborn, futile Palestinian demonstrations and four wars against the Goliath of Israel, a regional superpower, are unwinnable. It’s as if Mexico and Canada were to start firing missiles at the United States. Hopeless.
The death toll in Gaza has reached 213, including at least 61 children, as Israel continues to attack the besieged area by air, land and sea using U.S.-made warplanes and bombs. The death toll in Israel stands at 11 from rockets fired from Gaza. Israel is facing increasing criticism for targeting doctors in its attack, and its airstrikes have reportedly damaged at least 18 hospitals and clinics, according to the World Health Organization. The attacks on medical staff and facilities are a “nightmare,” says Dr. Rasha, a Palestinian internal medicine physician working in Gaza who asked not to use her full name for safety reasons. “I think this is targeted to increase the overwhelming of the already overwhelmed healthcare system,” she says.
As the Palestinian death toll in Gaza tops 200, the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem is accusing Israel of committing war crimes by killing blockaded civilians and destroying infrastructure on a massive scale. Executive director Hagai El-Ad says Israel has not done enough to distinguish between military and civilian targets or to act with proportionality. “We’ve seen war crimes in previous military assaults on Gaza,” he says. “And, in fact, the impunity of the previous times in which war crimes were committed is what has paved the way for the continuation of more such crimes being committed.” Earlier this year, B’Tselem released a landmark report denouncing Israel as an “apartheid regime.”
As the Israeli bombing of Gaza enters its ninth day, Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, Gaza and inside Israel are staging a historic general strike. This comes as violence is also spreading across Israel, with Jewish mobs attacking Palestinians in mixed Jewish and Arab communities. Last week, extremist Israeli settlers were filmed attacking Palestinian-owned shops in a Tel Aviv suburb. Another harrowing video shows ultranationalist Israelis dragging a man they believed to be an Arab from his car and beating him mercilessly. Some settlers were filmed on live television chanting “Death to Arabs,” and screenshots shared by an Israeli disinformation watchdog group show far-right Israeli WhatsApp and Signal groups coordinating attacks on Palestinians. We speak with Palestinian journalist and activist Rami Younis, who says Israeli media’s unwillingness to cover the widespread incitement is a “perfect example of how structural violence is maintained and nurtured in Israel.”
Media coverage of heightened violence in Israel/Palestine has misrepresented events in the Israeli government’s favor by suggesting that Israel is acting defensively, presenting a false equivalency between occupier and occupied, and burying information necessary to understand the scale of Israeli brutality.
The ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza, which has now killed at least 213 people, “really is an act of genocide,” says Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian parliament and head of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society who has been leading efforts to manage the pandemic in the West Bank and Gaza. He says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces multiple corruption charges, is using the latest violence to save his political future. “This man and his government is using Palestinian blood, and maybe even Israeli blood, to stay in power, to evade the three cases of corruption that he has to face, and he’s doing anything to keep his seat.”
Born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of the British mandate of Palestine, Said was educated at Princeton and Harvard, taught at Columbia for decades, and wrote dozens of books as well as hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles that attracted a loyal following and detractors, too. Timothy Brennan tells much of the story in his recent biography,€ Places of the Mind: A Life of Edward Said, which is dedicated to “the Palestinian people.”
At times, Said tries to be even handed in€ The Question of Palestine, though it seems likely that his book might not satisfy many observers of the Middle East today precisely because he tries to be even handed. On the one hand, he condemns “Palestinian violence” and PLO hijackings and suicide bombers, and on the other hand he denounces Israeli sponsored “state terrorism,” though he concludes that Zionists have done far more harm to Palestinians than Palestinians have done to Zionists.
When you’ve got neo-Nazis harassing an innocent family in the suburbs because of a podcast that has nothing to do with them, it’s pretty clear this country has a domestic extremism problem. The Department of Homeland Security knows it, Congress knows it, and every single person who watched the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in horror knows it. There are many elements to the domestic extremism threat in America, but one prominent component is private militias. An assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has warned that violent extremist militias present “the most lethal” threats in the U.S., and the share of public demonstrations involving far-right militias has increased since the 2020 general election, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
But it’s one thing to identify a problem; it’s another to figure out what to do about it. Militias pose a prickly dilemma for law enforcement because they butt up against a bunch of different American narratives around self-defense, gun rights and how to live in a safe society. Some militias are just a group of guys doing target practice in the woods. Other militias plot to kidnap a governor.
When trying to curb the worst of militias, law enforcement — from local beat cops to politicians passing new laws — inevitably run into questions of constitutional rights (the right to assemble, the right to bear arms) while also trying to keep communities safe. How do they know whom to go after, when to go after them, and how to stop them?
Donald Trump publicly lied at least 30,000 times while president and faced few if any negative consequences for that behavior. Moreover, he came within several thousand votes of "winning" the 2020 presidential election because of his strategic use of lying, deception and trickery, including voter suppression and voter intimidation.
ExxonMobil is the world’s single largest producer of single-use plastics, according to a new report published today by the Australia-based Minderoo Foundation, one of Asia’s biggest philanthropies.€
The Dow Chemical Company ranks second, the report finds, with the Chinese state-owned company Sinopec coming in third. Indorama Ventures — a Thai company that entered the plastics market in 1995 — and Saudi Aramco, owned by the Saudi Arabian government, round out the top five.
"Transitioning away from the take-make-waste model of single-use plastics will take more than corporate leadership and 'enlightened' capital markets; it will require immense political will."
"Today's bombshell report from the International Energy Agency is easy to translate," said Bill McKibben. "Anyone who continues to engage or invest in fossil fuel development is wrecking the climate."
"There will be substantially enhanced melting in the future—which is quite worrying," said researchers.
This is huge. An agency that has consistently boosted new oil and gas development in its flagship annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is now backing up the global call to stop the expansion of fossil fuel extraction.
A hotter world will mean more deserts and falling harvests âËâ bad news for food producers and for all of us.
Unless the stepped-up basis loophole is closed, we will soon have a large class of hugely rich people who have never worked a day in their lives.
"Given the scale of our unemployment, caregiving, healthcare, climate, and inequality crises," nearly 60 lawmakers wrote, "we urge our colleagues in Congress to pursue a larger upfront investment."
The shoreline communities of Ocean County, New Jersey, are a summertime getaway for throngs of urbanites, lined with vacation homes and ice cream parlors. Not exactly pastoral — which is odd, considering dozens of Paycheck Protection Program loans to supposed farms that flowed into the beach towns last year.
As the first round of the federal government’s relief program for small businesses wound down last summer, “Ritter Wheat Club” and “Deely Nuts,” ostensibly a wheat farm and a tree nut farm, each got $20,833, the maximum amount available for sole proprietorships. “Tomato Cramber,” up the coast in Brielle, got $12,739, while “Seaweed Bleiman” in Manahawkin got $19,957.
The experts have weighed in: Non-fungible tokens are dumb as hell.
The annual RSA Conference brings together some of the brightest minds in cryptography to discuss advances in the field, the year's biggest hacks, and where the cybersecurity industry is heading. This year, it just so happened to kick off with a pronounced dunk on NFTs.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has done it again: He’s disgraced himself in service to twice-impeached former President Donald Trump. This time, he’s officially come out against a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 violent insurrection, even after one of his own GOP allies negotiated a compromise deal that should have satisfied most of McCarthy’s prior objections (that’s what a compromise is, and if you get most of what you want, you go for it).
The results of the city's district attorney election will highlight the left's growing influence—or how far they still have to go.
The State Duma has approved the first reading of a bill banning people who were “involved in the activities” of outlawed extremist or terrorist organizations from being elected to the Russian parliament.
To hear Tahanie Aboushi tell it, a courtroom can be a strange place for a Muslim woman lawyer.1
This is not just a humanitarian point, which should be an incredibly big deal by itself. The idea of millions of preventable deaths in the developing world, and hundreds of millions of avoidable infections, should be enough to get any reasonable person’s attention.
But beyond the humanitarian issue, there is the simple common sense point that the more the virus spreads, the greater the likelihood that a vaccine resistant strain will develop. This possibility should have everyone terrified. Can anyone in their right mind want to see a whole new round of infections, deaths, and lockdowns, as we wait for a new vaccine to be developed, tested, produced, and then distributed in mass quantities?
Decades of disdain for politics as a civic calling means we get the politicians we deserve.
Entities under the Moscow Transport Department have laid off several dozen employees in response to last month’s protests in support of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny, says the independent television network Dozhd. Following reports last week that the Moscow subway system had fired nearly 40 employees in connection with recent opposition demonstrations, Dozhd interviewed nearly 100 of the city’s transport workers and found that they were warned of possible consequences after hackers leaked thousands of email addresses registered with Navalny’s team in mid-April. Most of the layoffs came after the May holidays. A source close to the Moscow Mayor’s Office told Dozhd that the order to fire these city employees came from the Kremlin.
Multiple bills meant to secure critical infrastructure against cyber threats were approved by the House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday afternoon, just a week after a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline caused fuel shortages across the nation.
The committee unanimously approved the Pipeline Security Act, introduced last week by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) and a dozen other bipartisan cosponsors, which would boost pipeline security efforts at both the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Additionally, the committee approved legislation, spearheaded by Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) requiring CISA to establish a National Cyber Exercise Program to test critical infrastructure readiness against cyberattacks.
To prepare for writing about Jordan Peterson, I asked numerous people I know what they thought of him. They all gave the same answer: “Who?”
The parents argue that Snapchat was negligently designed because it incentivized users to drive at dangerous speeds by offering a “speed filter” that could be used during the taking of photos and videos. The parents allege that many users believed that the app would reward them if they drove 100 miles per hour or faster. One of the boys had posted a “snap” with the “speed filter” minutes before the crash.
The Ninth Circuit rightly held in Lemmon v. Snap, Inc. that Section 230 does not protect Snapchat from the parents’ lawsuit. Section 230 is a critical federal law that protects user speech by providing internet intermediaries with partial immunity against civil claims for hosting user-generated content (see 47 U.S.C. €§ 230(c)(1)). Thus, for example, if a review site publishes a review that contains a statement that defames someone else, the reviewer may be properly sued for writing and uploading the defamatory content, but not the review site for hosting it.
EFF has been a staunch supporter of Section 230 since it was enacted in 1996, recognizing that the law has facilitated free speech and innovation online for 25 years. By partially shielding internet intermediaries from potential liability for what their users say and do on their platforms, Section 230 creates the legal breathing room for entrepreneurs to create a multitude of diverse spaces and services online. By contrast, with greater legal exposure, companies are incentivized in the opposite direction—to take down more user speech or to cease operations altogether.
The advertising ban comes months into what’s become known as the “hot tub meta” on Twitch. It’s become a trend for creators to stream themselves hanging out or playing games in hot tubs or inflatable pools. Siragusa has been a contributor to that trend, streaming from what appears to be a small plastic pool set up inside her home.
But it’s not known why Twitch revoked Siragusa’s ability to run ads — a punishment the site has never doled out before, according to Kotaku. That’s part of what makes this situation so concerning for streamers: Twitch has an explicit set of rules that streamers need to follow to avoid a ban, but there’s no specific rules around who can and can’t be supported by advertising. Twitch allows streamers to appear in swimwear.
Not only have some journalists become more influential than the papers they write for, but others have abandoned the employee-servant model completely.
Belarus has opened a tax fraud case against the leadership of the country’s most prominent independent media outlet, Tut.by. On the morning of May 18, the financial police raided the Tut.by newsroom and the homes of a number journalists, including the apartment of editor-in-chief Marina Zolotova — who was taken away after the search. Tut.by’s website was also blocked, though it was quickly restored under an alternate address. Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya condemned the allegations and raids against Tut.by as the “premeditated murder” of an independent media outlet.
On the morning of May 18, law enforcement officers in Minsk raided the newsroom of the independent outlet Tut.by, as well as its regional bureaus, and the homes of its journalists.
Belarusian law enforcement have detained at least 13 people who work for the independent new outlet Tut.by.€
From the mountaintops of southern Arizona, you can see a world without borders. I realized this just before I met Juan Carlos. I was about 20 miles from the border but well within the militarized zone that abuts it. I was, in fact, atop the Baboquivari mountain range, a place sacred to the Tohono O’odham, the Native American people who have inhabited this land for thousands of years. At that moment, however, I couldn’t see a single Border Patrol agent or any sign of what, in these years, I’ve come to call the border-industrial complex. On the horizon were just sky and clouds—and mountain ranges like so many distant waves. I couldn’t tell where the United States ended or Mexico began, and it didn’t matter.
The trial of the environmentalist lawyer Steven Donziger ended this week in a federal district court in Lower Manhattan. For a decade, Chevron’s lawyers have pursued him after he won a landmark case against the corporation on behalf of 30,000 clients in Ecuador for polluting a vast stretch of rain forest.
The best defense is a good offense. The FBI's decade-long streak of allowing informants to commit thousands of crimes a year continues, as Dell Cameron reports for Gizmodo.
Maybe in another rural, conservative county, a proposal to build a new jail would’ve been approved with very little fanfare. Even in Haywood County itself, a mountainous region in western North Carolina, the idea probably wouldn’t have garnered much attention a few years earlier.€
After all, Haywood County is a place where Donald Trump won in 2020 by almost 30 percentage points, Republican firebrand Madison Cawthorn was elected to Congress, and support for the military runs strong. Law-and-order politics tend to carry the day.€
Others say it's not just police tactics that are the problem, but the behaviour of individual officers.
The term "choice mindset," refers to whether an individual is inclined to perceive their own actions and those of others as the result of deliberate decisions. When someone views life with a choice mindset, it means they are more likely to see victims as at least partially to blame for their misfortunes and to be less troubled by reports of inequality.
Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and Nanyang Technological University have now uncovered an important clue about what causes people to think that way — namely, whether they come from a position of power in their own lives.
Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, May 17, 2021
You might recall that AT&T spent nearly $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV, believing this would turn the dodgy old phone company into an innovative new media juggernaut. But despite $42 billion in tax breaks and oodles of regulatory favors from the Trump administration (like killing net neutrality), AT&T simply couldn't overcome its own nature as a bumbling, government-pampered telecom monopoly. As a result, the company has laid off more than 52,848 employees since 2017.
Let me conclude by noting that if a choice must be made – some additional payments by a streaming service or regulating the free speech rights of Canadians – I would have thought that standing behind freedom of expression would be an easy choice to make and I have been genuinely shaken to find that my government thinks otherwise. I look forward to your questions.
The embrace of "free" in the video game industry continues to pick up speed. We were just discussing the years-long success Epic Games has had with Fortnite, a free-to-play game that has nevertheless racked up $9 billion over the course of two years. The point of that post wasn't that all games have to be free-to-play. The point was that there are methods in the industry that completely negate the idea that has far too long permeated industry mentality which amounts to: you cannot compete with "free" or piracy. Not only does the story of Fortnite prove that isn't true, it proves that it's not true in spectacular fashion.
Another point of contention was Apple’s announcement in November of a new program to reduce App Store fees from 30% to 15% for developers who generate under $1 million per year in revenue. Schiller couched it as an initiative to help small businesses during the Covid-19, but acknowledged under questioning that the company was also pivoting in response to worldwide scrutiny over App Store practices.
In the Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit, which recently began court proceedings, Epic Games alleges that Apple is exploiting a monopolistic position through its restrictions on sideloading and payment processing fees—arguments that mirror broader policy debates at both the federal and state levels.
One common theme we've seen for ages in the various content moderation debates are that those who think that governments should be able to determine what content stays up and what content needs to come down don't seem to recognize who various government leaders around the world are these days. Governments have an unfortunate track record of trying to pull down content that embarrasses themselves. And yet, for reasons unknown, eBay has decided that it is going to let government regulators automatically remove listings on the auction site.
As the CJEU prepares to answer the recurring question of marketplace liability for infringement, IP owners say legislative reform may have more of an influence
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 335. I was interviewed by Paul Kramer of the Youth in Policy Podcast.
The Board dealt with a request for re-establishment of rights with respect to the extended time limit for filing the statement of grounds of appeal. The representative of the appellant had waited until the evening of the extended deadline to submit the grounds of appeal and was due to Covid-19 restrictions forced to leave the office before a notification of his submission by fax was received. The next morning it turned out that due to an unknown change of the fax machine settings, the letter had not been received by the EPO. The Board concluded that all due care had not been exercised, and that the difficult circumstances due to COVID-19 do not give rise to another extension of the time limit as it already had been extended due to COVID-19.
South Korean giant Samsung is arguably the leader in the foldable smartphone space, with multiple foldable devices in the market currently. The company has no plans of slowing down on foldable smartphone, not as of now, from what we can make out of all the reports coming in about Samsung’s foldable plans for 2021. According to a new report, Samsung will show off new foldable designs during its SID Display Week 2021, which includes a foldable 17-inch tablet and a flexible smartphone with a 7.2-inch display that can be folded in two places and the structure resembles the letter Z or S.
According to the report, Samsung may also showcase a Samsung Slidable Display or a horizontally stretching display, which is said to be for an upcoming smartphone, according to reports. Samsung is also rumoured to announce its Under Panel Camera (UPC) technology during the SID Display Week 2021 - this is the company’s own attempt at putting a camera under the display. During the SID Display Week 2021, Samsung is not expected to talk about commercial products but will only show and talk about new research and possibly demonstrate prototypes.
You have a great product (or an idea for one). You think it will take the world by storm. You heard something about intellectual property protection and you are careful about not sharing your idea with just anyone. Your friend recommends talking to a patent attorney to discuss your options. Is that a good idea? Yes!
But to make the initial meeting a success, try to answer a few questions to determine when to meet with a patent attorney or what to find out from a patent attorney.
With many legal issues, the devil is in the details. In that light, the hypotheticals below are generic and merely illustrate basic principles. Your specific situation is likely to not fit neatly into all (or even most) of these hypotheticals.
Document signing has presented novel challenges in the new remote-working environment. Recording an assignment at the European Patent Office (EPO) can be straightforward provided that the formal requirements are understood and complied with. This article aims to set out those formal requirements so that pitfalls can be avoided.
Article 72 EPC relating to assignment reads:
An assignment of a European patent application shall be made in writing and shall require the signature of the parties to the contract.
[...]
In the current circumstances, digital signatures might be more readily obtainable than an original (wet) signature. However, digital signatures are not currently an accepted form of execution on assignments at the EPO. However, the EPO will accept a scanned copy of an original signature and the parties may sign in counterparts. The national law of China, Japan and Korea foresees that a seal or stamp can take the place of a signature. As we understand current practice, this will be accepted by the EPO in lieu of a handwritten signature for China, Japan and Korea, provided it is accompanied by the seal holder's name in printed form.
Patents protecting AbbVie's inflammatory disease drug Humira in Europe expired two and half years ago, forcing the company to sharply cut its prices as low-cost competitors flooded the region.
But in the U.S., the world's top-selling drug is protected until 2023 due to broader intellectual property protection and legal settlements with would-be rivals. AbbVie, meanwhile, has kept raising prices.
The company's so-called "patent thicket" for Humira emerged as the biggest villain in a hearing Tuesday before the House Oversight and Investigations Committee, suggesting an area of potential agreement between Democrats and Republicans on drug pricing legislation.
ASX-listed MGC Pharmaceuticals says a patent application for its CimetrA investigational medical product filed earlier this month has been accepted by the Slovenian Intellectual Property Office, giving it an avenue to seek patent protection in other EU and global markets. The company continues to move towards the start of a phase III clinical trial for CimetrA, a potential treatment solution for COVID-19 infected patients.
At present, along with the increasing importance of intangible assets in the market-driven economy and with the development of the intellectual property law, the number of protectable and marketable intellectual property subject matters is constantly growing. It is remarkable that persons, in particular, legal entities and individuals, have started to show an increasing interest in the security and protection of the results of intellectual activity and means of individualization when creating, promoting, and selling products or providing services, both in Russia and abroad. At the same time, we see that in some cases intellectual property objects are acquired in the name of one holder and in other cases — in the name of several holders of the relevant rights (rights holders) for quite different purposes, including commercial and non-commercial.
On May 6, 2021, the Brazilian Supreme Court determined that the minimum ten-year patent term set forth in Article 40 of the Brazilian Intellectual Property Statute (Law No. 9,279) was unconstitutional (ADI 5529), and, on May 12, 2021, retroactively reduced the terms of granted pharmaceutical and medical device patents that are valid only due to the ten-year patent term provision to 20 years from the filing date. The terms of granted patents in fields other than pharmaceuticals and medical devices did not have their terms retroactively reduced, i.e., they maintain their ten-years from grant date terms.
FS118 European patent protection granted: The European Patent Office (EPO) granted a patent in January 2021 with claims protecting the composition of matter of F-star’s FS118 molecule giving protection until June 2037. The phase 2 proof-of-concept trial of FS118 is proceeding on plan and the Company plans to provide an update on progress in the first half of 2022.
The two VLSI Technology v. Intel patent infringement cases that have been put before juries in the Western District of Texas this year have had two extreme outcomes: after a record verdict over $2.175 billion in March that shocked the technology industry, two other VLSI patents were found not to be infringed in April. A third trial between the two entities is coming up soon.
In either case, the losing party has the right to appeal. Many observers have noted that exorbitant jury verdicts are rarely upheld: they're typically adjusted or overturned. But there is no guarantee, and Intel leaves no stone unturned to attack VLSI's March 2021 win. On April 22, almost simultaneously with the jury verdict in the second case, Intel brought a total of four post-trial motions.
One of the four motions is specific to the '759 patent, for the infringement of which the jury awarded $675 million (a little less than third of the total amount). I've uploaded Intel's related Rule 52 motion and VLSI's opposition to Scribd.
A deep-dive into semiconductor-related patent publications reveals insights into the state of innovation and demonstrates the impact of government policy on R&D activity. In this co-published piece, George Park of IPValue and Paul Ahern of Longitude Licensing provide the details
On May 18, 2021, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against U.S. Patent 9,390,435, owned by Aeritas LLC, an NPE. The ‘435 patent relates to receiving notifications, e.g., notification related to products or services of interest, at a mobile device based on the location of the mobile device and notification criteria, and then receiving information, e.g., additional information about the products or services or a purchase confirmation, at the mobile device in response to an input. The patent has been asserted in 21 litigations, including current assertions against Finnair Oyi, Darden Restaurants, Whataburger Restaurants, Burger King, and WestJet Airlines.
This pending petition for certiorari involves a trademark registration dispute between Kaszuba (HOLLYWOOD BEER) and Hollywood Vodka LLC (HOLLYWOOD VODKA). Kaszuba first registered his mark (albeit on the Secondary Register). Later, HVL was denied registration — in part because of the existence of the Kaszuba’s mark. HLV then filed a cancellation proceeding before the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board (TTAB). After a drawn-out process, the Board eventually sided with HLV—entering judgment against Kaszuba as a sanction for discovery violations.
The USPTO filed its proposed rules for implementing provisions of the Trademark Modernization Act yesterday, May 17.
The document set forth guidelines for how the USPTO would oversee the new ex-parte expungement and ex-parte re-examination proceedings, which are designed to make it easier for third parties to cancel marks that are no longer in use.
Following demands that Twitter should remove "prohibited" content or face blocking in Russia, the authorities are warning that if Facebook and YouTube don't clean up their acts too, they could face similar measures. Those thinking of deploying VPNs to circumvent blocking are also on notice, since the government believes it has the necessary tools to thwart evasive technological action.
The Government of Trinidad and Tobago has sent a stark warning to those who sell and use illegal streaming devices. Importing and marketing these piracy tools can lead to a $250,000 fine and a ten-year prison sentence. Unfortunately, the vague definition of these illegal devices has created quite a bit of confusion. In a matter of hours, hundreds of comments poured in, noting that Firesticks, Chromecasts, mobile phones, and PCs could fit this description too.
The war against educating people without paying huge sums of money continues without pause. Over the last few years, we've written a bunch about Sci-Hub and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, including the fact that academic publishers have convinced the DOJ to investigate Elbakyan, claiming that this effort to (*checks notes*) give more academics free access to academic articles is... tied to Russian intelligence. The whole thing seemed bizarre. Sure, fine, people can make arguments about copyright -- but saying that it's connected to Russian intelligence seems like quite a conspiracy theory.
