Director of Technical Programs at RISC-V's, Stephano Cetola joins FLOSS Weekly. The RISC-V Foundation was first to the table with an open-source ISA—Instruction Set Architecture—and every developer with a stake in the future is at that table, as participating members of RISC-V. And these are just two among the many interesting facts Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett learned on this week's show from Cetola. If you care about the past and future of open hardware, nothing can be more important than what you'll hear in this hour of FLOSS Weekly.
Hellpoint running natively on Linux. Here are my thoughts on this Dark Souls type game.
Pretty ping isn't actually a ping rewrite unlike you may expect, this is a wrapper around the base version of ping that shows the data in a bit more of a user readable format.
I got the urge to play some Madden football. Imagine my surprise when it wouldn't even LAUNCH on Windows!
DTrace network probes, next 50 years of shell programming, NetBSD on the Vortex86DX CPU, system CPU time in top, your filesystem as a dungeon, diving into toolchains, and more
Laptop woes continue, old servers, raspberri pi, tapedrive backup, 3d printing
Memory ordering issues are, as Linus Torvalds recently observed, "the rocket science of CS". Understanding memory ordering is increasingly necessary to write scalable code, so kernel developers often find themselves having to become rocket scientists. The subtleties associated with control dependencies turn out to be an especially tricky sort of rocket. A recent discussion about how to force control dependencies to be observed shows the sorts of difficulties that arise in this area.
The kernel-development community has long had a tense relationship with companies that create and ship proprietary loadable kernel modules. In the view of many developers, such modules are a violation of the GPL and should simply be disallowed. That has never happened, though; instead, the community has pursued a policy of legal ambiguity and technical inconvenience to discourage proprietary modules. A "technical-inconvenience" patch that was merged nearly one year ago has begun to show up in stable kernel releases, leading at least one developer to complain that things have gone a little too far.
Code that is directly linked into the kernel can access any symbol that is visible to it. Loadable modules, instead, are restricted to a smaller (though still large) set of symbols that are explicitly "exported" for that purpose. Symbols that are exported with EXPORT_SYMBOL() are available to all loadable modules, while those exported with EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() can only be used by modules that declare a GPL-compatible license. A non-GPL-compatible module that tries to use a GPL-only symbol will fail to load.
The idea behind GPL-only exports is that the affected symbols are so deeply situated within the kernel that any module using them must be a derived product of the kernel and, thus, be subject to the requirements of the GPL. In practice, that sort of analysis is rarely (if ever) done, and the decision of whether to use a GPL-only export is left to individual developers. Many developers habitually use EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() for every symbol they export out of a general distaste for proprietary modules; some maintainers encourage this practice for code that passes through their hands.
Over the years, purveyors of proprietary modules have engaged in a number of tricks to get around GPL-only exports. One of those was manually looking up symbol addresses with kallsyms_lookup_name(); that practice was shut down in early 2020. Another is to split a module into two, one GPL-licensed and one proprietary. The GPL-licensed module interfaces directly with the kernel, using GPL-only symbols where needed; it then calls into the proprietary module, where all the real work gets done.
In July 2020, the posting of this kind of shim module created a stir on the mailing lists, leading to the posting by Christoph Hellwig of a patch set making this trick harder to exploit. Specifically, any module that uses symbols exported by a proprietary module is itself marked proprietary, regardless of the license it declares to the kernel. Modules that hook into proprietary modules, thus, will lose access to GPL-only symbols, making it impossible to perform the shim function they were created for in the first place. This series was merged for the 5.9 kernel release in October.
Kernel development is not for people who lack persistence; changes can take a number of revisions and a lot of time to make it into a mainline release. Even so, the story of the Landlock security module, developed by Mickaël Salaün, seems like an extreme case; this code was merged for 5.13 after more than five years of development and 34 versions of the patch set. This sandboxing mechanism has evolved considerably since LWN covered version 3 of the patch set in 2016, so a look at what Landlock has become is warranted.
Like seccomp(), Landlock is an unprivileged sandboxing mechanism; it allows a process to confine itself. The long-term vision has always included adding controls for a wide range of possible actions, but those in the actual patches have been limited to filesystem access. In the early days, Landlock worked by allowing a process to attach BPF programs to various security hooks in the kernel; those programs would then make access-control decisions when asked. BPF maps would be used to associate specific programs with portions of the filesystem, and a special seccomp() mode was used to control the whole thing.
The goals behind Landlock have never been particularly controversial, but the implementation is a different story. The use of BPF was questioned even before making BPF available to unprivileged users in any context fell out of favor. It was also felt that seccomp(), which controls access to system calls, was a poor fit for Landlock, which does not work at the system-call level. For some time, Salaün was encouraged by reviewers to add a set of dedicated system calls instead; it took him a while to give that approach a try.
In the end, though, dedicated system calls turned out to be the winning formula. Version 14 of the patch set, posted in February 2020, dropped BPF in favor of a mechanism for defining access-control rules and added a multiplexing landlock() system call to put those rules into force. The 20th version split the multiplexer into four separate system calls, but one of those was dropped in the next revision. So Landlock, as it will appear in 5.13, will bring three system calls with it.
After several months of development, Linux Torvalds finally announced the latest Linux kernel – Kernel 5.13 release on Sunday. The chief maintainer of Linux was quoted saying, “So we had quite the calm week since rc7, and I see no reason to delay 5.13.”
One of the important updates with this new release is the native support of Apple M1 silicon devices. Even though this support is still at its formative stage and some core features are still not included (no accelerated graphics), you can expect more updates in future kernel releases.
Tip: The M1 is the first System on a Chip (SoC) designed by Apple specifically for use in Macs. It represents Apple’s shift from Intel processors, which the Cupertino corporation has been using since 2006. Some of the devices already using the M1 chip include MacBook Air (M1, 2020), MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020), iMac (24-inch, M1, 2021), iPad Pro, 11-inch, etc.
Linux kernel 5.13 brings forth a new “Landlock” security module used alongside the existing modules like SELinux. Landlock’s purpose is to restrict ambient rights for a collection of processes running on the system. For example, global filesystem access would be considered a security risk. Still, on security, this new kernel allows keys from sources other than Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which is not present on all systems. Trusted keys are now managed in the ASN.1 format.
Arguably, one of the most common administrative tasks for Linux end users is file management. File management tools are intended to simplify tasks such as locating files, managing disk space allocation, deleting files, moving files, naming files, and opening files in other applications.
Linux operating systems have a wide range of free open source file managers. Unfortunately, many users do not realize the full capabilities of the file managers they use daily. Most default file managers provide simple yet decent features to use, but you could also install other feature-rich file managers to meet your needs. I use GNOME Files (formerly Nautilus), the default file manager for Fedora, but I also find myself using Konqueror and Midnight Commander (my favorite text-based console file manager).
This tutorial explain how to install memcached from source on Ubuntu 20.04 (LTS) Focal Fossa. Memcached can be use for any caching usage but mostly used by dynamic web application to reduce database load. We can also cache API calls and page rendering.
Memcached (pronounced: mem-cash-dee) is a free, high performance, distributed memory object caching system.
Why Memcached from source? Ubuntu already shipped with Memcached but not the latest version. The version shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 is 1.5.22 while the latest stable of Memcached is 1.6.9.
The worldwide popularity of the MariaDB server speaks for itself. Its landmark in the MariaDB community has strong developmental ties from MySQL’s original developers. This team stepped up to create MariaDB when Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL was a news bulletin. MySQL provided the fork for creating MariaDB. It caters to data processing tasks that meet the objective of small teams and enterprise needs.
MariaDB is a perfect drop-in replacement for MySQL due to shared similarities in its offered database features. Switching to this database app is as simple as uninstalling MySQL; if you have it on your system and making a fresh MariaDB installation.
Its open-source status is a continuing guarantee of database reliability and security to its user community. Notable organizations and companies that are already first in line to reap the benefits of MariaDB include ServiceNow, Wikipedia, and DBS Bank.
The make utility and its related Makefile have been used to build software for a long time. The Makefile defines a set of commands to run, and the make utility runs them. It is similar to a Dockerfile or Containerfile—a set of commands used to build container images.
Together, a Makefile and Containerfile are an excellent way to manage a container-based project. The Containerfile describes the contents of the container image, and the Makefile describes how to manage the project itself: kicking the image build, testing, and deployment, among other helpful commands.
Just like Gzip, Brotli is also a generic-purpose compression algorithm developed by Google. It compresses data using a combination of modern technologies and algorithms. It is similar in speed to deflate but provides higher compression. Brotli compression is supported by all the major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge.
The Brotli compression is opted by the top tech fortunes like Cloudflare etc. This is the reason, we recommend switching to brotli from the old deflate data compression algorithm.
This tutorial helps you to enable brotli compression in the Apache webserver.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Nvidia is a graphics processing chip manufacturer that currently generates most of its revenue from the sales of graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used for competitive gaming, professional visualization. Installing NVIDIA drivers on Manjaro Linux is an easy task that can be done in less than a minute. Manjaro includes a tool that can detect the graphics card model and install the appropriate NVIDIA drivers. Alternatively, you can download and install the drivers from the NVIDIA site.
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 Nvidia Drivers on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).
This tutorial explain how to compile and install memcached from source on Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS) Bionic Beaver.
Memcached can be use for any caching usage but mostly used by dynamic web application to reduce database load.
We can also cache API calls and page rendering.
Memcached (pronounced: mem-cash-dee) is a free, high performance, distributed memory object caching system.
Why Memcached from source? Ubuntu already shipped with Memcached but not the latest version. The version shipped with Ubuntu 18.04 is memcached 1.5.6 while the latest stable of Memcached is 1.6.9.
We are studying of Penetration Testing Tutorial This article will cover how to download, install, activate, and access the web interface of Nessus on Kali Linux.
This post is origin How to Install Nessus on Kali Linux Move forward and start your tutorial. In a previous post you have completed Nessus Vulnerability Scanner Tutorial If you did not read it, please read now.
Git is one of the most used free and open-source version control repository management tools. Most programmers, developers, and software quality controllers use Git for professional use. Git is super scalable and super fast to use. It can also handle data version control for Big data analysis and other data analysis-related tasks. If you’re a software developer, you must learn Linux and Git simultaneously to develop your skills. Very often, Git is used to showing as a skill for getting hired in any programming job. On the other hand, if you have a large software project where many developers update, modify and write new codes, Git is totally for you. Using Git, you can check who made what changes, who wrote which part of the project. Even Git also allows you to retrieve the versions if necessary.
A database is a collection of data that is stored electronically in a computer. Databases are controlled by Database Management Systems (DBMS). Therefore, the DBMS data and the applications used are referred to as a Database System.
Data in database systems are modeled in rows and columns in a series of tables to make the processing and querying of data efficient. Data in tables can be easily accessed, managed, modified, updated, and organized efficiently. Most database systems use Structured Query Language (SQL) for writing and querying data.
A structured Query language is a programming language used by most relational databases to query, manipulate and define data and provide access control. MySQL is a popular and open-source relational database application; hence many servers make use of MySQL. MySQL has powerful features, but it is simple to set up and use.
In part one, the focus was on Podman in Podman scenarios. We saw some of the different rootful and rootless Podman combinations. We also discussed the ramifications of the --privileged flag.
But what about Podman and Kubernetes? There are plenty of options available for relating these two services, as well.
For part two of the series, I am using a Kubernetes cluster running with CRI-O as the runtime.
MariaDB is a divergence of the MySQL relational database system, which means that the original developers of MySQL created MariaDB after Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL raised some issues. The tool offers data processing capabilities for small and enterprise tasks.
Generally, MariaDB is an improved edition of MySQL. The database comes with several built-in features that offer straightforward usability, performance, and security enhancement that are not available in MySQL.
One of the most asked about topics to folks working on upstream container technologies is running Podman within a container. Most of this has historically been related to Docker in Docker (DIND), but now, people also want to run Podman in Podman (PINP) or Podman in Docker (PIND).
WebSocket is a communications protocol that provides full-duplex communication channels to web servers and clients over a single TCP connection. The protocol was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has been in common use by web developers for more than a decade.
Red Hat 3scale API Management is a hosted environment for web applications. In this quick tip, you will see how to use 3scale to set up WebSocket communication easily. Figure 1 shows how 3scale mediates between the web client and the WebSocket interface on the server.
OpenCL is an abbreviated form for "Open Computing Language". It is a programming language that can be used across diverse platforms, primarily for accelerated computing. Due to its diverse nature of applicabilities across multiple platforms, it is most often referred to as a cross-platform computing language. You can write programs on OpenCL and run them on a variety of devices including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and a lot more.
In this guide, I'm going to focus on GPUs alone. I've worked with both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and I'm going to show you how you can get them operational with OpenCL in the simplest possible way.
Though I've used Ubuntu for the host system, the Docker part is applicable to all other Linux distributions.
MariaDB is a community-based project of the MySQL DB. It is an open-source system, a relational database management system, and a fully compatible database. Furthermore, the software allows modification and alteration of its initial source code because of its open-source nature. Therefore, this will enable users to explore more on their skills without blocking them. In this article, we will look at how to create a user in both Windows and Linux.
PKGBUILD files are how packages are built and created for Arch Linux and its derivatives such as Manjaro.
You may have even come across them a bit yourself if you’ve ever used the AUR, Arch Linux’s user-curated repository of PKGBUILDs.
But how exactly do you go from a PKGBUILD to an installable package? What exactly is going on between the two, and how can you make them for your own packages? You’ll learn them in this article.
In this post, we cover some basic steps required to upgrade to Pop OS 21.04 from Pop OS 20.10.
This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience.
Unit testing some parts of Transilience, like the apt and systemd actions, or remote Mitogen connections, can really use a containerized system for testing.
To have that, I reused my work on nspawn-runner. to build a simple and very fast system of ephemeral containers, with minimal dependencies, based on systemd-nspawn and btrfs snapshots:
In this tutorial, we learn how to install PostgreSQL 9.6 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
PostgreSQL, or usually called Postgres, is an open-source object-relational database management system (ORDBMS) with an emphasis on extensibility and standards compliance.
PostgreSQL is ACID-compliant and transactional. It is developed by PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) that consists of many companies and individual contributors. PostgreSQL released under the terms of PostgreSQL license.
Love some quirky comedy? A few months after releasing for Windows, Cyanide & Happiness - Freakpocalypse (Episode 1) is now available for Linux too. Funded thanks to Kickstarter backers in 2017 giving around $575,377 the popular web comic has turned into a digital point and click adventure.
"In this point-and-click adventure, control Coop in his quest to be the hero he always wanted to be by helping the people of Netherton! Talk to, touch, and look at everything in your environment! That sexy looking clock? Ask it to prom! That rotting piece of fruit? Touch it!"
Resident Evil 2 running through Steam Play on Linux.
It's been announced for release on July 21, which the publisher informed us today that this date will include the Linux version.
Brass: Birmingham, a popular board game that had a big and successful crowdfunding campaign which was the sequel to Martin Wallace's original game Brass has now been made into a digital game. The adaption comes from developer Cublo and publisher Phalanx, the same teams behind the original digital version of Brass from 2017.
" Would you like to take part in the Industrial Revolution and find out why Brass: Birmingham is considered to be an excellent sequel to one of the best economic board games of all time? Brass: Birmingham takes you back in time again, when a knack for strategic thinking fueled by gut instinct could sketch biographies of the likes of Friedrich Krupp or Richard Arkwright. Will you manage to follow in the footsteps of mighty industrialists from the era of iron and steam power?"
Have time to play some more classics? The latest release of ScummVM might not be out yet but they have announced some more titles will be playable. The team do provide regular daily builds of all the latest work, thanks to that trying out all the latest enhancements is only a few clicks away.
Two notable titles they included support for recently are Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy a cyberpunk-themed adventure released originally in 1998. An interesting development, as thankfully the original developers actually provided the ScummVM team with the source code and so it got ported over to ScummVM. Doesn't look like it's easy to come by the game though.
June has been a slow month for the development of the lightweight Xfce desktop environment, probably because the summer is here and we’re all thinking about the holidays, but we got a new major release of the beloved Ristretto images viewer.
Ristretto 0.11 is here and it’s been in development for the past two years, adding new features like the ability to copy an image to the clipboard, support for old GTK2-style background color settings, new stock icons with reverse DNS format, as well as the ability to show the toolbar in full-screen when the mouse cursor is moved to the top.
KaOS provides one of the best integrations yet of a refreshed KDE-based computing platform. The latest KaOS 2021.06 release comes with KDE Plasma 5.22, which offers new visual effects, and a new system monitor.
KaOS Linux remains one of the most aesthetically pleasing Linux distributions around the beautiful KDE desktop environment. It is is built from scratch and uses customized KDE as its desktop environment. This distro is exclusively developed for 64-bit architecture computers only.
The idea behind KaOS is to create a tightly integrated rolling distribution to maintain a modern desktop with the latest features and software. KaOS is targeted at users who are looking for an operating system that puts all of its resources into making one desktop environment the best it can be, with that desktop being KDE.
If you already are sold on the efficiency that the KDE desktop offers, you will be pleased with the unique design of this distro. Recently, KaOS 2021.06 version of this distribution is out now.
KaOS Linux 2021.06 is now available for download as the first ISO release of the distribution to ship with the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment by default. The second point release, KDE Plasma 5.22.2, is included, along with the KDE Gear 21.04.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.83 software suites, all built on Qt 5.15.2.
It’s good to see KaOS Linux jumping into the KDE Plasma 5.22 bandwagon as it gives users more options if they want to use the latest desktop environment on their personal computers. Right now, you can try the Plasma 5.22 desktop on KDE neon, Arch Linux, PCLinuxOS,
openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Kubuntu 21.04.
KaOS 2021.06 comes with Plasma 5.22, which is the latest and the most stable release currently. Not just limited to stability, it also provides better flexibility and usability. To know more about the desktop environment, you can refer to our article on Plasma 5.22.
To give you a quick overview, the most remarkable new feature Plasma 5.22 presents is Adaptive Transparency. It means the panel and panel widgets will be pleasantly translucent. However, if there are any maximized windows, they will become entirely opaque.
Also, Plasma Wayland session now supports Activities. Thus, you can keep your work separate from other tasks. In other words, you will get the most out of your activity by staying focused on it.
Deepin OS is a revolutionary distribution. OK. I’ll stop right there; maybe that was giving a little too much credit. But I’ve got to be honest with you, nothing quite easily blows me away when it comes to Linux distributions as of late.
Deepin 20 specifically is awesome! The installer is dead simple that even my grandma could install it on a PC.
Released on July 1st, 2019, the Mageia 7 release shipped with the Linux 5.1 kernel, KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment, the DNF package manager supporting system upgrades from Mageia 6 to Mageia 7, a revamped Welcome screen, and much more.
The release was supported for exactly two years, until June 30th, 2021, with software and security updates, but it has now reached end of life and it will no longer receive support from the Mageia team. As such, all Mageia 7 users are now urged to upgrade to the latest release, Mageia 8.
This report covers work that happened between April 2nd and June 30th. For previous work, see the 2021Q1 report.
One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing.
The CentOS Hyperscaler effort has been working on better fitting CentOS Stream to modern enterprise needs and via their repository working on things like backporting newer systemd versions and other key packages either as upgrades or what isn't currently found in CentOS/EPEL.
IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. And this has been going on for several days.
Current and former IBMers have confirmed to The Register that the migration, 18 months in the making, has been a disaster.
"I feel bad for bringing this to the press but I'm afraid that I'm only one of the many thousands at Big Blue who are utterly disgruntled at the moment," one employee told us. "If we can't even handle our own cloud migration program then why would any customer trust us?"
If you are unfamiliar with Docker or containers as a whole, you might think of them as lightweight VMs that run on almost anything. While this is a major oversimplification, it gives you enough information without being overwhelming. Swarm is an extension of Docker. It provides a simple and built-in way to “orchestrate” containers, deploying them across multiple nodes, managing resources, and other things of that nature.
In my existing infrastructure, I already had 5 nodes running in Swarm. Four Raspberry Pi B4s and one Dell Optiplex 7040. This provides an excellent base to get started. But you only need a single node to follow along with this Docker Swarm tutorial. It should be noted that while I got this one for pretty much nothing, they can be found for $200 or less on eBay if you search and haggle some.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
This is my fourth month of working for LTS. I was assigned 12 hrs and worked all of them.
Pop!_OS 21.04 features the new "COSMIC" desktop workflow, with a host of new features. New features include a dock, dedicated interfaces for workspaces and applications, and much more. In this video, I'll give you a full review of 21.04 and let you know my thoughts.
Today we are looking at Pop!_OS 21.04. It uses Linux Kernel 5.11, Gnome 3.38, their new Cosmic desktop environment, and uses about 1.5GB of ram when idling. Enjoy
System76 sent a message out to us media types to let us know the latest iteration of its in-house Linux distribution, Pop!_OS, was available for download and/or upgrading. As a long-time (relatively speaking) user of Pop!_OS, I was excited. The official release of the upgrade was made available last night, so I went to sleep knowing I'd run pop-upgrade release upgrade in the morning and wait for the magic to unfold.
Okay, it’s not quite that dramatic, but if you run Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla” you need to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04 some time soon.
Why?
Because official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021 — that’s this month!
Thankfully there are plenty of compelling reasons to migrate to Ubuntu 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo’, which launched back in April.
Jevois-A33 smart camera was a tiny Linux camera with Allwinner A33 processor designed for computer vision applications and announced in 2016. I had the opportunity to review the computer vision camera the following year, and it was fun to use to learn about computer vision with many examples, but since it relied on the CPU for processing, it would not have been suitable for all projects due to the lag, as for example, object detection took 500ms and Yolo V3 around 3 seconds per inference.
But time has passed, and great progress has been made in the computer vision and AI fields with the tasks now usually handled by a built-in NPU, or an AI accelerator card. So JeVois Pro deep learning camera has just been launched with an Amlogic A311D processor featuring a 5 TOPS NPU, and support for up to 13 TOPS via a Myriad X or Google Edge TPU M.2 card.
Vecow has launched a Whiskey Lake based “ABP-3000” edge AI system with up to 2x optional Hailo-8 NPUs plus 4x USB 3.1, 4x COM, 2x DP, mini-PCIe, and 4x GbE, 2x of which support PoE.
Hailo has found another hardware partner to deploy its Hailo-8 neural processing unit (NPU). Vecow is featuring Hailo-8 as an option on a new ABP-3000 edge AI computer, which runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake processors.
A common example of the sheer amount of computing power available to almost anyone today is comparing a smartphone to the Apollo guidance computer. This classic computer was the first to use integrated circuits so it’s fairly obvious that most modern technology would be orders of magnitude more powerful, but we don’t need to go back to the 1960s to see this disparity. Simply going back to 1989 and getting a Compaq laptop from that era running again, while using a Raspberry Pi Zero to help it along, illustrates this point well enough.
[befinitiv] was able to get a Raspberry Pi installed inside of the original computer case, and didn’t simply connect the original keyboard and display and then call it a completed build. The original 286 processor is connected to the Pi with a serial link, so both devices can communicate with each other. Booting up the computer into DOS and running a small piece of software allows the computer into a Linux terminal emulator hosted on the Raspberry Pi. The terminal can be exited and the computer will return back to its original DOS setup. This also helps to bypass the floppy disk drive for transferring files to the 286 as well, since files can be retrieved wirelessly on the Pi and then sent to the 286.
Here’s the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
The table above shows our articles updated in June 2021.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
No matter what industry you work in, a key aspect of sustaining your business is keeping your customers. In the customer-relations domain, we call this customer retention.
Whether you run a retail store, restaurant, pub, supermarket, gym, or any other business, you need a reliable way to keep in touch with your customers. After all, they're customers because they like what you do, and, if they've shared their contact information with you, they want to hear more about what you have to offer. Sending them discount coupons, promotions, and special offers benefits your customers and helps ensure they remember your brand and come back to do business with you again.
Up until spring of 2021, only two of our leading password managers offered free service tiers that allowed you to synchronize and use your password manager across multiple devices. So when LastPass restricted its free service to use on only a single device in March, Bitwarden -- the only other app with the same offer -- sealed the deal and became the de facto champion of the free password manager game.
But what do we know about Bitwarden? Is it as safe to use as LastPass? Is it as convenient and user-friendly? Is it as compatible across platforms, and packed with as many features? You bet your login it is. Bitwarden's open-source code base creates a transparent security foundation beneath its otherwise streamlined and designed-for-simplicity interface. This -- combined with its hyperflexible platform and browser compatibility and its feature-rich premium options -- push Bitwarden ahead of its competitors.
Storage management is a term that includes all the technologies, processes, and strategies that organizations use to maximize the performance of their data storage resources.
Storage management features virtualization, security, provisioning, automation, redundancy, fault tolerance, it takes into account a ton of different factors, improves the performance of data storage resources, reassigns storage capacity quickly as business needs change and more.
In addition, increasing the storage capacity is an expensive investment for companies, so there is a good amount of capacity planning and forward-thinking involved in it as well, especially considering the rate at which data is growing.
Storage management is the main processes and technologies that are needed to deliver big, fast, and reliable data to your organization.
In this article, we’ll cover 10 open sources of storage management systems.
We have a new stable release today. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.6.6 on the download page.
Tor 0.4.6.6 makes several small fixes on 0.4.6.5, including one that allows Tor to build correctly on older versions of GCC. You should upgrade to this version if you were having trouble building Tor 0.4.6.5; otherwise, there is probably no need.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Licensing & Compliance Lab is the central hub for licensing education and advocacy. Our work ranges from evaluating software, operating systems, and physical devices using our criteria for user freedom, to protecting free software against proprietary developers, to teaching users, developers, and lawyers about free software licensing. We have a large job to fulfill in order to make sure freedom is maintained and protected for future generations. With all that work going on, often behind the scenes, we wanted to take a moment to highlight some of our recent achievements.
Although various companies may have their expectations and job requirements for a DevOps position, a decent working definition of a DevOps engineer is a technical expert who follows a software development approach that combines development and operations. The main duty of a DevOps engineer is to supervise software code releases to accomplish corporate goals.
You know that you've had the same server too long when they discontinue the entire class of servers you were using and you need to migrate to a new instance. And you know you've not done anything with that server (and the blog running on it) for too long when you have no idea how that thing is actually working.
Its a good opportunity to start over from scratch, and a good motivation to the new thing as simply as humanly possible, or even simpler.
For CPAN our definition is "a measurement of how risky it might be to start relying on a CPAN module, which might not be actively maintained".
Python 3.10 is proceeding apace; everything looks to be on track for the final release, which is expected on October 4. The beta releases started in early May, with the first of those marking the feature-freeze for this version of the language. There are a number of interesting changes that are coming with Python 3.10, including what is perhaps the "headline feature": structural pattern matching.
As we did with Python 3.9, and Python 3.8 before it, taking a look at what is coming in the (now) yearly major release of the language has become something of a tradition here at LWN. The release notes that are compiled as part of the release process are invaluable in helping track all of the bits and pieces that make up the release. "What's New In Python 3.10" does not disappoint in that regard; those looking for more information about this release are encouraged to give it a look. In addition, we have covered some of these changes as they were discussed and developed over the last year or so.
With a successful launch behind us and an ambitious agenda ahead, the Rust Foundation is looking to channel the energy and vision of our members with the hiring of the organization’s first permanent executive director. In short, we’re in search of a dynamic leader who can help us unlock the Foundation’s full potential, connecting our aspirations with strategy and execution.
While there would be clear benefits to having an existing member of the Rust community fill this role, we would also be excited to introduce someone new with the right blend of experience and expertise. In either case, the new executive director will need to work with and learn from Rust’s famously supportive community in order to succeed. This person will lead the Foundation’s efforts to support the volunteer work of maintainers, by identifying, funding, and leading programs like eliminating maintainer out-of-pocket costs.
Myth of Legality
Somewhat related to the myth of perpetuity is the myth of legality. When the federal government bought the ranchlands in the 60’s and 70’s to form the park, the land deals included Rights of Use and Occupancy (ROPs), generally for 25 years or life of the owner or spouse. The assertion is that, regardless of the squishier claims around who intended what and when, the fact of the matter is the ranches are legally warranted beyond the ROP durations under the same language cited above (repeated here):
I have never been normal. As a Black, disabled, trans person, I live on the margins of society. So when I hear people talking about “getting back to normal,” I want to ask, What exactly are we expecting to return to as things continue to open up? Understandably, so many of us want to return to some semblance of what once was before the pandemic started. Normal, however, has always been a perilous reality for me.
Plato, 427 – 347 BCE, lived at a time of peril. He grew up in Athens during the last twenty-three years of the Peloponnesian War. Things did not look good. He tried to find out why Athens was part of a Greek fratricide. He studied why civilizations often decline, even disappear. His fertile mind examined historical experience, seeking clues and examples of regeneration. Book 7 of his€ Republic€ and his dialogues,€ Timaios€ and€ Kritias, offer valuable insights into how humans can sometimes dig in the rubble in order to reinvent civilization. His story of the lost world of the Atlantis has mesmerized countless people throughout the ages. The dialogues€ Timaios€ and€ Kritias€ explain the rise and fall of the giant island empire of Atlantis.
Readers of the€ Washington Post€ this past Sunday, many of whom work at least a 40-hour week with short vacations, were informed by reporter Paul Kane about the large number of recess days the Senate and the House are taking this summer. In the midst of a huge backlog of critical legislation – as with the multi-trillion-dollar public and human infrastructure bills and other responsibilities deferred under prior periods of Republican control – these recess periods constitute reckless abandon and endangerment to the country.
For some, the Fourth of July is a patriotic day to celebrate the independence of the United States. For others, it is a mournful reminder of a nation built on colonialism and systemic racism. Folk duo Dan + Claudia Zanes address the more somber side of American history with “Reparations is a Must (4th of July Love Song),” the first single off their upcoming debut album “Let Love Be Your Guide,” which will be released on September 10.The entire album was conceived during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings and coronavirus pandemic, and the eclectic collection features a wide range of genres including gospel, R&B, and Haitian folk songs. It also displays an optimism for mending the wounds of the past and moving forward together.The song features an introduction from educator, author, and activist Dr. Kaye Wise Whitehead, “Reparations is a Must (4th of July Love Song),” and the duo created a lyric video to further comment on the need for reparations.“This video shows the kinds of images we both grew up with in New Hampshire,” Claudia Zanes recalled. “I saw white folks represented almost everywhere I looked. It was hard for me to find my sense of belonging. In history classes I learned very little about slavery, even less about Jim Crow, and practically nothing about the amazing achievements and contributions of Black people in America.”“The idea of reparations never came up! And if it had, back then I had no context. This is our way of helping families talk about one of the most important issues facing our country. If we’re not talking about reparations, what are we talking about?” Zanes added.One of the songs poignant lyrics is “but if you sing, ‘This Land Is Your Land,’ reparations is a must.”Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” is a classic protest standard, whose lyrics feature a strong anti-capitalistic and anti-classist message (even though the tune’s most direct lines are often omitted). The song also deserves scrutiny due to its omission of colonialism and the issue of stolen land.An important part of folk music is how it opens itself up for critique. Dan + Claudia’s song builds upon past folk traditions to advance an important discussion.Listen to Dan + Claudia Zanes – “Reparations is a Must (4th of July Love Song):
The outlook continues to look a little bleak for NASA's veteran Hubble telescope as a former astronaut and a Space Shuttle manager weighed in on repair options and the possibility of a fix.
NASA has remained silent on the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) since an admission last week that back-up computer hardware exhibited the same behavior as the primary payload computer system, which unexpectedly halts and puts the spacecraft goes into safe mode, suspending scientific operations. Engineers have since spread the fault-finding net a little wider.
Writing on Twitter, former astronaut Clay Anderson gave voice to the fears of many, saying that he believed the observatory was "beyond repair."
Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.
Underpinning our vast and simple-seeming digital networks are technologies that, if they hadn’t already been invented, probably wouldn’t unfold the same way again. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way.
The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention.
Decades of a movement based on educating the public about the merits of a national health insurance program (like Canada and many other developed countries) achieved a remarkable feat: the majority of Americans now favor€ Medicare for All. At a Bernie Sanders healthcare town hall last year, Rep. Pramila Jayapal glibly stated that the problem to enacting Medicare for All was not more education of the public, but a question of “political will” necessary to actually push it forward.
Yet, despite a pandemic, which has laid bare the inequalities and deficiencies of our healthcare system coupled with Democrat majorities in three branches of government, Medicare for All seems off the table. Where is the political will?
The Department of Health and Human Services' internal watchdog must launch a formal probe following a new exposé showing Biogen "courting" a key U.S. Food and Drug Administration official and an apparent lack of independence between the federal agency and the pharmaceutical company in the lead-up to the controversial approval of Alzheimer’s disease drug aducanumab, Public Citizen said Wednesday.
"The circumstances described in the STAT exposé, if confirmed," said Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group, "paint a damning picture of drug regulators who surrendered their independence and objectivity, essentially began working on behalf of Biogen, and fostered regulatory capture at the agency."
On Monday, I posted a typically lengthy, detailed, and snarky article about how ivermectin is the new hydroxychloroquine. What I meant by that comparison is that, just as 12-15 months ago the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the repurposed drug touted as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19 that fizzled when tested with rigorous clinical trials, over the first half of 2021 the veterinary deworming drug ivermectin has become the repurposed drug touted as a “miracle cure” for COVID-19. Like hydroxychloroquine, which by the end of last summer I was describing as the Black Knight of COVID-19 treatments, an homage to (of course) the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, belief in ivermectin as a highly effective treatment for COVID-19—that will eliminate the need for vaccines, too!—seems similarly immune to having its limbs hacked off by science, the way that they were for hydroxychloroquine. This post won’t be as long—although it might be as snarky—and will deal more with the conspiracy theories that have cropped up around ivermectin. Unsurprisingly, they’re very similar to the conspiracy theories that cropped up around hydroxychloroquine. They’re even being people, people such as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).
The number of COVID-19 vaccines is growing, with 18 vaccines in use around the world and many others in development. The global vaccination campaign is slowly progressing, with over 3 billion doses administered, although the percentage of doses administered in low-income countries remains at only 0.3%. But because of differences in how they were tested in clinical trials, making apples-to-apples comparisons is difficult—even just for the 3 vaccines authorized by the FDA for use in the United States. In this post, we explore the open questions that remain because of these differences in clinical trial design, the FDA’s authority to help standardize clinical trials, and what lessons can be learned for vaccine clinical trials going forward.
[...]
Study populations. Vaccines were studied in different populations, based in part on recruitment efforts and in part on trials being conducted in different countries. Globally, for instance, the J&J patient population was 45% Hispanic and/or Latinx, Pfizer-BioNTech 26% and Moderna 20%. Given disparities in COVID-19 impact on different communities, disparities in vaccine access, and a history of biased clinical trial populations, balanced vaccine demographics are particularly important. Population age also differed, though less starkly (even setting aside pediatric trials); 25% of Moderna’s patients were 65 or older, but only 21% of Pfizer-BioNTech’s. (Notably, even knowing whether the comparisons are apples to apples is nontrivial; Moderna’s reported age breakdown was 18-65/older, Pfizer’s was 16-18/16-55/55+/65+/75+, and J&J’s was under/over 60).
Endpoints. Manufacturers also chose different endpoints for their clinical trials. What were the endpoints? Pfizer-BioNTech measured efficacy against any symptomatic infection beginning seven days after the second vaccine dose. Moderna also measured any symptomatic infection, but not until two weeks after the second dose. And J&J measured cases both at two and four weeks after its single dose—but counted only cases of moderate-to-severe COVID-19 (including a positive test). These differences make it difficult to compare even topline results.
Variants. Finally, clinical trials occurred at different times and in different countries—which means that the prevalence of viral variants also differed. Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s vaccines were tested before variants of concern were widely circulating, making it harder to know how effective they are against variants. J&J’s vaccine, on the other hand, was tested in South Africa when the Beta variant was spreading there, and it showed lower efficacy in preventing infection in South Africa (57%) than in the United States (72%), though still strong protection (85%) against severe illness. Three months ago we described the existing data on vaccines and variants, including the lack of clinical trial evidence for most vaccine/variant combinations. Studies from England and Scotland suggest Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines offer somewhat reduced protection against infection by the highly transmissible Delta variant, but similar protection against severe illness. But these studies are not randomized controlled clinical trials.
More and more, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic are recognizing the importance of ensuring the reliability of software for use in court. In early June, the UK barrister Paul Marshall laid out the various ways that the Post Office Limited—and, indeed, the UK government—had failed the SPMs, with the POL essentially betting its rich coffers against the ability of the SPMs to successfully win against it. Marshall’s speech is well worth the read for anyone interested in ethics, the law and government.
As for trusting computer code, Marshall reminded his audience that the software was the only evidence against the SPMs, "If you remember only one thing from this talk, bear in mind that writing on a bit of paper in evidence is only marks on a piece of paper until first, someone explains what it means and, second, if it is a statement of fact, someone proves the truth of that fact." If you're looking at computer software providing evidence, then the software must be available for cross-examination—just as it would be for any witness. In the US, anything less obviates the legal protections of due process and the confrontation clause. It results in conviction through mistakes, not facts.
Google has announced a big change for developers who want to list their apps on Google Play that could have an impact on the Android app ecosystem. Right now, the standard format for app publishing is the APK, but starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps are published instead using the Android App Bundle.
On a Google page about Android App Bundle, the company touts many potential improvements with the new format, such as smaller app downloads for users. But the format has a catch: Android App Bundles are a format that only Google Play uses, which could complicate app redistribution.
There is an ongoing effort to "modernize" the kernel-development process; so far, the focus has been on providing better tools that can streamline the usual email-based workflow. But that "email-based" part has proven to be problematic for some potential contributors, especially those who might want to simply submit a small bug fix and are not interested in getting set up with that workflow. The project-hosting "forge" sites, like GitHub and GitLab, provide a nearly frictionless path for these kinds of one-off contributions, but they do not mesh well—at all, really—with most of mainline kernel development. There is some ongoing work that may change all of that, however.
Konstantin Ryabitsev at the Linux Foundation has been spearheading much of this work going back at least as far as his September 2019 draft proposal for better kernel tooling. Those ideas were discussed at the 2019 Kernel Maintainers Summit and at a meeting at Open Source Summit Europe 2019 in October. Throughout, Ryabitsev has been looking at ways to make it easier for non-email patch submitters; along the way, he has also released the b4 tool for collecting up patches and worked on patch attestation.
We are pleased to announce that the Real-time Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. Since 2004, the project that has become known as PREEMPT_RT, formally the real-time patch, has improved the real-time and low-latency features of the Linux kernel. Over the past decade, many parts of PREEMPT_RT have been included into the official Linux codebase. Examples include: mutexes, high-resolution timers, lockdep, ftrace, RT scheduling, SCHED_DEADLINE, RCU_PREEMPT, generic interrupts, priority inheritance futexes, threaded interrupt handlers, and more. The number of patches that need integration has been significantly reduced, and the rest is mature enough to make their way into mainline Linux.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, has announced the recipients of the 2021 Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships. LiFT aims to increase diversity in open source technology by providing access to online and in-person training and certification exams for underserved demographics at no cost to the recipient. Since 2010, The Linux Foundation has awarded over 1,100 scholarships for millions of dollars worth of specialized, technical training to those who may not have the ability to afford this opportunity otherwise.
The Linux Foundation has announced the winners of its 2021 Linux Foundation Training Scholarships, which award online and in-person training and certification exams at no cost to underserved demographics from around the world.
An infosec firm accidentally published a proof-of-concept exploit for a critical Windows print spooler vulnerability that can be abused by rogue users to compromise Active Directory domain controllers.
The security hole, tracked as CVE-2021-1675, can be exploited by a low-privileged user to execute code as an administrator on a system running the print spooler service. Initially Microsoft classified it as a local privilege escalation flaw in June's Patch Tuesday run of Windows updates – but on 21 June that classification was upped to describe it as a remote-code execution vuln meaning it can be pulled off over a network.
Server admins must consider potential security problems when deploying infrastructure to ensure it is protected from attackers. For example, admins should harden systems, especially going beyond the network to account for employees who work remotely. They also need to keep data encrypted when moving and when at rest.
David Clinton, a server admin and AWS Certified Solutions Architect, wrote Linux Security Fundamentals to give admins a high-level overview of Linux security best practices. These steps ensure a company's infrastructure is protected from attackers and stays that way.
"Whether you're a professional Linux admin, a developer, a data engineer or even just a regular technology consumer, you'll both be safer and more effective at everything you do if you can understand and apply security best practices," Clinton wrote.
Internet Explorer 11 may only have a year left, but Microsoft still found itself releasing a patch to resolve some PDF issues in the elderly browser.
The issue could stop PDFs working in either IE 11 itself or the all-important WebBrowser control, upon which many apps depend (despite Microsoft pushing out Edge-friendly alternatives).
Consecutive FBI directors (James Comey, and Chris Wray) have declared a small scale war on encryption. Both of these directors relied on inflated numbers to make their case -- an error chalked up to software rather than rhetorical convenience. (The FBI has refused to hand over a correct count of encrypted devices in its possession for more than three years at this point.)
With the temporary exception of the Federal Police, all German police agencies and secret services are now allowed to hack into computers and telephones. This is an extremely deep invasion of privacy
Imagine waking up each morning knowing the identities of thousands of people who are about to be mugged for thousands of dollars each. You know exactly when and where each of those muggings will take place, and you’ve shared this information in advance with the authorities each day for a year with no outward indication that they are doing anything about it. How frustrated would you be?
There are several different proof-of-concept exploits for a vulnerability in the Windows print spooler service circulating publicly right now, some of which are able to exploit the bug even if the patch Microsoft released earlier this month is applied.
The vulnerability (CVE-2021-1675) affects most versions of Windows and Windows Server, and although Microsoft initially classified it as a low-severity local privilege escalation bug, it revised that assessment last week to clarify that it can be used for remote code execution and upgraded it to a critical rating. The print spooler service runs by default on Windows Domain Controllers and is often enabled on other servers and desktops, as well. However, the attacker would need to have authenticated access to the print spooler service in order to get remote code execution.
A research team posted PoC exploit code for the vulnerability to GitHub on Tuesday, and although the repository was removed soon after, it was up long enough to allow other people clone it and fork it.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (htmldoc, ipmitool, and node-bl), Fedora (libgcrypt and libtpms), Mageia (dhcp, glibc, p7zip, sqlite3, systemd, and thunar), openSUSE (arpwatch, go1.15, and kernel), SUSE (curl, dbus-1, go1.15, and qemu), and Ubuntu (xorg-server).
Civil liberties advocates on Wednesday cheered as Maine enacted what that state's ACLU chapter called "the country's strongest statewide facial recognition law."
"I hope that Maine can provide an example to other states that want to rein in the government's ability to use facial recognition and other invasive biometric technologies."—Maine Rep. Grayson Lookner, sponsor
Let’s start with the fact that the report is still classified—the PCLOB is supposed to provide public access to its work “to the greatest extent” consistent with the law and the needs of classification.€ Yet the public statement here is just 26€ pages describing, rather than analyzing, the program. Nothing signals to the public a lack of commitment to transparency and a frank assessment of civil liberties violations like blocking the public from even reading a report about one of the most invasive U.S. surveillance programs.
Member LeBlanc rightly points out that, at a minimum, the PCLOB should have sought to have as much of its report declassified as possible, rather than issuing what he correctly criticizes as more like a “book report” than an expert legal and technical assessment.€
The PCLOB was created after a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission to address important civil liberties issues raised by intelligence community activities. While its first report about Section 215 was critical in driving Congress to scale back that program, other PCLOB reports have been less useful. EFF sharply disagreed with the Board’s findings in 2014 on surveillance under FISA Section 702, especially where it found that the Section 702 program is sound “at its core,” and provides “considerable value” in the fight against terrorism—despite going on to make ten massive recommendations for what the program must do to avoid infringing on people’s privacy.
The DHS proposed rule garnered more than 5,000 comments in response, the overwhelming majority of which opposed this unprecedented expansion of biometrics. Five U.S. Senators also demanded that DHS abandon the proposal.
EFF, joined by several leading civil liberties and immigrant rights organizations, submitted a comment that warned the proposal posed grave threats to privacy, in part because it permitted collection of far more data than needed to verify a person’s identity and stored all data collected in the same place—amplifying the risk of future misuse or breach. EFF’s comment also highlighted the burden on First Amendment activity, particularly because the breadth of sensitive biometrics required by the proposal could lay the groundwork for a vast surveillance network capable of tracking people in public places. That harm would disproportionately impact immigrants, communities of color, religious minorities, and other marginalized communities.
In its final days, the Trump Administration failed to finalize the proposed rule. Civil liberties and immigrant rights organizations, including EFF, pushed hard during the transition period to rescind it. Last month, the Biden Administration did just that.
The videos that will start showing up in users’ feeds in the coming months will include recommended content from accounts users don’t already follow, with a new test feature being rolled out this week that will allow users to select topics that they want to see more or less of, Mosseri said.
Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), who was involved in the drafting of the report as shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA group, comments:
“This report is a milestone in the fight against biometric mass surveillance in Europe, because for the first time a majority in the European Parliament wants to put an end to this total form of surveillance. Biometric and mass surveillance and behavioral prediction technology in our public spaces undermines our freedoms and threatens our open society. We cannot allow the discrimination of certain groups of people and the false incrimination of countless individuals by these technologies. The European Data Protection Supervisor has also recently spoken out in favour of a ban on biometric mass surveillance.
I call on all citizens to put pressure on the EU by signing the European Citizens’ Initiative #ReclaimYourFace!“
Crime scene DNA analysis can help identify perpetrators, but current methods may divulge the genetic information of innocent people. Cryptography can protect genetic privacy without hampering law enforcement, Stanford researchers say.
The illusory all-screen phone design is no longer just a dream. iPhones have a notch at the top, whereas Android handsets come with hole-punch selfie cameras. These are necessary compromises between form and function. We need cameras and sensors on the front side of the screen, but we also want the display to occupy as much real estate as possible. The “perfect” smartphone design is already in development. More phones with cameras under the screen are coming this year, after the world’s first such device launched in 2020. But some handset vendors came up with a novel way to place the selfie camera behind the display.
The State of Maine has enacted what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes as the strongest state facial-recognition law in the US amid growing concern over the unconstrained use of facial-recognition systems by the public and private sector.
The Maine bill, LD 1585 [PDF], forbids state officials from using facial-recognition technology, or entering into agreements with third parties to do so, except under a relatively limited set of circumstances having to do with serious crimes and searches of vehicle registration data. It imposes the sort of broad limitations that civil liberties advocacy groups have been advocating.
"Maine is showing the rest of the country what it looks like when we the people are in control of our civil rights and civil liberties, not tech companies that stand to profit from widespread government use of face surveillance technology,” said Michael Kebede, policy counsel at the ACLU of Maine, in a statement.
At 7 am on December 30, 1896, a 35-year-old ophthalmologist, bound at the elbows with four bayonets pointed at his back, walked onto the killing field in a military compound just outside the walled city of Manila. Hours earlier, in a detention cell, he had penned 14 melancholy yet triumphant stanzas, “Mi Ultimo Adios,” exalting God and motherland—the Philippines. He hid the poem inside a lamp, later remitted to his family among his other worldly possessions. In the morning before the last day of the year, the eye doctor met his execution squad.
All of the idealism and discussion about the rules of war and atrocities were forgotten by many with the ease of a change in fashion. Being against war was no longer fashionable for some.
Fast forward to the contemporary US where the military enjoys 89% approval. Two issues were recently raised, one about POWs during the Vietnam War and one about the reputation of a member of the Trump administration who received a pardon from Trump for lying to the FBI. The lies had to do with communicating with a Russian official, a whole other ball of wax that deserves separate treatment. The issue of POWs from the Vietnam War involves the late Senator John McCain, and the case of lying to the FBI and a presidential pardon involves retired General Michael Flynn.
House lawmakers are set to vote to create a select committee that will investigate the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, while Republican leaders still aren’t saying whether they will participate in the panel. Congressmember Nikema Williams of Georgia says it’s vital to properly investigate the January 6 insurrection. “I experienced this attack on the Capitol my third day of being a member of Congress, having just been sworn in,” Williams says. “I signed up to serve the people, but I never imagined that I would be unsafe as a member of Congress.” Williams also discusses ongoing negotiations about infrastructure spending and the push to pass a sweeping voting rights bill.
“Bombing, bombing, bombing”—that’s how Ahmad Yassin Leila recently described the whirlwind of destruction that met him and his young family as they sought shelter in Idlib, Syria, early last year. Leila, his wife, and their four children had come to Idlib after the Syrian government’s heavy artillery siege of their Damascus neighborhood of East Ghouta had forced them from their home years before. Since then, they had been on the run from the pervasive violence—shock waves, caved-in ceilings, flying shrapnel—that seemed to follow wherever they fled.1
Twelve years ago, in the wee hours of June 28, 2009, Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras, was abducted from his residence by heavily armed Honduran soldiers and carted off to Costa Rica in his pyjamas, never to be restored to his rightful post.
Donald Rumsfeld, the former U.S. congressman, aide to several Republican presidents, and two-time defense secretary whose torture-laden tenure and ruinous legacy were defined by his lies in service of an unending war that's killed at least hundreds of thousands of people, died Tuesday at age 88.
"Donald Rumsfeld is responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths and enriching himself in the process. The least we can do is to forever link his name with 'war criminal.'"—Veterans for Peace
Decrying the United States' "forever wars" and their deadly consequences, a group of over 110 advocacy groups from around the world on Wednesday published an open letter imploring President Joe Biden to end airstrikes "outside any recognized battlefield" and "abandon this war-based approach and chart a new path forward that promotes and respects our collective human security."
The letter demands "an end to the unlawful program of lethal strikes outside any recognized battlefield, including through the use of drones," that are "a centerpiece" of the so-called War on Terror and have "exacted an appalling toll on Muslim, Brown, and Black communities in multiple parts of the world."
Janine Jackson interviewed the Americas Program’s Laura Carlsen about Biden’s Central American policy for the June 25, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Eastern Yemen has been largely spared the country’s grueling six-year war, with U.S. military personnel in the region, once a rare sight, garnering little more than a curious stare from the passing onlooker. But a new sense of anxiety has settled over the residents of the eastern Al-Mahrah Province amid stories of violent midnight raids by American and Saudi commandos and an increasingly visible U.S. military presence in the region.
The recapture of Mekelle marks a turning point in an atrocity-filled war that Abiy had thought would last just a few weeks. It has not only scuppered Abiy’s attempt to bring Tigray to heel by force of arms, but also threatens to break up the fractious ethnic federation that makes up Africa’s second-most populous country.
He said Beijing had "lodged solemn representations" with Tokyo over Nakayama's use of the word "country."
Around the same time, U.S. Africa Command began changing its language when talking about terror groups in Africa, speaking of “containing” rather than “degrading” them.
This past November, the Pentagon’s inspector general was equally blunt in its final report on U.S. counterterrorism operations in Africa, warning that key terror groups, like the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab in Somalia and various affiliates of the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or IS, were maintaining their strength if not growing.
Dozens of sudden-death calls that Vancouver authorities have received this week are believed to be tied to the dangerous heatwave currently scorching Canada and pushing temperatures to record levels, an event experts say is a direct result of the human-caused climate emergency.
"We're in a climate emergency that has never once been treated as an emergency."—Greta Thunberg
"The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handles." Thus sang Bob Dylan in 1965, and we can now clearly see those vandals: In addition to polluting corporations, they're the national, state and local officials who have routinely failed over the years to prevent the waste and defilement of our water supply while also failing to budget for even minimal upkeep and modernization of water delivery. As a result, the system is badly broken.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) needs to draw on its regulatory authority and make companies disclose both their risks to climate change and impacts on it, California Attorney General Rob Bonta told The Hill's Equilibrium.
Bonta is one of 14 Democratic state attorneys general who are calling for the government’s corporate watchdog to establish a standard for firms when it comes to disclosing climate risk — part of a larger debate among investors, businesses and policy makers about how best to incorporate environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) concerns into the market.
Every person on Earth today is living in a crime scene.
This year’s London Climate Action Week marks a key moment in the run-up to November’s COP26 in Glasgow. Running from June 26 – July 4, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a festival on “net zero”. Search its website for the term and a whole host of events and organisations pop up, such as “Bankers for Net Zero”, or “Get Net Zero Right”, a town hall debate promising a “frank conversation”.
“Net zero” is equally stamped all over international, EU and national climate policies. The UK was the world’s first major economy to sign-up to “net zero” by 2050, while the EU’s Green Deal is based on “net zero” by mid-century. Many are interpreting this to mean we are finally ready to follow the climate science and leave oil, coal and gas in the ground.
The crime in question is the fossil fuel industry’s 40 years of lying about climate change. Arguably the most consequential corporate deception in history, the industry’s lies have had the effect of blunting public awareness and governmental action against what scientists say is now a full-fledged climate emergency. As a candidate in 2020, Joe Biden said he would support efforts to prosecute the oil giants for their lies. It remains to be seen whether he will keep that promise.
Journalists have dedicated years to documenting the crime scene evidence. Then, in 2015, the Los Angeles Times, Inside Climate News, and the Columbia Journalism School blew the case open by tracing the crime link to ExxonMobil, then the world’s largest oil company.
Internal records showed that by the late 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists were briefing its top executives that man-made global warming was real, potentially catastrophic, and caused mainly by burning fossil fuels. Climate activists seized on the revelations, launching the hashtag #ExxonKnew.
UNSW in a statement issued on Thursday points to a study published this week in Environmental Research Letters, with researchers showing that road transport, meat consumption and a global trend towards expanding floorspaces – otherwise the hallmarks of affluent economies – were big factors behind greenhouse gas increases while industry, agriculture and the energy systems continued to account for a substantial slab of the carbon emission total.
The Federal Court of Australia ruled Thursday that the Minister for Environment, Sussan Ley, and the wider government, has a duty of care to protect Australia’s youth from the climate crisis.
The landmark decision comes after eight Australian teenagers filed a claim with the Federal Court, seeking an injunction to “restrain an apprehended breach of the duty,” that they believed the Commonwealth Minister for the Environment owes them and other Australian children. As a result of the age of the applicants, the proceedings were brought by their representative, 86 year-old Sister Marie Brigid Arthur, who is a Sister of the Brigidine Order of Victoria.
As the death toll from the 13-story apartment building collapse in Florida rises to 12, with nearly 150 people still missing, we examine how the disaster raises new questions about how rising sea levels will impact oceanside buildings in Miami and other cities. “The reason this is so important is that either this is something unique to the building or this is a general problem that all the condos along the coasts of the world are going to have to deal with,” says Harold Wanless, a professor in geography and urban sustainability at the University of Miami who leads a project called The Invading Sea, a collaborative effort by news organizations across Florida to address the threat of sea level rise.
Portland, Ore.—By noon on Monday, the temperature in Portland was climbing up the triple digits, passing 104, then 106, on its way to a record high of 116—40 degrees higher than the average temperature for this time in June. Most of the city was in a daze, the streets quiet and nearly empty. But one block in the city’s southeast quadrant was busy with cars and people lining up at a shade tent to collect coolers full of water, Gatorade, and other supplies to bring to people living on the streets and in encampments throughout the city.
Climate activists and experts responded with alarm Wednesday to some parts of a White House memo, obtained and reported on by Axios, outlining Biden administration plans for climate and energy provisions in evolving budget reconciliation legislation.
"The White House continually praises far-fetched, pro-industry projects like carbon capture as a viable solution to drastically reducing climate emissions. This approach is foolish and dangerous."—Mitch Jones, Food & Water Watch
Campaign groups urging the United Nations to adopt a global fracking ban say they have won the backing of Ireland.
Molly Scott Cato, Green Party finance and economy spokesperson, said:
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate emergency.
While ExxonMobil's decades of sowing public doubt about climate science and the impact of fossil fuels have provoked various lawsuits, secretly recorded videos released Wednesday expose how the company continues to fight against U.S. efforts to tackle climate emergency.
"These recordings should be played on every TV station in the world."—Emily Atkin, climate reporter
Late last summer, after churning along through the pandemic with only a two-week pause, managers at FreightCar America called hundreds of workers into the break area at the company’s factory near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to tell them that the plant was closing for good.
For some employees, the news wasn’t a shock: They’d been hearing rumors that management would move the work elsewhere for years. The timing, however, seemed odd. Only a few months earlier, the publicly traded company had received a $10 million Paycheck Protection Program Loan — the maximum amount available under a pandemic relief program designed to keep workers employed. Some had believed the funds would keep the doors open for a little while longer.
Trillions of dollars have emerged from recent US stimulus packages and budget proposals, but student loan forgiveness has yet to be addressed. Still, the American people have not forgotten their new president’s campaign promises to solve the disaster of spiralling student debt.
Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ordered the software biz to cough up $57m in fines plus pay back $12.6m to customers to cover their losses with interest.
“The fine imposed in this matter, the highest ever levied by FINRA, reflects the scope and seriousness of Robinhood’s violations, including FINRA’s finding that Robinhood communicated false and misleading information to millions of its customers,” Jessica Hopper, the head of FINRA’s Department of Enforcement, said in a statement.
A Bitcoin holder, hodling over $1 billion worth of bitcoin is now reportedly dead leaving behind his virtual financial holdings. Guess he took hodl till I die literally. Bitcoin is the most expensive and popular cryptocurrency right now going for as much as 36,358 dollars at the time of the writing of this article. The currency has taken a lot of hits recently but is still a viable investment in every crypto enthusiast’s eye.
[...]
He also showed support for open-source systems. When the open-source operating system Open BSD ran into funding issues, it was Popescu who donated around $20,000 to the non-profit foundation behind the project back in 2014. Most of what he said on the network was usually taken in a bad light and his threat of dumping 1 million bitcoins earned him the title of Father of Bitcoin Toxicity.
Well, his warning did work as the network’s use of 1MB block sizes remained unchanged. While being one of the biggest bitcoin holders out there, Popescu was also the biggest supporter of cryptocurrency in general. His death will be mourned by every crypto investor out there.
For the third straight day, climate action advocates descended on Washington, D.C. Wednesday—this time for an Indigenous-led demonstration demanding that President Joe Biden stand up "for the rights of our communities instead of doing the bidding of corporate polluters."
"If we can stop these pipelines, stop our dependence on oil and gas, and change to cleaner types of energy that are sustainable, it will protect the future."—Crystal Cavalier-Keck, MVP opponent
On April 21, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen sat for an extended Zoom chat with The Nation as part of the magazine’s biweekly Conversations series. Born in Vietnam and raised in the United States, where his family were resettled as refugees, Nguyen has become an essential literary voice—at once an eloquent champion of the displaced and a trenchant critic of empire.
Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in next year's midterm elections. Apparently Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head weren't gaining enough traction…
The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016 and his defeat in 2020 launched destructive acts against democracy and civility. The former President followed a mediated self-aggrandizing script and narrative of€ destruction and salvation: He€ damaged€ the role and institution of a democratically elected president with€ Media Logic€ and the politics of fear and promoted himself as the€ salvation€ for the country. Gonzo Governance has continued as his claims, threats, destructive policies, and institutional changes in voting, managing elections, and the civic culture were adopted by members of Congress and state and local officials.
His rise from a reality TV star to a disruptive President, and then his refusal to concede defeat in 2020, received extensive mass media and digital media coverage. Donald Trump spread fear and misinformation through thousands of lies and tweets.€ Media Logic refers to the way in which various media define, organize, and present material, as well as how audiences participate, expect, interpret, and use information.€ The media environment and new information technologies that are personal, visual, and instantaneous were foundational for audiences to be receptive to Trump’s nationalist slogans, derogatory epithets, memes, and politics of fear.
Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House, threw his support behind Shontel Brown on Tuesday in the race to fill the vacant seat in Ohio's 11th Congressional District, the latest salvo in the party establishment's effort to forestall the momentum of progressive firebrand Nina Turner.
"People are chipping in $5, $10, $27 at a time because they know our grassroots movement cannot be stopped."—Nina Turner
– Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
When I was a kid in sleep-away camp, I dreaded the onset of August because it meant we were nearing the end of a glorious summer and heading back home.
Biden became president on January 20, 2021. On January 21, Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create emergency COVID safety standards for workplaces by mid-March.And then… nothing, for months.
Finally, in June, Biden’s OSHA announced that the agency would issue an emergency COVID workplace safety standard, but only for healthcare workers.
The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.
Russian national Dmitry Popov, who is facing up to 15 years in prison in Belarus, has asked President Vladimir Putin to revoke his Russian citizenship. The appeal was included in a letter Popov sent to his sister from jail, and was published online by blogger Anton Motolko and RFE/RL’s Belarusian service.€
Last year, President Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in show was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic. But on Wednesday, June 30, the “direct line” made its return to national television. Despite some technical hiccups, Putin answered questions from Russian residents for four hours straight. Meduza watched the whole thing and summed up Putin’s most interesting remarks about vaccination against COVID-19, hyper-local issues, and his presidency, in a nutshell.
On the evening of June 30, Russian law enforcement detained Alexey Yakovlev, the former broadcast director for the YouTube channel “Navalny Live,” on board a plane that had just landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
A number of Canadian communities have answered calls to cancel Canada Day, the country's annual celebration of its establishment as a country 154 years ago, following the discovery of nearly 1,000 unmarked graves on the grounds of residential schools for Indigenous children.
"Indigenous people deserve more than words and promises. These horrific discoveries make it undeniably clear: the federal government has failed and is continuing to fail First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities."—Jagmeet Singh, New Democratic Party
“We don’t know what the House and the presidency and the Senate is going to look like in 2022 or 2024,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said to hundreds of young Sunrise Movement activists gathered in front of the White House on Monday. “What we know is that we’ve got an opening to tackle climate.”
This smug self-congratulation about bipartisanship speaks volumes about the trajectory that public policy formation in Washington has been taking for decades. For establishment Democrat Washington insiders like Biden, calling something ‘bipartisan’ seems to be the greatest complement one can pay a proposal. It’s not hard to see why: in a prevailing culture that constantly tells us how divided the country is, it provides a facile way of presenting oneself as a great statesman who’s able to bridge the bitter divides and put the interests of the nation above petty partisan squabbles. The master of this pose was, of course, Biden’s former senior running mate, Barack Obama, who waxed lyrical about his willingness to compromise with Republicans.
The reality, however, is that bipartisanship is not only a tool for lazy posturing, but also stands as possibly the biggest impediment to enacting a radical agenda that breaks with the neoliberal status quo. After all, if the majority of people vote for one party and then that party compromises with the other that had only minority support, then you are thwarting the will of the majority and, in turn, undermining democracy. Keep in mind that this happens in an atmosphere that is already steeply tilted against majority rule and towards minority obstructionism of even modestly left-of-center policies. The Senate already gives disproportionate representation to small, white, and right-leaning states and, on top of that, has adopted an arcane set of rules surrounding the filibuster that requires a 60–40 supermajority for anything to pass.
In a new investigative report published by Open Media, Ilya Rozhdestvensky profiles Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu’s daughter Ksenia, who is just 30 years old but oversees billions of rubles in investments and youth programs. According to Open Media’s findings, the entire Shoigu family leverages state funding and government connections in its business dealings. Meduza summarizes the story here.
The Russian Attorney General’s Office has recognized Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s eponymous, U.K.-registered foundation as “undesirable” in Russia, along with several other NGOs based in Britain and France.€
As acrimony grows with Indian authorities, Twitter faces at least five police cases in different states. Its non-compliance with new rules raised suggestions that Twitter may no longer enjoy legal protection in India over content posted by users.
On Wednesday, an Indian state challenged in the Supreme Court a bar on police action against Twitter's country head, Manish Maheshwari, after a lower court protected him against arrest over an accusation that the platform had been used to spread hate.
The channel and the message were secretly part of an Iranian disinformation campaign, according to Israeli disinformation researchers. Over several months, Iranian agents had infiltrated small WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels and messaging apps that Israeli activists used for intimate discussions among dozens to thousands of people.
Once there, the agents shared polarizing images and text, and began to send direct messages to people within the groups. Their goal, most likely, was simply to cause trouble, and to make people in these otherwise trusting online communities wary of one another.
The first-of-its-kind discovery of the Iranian campaign by FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog group, offers insight into how countries have miniaturized their disinformation campaigns in an effort to stay under the radar of tech companies that have become more aggressive in rooting them out.
Russia’s censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, has filed a claim against Evgeny Antipov — the founder of the popular Telegram bot “Eye of God,” which searches online databases for personal information.
In a very dense and somewhat counterintuitive opinion [PDF], the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has dumped two more of the dozens of bogus "sue social media companies for acts committed by terrorists" lawsuits. But it has kept one alive. Worse, the 167-page ruling comes with concurring opinions that suggest Ninth Circuit judges think Section 230 immunity is, on the whole, letting social media companies get away with too much bad stuff.
It has been one year since China officially implemented a sweeping national security law for Hong Kong, right before the anniversary of the island’s handover from British to Chinese rule on July 1.
The wide-ranging law calls for the arrest and prosecution of those accused of jeopardizing China’s national security via subversion, terrorism, or collusion with foreign forces.
In the year since, critics say the measure has undermined the city’s core values, including freedom of speech, democratic elections and rule of law.
I'm sorry, but those of you looking forward to riding the Friend Feed Flume at Zuckland or the Search Engine Shuffle at GooglePark are probably out of luck. Florida's new social media law (and its theme park owner exemption) is not going to become law.
Just two years ago, Florida state Rep. Evan Jenne introduced a resolution calling for what he called "a formal and heartfelt apology" to victims of one of the most shameful episodes in the modern history of the Sunshine State—a lengthy witch hunt by a legislative committee at the height of post-World-War-II McCarthyism that ruined the lives of university professors and members of the LGBTQ community, and targeted Black activists.
A federal judge on Wednesday night blocked a Florida law that would penalize social media companies for barring the speech of politicians, striking a blow to conservatives still fuming over the suspension of former President Donald Trump and allegations that Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube censor right-wing views.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle of the Northern District of Florida said the law, which would have forced social media companies to allow speech even if it violated their rules, would likely be found unconstitutional.
SB 7072, signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in May, limits when web services can kick off users. It includes a ban on suspending or annotating the posts of political candidates, a requirement that users can “opt out” of algorithmic sorting systems, and an “antitrust violator blacklist” for companies that break the rules. As mentioned above, the rules don’t apply to “a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex,” placating media conglomerates like Disney.
Likening the state’s law to “burning the house to roast a pig,” U.S. District Judge Robert R. Hinkle in Tallahassee said the legislation passed by a Republican legislature and a priority of Governor Ron DeSantis, violates the companies’ free speech rights. [sic]
“Rather than preventing what it calls ‘censorship,’ the Act does the exact opposite: it empowers government officials in Florida to police the protected editorial judgment of online businesses that the State disfavors and whose perceived political viewpoints it wishes to punish,” the complaint from the companies says.
"They stopped torturing me once they found out I'm a U.S. citizen," he told VOA. But he said dozens of journalists who aren't Western citizens remain locked behind bars, facing worse conditions with less support.
Women's rights advocates expressed solidarity on Wednesday with the 60 women who came forward to tell their stories of sexual abuse€ at the hands of Bill Cosby after the actor's conviction was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
The seven-judge panel ruled that Cosby should not have been convicted in 2018 on three counts of aggravated indecent assault of his former mentee, Andrea Constand, due to a "non-prosecution agreement" he had reached earlier with a former prosecutor.€
After President Biden signed legislation this month to create a federal holiday commemorating June 19 as Juneteenth, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Georgia Congressmember Nikema Williams reintroduced what is being called the “Abolition Amendment” to amend the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime” — a clause that has allowed the widespread use of forced prison labor. “Eliminating the loophole … is one way to continue moving forward with addressing the problems of our past and building for the future,” says Democratic Congressmember Nikema Williams. “American prisons are run by incarcerated labor,” adds Jorge Renaud, national criminal justice director for LatinoJustice, who experienced forced labor while serving 27 years in a Texas prison.
As the U.S. marks 50 years since President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs on June 17, 1971, we speak with journalist Maya Schenwar, editor-in-chief of the news website Truthout, whose sister Keeley died of a drug overdose in February 2020 at the age of 29. Schenwar says her sister’s death came after “a long cycle of criminalization” that made her chances of recovery much harder. “She became so afraid of being rearrested,” says Schenwar, who notes that many drug users avoid seeking medical help because of the fear of police involvement and incarceration. “Why are we supporting criminalization at the expense of people’s actual survival?” she asks. Drug overdoses have soared during the pandemic, causing over 92,000 deaths in the United States in the 12-month period ending in November — the most since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began keeping track over two decades ago. Experts say the pandemic and the increasing availability of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have contributed to the death toll.
The community of Ãâaq'am, one of four bands in the Ktunaxa Nation, used ground-penetrating technology to uncover the gravesites close to the former St Eugene's Mission School near Cranbrook, British Columbia.
Some remains were found in shallow graves, only 3-4ft deep, the Lower Kootenay Band said in a statement.
` St Eugene's was operated by the Catholic Church from 1912 until the early 1970s. It was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries with the aim of forcibly assimilating indigenous youth.
As an end to EFF's year-long celebration of our 30th anniversary, join us for a candid live discussion with some of our founders and early board members. EFF's Executive Director, Cindy Cohn will be joined with Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and Steve Wozniak to discuss a variety of topics from EFF's origin story and its role in digital rights to where EFF is as an organization today.
Ohio Republicans have been forced to back off an attempt to ban community broadband networks in the state after massive public opposition. As we recently noted, state Republicans included a last-hour amendment to a state budget bill (at AT&T and Charter's behest) that would have effectively outlawed community and municipal broadband. Such networks are an organic, grass roots response to market failure at the hands of regional telecom monopolies. And instead of addressing them by offering better, cheaper service, giant ISPs often find it's cheaper to just lobby state and federal lawmakers.
After months of Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault invoking the names of cultural lobby groups as evidence of support for Bill C-10, it took one of Canada’s most celebrated authors to set the record straight and bring the debate to a close.
Amazon filed a petition Wednesday seeking the recusal of newly confirmed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan from any antitrust probes involving the tech behemoth, arguing that Khan's past work criticizing the company means she cannot oversee such investigations in an impartial manner.
"Amazon is going to pursue every single angle they can invent to try to dodge scrutiny."—Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self-Reliance
The federal court in DC ruled narrowly that the FTC hadn’t included enough detail in its complaint about Facebook’s monopoly power, and gave it 30 days to do so.€ That alone was troubling, but probably not fatal to the lawsuit. A more ominous problem came in what lawyers call dicta: the court opined that even if Facebook had monopoly power, its refusal to interoperate with competing apps was OK. This decision highlights many of the difficulties we face in applying current antitrust law to the biggest Internet companies, and shows why we need changes to the law to address modern competition problems caused by digital platform companies like Facebook.
When the FTC filed its suit in December 2020, and 48 U.S. states and territories filed a companion suit, we celebrated the move, but we predicted two challenges: 1) proving that Facebook has monopoly power and 2) overcoming Facebook’s defenses around preserving its own ability and incentives to innovate. Yesterday’s decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for D.C. touched on both of those.
To make a case under the part of antitrust law that deals with monopolies—Section 2 of the Sherman Act—a plaintiff has to show that the accused company is a monopoly, legally speaking, or trying to become one. And being a monopoly doesn’t just mean being a really large company or commanding a lot of public attention and worry. It means that within some “market” for goods or services, the company has a large enough share of commerce that the prices it charges, or the quality of its products, aren’t constrained by rivals. Defining the market is a hugely important step in monopoly cases, because a broad definition could mean there’s no monopoly at all.
As you've now heard, there's a big push in Congress to revise how antitrust works. A group of mostly Democratic House members (with a few Republicans on board) introduced a questionable package of antitrust bills, with many, many problems. There were some good ideas (such as better funding of the FTC) and some more creative ideas (such as around interoperability), but done in such ham-fisted ways that they would cause a lot more harm than good. We've noted how the bills would create massive problems for content moderation, and raise related speech issues.
We've been talking a lot about the huge effort in Congress to pass new antitrust laws targeting big tech companies, and all the issues these proposals have. This week, we've got an insider perspective on just what's going on with antitrust in the House: Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who called out many of the deficiencies in the bills during last week's marathon markup session, joins us for a discussion all about the many, many problems in all five proposed antitrust bills.
But technology giants like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple, which dominate e-commerce, social networks, online advertising and search, have risen in ways unforeseen by the laws. In recent decades, the courts have also interpreted the rules more narrowly.
It’s unlikely that Amazon’s petition will succeed. Recusal petitions against FTC commissioners are rarely successful, and it’s common for an FTC chair to have previously worked for nonprofit groups or as a congressional staffer. The petition highlights an unusually high number of public editorials by Khan, but even those are well within the limits of political commentary.
Electricity storage inventions show annual growth of 14% over past decade, joint study by European Patent Office (EPO) and International Energy Agency (IEA) finds
The German Federal Court of Justice (“BGH”) held in its decision “Papierspender” (“Paper Dispenser”) that a Community design was not automatically caught by the functionality provision of the Community Design Regulation because it had appeared in a patent application. The decision highlights the importance for product developers to keep detailed records, already during product development, as to why a particular visual appearance of the product was chosen.
In the decision of 7 October 2020, the BGH annulled the appeal court’s judgment that had found the community design No. 001344022-0006 invalid. Functionality was not proven by the mere fact that the product appeared in a patent application as a patent application does not contain considerations as to the visual appearance of the product, but only describes its technical function. Now the case is back at the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court.
[...]
Developing this further, the BGH has now decided that the mere fact that a patent has been requested for the product at issue is not compelling evidence that its features were solely dictated by the technical function, nor was it necessary to prove an “aesthetic excess” as the Appeal Court Dusseldorf seemed to require.
Of course a patent application may serve as an indication of functionality in the overall assessment under art. 8(1) CDR as to whether the appearance of the features is dictated by the technical function. That is not contrary to the principle that different forms of IP protection can coexist. That said, the mere existence of a patent application cannot prove functionality, and neither the absence of considerations regarding the visual appearance of the product nor the presence of considerations regarding its technical function in the patent application indicate functionality. After all, it is the sole objective of a patent application to describe the technical function and not the visual appearance of the product.
Five in-house counsel weigh in on the importance of in-person interactions and how private practice lawyers can make the most out of virtual connections
The request must be filed within 30-days of the PTAB’s final written decision or rehearing decision. The Agency has indicated that a request for review by the USpTO Director will be considered a request for rehearing under 37 C.F.R. 90.3(b) — that means that no appeal to the Federal Circuit will be due until after the Director acts on the request. In the short-term, the Office is not charging a fee for the request, but a fee will be added.
Request vs Petition: I’m not sure why, but the PTO is not identifying the Request for Review as a Petition for Review.
Pop-Panels and Ex Parte Proceedings: The Supreme Court identified inter partes review as demanding a process for PTO Director Review. However, it is clear that this extends to Post-Grant and Covered-Business-Method Reviews. It is unclear though whether it will extend to reexaminations or ordinary ex parte examination. I’m sure that the Director will still receive those petitions this month. The Office created Precedential Opinion Panels (POP) as a mechanism for giving the PTO Director more direct control over PTAB precedent. The Agency has indicated that the POP system remains in place for now, but is could be eliminated in favor of the simpler system of director review.
For many years, the following question awaited judicial determination under Australian law: is a DNA-based diagnostic method patent eligible subject matter? For this reason, the case of Sequenom, Inc. v Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. has been watched closely as it played out around the world: from the US, to the UK, and now, at last, Australia. In exciting news for life sciences innovators, the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia has confirmed that diagnostic methods involving the practical application of “natural phenomena” can be patentable inventions in Australia.
We have previously reported on the US decision of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc. v. Sequenom, Inc. 788 F.3d 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2015), which held that the claims in suit to prenatal diagnostic methods were patent ineligible because they began and ended with a natural phenomenon. We have also previously reported on the decisions of the High Court of Australia in D’Arcy v Myriad Genetics Inc [2015] HCA 35 (Myriad), which held that the claims-in-suit to isolated nucleic acids were not directed to patent eligible subject matter, and in Apotex Pty Ltd v Sanofi-Aventis Australia Pty Ltd & Ors [2013] HCA 50 (Apotex), which held that methods of medical treatment are patent eligible subject matter.
[...]
In line with our previous discussion of the NRDC Factors and the Myriad Factors, Justice Beach concluded that the invention fell clearly within the concept of a manner of manufacture as outlined in National Resource Development Corporation v Commissioner of Patents [1959] HCA 67 (NRDC): the claimed invention was a product or process made by human intervention, which had economic utility. Justice Beach went on to consider the additional factors set out in Myriad, even though he did not consider it necessary as he found that the claims to the prenatal diagnostic method did not involve a significant new application or extension of the concept of manner of manufacture.
On appeal in Sequenom FCAFC, the appellants contended that the Patent claimed “a mere discovery of a naturally occurring phenomenon” (the discovery being the fact that cell free foetal DNA (cffDNA) from maternal plasma or serum is a source of foetal DNA), not a method involving a practical application that goes beyond the discovery itself, and, as a result, there was no artificially created state of affairs arising from the invention as claimed. In a related submission, the appellants contended that, properly understood, the end result of each claim is information only and, accordingly, not an artificially created state of affairs. Based on these arguments, the appellants claimed the invention was not a manner of manufacture, and therefore not patent eligible.
The Munich Regional Court last week gave IP Bridge the green light to proceed against Huawei with three lawsuits based on standard essential mobile phone patents. The judges rejected Huawei’s opposition to an AASI (case ID: 7 O 36/21). Under German law, parties can oppose an AASI judgment at the same chamber before appealing it at a higher court.
The Munich Regional Court considers it likely that Huawei will file an anti-suit injunction with a Chinese court in order to prevent IP Bridge from making SEP claims in Germany. However, the Chinese mobile giant has not yet applied for such an ASI in China or elsewhere.
[...]
Under German law, the legal basis for an AASI without an ASI is the so-called ‘danger of imminent action’ (in German: Begehungsgefahr). The Munich judges have thus confirmed IP Bridge’s right to enforce its IP rights in Germany, regardless of whether another court prohibits the NPE from doing so.
The AASI dispute stems back to three patent infringement suits filed by IP Bridge in Munich based on standard-essential mobile phone patents (EP 17 88 782 B1, EP 22 94 737 B1, EP 21 24 463 B1). IP Bridge and Huawei are currently exchanging pleadings in these cases. Oral proceedings will not start until autumn. IP Bridge has filed an application for a global FRAND licence at the UK High Court in London.
Although it is established practice at the European Patent Office (EPO) that two patents cannot be granted to the same applicant for the same subject matter, the exact legal mechanism for refusing grant of patents on this basis was previously unclear.
In G 4/19, the Enlarged Board of Appeal held that Article 125 EPC (which relates to taking into account law generally recognised in contracting states of the EPC) provides the legal mechanism for refusing grant of patents under Article 97(2) EPC.
The Board also held that patents can be refused for double patenting, regardless of whether they are (1) two applications filed on the same day, (2) parent and divisional applications or (3) an application and its priority application.
Rather disappointingly, the Board did not answer the final question referred in T 0318/14 as to whether an applicant had a “legitimate interest” in obtaining grant of a second application directed to the same subject matter as the first due to the resulting second patent having a later date of expiry.
As you may recall, a few weeks ago I wrote about how Congress was asking the GAO to investigate whether the director of the US Patent & Trademark Office had been interfering in determinations made by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). I'm not going to go into all of the background again (please read the original for that), but under the America Invents Act, a process for reviewing patents after they were granted was set up, known as the Inter Partes Review (IPR) process. This was important, because the granting of patents is a non-adversarial process, where patent examiners are not given very much time to actually review everything. So the IPR process allowed those (especially those with prior art) to kick off a process by which the PTAB would recheck to see if the original examiner made a mistake in granting a 20 year monopoly to someone.
On June 17, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,237,577. The IPR was filed as a part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. Formerly owned by Intellectual Discovery Co. Ltd., the ‘577 patent is currently owned by Dolby Laboratories. The patent is a part of the HEVC Advance patent pool and HEVC Advance claims that certain claims of the '577 patent are essential to the HEVC standard.
On June 17, 2021, 6 weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,523,497, owned by PacSec3, an NPE. PacSec3 was formed in 2020 with NACAR IP LLC as its managing member. NACAR IP was also formed in early 2020 with Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP), a patent monetization company, identified as its managing member. The ‘497 patent has been asserted against F5 Networks, NetScout Systems, Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, Cisco, and Juniper Networks.
According to an alert issued in response to repeated allegations of copyright infringement, Comcast has suspended an Xfinity account for eight hours, warning that a further breach would result in 12 hours of downtime. In response to additional complaints, Comcast warns that the account could be terminated.
Nintendo won a $2.1 million summary judgment against the operator of the pirate site RomUniverse last month. The California federal court denied a permanent injunction, however, noting that the site had already shut down. Nintendo now asks the court to reconsider this decision, as there are signs that RomUniverse may relaunch after all.
Last week, in a somewhat controversial decision in the TransUnion v. Ramirez case, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, that plaintiff's in a class action lawsuit did not have standing to sue under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FRCA). The issue may seem wholly unrelated from copyright, but in reading through the decision, it's possible it could lead to a vastly different world for copyright going forward, because the same issues that the Court finds fault with in the FRCA also apply to copyright law -- and, indeed, it's the part of copyright law that is most widely abused in lawsuits.
