I'm a portable man—I like laptops and tablets. It's been years since I've owned a desktop PC. Between frequent travel to tech conferences and my predilection for doing my work done from the comforts of donut and coffee shops, I just can't be tethered to a desk.
That means I ask a lot of my mobile gear. I need them to perform with desktop power. Compile code, edit video, play games—they need to do it all. And do it well.
A downtown Denver computer company has boxed up a bit of spring’s rainy weather. Not a virtual box. It’s a real one. And it’s filled with 200 pounds of white sand — and virtual rain.
System 76 CEO Carl Richell played with the sandbox at the company’s office Tuesday. He built a mound and, using augmented reality, turned it into an island with a mountain range. When he hovered his hands above the sand, the virtual rain poured down, streaming off the mountain peaks to the lowest point.
He mixed and mashed the sand again. The scene changed instantly, thanks to an overhead projector, a motion sensor and a Linux laptop that overlaid the image on the sand.
“It’s measuring what the fluid is doing at all times. And if you have lots and lots of fluid inside the box, you have a lot of calculations going on,” Richell said. ” … The idea is to inspire, to get people to think about what you can do with a computer.”
The first step in driver development is to understand the differences in the way each operating system handles its drivers, underlying driver model and architecture it uses, as well as available development tools. For example, Linux driver model is very different from the Windows one. While Windows facilitates separation of the driver development and OS development and combines drivers and OS via a set of ABI calls, Linux device driver development does not rely on any stable ABI or API, with the driver code instead being incorporated into the kernel. Each of these models has its own set of advantages and drawbacks, but it is important to know them all if you want to provide a comprehensive support for your device.
In this article we will compare Windows and Linux device drivers and explore the differences in terms of their architecture, APIs, build development, and distribution, in hopes of providing you with an insight on how to start writing device drivers for each of these operating systems.
The Samba project, the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix, has released a client for ChromeOS.
The client, Network File Share, is available for installation from the Chrome Web Store and can be used to access network files directly from the Files app on ChromeOS.
OpenSwitch, the operating system for data center network switches Hewlett-Packard Enterprise launched last year as an open source project together with a number of other networking heavyweights, has become an official Linux Foundation project, the foundation announced today.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today is announcing the OpenSwitch Project is becoming a Linux Foundation project. OpenSwitch is an open source, Linux-based network operating system (NOS) designed to power enterprise grade switches from multiple hardware vendors that will enable organizations to rapidly build data center networks that are customized for unique business needs.
Cloud Foundry is an open source cloud platform-as-a-service operating owned as a joint venture by EMC, VMware and General Electric and run by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Cloud Foundry was designed and developed by a small team from Google led by Derek Collison and originally was called Project B29.
As a “networking guy," Cisco CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect Dave Ward finds it frustrating that today, although somebody can fire up an application and ask for CPU, RAM and storage, they can't even ask for bandwidth. They have very simple networking primitives all the way up to the PaaS (Platform as a Service) layer.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced keynote speakers and the full schedule for LinuxCon and ContainerCon, which takes place August 22-24 in Toronto, Canada. The annual event will include rich technical content that will appeal to technologists of all levels and a celebration of open source and its history to mark the 25th anniversary of Linux.
You can celebrate the 25th anniversary of Linux with Linus Torvalds and other open source innovators and leaders at LinuxCon North America and ContainerCon this year.
Linux boasts a cornucopia of filesystems, some cutting edge, some cross platform, and some retro support from days of UNIX past. Btrfs is one that’s been sticking its head above the crowd lately, and for good reasons like its Copy-on-Write, RAID functionality, and Snapshotting ability.
It seems like only yesterday that I read Jeff Bonwick's blog entry "ZFS: The Last Word in Filesystems". It was Halloween of 2005 that ZFS was fully integrated into Sun Microsystem's Solaris, and the filesystem was very well received. For the readers not familiar with ZFS, it is a combined all-purpose filesystem and volume manager. It simplified data storage management while also offering the most advanced features of the time. Such technologies include drive pooling with software RAID support, file snapshots, in-line data compression, data deduplication, built-in data integrity, advanced caching (to DRAM and SSD), and more. Today, the ZFS trademark and technology is owned and maintained by the Oracle Corporation.
AMD has been announced that its new graphics driver stack for the Linux operating system is finally ready to be rolled out to compatible systems. The new gaming-optimized AMD GPU-PRO diver supports Ubuntu version 16.04, and Valve has also added it to the latest version of SteamOS.
When announcing the release yesterday of Wayland/Weston 1.11, Bryce Harrington at Samsung also laid out the release plans for Wayland 1.12.
With the branching this week for the huge Mesa 12.0 milestone, here are some fresh Mesa 11.2 stable vs. Mesa Git benchmarks I ran today/yesterday with several graphics cards on Ubuntu 16.04 with the Padoka PPA for the updated Mesa Git stack plus also pulling down the Linux 4.6.0 stable release.
For these fresh Mesa 11.2 vs. Git benchmarks I used a Radeon R9 270X, R9 285, R7 370, and R9 FURY this round for the open-source AMD Linux benchmarking from this system.
The reaction to this headline from sysadmins who deploy Fail2Ban on an IPv6 enabled system is probably: “Fail2Ban doesn’t support IPv6ââ¬Â½” At least, that seems to be the reaction most admins have posted on forums and social media when they learn that Fail2Ban doesn’t support IPv6. Now Fail2Ban’s IPv4-only limitation is about to be lifted.
Fail2Ban is a tool that identifies unwanted behaviors by monitoring service logs, and can act upon that by banning offending IP addresses temporarily. Up until recently, Fail2Ban only supported IPv4 although it’s almost certainly running on many IPv6 capable systems as well.
The Tor Browser team has announced the first stable version of its 6.0 release. It can be downloaded from the project's website.
The browser is based on Firefox ESR and this release brings it up-to-date with Firefox 45-ESR, providing better support for HTML5 video on YouTube.
Spun from last week's Wine 1.9.11 release is the new Wine-Staging version that re-bases many existing experimental patches (such as the D3D command-stream multi-threading work) plus adds in some new patches that aren't yet ready to be mainlined in Wine.
Wine Staging 1.9.11 has been released this weekend. This release is a small update containing only a few improvements targeting different applications.
The team behind Wine Staging, a special version of the Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator) software that lets Linux users play Windows games and use Windows apps on their PCs, released Wine Staging 1.9.11.
Feral Interactive have updated their teaser radar to show that Life Is Strange is coming to Linux/SteamOS and Mac. The only official announcement for now is Mac App Store, but it is now confirmed to be coming to Linux. We already sort of knew this thanks to SteamDB info
The Way of Life sees you relive different experiences using three characters at different ages. It sounds like a cool idea and it's free so why not give it a go?
Tumbleweed Express, trains mixed with guns in the wild west now on Steam with Linux support Posted by liamdawe, 1 June 2016 at 12:03 pm UTC / 548 views Share Tumbleweed Express looks like quite a cool action game where you're defending a train from airships and other trains with Borderlands styled graphics.
A nice addition to the on-rails shooter type of game where you don't control your movement, anyone going to check it out? It's pretty darn cheap too, so that's great.
The latest version of Unreal Engine 4 is now available to game developers.
RetroArch has announced their first release of the Mednafen/Beetle PSX HW PlayStation emulator for Linux and other operating systems.
The Mednafen PSX HW core is significant in that its added an OpenGL renderer utilizing an OpenGL 3.3 core context. This PlayStation emulator now supports rendering on the GPU and is said to be one of the first doing so for PSX that is based upon modern OpenGL. This GPU renderer is based upon the work done by Rustation, a Rust-written PlayStation emulator.
Salt and Sanctuary is a very stylish looking 2D action RPG with haunting visuals and fast paced combat. Looks like Ethan Lee is having a go at porting it.
Normally, when we talk about any issue involving how realistic video games are becoming as an art form, those stories revolve around either the decrying of realistic violence within the games or occasionally governments attempting to use realistic game footage to pimp their own fictional military capabilities. But, while those stories often come off as silly, those examples and their like are not the only benchmarks for just how realistic gaming is becoming. Other examples involve games reaching a realism level high enough to open the door to real-life application.
Serving as a recent example of this is the latest from racing game giant Gran Turismo, which has achieved enough realism to earn it a partnership with Formula One Racing as a sort of proving ground for racers to get their license with the professional racing organization.
The team behind Wine Staging, a special version of the Wine (Wine is Not an Emulator) software that lets Linux users play Windows games and use Windows apps on their PCs, has released Wine Staging 1.9.11.
The next KDE framework release will include a small addition in KWayland which will make it much easier to run auto tests for Wayland based applications. KWayland now installs a small virtual framebuffer test server into libexec directory.
The latest KWayland feature in the pipe for the next KDE Frameworks 5 update is virtual frame-buffer support for its Wayland server.
This virtual frame-buffer Wayland server is coming to KWayland and inspired by X.Org's Xvfb virtual frame-buffer. The purpose of this new code is for allowing auto tests to run for Wayland-based applications. This small test server is designed to make it very easy for running tests on X11 and Wayland, albeit the environment is very limited.
Most Linux users know that KDE is a feature rich desktop environment with a whole suite of applications for nearly every task imaginable. What many Linux users don’t know is how far the KDE team has stepped up the level of completeness in the latest releases in Plasma 5. As of the latest release of KDE Plasma 5(5.6 at the time of this article), the KDE team has been packing Plasma with a ton of interesting and convenient features that show just how modern and convenient the Linux desktop experience can be.
Boudewijn Rempt, the maintainer of open-source painting software Krita has announced the release of version 3.0.
3.0 is a major version bump and with this release the project now has its own repository and wiki. The main focus of the developers for this release was code cleaning. With this release Krita has been ported to the latest Qt 5 and KDE Framework 5, thus keeping the codebase modern.
The GNOME Calendar app is getting a lot of attention lately, especially now that it has been integrated by default into the Ubuntu Linux operating system, but also because the development cycle of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment is ongoing.
We reported a few days ago that the second snapshot, version 3.21.2, of the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release later this year, on September 21, 2016, was released to public beta testers and early adopters, bringing various improvements to its core applications and components.
Linux Lite, a Ubuntu LTS based and lightweight Linux distribution is focused on Windows users who want to turn to Linux easily. The distribution has always been trying to make it so easy that any Windows user has no trouble performing regular tasks on Linux Lite. Linux Lite was improved a lot in 2 series and now there is starting of series 3 with many improvements.
Cumulus Linux is touting a bunch of heavyweights as supporting the latest iteration of its white-box Linux.
On board for the launch of the Cumulus Linux 3.0 network operating system are Dell, EdgeCore Networks, Mellanox, Penguin Computing, and Supermicro.
For Cumulus, one of the biggest aspects of the launch is that version 3.0 is 100 Gbps Ethernet-capable, something it reckons will be important for the data centre market.
Linux Lite creator Jerry Bezencon has unveiled the final release of the long-anticipated Linux Lite 3.0 computer operating system, a major version that includes dozens of new features and enhancements.
Clonezilla Live and GParted Live developer Steven Shiau has released today a new stable version of his acclaimed Clonezilla Live CD, which users can use to clone their disk drives and partitions using the open-source Clonezilla utility.
Based on the latest Debian Sid software repositories, Clonezilla Live 2.4.6-25 is now live as the latest stable version of the product, which includes all the upstream security patches and software updates as of May 29, 2016. The kernel packages have been upgraded as well, and Clonezilla Live 2.4.6-25 ships with Linux kernel 4.5.4.
Alpine Linux creator Natanael Copa has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the Alpine Linux 3.4 operating system, ending the development of the 3.3 series.
Alpine Linux 3.4 is the first in the 3.4 stable series, offering users the most advanced GNU/Linux technologies. Among them, we can mention the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel (version 4.4.11 is included in the base ISO images), the OpenRC init system, DNS search domain support in the /etc/resolv.conf file.
Today, June 1, 2016, openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio informed the openSUSE community about the latest GNU/Linux technologies that are coming to the rolling openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system, as well as what has landed last week.
First of all, users are being informed that the first Alpha release of the upcoming openSUSE Leap 42.2 operating system is now available for download and testing. However, the development cycle for openSUSE Leap 42.2 has just started, and it looks like the final release lands in the first week of November 2016.
openSUSE Leap 42.2 Alpha 1, which is now available for testing, made some news last week, but this week’s news focuses more on openSUSE’s rolling distribution.
Developers have been focusing on moving Tumbleweed to GNU Compiler Collection 6, which is always challenging for a distribution.
In the openSUSE Tumbleweed’s Review of the Weeks 2016/21 email sent out last week by Dominique Leuenberger, he listed the progression of moving GCC 6 to the default compiler, which can be viewed on the wiki.
Linux 4.6 was officially released two weeks ago and already this exciting upgrade to the kernel has begun appearing in rolling-release distributions.
OpenSUSE News confirmed today that the Linux 4.6 kernel is expected to land in OpenSuSE Tumbleweed with a new snapshot coming possibly this week. (They are also prepping KDE Applications 16.04.1, Perl 5.24, etc.) OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has already been making progress too in switching over to GCC 6 as the default compiler, but there is still more work to be done.
Lots of companies offer the OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud distributions. Mark Smith, SUSE‘s global product and solutions manager, claims that SUSE OpenStack Cloud 6 is the one you can use to transform your data center from IBM z System mainframes to Microsoft Hyper-V with its unique blend of hypervisor support. He’s not wrong.
It seems methods already in use (daemon, nohup) are not good for them, so handling of processes after logout has to change at their request and as how they say. They don't even engange into a discussion about the general issue, but just pop up with the "solution". And what's the "reason" all this started rolling? dbus & GNOME coders can't do a clean logout so it must be handled for them.
Just a "concidence" systemd came to the rescue and every other project like screen or wget will require changes too, or new shims like a nohup will need to be coded just in case you want to use with a non changed program. Users can probably burn all the now obsolete UNIX books. The systemd configuration becomes more like a fake option, as if you don't use it you run into the poorly programmed apps for the time being, and if they ever get fixed, the new policy has been forced into more targets.
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Since its inception back in 2005, Korora has undergone numerous updates, been abandoned, rescued from obscurity and has recently been revamped into something completely new. To say it has gone on a journey would be an understatement, but the finished product proves to be one of the better entry-level distros out there.
I found Jim through Korora, which is a Fedora remix. Jim’s story of coming to Linux is a common one for non-technical users. In fact, it’s mine! He started with free and open source software on Windows, moved to a dual-boot situation and eventually left Windows behind for good. He uses Xfce because it stays out of his way, and that’s also one of my favorite things about it. It’s the desktop that doesn’t need to prove it’s a desktop.
The BBC micro:bit (or Micro Bit) is an ARM-based embedded system designed by the BBC for use in computer education in the UK. It will be given to every 11 year old student in UK. The device is based on ARM Cortex-M0 processor, and has an accelerometer and magnetometer sensors. In this article, you’ll learn how to get started with programming using a Micro Bit with Fedora.
New version of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE is out. This release is focused on stability and should ease the transition for prepared DNF 2.0. Any call of not documented and so not supported Python methods should print warning.
Just a few moments ago, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent a quick email to the Ubuntu Phone mailing list to inform the community that the OTA-11 update for Ubuntu-powered devices has been approved for landing.
A few moments ago, Canonical published a new security notice for users of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system, informing them about the availability of updated Linux kernel packages that fix multiple security issues.
We've just been informed by Canonical that the OTA-11 update for supported Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet devices has landed today, June 1, 2016, as reported by us earlier in the day.
Canonical has begun shipping the latest Over-The-Air update for Ubuntu Phones. Ubuntu OTA-11 is starting off the month with providing several new features to Ubuntu Phone early adopters.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-11 brings initial Wireless Display support via Aethercast as the most notable feature, but this wireless display support is currently only supported by the Meizu Pro 5 smartphone. Ubuntu OTA-11 also has improvements to its location services, NetworkManager 1.2 is now there for networking, Dynamic Grid Unit support was added, there is support for multiple application windows, shell rotation, pre-loading of the home scope on boot, visual updates, username/password authentication support in VPN, improvements to the Ubuntu Web Browser App, and many bug fixes. The Ubuntu Web Browser updates also include working support for Google Hangouts across all form factors.
deepin Linux maintainer Melody Zou announced today the release of deepin 15.2, the second major update to the stable series of the Ubuntu-based computer operating system.
Before my recent trip to Tokyo, I spent some time writing, debugging, and optimizing my Little Backup Box script that transforms a Raspberry Pi into a mobile backup device. A Raspberry Pi Model B 2 running the script served me well during my trip, but it wasn’t without its limitations. First and foremost, because of Model B 2’s power consumption, I had to use it with a power supply. This meant that the device wasn’t truly mobile, and I had to wait until I got back to my hotel room before I could back up RAW files and photos from my cameras. Although the entire setup wasn’t that big in size, it still wasn’t pocketable.
The BBC Micro:bit SBC, which has already been given out free to a million U.K. school kids, is now available for pre-order from several online resellers.
BBC.com reported this morning that the tiny Micro:bit microcontroller board, which “is already being delivered, free, to one million Year 7 children in schools across the UK,” is now “going on sale to the general public.”
But there’s a catch: U.K distributor Premier Farnell, which has been licensed by the BBC to manufacture the Micro:bit boards (and which also makes SBCs for Raspberry Pi Foundation), currently is only accepting orders for “Micro:bit Go” kits, and only in quantities of 90 or more, priced at €£12.29 per kit.
Your Android phone is already powered by the goodness of Linux, but you can enhance it further and make better use of its multi-core processors and oodles of RAM by running a full-blown Linux distro alongside the existing mobile OS.
Had Oracle won instead, a cascade of liability could have meant every Android phone owner in the world was breaching copyright law
Android hasn’t always been known for tablets. That changed when Google jumped in with its Nexus line back in 2012. These days though, it doesn’t have to be a Nexus Android tablet to be worth your money. What’s even better is that Android is finally getting split-screen multitasking with Android N, which will make it much more productive in tablet form.
So here they are—our ranking of the 10 best Android tablets you can buy right now.
Researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland have developed a system known as vitrivr, which allows a search for images and videos by means of a sketch.
The vitrivr system is open source and freely available on GitHub.
The importance of the web shouldn't be underestimated, it has helped to open up the world, democratise information and is one of the greatest ever inventions.
While it has had a profound influence on the world, the web is made up of numerous different elements, such as web server software.
Apache, an open source software that is available for free, is the most widely used web server software and is developed and maintained by the Apache Software Foundation.
Contrary to the common trend of bringing an open-source project like ownCloud into an established model, like the Linux Foundation's Collaborative Project approach, where the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, node js foundation, OpenDayLight and so many other now live, ownCloud is building its own Foundation.
Taking a bootstrapped initiative to a healthy open-source project is difficult. But when there’s only approximately 100 developers in the world that have a deep understanding of the technology, such as blockchain, the difficulty increases dramatically.
That's right, you can now watch the keynote conversation with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and 32 more sessions from LibrePlanet 2016: Fork the System on the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNU MediaGoblin instance, including:
I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off aping the Amazon Alexa skills JS API. Amazon Echo appears to be doing quite well and people have written a number of skills with their API. There isn’t really any alternative right now, but I actually happen to think their API is quite well thought out and concise, and maps well to the sort of data structures you need to do reliable speech recognition.
OpenStack, the leading solution for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), is currently being used by various organizations for their own on-premises private cloud, for hybrid cloud deployments, or for offering public cloud services to their clients. Through Nova, the compute module of OpenStack, various other components can be controlled, such as networking, block and object storage, disk imaging, identity management, key management, DNS, and search, among others. The entire deployment can be managed using the Horizon dashboard software.
While OpenStack, itself, does not attempt to emulate the API design of popular public cloud providers, compatibility layers are being developed that provide compatibility with Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Google Compute Engine.
Tech analysts love trending topics. In fact, that’s their job: forecast and analyze trends. Some years ago we had “Big Data”, more recently “Machine Learning”, and now it s the time of “Deep Learning”. So let’s dive in and try to understand what‘s behind it and what impact it can have on our society.
NoSQL databases have emerged as a leading new data storage technology. But they're not perfect. Here's a look at the limitations and drawbacks of NoSQL storage.
To be sure, NoSQL offers a lot of advantages over traditional data storage techniques. But NoSQL is not a uniformly better storage solution.
SQL-style storage systems, like MySQL, come out ahead in some contexts. In others, there's not yet any ideal storage platform.
If you use your Mac or PC for word processing, creating and editing spreadsheets or putting the finishing touches on a slideshow presentation, you need a suite of office applications that come with all the tools you need to create some impressive documents, and LibreOffice is one of the best options.
The Microsoft Office suite is near ubiquitous, but even though Mac version of Office 2016 released last year, it's still relatively expensive.
While iWork has become free, it lacks some of the features that come with other office suites. LibreOffice, however, is not only completely free, but it's constantly updated with improvements and new features, and contains a host of tools that you'd expect in an expensive software collection.
In this article, I’m going to get into minute detail with you on all of the major aspects of open source CMS and the things you should consider to make an informed decision. This is my “how to select the best open source CMS” guide.
When it comes to selecting a CMS, there’s no doubt that the process of doing so is overwhelming (hey, it’s why this site exists!) but it doesn’t have to be.
gNewSense 4.0 was released at the beginning of May and today blogger DarkDuck said it's still a gnuisance due to the lack of drivers. Elsewhere, LinuxConfig.org looked at the features of KDE Plasma and Linux Laptop leader System 76 CEO Carl Richell used Linux to augment reality. The Linux Setup interviewed Korora contributor Jim Dean and Matt Hartley sent another love-letter to Ubuntu.
The documentation says the distribution name gNewSense came from Gnuisance, the RMS's GPG key. Is it true? Or the whole system is just a g-nuisance? Let's check.
The move to open source is inevitable as open source communities of developers continue to work on 1000's of applications & as more software development companies invest in open source models to allow for greater flexibility & lower end user prices than existing proprietary competitors. Europe has more than a decade head start on North American cities. The quality of available open source software has improved so much in that decade that the transition can be far easier for cities starting now.
Obviously there are huge savings in licensing fees to be had by cities migrating to FLOSS solutions from the desktop OS to the servers. On the other hand there is time/money/effort required to make changes happen but these are mostly one-time costs. Cities in Europe have been adopting GNU/Linux and FLOSS steadily for more than a decade. It’s about time North American cities did the same.
Over the last 19 years, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been the steward of the Open Source Definition (or OSD), establishing a common language when discussing what it means to be an Open Source license [1], and a list of licenses which are known to be compatible with the OSD.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.
According to the organization, the API will allow third parties to "become license-aware", giving businesses everywhere the means to determine if a license is open source or not.
The Open Source Initiative considers this the next "logical step" and quite important, knowing all the copyright and license legal battles going on nowadays, and how expensive they can be.
Open Source Lead at GitHub, Brandon Keepers offered, "A canonical, machine-readable source of license metadata is a great step towards enabling developers to build tools around open source licensing and compliance. We can’t wait to see what the community does with it".
Except, of course, tons of copyright experts predicted exactly this result (and many more argued that APIs should not be subject to copyright at all). Famed copyright scholar Pam Samuelson has been writing extensively about the case, focusing both on why APIs should not be covered by copyright (and, why basically every other court has agreed) as well as why, even if it is covered, it's fair use. Hell, she even wrote a response to the Hurst piece, explaining why Hurst was wrong. It's weird for Hurst to take a position that actually seems at odds with a huge number of copyright experts, and then state that none would take the position that many did.
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Once again, this shows a rather unfortunate ignorance of how coding works. It's not about a desire to "copy freely." It's about building amazing and innovative services, and making use of APIs to increase interoperability, which increases value. Copying an API structure is also just much more about making developers comfortable in using new environments. You know, like how Oracle copied SQL from IBM. Because lots of people understood SELECT-FROM-WHERE and it made little sense to create a relational database that didn't use that structure. It's not about copying freely. It's about interoperability.
And, really, the idea that an Oracle lawyer is "concerned" about the future of the GPL is fairly laughable. Thankfully, many people have weighed in in the comments -- including plenty who are quite familiar with the GPL and software development to explain to Hurst why she's wrong. Somehow, I think she has some fairly strong reasons to ignore those responses.
On 27 October, the German City of Munich is organising the fourth edition of its annual Open Government Day. This year's theme is 'openness, participation and digitisation — impulses for a modern community'. The day provides an opportunity for discussion and exchange of experiences with Open Government.
A new science journal that focuses on food and environmental science has just been launched by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center. Called the "Natural Science Journal," the new peer-reviewed journal focuses on independent science pursued by laboratories and scientists who have no financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness giants or government funding sources.
EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” The decision was taken during a meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which is made up of ministers from the EU’s member states. In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.”
The formal “conclusions” of the meeting define open access to publications as “free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.” This is taken from the key Budapest Open Access Initiative that helped to define open access back in 2002—an indication of how slow progress has been so far.
It’s often said that the internet makes it possible for anyone to get educated on any subject. But just as in offline modes of education, the many models of online teaching and learning are far from perfect, with plenty of room for improvement and innovation.
For those who have been immersed in a capitalist society, open source thinking can seem counterintuitive. For the last three decades wealth has been determined through ownership and property rights. Businesses have been valued and financed based on the patents they own and the applications of their intellectual property. But open source, a term originating from software code being open for other developers to use, has started to change the prevailing capitalist mentality. Innovation is essential to their survival, and companies are seeing open source thinking, like sharing and collaborating, as a methods towards that goal.
With preparing for the upcoming release of Phoronix Test Suite 6.4-Hasvik I've been running through my validation tests on all supported versions of PHP going back to PHP 5.3 as well as HHVM. As part of that testing, I've been running my self-hosted tests of the major PHP release series once again up through PHP 7.1-dev. Here are those results if you are curious about some fresh PHP CLI benchmarks.
The results in this article are of PHP 5.3 through PHP 7.0.7 and PHP 7.1-dev (as of this morning in php-src Git) plus Facebook's HHVM PHP implementation via the Ubuntu 16.04 package repository. I also tested PHP 7.0.4 as currently packaged in Ubuntu 16.04 compared to my freshly built 5.3.29 / 5.4.45 / 5.5.36 / 5.6.22 / 7.0.7 / 7.1.0-dev that are basically stock builds with ensuring ZIP / XML / JSON / PCNTL support is enabled. (Basically, part of what I do for each quarterly Phoronix Test Suite release to ensure compatibility and a good out-of-the-box experience going back still to PHP 5.3.)
The platform makes use of common toolsets and frameworks, such as Jenkins, GIT, and Gherkin, while also providing insights to developers and application testers. This could potentially help enterprises deliver those applications more quickly, without having to cut corners in the vetting process.
Computer science (CS) students in the US aren't being taught properly, and their classes are too limited in scope, says one IT think-tank.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) says that its most recent study [PDF] of curriculum in the US has found that not enough schools are offering computer science classes, and those that do aren't going in-depth enough.
As a result, the ITIF says, many universities are failing to produce the diverse, well-trained graduates that companies seek to hire.
"There is the possibility that interest in the field could again wane like it did in 2003 following the burst of the tech bubble," ITIF warns.
"To maintain the field's current momentum, the perception of computer science needs to shift from its being considered a fringe, elective offering or a skills-based course designed to teach basic computer literacy or coding alone."
The report found that at the high school level, dedicated computer science classes are mostly limited to affluent schools, and when the courses are taught, girls and minority students are rarely enrolled.
While there have been Git mirrors available of LLVM and its sub-projects (including Clang) for some time, this open-source compiler infrastructure project has relied upon SVN as its cental development repository. The LLVM project is now looking at finally transitioning to Git for development and quite likely utilizing GitHub for hosting.
GitHub anyone? was spawned today on the LLVM developer mailing list about shifting their development practices from SVN to Git. In particular, utilizing GitHub for hosting and potentially using other GitHub services for managing bug reports, pull requests, etc.
I had a friend tell me recently that all programming languages seem very similar to each other. They all have variables, and arrays, a few loop constructs, functions, and some arithmetic constructs. Sure, some languages have fancier features like first-class functions or coroutines, but he doesn't consider himself an expert programmer anyway and doesn't use those features.
What really makes a programming language productive for him, he says, are the libraries it comes with. For example, he got into programming by using the popular Ruby on Rails web framework. There is no way that he could have written a full database-driven web stack by himself, nor is he interested in doing so. But thanks to Ruby on Rails, he doesn't have to! So he said that he has no particular opinion about the Ruby programming language, but he absolutely loves Rails. The vast majority of programmers are non-experts, like himself, and the largest gains in productivity for non-experts come from having a wide spectrum of easy-to-use libraries. Subtle language features like first-class functions, and object systems, are lost on them because they don't really use them anyway. Computer scientists should really be spending their time developing new libraries rather than inventing new programming languages.
DevOps depends heavily on open source software, and–to a lesser extent–open source projects leverage DevOps as well.
As standardisation increasingly takes place at the global level, Europe needs a speedier, more streamlined way to set the technical specifications that define requirements for products, production processes, services and test methods, the European Commission said today. As part of its single market strategy, the EC announced plans for a joint initiative on standardisation (JIS), guidance to boost the development of European standards, and an annual reporting system among EU institutions on how the standardisation policy is working and contributing to competitiveness, jobs and growth.
The HSA Foundation today announced version 1.1 of the Heterogeneous System Architecture.
Heterogeneous System Architecture 1.1 most notably brings multi-vendor architecture support for allowing IP blocks from different vendors to "communicate, interoperate and collectively compose an HSA system."
The consequences of the Brexit referendum are bad for both Europe and Britain, regardless of the result.
At one of the public brainstorming sessions for the New York Organic Action Plan, an organic farmer made an impassioned plea for support for “independent science” and told us that with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we will need genetic engineering to prevent starvation.
I would like to examine these words carefully to decipher what they mean, how those words are used by this farmer and by others, and suggest how the movement for locally grown organic food in this country should respond.
It seems like Microsoft will not be fixing the ‘Sleep of Death’ bug, even though most of the Surface Book users face the problem.
During the recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft pointed out that the Surface line is getting popularity in the market. Microsoft also said that it has turned out to be the growth leader in its More Personal Computing line of business.
At the event, the company said that the device has brought 61 percent growth.
Now Samsung is telling owners not to install “10” because drivers don’t work. Samsung should suggest Debian GNU/Linux instead.
According to a new study by experts at the World Health Organization, prices of hepatitis C treatments are unaffordable globally and put a major strain on national health systems. Hepatitis C can cause liver cirrhosis and cancer, and with an estimated 80 million people affected in the world, if untreated, the sickness could lead to 700,000 deaths per year worldwide, the study said, suggesting that governments and industry stakeholders should develop and implement fair pricing frameworks.
The purpose of this piece is to draw readers’ attention to an important chapter from a document by Aruna Rodrigues that discusses the unique risks associated with GM crops. Contrary to what supporters of GM often claim, it shows that criticisms of this technology are based on credible concerns, sound logic and solid science.
However, some background information and context might first be useful to indicate that, while critics rely on science, the pro-GMO lobby is mired in duplicity and engages in the debasement of science.
While long-awaited new vaccines for malaria and dengue may finally be within reach, many of the world’s existing vaccines have remained unreachable for many of the people who need them most.
The recent outbreak of yellow fever in Angola shows how deadly infectious diseases can return when gaps in vaccination programs grow.
Even as a new study suggests opioid painkillers may in fact make chronic pain worse, Big Pharma continues to work against efforts to stem the national opioid crisis, according to reporting at The Intercept on Tuesday.
The study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that addictive opioids like morphine appear to paradoxically cause an increase in chronic pain in lab rats.
Led by Colorado University-Boulder professors Peter Grace and Linda Watkins, the study showed that "just a few days of morphine treatment caused chronic pain that went on for several months by exacerbating the release of pain signals from specific immune cells in the spinal cord," according to a news release. The results suggest that the recent escalation of opioid prescriptions in humans may be a contributor to chronic pain, as Grace noted.
A U.S. senator has called for a federal investigation of Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, in the wake of reports that the money-making pain reliever wears off early in many patients, leaving them exposed to pain and increased risk of addiction.
Anti-Monsanto rallies in 400 cities in 48 countries around the world failed to draw much US media attention, despite hundreds of thousands of people, from Dhaka to Paris to Cape Town, literally yelling out their opposition to the biotech giant’s products and practices, and the disturbing impact of their increasing control over the food supply.
New National Research Council study trumpets the safety of GMOs, but how much confidence can we have in these findings given the many conflicts of interest involved?
A story by ProPublica and NPR and a Senate investigation prompt a Missouri nonprofit hospital to change its policies and forgive thousands of patients’ debts. But without similar scrutiny, it’s unclear if other hospitals that sue the poor will change.
I'm scanning at only 125kpps from 4 source IP addresses, or roughly 30kpps from each source address. This is so that I'll get below many thresholds for IDSs, which trigger when they see fast scans from a single address. The issue isn't to avoid detection, but to avoid generating work for people who get unnecessarily paranoid about the noise they see in their IDS logs.
A hacker is selling a dangerous zero day vulnerability on a Russian cybercrime website. This exploit is said to be affecting more than 1.5 billion Windows users as it works on all version of Windows. The hacker wishes to sell the complete source code and demo of the exploit to any person who pays him $90,000 in bitcoin.
The new ransomware, which Microsoft has dubbed Ransom:Win32/ZCryptor.A, is distributed through spam emails. It can also infect a machine running Windows through a malware installer or fake installers like a Flash player setup file.
The ransomware would run at boot and drop a file autorun.inf in removable drives, a zycrypt.lnk in the start-up folder and a copy of itself as {Drive}:\system.exe and %APPDATA%\zcrypt.exe.
It would then change the file attributes to hide itself from the user in file explorer.
Running a Bitcoin node on your ARM single board computer? Fan of cheap Chinese tablets and smartphones? Maybe you contributed to the recent CHIP computer Kickstarter, or host a wallet on one of these devices. Well, if any of these applies to you, and your device is powered by an Allwinner SoC, you should probably wipe it and put an OS on it with the most recent kernel release. Why? Allwinner left a development “tool” on their ARM Linux kernel that allows anyone to root their devices with a single command. This oversight has serious security implications for any Allwinner powered device, especially so for those of us hosting sensitive data on them.
The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) — the U.S. government’s repository of standards-based vulnerability management data — says 2015 was another blockbuster year for security vulnerabilities with an average of 17 new vulnerabilities added per day.
While IT managers can somewhat breathe a collective sigh of relief that the total number of vulnerabilities actually decreased from 7,937 in 2014 to 6,270 in 2015, there’s no time to relax. According to NVD data, 37 percent of vulnerabilities reported in 2015 were classified as highly severe, up from 24 percent in 2014.
Everybody loves getting badges. Fitbit badges, Stack Overflow badges, Boy Scout merit badges, and even LEED certification are just a few examples that come to mind. A recent 538 article "Even psychologists love badges" publicized the value of a badge.
Serverless applications remove a lot of the operational burdens from your team. No more managing operating systems or running low level infrastructure.
This lets you and your team focus on building…and that’s a wonderful thing.
Goodbye, Password1. Goodbye, 12345. You’ve been hearing about it for years but now it might really be happening: the password is almost dead.
At Google’s I/O developer conference, Daniel Kaufman, head of Google’s advanced technology projects, announced that the company plans to phase out password access to its Android mobile platform in favour of a trust score by 2017. This would be based on a suite of identifiers: what Wi-Fi network and Bluetooth devices you’re connected to and your location, along with biometrics, including your typing speed, voice and face.
The phone’s sensors will harvest this data continuously to keep a running tally on how much it trusts that the user is you. A low score will suffice for opening a gaming app. But a banking app will require more trust.
With the beginning of separate offensives against the Islamic State (IS) in Fallujah and Raqqa, many analysts are highlighting that this is the beginning of the end of IS, with Mosul next in sight. However, there is one key issue with this analysis; these offensives do nothing to address the structural failures in both Iraq and Syria that led to IS’ rise. Moreover, there is no valid plan for the governance of the people being ‘liberated’ from IS. Without addressing these issues, history will repeat itself and IS will either return or morph into another radicalised entity looking to represent marginalised Sunnis.
The offensive in Fallujah happens as the prime minister of Iraq, Haider al-Abadi, is under pressure to show action against IS, due to scores of suicide bombs in Baghdad and his failure to implement reforms. The position of Abadi – and the central government of Iraq in general – optimises the chaos in Iraq, further highlighting the difficulty of implementing a successful post-IS solution.
I also deplore focus on America’s war dead rather than the far, far greater numbers America has killed in our nearly continuous wars of choice. The aggregate death toll in Southeast Asia in the 1970s inflicted by direct, indirect and proxy US aggression and political destabilization in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia was approximately 7,650,000. The US death toll was 58,220, a ratio in our favor of 132/1. In our gratuitously justified “War on Terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Physicians for Social Responsibility estimated 1.3 million Muslims killed while some 6,800 Americans have died, a ratio of 191/1. And that estimate excluded our destruction of Libya and ongoing proxy war on Syria with an American death toll limited to four in Benghazi and probably a few Special Forces “advisers” in Syria. Our victims deserve at least six to ten months of continuous memorial days to one day of ours, and our appropriate national mood should be not grief but remorse.
On the heels of a World Health Organization report documenting pervasive—and often deliberate—attacks on medical facilities in conflicts, a humanitarian specialist with Doctors Without Borders is stressing that the world's major powers are themselves complicit in such attacks.
Speaking to the Guardian, Michiel Hofman directed his sharp criticism at four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—which provide arms, intelligence, and logistical support to forces which have conducted these often deadly attacks.
Glancing upward at one of the six U.S. manufactured aerostat blimps performing constant surveillance over Kabul, I wonder if the expensively high-tech giant’s-eye view encourages a primitive notion that the best way to solve a problem here is to target a “bad guy” and then kill him. If the bad guys appear to be scurrying dots on the ground below, stomp them out.
Instead of the comfortable and pleasant partner, Netanyahu chose a devious bully who does not even bother to hide his deep contempt for him. Avigdor Lieberman does not hide his hopes to succeed Netanyahu at the first opportunity either. A partner who the entire world views as a dangerous man. Why? There is no explanation. No logical reason. To bring Lieberman into the government is a suicidal act. To hand the Defense Ministry to him is an insane act.
French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s eagerness to support a military intervention with the purported aim of protecting the civilian population contrasts with the reception offered to the Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi, when he visited Paris in December 2007 and signed major military agreements worth some 4.5 billion euros along with cooperation agreements for the development of nuclear energy for peacetime uses. The contracts that Libya seemed no longer willing to pursue focused on 14 Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jets and their armament (the same model that France sold or is trying to sold to Egypt€´s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the self-proclaimed marshal), 35 Eurocopter helicopters, six patrol boats, a hundred armored vehicles, and the overhaul of 17 Mirage F1 fighters sold by Dassault Aviation in the 1970s[2].
Turkey on Sunday marked the 563rd anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Istanbul with huge parties and a fireworks show in the former Byzantine imperial capital once known as Constantinople.
Around a million people were expected for a giant party in the city to mark its capture in 1453 by Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, nicknamed "the Conqueror".
The Air Force aerobatics team was to perform a fly past prior to an evening fireworks display with Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Binali Yñldñrñm due at the festivities in the Yenikapi district in the European half of the city.
In many military movies, the arrival of a green-clad soldier at a family home with a folded flag in hand often signifies both the fall of a hero and motivation for the rest of the characters. You don't stop to think about the guy whose job it is to deliver the worst news possible to family after family. If you're trying to find a candidate for Worst Fucking Job in the World, that definitely has to be in the top three.
Those guys are known as Casualty Notification Officers, and we interviewed one who served during the Iraq War, when he unfortunately got plenty of on-the-job experience. He says ...
Rather than accept the onset of multipolarity demanded by the emergence of Russia and China as major strategic, military and/or economic powers, Washington and its proxies are determined to increase military, economic, and geopolitical pressure on both with the objective of returning them to their ‘rightful place’ in service to US hegemony.
When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she was asked what must have been a surprising and unwelcome question. In the years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, there has been remarkably little scrutiny in the major media of how Clinton’s State Department handled it, and she has had to answer few questions about it.
But Juan González asked why she resisted cutting off aid to the coup regime and instead brokered a deal for new elections. Clinton controversially doubled down on defending the coup, outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification. Worse, she suggested that Honduras emulate Plan Colombia: the U.S.-funded war on drugs and guerrillas that sparked the biggest internal refugee crisis in the world outside of Syria, involved the deliberate killing of thousands of innocent civilians by Colombian armed forces, and fostered death squads now poised to stick around even as the country nears an end to its civil war.
When President Obama went to Hiroshima, the American media focused on what he would – or wouldn’t – say about Harry Truman’s horrendous war crime against the Japanese people. Would he apologize? Leaving aside how one apologizes for such a monstrous act – short of committing seppuku – as it turned out he just spoke in harmless generalities about the dangers of nuclear weapons, expressing a commendable albeit vague wish to rid the world of them. What the pundits mostly ignored, however, was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s outrage at the latest murderous sex crime committed by an American soldier stationed on Okinawa; the brutal murder of 20-year-old Rina Shimabukuro by a US military contractor.
In the second of a four-part series examining Isis, Patrick Cockburn says the terror group may be under threat, but regaining the terrority it captured would not necessarily stabilise the region
During May, at least 4,164 people were killed and 2,396 were wounded in Iraq. These figures should be considered very low estimates. Heavy fighting at the Fallujah and Mosul frontlines prevents independent verification of any reports, but we do know there is heaving fighting going on. In April, 4,609 were killed and 1,772 were injured.
Secretary General invokes Democratic Charter at the behest of Venezuela's right-wing opposition at the same time Brazil faces an overt crisis of democracy
Hillary Clinton’s support for the “Promesa” bill should not be at all surprising. Clinton has time and again trampled on Puerto Rico. The Democratic Party’s Clintonista wing’s preferred scare-tactic revolves around a Donald Trump presidency, but Trump is a symptom of current political indolence, the product of McCarthyism, the Red Scare, and Fox News. Clinton is a vector of transmission of this disease. She is against the release of our political prisoner, Oscar López Rivera. She represents the most reactionary conservative elements of her party and is inexcusably tied to the neoliberal agenda of Wall Street. Is it at all surprising that she would support a bill that seeks to impose a neocolonial Congressional dictatorship on Puerto Rico?
Memorial Day weekend was replete with parades, American flags, and tributes to our war dead, but little reflection on war, particularly the tragic fact that the United States has fallen into the death trap that President Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex.
Instead of defending our nation as the Constitution stipulates, since the 9/11 attacks the U.S. military, CIA, and military contractors have been waging aggressive wars or interfering by proxy in other nations’ internal affairs.
The Senate Armed Services Committee wants to save money by cutting back on housing benefits for armed service members, potentially costing individual military members hundreds of dollars a month.
Currently, armed service members who live off-base in the United States receive a flat-rate stipend called the Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH), which is calculated based on their family status, rank, and cost of living by zip code. If they find housing for less than the allotted benefit or live with a working spouse or roommate, how they use the extra money is up to them.
Barack Obama called the drone assassination on May 21 of Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, “an important milestone.”
It might turn out to be. But I doubt it. My advice is every time you hear an American official use the term “milestone,” run the other way.
For example, back in September 2014 Secretary of State John Kerry claimed the formation of a new Iraqi government then was “a major milestone” for the country. But on the same day that Obama was proclaiming his own milestone, protesters stormed the Green Zone in Baghdad seeking the end of that previous milestone government.
An internal Defense Department investigation into one of the most notorious night raids conducted by special operations forces in Afghanistan — in which seven civilians were killed, including two pregnant women — determined that all the U.S. soldiers involved had followed the rules of engagement. As a result, the soldiers faced no disciplinary measures, according to hundreds of pages of Defense Department documents obtained by The Intercept through the Freedom of Information Act. In the aftermath of the raid, Adm. William McRaven, at the time the commander of the elite Joint Special Operations Command, took responsibility for the operation. The documents made no unredacted mention of JSOC.
Los Angeles high school students and organizers forced police to remove grenade launchers and M-16s from their arsenals.
We continue our conversation with Dave Zirin, author of the book "Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy," and Jules Boykoff, author of "Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics." In early August, more than 10,000 athletes across the world will convene in Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic City for one of the most widely watched sporting events of the year. This comes as Brazil is battling an economic recession, a massive Zika outbreak and its worst political crisis in over two decades.
The ouster of Brazil’s left-of-center president was the latest right-wing victory in Latin America, but was this “quiet coup” driven by local politics or part of a broader U.S. strategy to reclaim dominance over its “backyard,” asks Ted Snider.
Matthew Cassel has reported on the Middle East for over a decade, including a five-year stint covering the Arab world for Al Jazeera. Living and working in Istanbul, he saw the rising tide of refugees making their way to Europe in 2014. But as he noted in an interview with Field Notes, traditional news outlets were slow to recognize the gravity of the crisis. While coverage existed, media attention didn’t intensify “until Alan Kurdi, who was the young poor kid from Kobaní, inside Syria, washed up on the shore in Turkey — if you remember that iconic image from September of 2015,” he said. “But there were people who were dying, people who were struggling to get to Europe before that.”
Some Democratic leaders are privately scouting around for someone to replace Hillary Clinton if she stumbles again in California and/or the FBI detects a crime in her email scandal, reports Robert Parry.
The IG report does not make pretty reading for the avid Clintonite. It dismisses a core claim that using government servers was not standard practice during her tenure, pointing to departmental protocols dating back to 2005.
So we get to see some remarkable insights into the two campaigns. (obviously this is again a blog article about the US election, not about digital/mobile/tech). Hillary had her worst days this year, from the middle of last week when the Inspector General of the State Department found she had broken rules about emails and was at fault. For a pro campaign and very seasoned veteran politician, Hillary's campaign had a disastrous moment (every campaign has some of those) and it was clearly her worst moment of the year so far (don't fall for any of the Bernie 'moments' her victory was never in doubt so they were never that bad for her). And like a pro in a pro campaign, she went immediately onto the talk shows, put out as much of the fires as possible, then went to lay down low, riding out the rest of the news cycle. Her best hope is for other news stories to overtake this bad news email story, and that it won't grow to be any bigger than it now is.
The federal and provincial governments cleaning up the Wabigoon River will show a new era has dawned in our relationship with indigenous peoples
A Center for Biological Diversity investigation into chemicals used in California’s offshore fracking operations found that at least 10 of the chemicals routinely used in fracking could be lethal to marine animals. Some of the chemicals have also been shown to break down into nonylphenol, a toxic substance that can lead to intersex fish species and bioaccumulate in animals further up the food chain, like in already-threatened sea otters.
Fighting back against the notion, put forth by American academics, that isolated tribes must be forced into contact with the modern world, Amazonian Indians are warning of another potential Indigenous "genocide" if such ideas come to pass.
U.S. anthropologists Kim Hill, a professor at Arizona State University, and University of Missouri associate professor Robert Walker, have argued that in order to ensure the survival of the most remote tribal people they must be "contacted in a controlled way."
North America is falling woefully behind on public promises to protect surrounding oceans from fishing, oil and gas development, and other harmful human activities—and those promises are paltry, found a joint report from Canadian and American conservation groups.
The cooperative venture from the Marine Conservation Institute (MCI) and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) discovered that while Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. have promised to protect 10 percent of the continental ocean estate—"defined as the territorial sea plus exclusive economic zone, which together extend 200 nmi from each country's shoreline"—by 2020, currently only .89 percent is protected.
The European Commission wants new powers to oversee the way new cars are approved before they are sold, but it has never used a key scrutinising power it has had for more than eight years, the EUobserver has learned.
Under current rules, the commission can ask a member state to submit assessments of the test facilities that carry out certification tasks including emissions testing.
As I write, the zoo’s Gorilla World page still shows a bio of Harambe, along with the bios of several remaining gorillas. They, captive and unable to safely return to their lands, should not be exhibited, but should instead be offered private refuge. No captive breeding. No public viewing or cognitive research.
Every so often, our society -- which proves daily how little it values animal life -- erupts in an uproar about the tragic death of an individual animal. Whether it's a case of lethal cruelty to a domestic animal, the high-profile shooting of a majestic lion, or more recently, the shooting of a gorilla named Harambe at the Cincinnati Zoo, public outrage typically isolates a human target and flares until a particular hashtag has exhausted itself on Twitter.
Renewable energy boomed in 2015, a year that saw fossil fuel prices plummet and ended with a historic climate agreement hammered out in Paris.
In fact, investments in renewables such as wind and solar were more than double the amount spent on new coal and gas-fired power plants in 2015, according to the Renewables Global Status Report (pdf) from REN21, an international non-profit association based at the United Nations Environment Programme in Paris, France.
An estimated 147 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power capacity was added in 2015—the largest annual increase ever—while renewable heat capacity and biofuels production also increased. Indeed, the world now adds more renewable power capacity annually than it adds (net) capacity from all fossil fuels combined, the report states. Furthermore, employment in the renewable energy sector rose in 2015 to an estimated 8.1 million direct and indirect jobs.
Summer water shortages caused by the reduction of glacier ice mass could be alleviated by dams being constructed to contain springtime runoff from melting snow.
If Donald Trump is elected president, America’s approach to energy and the environment will be drastically different than it is today.
Trump made that clear last week, when he laid out his full energy policy proposal for the first time in Bismarck, North Dakota. In that speech, Trump said he would roll back president Obama’s climate change regulations, build the Keystone XL pipeline, and “cancel” the landmark Paris climate agreement. In a nutshell, Trump promised to undo almost every major policy developed in the last decade intended to slow human-caused global warming.
What Trump did not do in his speech, however, was mention the words “climate change.” He did not say whether he believed the phenomenon was occurring, and he didn’t speculate on how his policies would solve or worsen the problem.
Energy ministers from 23 countries and the European Commission, representing 75 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90 percent of worldwide renewable power investments, will convene June 1-2 in San Francisco to encourage a new drive toward clean energy deployment, and further hasten the growing movement away from coal to the increasing use of green power.
For the past 12 years, Maryland has had a highly successful program requiring utilities to use more renewable energy. Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s own Dept. of Environment last fall said the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) was creating thousands of jobs and would create billions in economic activity by 2020. In April, the governor signaled his own commitment to clean energy, signing the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction Act.
The climate movement and trades union movement need to come together to stop repressive corporate/state spying.
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was horrific to watch unfold. It will take decades — and billions of dollars — to clean up, as more problems seem to emerge by the minute.
Most recently, Tepco announced that it’s still missing a large amount of spent fuel — in part because radiation remains so high that robots and other devices cannot function inside the plant to give workers a better picture of what’s going on.
We mourn the loss last weekend of Harambe, the 17-year-old Western lowland silverback gorilla killed while either entertaining and/or threatening a four-year-old who somehow slipped away from his mother and fell into the gorilla's enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo as onlookers screamed, which likely didn't help. Zoo officials, determining a tranquilizer gun might further agitate Harambe and endanger the boy, made the controversial and difficult decision to shoot Harambe. Defending the move, Zoo director Thane Maynard declared it "a sad day all the way around,” but insisted, “The right choice was made."
Hah, said a furious, sanctimonious, all-knowing and - once it was determined the family was black - racist Internet mob of animal lovers, mom shamers, dad blamers, parenting and/or gorilla experts, and thousands more with axes to grind. Quick as you can say "Get a life," the outrage had fueled "Prayers for Harambe" and "Justice For Harambe" Facebook pages (130,000 likes) to "raise awareness of Harambe’s murder,” a petition (400,000 names) urging city officials to investigate the child's "home environment," another petition (140,000) calling for passage of a new Harambe's Law to punish anyone harming or killing an animal, a charge by PETA that “Harambe paid with his life for others’ negligence,” a memorial, a protest, a call for a boycott, and a hit piece on the child's father, who wasn't even there but it turns out had a criminal history before turning his life around.
Many credible sources have said that Donald Trump has lost touch with reality. Even so, I won’t say it.
We all have a responsibility to be judicious with words — as Trump himself explained in January, “I was going to say ‘dummy’ Bush; I won’t say it.”
Yes, it’s true that an actual headline Friday from CBS in Sacramento was, “Donald Trump Tells California ‘There Is No Drought’ As Drought Continues.” And yes, it’s true that scientists report that 86 percent of California is still in a “moderate drought,” 61 percent in a “severe drought,” 43 percent in an “extreme drought,” and over one-fifth of the state (21 percent) is in an “exceptional drought.”
Join us as we celebrate and learn about our world ocean during National Ocean Month.
This candidacy brought to you by Deutsche Bank.
A majority of chief executives of the world's biggest companies say they would support Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump for president, according to a new survey that upends the usual Republican leanings of corporate CEOs.
Fortune magazine in May sent a poll to all of the executives on its 500 list asking them to rank their preference between the two candidates. (No other options were given.)
Of those who responded, 58 percent said they would choose Clinton, while 42 percent said they favored Trump.
Working families are turning their anger at Wall Street into action.
The idea that the EU undermines English liberty is nonsense: it has helped curtail the British state's repressive surveillance.
Last week, a research wing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" is hopefully a sign of the ideology's death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, "So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?"
The illusion that people are to blame for their own poverty goes back centuries in our culture.
The University of Helsinki has announced its decision to impose tuition fees of 13,000–18,000 euros on its postgraduate degree students from outside the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA).
After persevering through trying times, one college student wore her cap and gown with pride.
Bianca Jeannot, a 22-year-old who attended the College of New Rochelle in New York, has been through a lot. She has experienced homelessness and also had to work multiple jobs to support and care for her brothers while attending college, ABC News reported.
Recently, the student saw her hard work come to fruition as she graduated from the school with honors, WABC reported.
Fire deaths across the capital have gone up by 20 per cent in the last year, according to figures released by the London Fire Brigade (LFB).
A total of 36 people died from fires in London in 2015/16, compared with 30 in the previous year.
It’s no secret that those Americans who are working are working more hours for less pay than in decades–and suffering for it. And while it’s true wealthy people may be finding new clandestine ways to tuck money away, some of the core causes of working people’s problems are more out in the open, in the demonstrable erosion of worker wage protections.
This, our next guest’s group says, is a fixable problem. And one step in that direction came recently with the Labor Department’s issuance of a new rule raising the salary threshold below which salaried workers are automatically eligible for overtime pay.
Here to talk about the overtime rule, the pushback against it and where it fits in broader efforts to fight inequality is Ross Eisenbrey. He’s vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ross Eisenbrey.
In this week’s episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt,” Truthdig contributor Chris Hedges sits down with guests Lynne Stewart and Ralph Poynter, both veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement. Stewart, a former civil rights attorney, and Poynter, a human rights activist and Stewart’s husband, have a long history of community organizing.
The two met while working at a school in Harlem in the early 1960s—she as a librarian and he as a teacher. Hedges interviews them about their role in the civil rights and anti-war movements, before moving on to ask them whether our society has lost the political consciousness it had in the 60s and 70s.
Less than a week after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expressed reservations about neoliberal policies like austerity, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is urging governments to increase spending in order to "make good on promises to current and future generations."
Not doing so, OECD chief economist Catherine Mann told Reuters, deprives youths of job opportunities and means the elderly will not get the healthcare and pension benefits they expect. "We are breaking promises to young people and old people," she said.
In its twice-yearly Global Economic Outlook, the 24-nation body said the world is stuck in a "low-growth trap" that will only get worse under status quo policies like quantitative easing.
Indeed, the OECD said "almost all countries have room to reallocate spending and taxation towards items that offer more support to growth" like investments in infrastucture as well as education.
Last week a research wing of the International Monetary Fund came out with a report admitting that neoliberalism has been a failure. The report, entitled, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is hopefully a sign of the ideology's death. They were only about 40 years late. As Naomi Klein tweeted about the report, "So all the billionaires it created are going to give back their money, right?"
Many of the report’s findings which strike to the core of the ideology echo what critics and victims of neoliberalism have been saying for decades.
“Instead of delivering growth,” the report explains that neoliberal policies of austerity and lowered regulation for capital movement have in fact “increased inequality.” This inequality "might itself undercut growth…" As a result, the report states that “policymakers should be more open to redistribution than they are."
When news broke that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe was under investigation by the Justice Department and that his campaign had taken $120,000 directly from a Chinese-owned business, it may have seemed liked an open-and-shut case.
But federal law doesn’t preclude foreign-owned businesses from making political donations, and Virginia law doesn’t limit their size. So amazingly enough, if there was something illegal here, that wasn’t it.
Negotiations over a plan to lengthen the working day by six minutes – as well as cut holiday benefits and freeze pay net year – are wavering at the last hurdle, but there’s still chance of a deal this week, the papers report. Elsewhere, there’s a proposal to replace Finland’s health centres with bigger clinics offering more under one roof, and police claims that speed cameras have made a Helsinki highway safer come under scrutiny.
Some of the world's biggest retailers, including Walmart, Gap, and H&M, have failed to improve workplace safety three years after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 1,100 people and turned a spotlight on dangerous labor conditions faced by some of the world's poorest workers.
A series of new reports released Tuesday by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, a coalition of rights groups and trade unions, finds that tens of thousands of laborers in Bangladesh are still making garments in buildings without proper fire exits, while pregnant workers in Indonesia and India face discrimination and wage theft.
On Friday, May 27, the six-and-a-half-week Verizon strike came to an end with a tentative contract agreement.
The Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the unions that represent the Verizon workers, hailed the contract as a victory, citing its creation of 1300 new call center jobs along the East Coast, first-ever contracts for Verizon wireless store employees in Brooklyn and Everett, Massachusetts, and raises of nearly 11 percent over the life of the contract. The workers beat back demands from the company to cut pensions, transfer workers out of state for up to two months, and proposed cuts in disability and accident benefits.
When the Nuit Debout youth movement erupted in Paris to protest the most significant reform to the country's labor code in decades, it made headlines both nationally and globally as it was immediately compared to other upsrisings such as Spain's Indignados and Occupy Wall Street. However, as the movement occupying Paris' Republic Square approaches its two-month anniversary on Tuesday, it is still struggling to evolve into a more diverse and inclusive movement, as activists say it must do more to involve France's marginalized communities, especially from the suburbs, who have been struggling against unemployment, police violence and state racism for decades.
More likely, the vehicle of exchange and secrecy set up in 1974 were renewed when the US and Saudis signed the similar Technical Cooperation Agreement in 2008, which got extended in 2013 until 2023. Which would suggest Treasury has a reason to show us the old-style debt holdings, but not whatever they have going on now.So in the interest of “transparency” (that is, in the interest of avoiding any panic as the Saudis threaten to dump US debt if we start releasing information the Kingdom’s role in sowing terrorism) Treasury has revealed the old-style arrangement, but not whatever is the core of what we’ve got going on now.
In other words, what Treasury’s so-called transparency actually tells us is the larger part of Saudi holdings (they threatened to dump $750 billion in US debt) are stashed somewhere even more secret than the original holdings. And they likely rolled out that even-more-secret stash in 2008, long after we knew they were sponsoring terrorism around the world.
Clinton surrogates and operatives are pounding on Bernie Sanders to get out of the race, claiming they want to unify the party even as they excoriate Sanders and scorn his supporters. Perhaps it is time for a little common sense about the campaign.
In the next week alone—the last before the June 7 primary in California—Sanders supporters in Los Angeles will host nearly 200 small-scale events in homes, businesses, and public parks from Burbank to Compton.
With the increasingly likelihood of a presidential contest between the generally despised Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, millions of angry voters are considering protesting the lineup by either sitting out the election or writing in alternatives. With almost one-third of all eligible voters already failing to participate in elections, a greater abdication of voting responsibility in an election between the lesser of two evils could lead to a tyranny of the minority. On the other hand, by carefully writing in the names of their true choices, voters can exercise the only power available to them. If sufficiently widespread, such a protest could have a lasting effect on the course of the Nation, including the abandonment of the two major political parties and the emergence of new—more relevant—alignments.
As former PM Stephen Harper quits parliament, his legacy is more of a gift to Conservatives than to Canadians.
There's no question that Stephen Harper, Canada's former prime minister, will be leaving a legacy when he quits parliament this summer.
A political mastermind, he united the country's fractious right in 2003 when his Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) was born. In 2006, he led it to the first of its three successive electoral victories. Canada was his for nine years - at least until Justin Trudeau's Liberals trounced his government last October.
The party is still holding together seven months after he stepped down from the party leadership. Canadians are united as well - in celebrating his departure.
So Harper's legacy is more of a gift to Conservatives than to Canadians.
As the Democratic National Convention approaches, some Democrats are considering pressuring DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to step down. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long accused Wasserman Schultz of being biased toward Hillary Clinton. Wasserman Schultz has also quietly repealed ethics rules implemented in 2008 by President Obama preventing federal lobbyists from donating to the DNC. The opposition from Capitol Hill Democrats comes as Wasserman Schultz is also in a tight race against progressive challenger Tim Canova for her own congressional seat in Florida. In an unusual move, Sanders has backed Canova. For more, we’re joined by Lee Fang, investigative reporter for The Intercept.
The California primary is just over one week away, and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are in a dead heat. Hillary Clinton has changed this week’s campaign schedule to add more California stops in order to try to reverse Sanders’ growing momentum. Yet multiple issues have continued to dog Clinton’s campaign, including the question of her connection to Goldman Sachs. The Wall Street giant paid Clinton $675,000 in 2013 to give three speeches. And now new questions are being raised about the ties between Goldman Sachs and Hillary’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky. Mezvinsky worked at Goldman for eight years and then formed a hedge fund in part with help from Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein. For more, we’re joined by Intercept investigative reporter Lee Fang. His recent piece is headlined "Hillary Clinton Won’t Say How Much Goldman Sachs CEO Invested with Her Son-in-Law."
As was reported following the assassination of prominent Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres in March, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton erased all references to the 2009 coup in Honduras in the paperback edition of her memoirs, “Hard Choices.” Her three-page account of the coup in the original hardcover edition, where she admitted to having sanctioned it, was one of several lengthy sections cut from the paperback, published in April 2015 shortly after she had launched her presidential campaign.
A short, inconspicuous statement on the copyright page is the only indication that “a limited number of sections” — amounting to roughly 96 pages — had been cut “to accommodate a shorter length for this edition.” Many of the abridgements consist of narrative and description and are largely trivial, but there are a number of sections that were deleted from the original that also deserve attention.
As Trump showed the world, it is relatively easy to run for president if you are willing to say or do anything to get attention and you believe in nothing except your own self-inflated myth. His reality-television-style campaign overwhelmed a badly fractured Republican Party. But the act is getting harder to pull off because now his words, often chosen for their shock value, have real consequences.
He’s also had a feud with the judge of Art Cohen v. Donald J. Trump, about Trump University fraud. He criticized the judge publicly, accusing him of being “Mexican” etc. Rather than finding Trump in contempt, the judge just decided to release Trump’s “playbooks”, recipes for roping in “students”, actually high-pressure sales tactics. It seems rather than teaching dealing in real estate, TU was applying such tactics to students and not delivering much of value, certainly not hand-picked-by-Trump instructors. The “playbooks” also showed an intense interest in the wealth of students rather than their aptitude for success…
And some of the material offers a potential counterweight to claims that Trump University's aim was just to sell someone on the highest-priced course. For example, the 2007 sales playbook tells staffers, "you are here to meet the needs of your client, not to push product." And the 2010 version advises that one should "sell for a relationship, not a commission."
By accepting the NRA’s presidential endorsement, Donald Trump bought into the gun lobby’s paranoid view of government and its distorted interpretation of the Second Amendment, writes Lawrence Davidson.
Documents detailing exactly how Trump University convinced students to enroll in its real estate classes were made public on Tuesday after a federal court ordered their release.
The business, which began operating in 2005 and is now defunct, was actually never an accredited university. Instead, students paid thousands of dollars for advice from professors whom they believed were handpicked by Trump. In reality, the professors were not chosen by Trump, something the real estate mogul has admitted in depositions.
We’re going to be hearing a lot more about Trump University in the coming days, especially after a judge whom Trump had bashed for being a “Mexican” recently ordered the release of several internal Trump U. documents that will be out by the end of the week. CNN spent some time talking with some former Trump University students who described how the “university” took $26,000 of his money and gave him almost nothing in return.
There was a palpable thrill in the air as some 20,000 supporters stood in lines that stretched for blocks to hear Bernie Sanders speak Monday in Oakland, Calif. Hundreds of supporters were turned away in the name of security at the event, which marked one of Sanders’ campaign stops before the state’s crucial primary election on June 7.
Since Trump has never been a politician – and presents himself as an anti-politician -- his campaign has been nothing but a series of gestures. To have a platform and well thought-out positions would bring him too much into the realm of real politics. Trump rolls out proposals – building a wall in the southwest and getting Mexico to pay for it, banning all Muslim immigrants, bringing back waterboarding – as a network executive might introduce a new season of TV shows. They’re meant to generate headlines, capture attention, and create a loyal following. They’re not meant to add up to anything larger.
Refusing to be silenced by restrictive new voting laws, Native Americans across the western U.S. are taking their fight to the courts, arguing that tribal communities have become even further disenfranchised by rules passed in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark voting rights ruling.
An in-depth report published by Reuters on Tuesday highlights revisions to a North Dakota law that "eliminated a provision that had allowed people without proper identification...to vote if they were recognized by a poll worker or if they signed an affidavit swearing to their identity."
Looking back at the 1932 U.S. presidential election is instructive. Herbert Hoover, the Republican incumbent, bore the blame for the Great Depression. It had happened on his watch. Armies of the unemployed moved into shantytowns, which they named Hoovervilles. Hoover’s main Democratic opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came from establishment stock. Roosevelt’s main plank was to shrink the government and expand U.S. trade with the world. These were policy positions much favored by the elite. During the election, there was little sign that Roosevelt would expand the U.S. government and use state spending to enhance economic activity. The tone of the campaign was ugly, with Hoover calling Roosevelt (correctly as it turned out) a “chameleon in plaid” and Roosevelt responding that Hoover was a “fat, timid capon” (a capon being a rooster). Hoover felt that Roosevelt was “very badly informed and of comparably little vision”. Roosevelt was elected to three consecutive terms. He died in office.
Bernie Sanders, in a way, is the perfect opposite of Trump and both embody the exhaustion of the American people.
44 percent of voters want a third-party option come November.
Distraught over the likely choice of Trump or Clinton, many Americans are thinking about third parties or write-ins, but the process is harder than one might expect, like much else about the U.S. electoral system, notes William John Cox.
[...]
Under state laws, political parties must “qualify” for their candidates to be listed on the ballots and counted. The two major parties are qualified in every state, but the Libertarian Party candidates will appear on the ballots in only 33 states, the Green Party in 21, and the Constitution Party in 13.
On April 28, Luis Miranda, communications director for the Democratic National Committee, did an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper to formally clarify the official position of the Democratic Party on when superdelegates are, and are not, supposed to actually count in public vote tallies.
What he said shocked the hell out of me and should shock the hell out of you — in part because not a single media outlet or the Hillary Clinton campaign has paid one bit of attention to it before or since. Since election season began, networks, newspapers and pundits have included superdelegates in their tallies, but the DNC emphatically said that was wrong over a month ago.
On MSNBC and in the New York Times, he’s been likened to segregationist George Wallace. Louis CK and Glenn Beck have compared him to Adolf Hitler.
Even at this late date, with the threat of a Donald Trump presidency looming, Sanders pulls no punches against Hillary Clinton. His stump speech links her to a "rigged economy" – highlighting "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in contributions to the Clinton campaign by a member of the Walton family, whose Wal-Mart fortune, Sanders says, is richer than the combined wealth of the "bottom 40 percent" of the American people. Transforming jeers into cheers, Sanders demands of the billionaire clan, "Instead of making large campaign contributions to Secretary Clinton, pay your workers a living wage!"
Donald Trump has now won the delegates needed to give him the Republican presidential nomination. The Bernie Sanders surge continues — he may even win California — but Hillary Clinton apparently has the superdelegate support needed to give her the nomination. We’re headed to a presidential race with two candidates burdened with record levels of disfavor.
A new poll released Wednesday found that a majority of registered Democrats want presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders to stay in the race.
The national survey of 2,001 voters by Morning Consult found that 57 percent of all Democrats polled want Sanders to keep running, while 33 percent want him to drop out. Ten percent have no opinion.
The findings contradict the pressure from prominent Democratic politicians and centrist pundits on Sanders to drop out of the presidential race—some of whom even argue that he's already lost—despite the fact that several states (including delegate-rich California) and U.S. territories have yet to hold their primaries. (Polls also show Sanders and Clinton in a dead heat in California, which votes on June 7.)
Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Researcher Tanya Cooper suggested that Ukraine’s international partners should protest the decree that ban 17 editors and reporters from Russia and urge Kiev to revoke it.
The girl's winning speech insulted others by spreading pro-Palestine "propaganda," according to the organizers.
A 15-year-old girl was kicked out of a speech competition on Sunday for “propaganda” after delivering a winning speech on the rights of Palestinians and Muslims.
Media censorship is not a foreign concept in the developing world, one only has to look at China as an example. But South Africa was on a different path. Following the regime change in the early 90’s, there was an air of optimism, as democracy and free speech took centre stage. But as Ed Herbst suggests, the tide did turn. The recent censorship of violent protests by the state broadcaster has again opened Pandora’s Box. One has to wonder if the leadership of South Africa will ever learn?
Back in 2014, erotica publisher Ellora's Cave sued the person behind the influential and respected website Dear Author for defamation in response to a post questioning the imprint's financial stability and detailing multiple authors' claims that the publisher wasn't paying out royalties in a timely manner.
Dear Author based its post on statements from Ellora's Cave writers, as well as public records, which included a handful of tax liens against EC founder Tina Engler (a.k.a. Jaid Black). The post was a balanced and sobering examination of the publisher's financial problems and included plenty of citations for every assertion it made. Rather than address the issues raised by the post, EC/Jaid Black decided to sue.
Techdirt has written a number of posts about the controversial "right to be forgotten" idea -- strictly speaking, a right to be de-listed from search engine results. As Mike noted a couple of months ago, there is no doubt that this idea is starting to "infect" an increasing number of governments and legal systems around the world. The Fei Chang Dao site has a fascinating post about what appears to be China's first "right to be forgotten" case.
Censorship in screening certain films has been problematic several times in Korea, but in some countries, filmmakers suffer from pre-production censorship that disallows a film to be made in the first place.s
Even as Donald Trump’s press conferences usually go, Tuesday’s was a barn burner. The original focus of the post-Memorial Day event was his donations to veterans groups, after the Washington Post uncovered that Trump did not distribute most the $6 million he claimed to have raised month ago to charities benefiting former servicemembers. But the conference quickly devolved into a heated back-and-forth on the definition and purpose of critical journalism, with the GOP nominee slamming the press both individually and collectively as “dishonest,” “sleazy,” and “disgusting.” Some reporters tried to defend themselves, arguing that asking tough questions of powerful figures is literally their job, but these attempts only resulted in more name-calling from Trump.
In a novel step to curb harassment on its platform, Periscope said today it would ask viewers of live-streaming broadcasts to evaluate comments that other viewers report as abusive. An update rolling out today will convene "flash juries" of randomly selected viewers whenever a fellow viewer reports a comment for being abusive or spam. Jurors vote with a single tap, and if a majority of jurors find the comment guilty, it disappears — and the offending commenter is given a 60-second timeout from further commenting. If a second comment is found to be abusive, the offending viewer loses their commenting privileges for the duration of the broadcast.
Now Bajagić is claiming one of her works has been censored from an upcoming show in Romania. The artist announced, via a Tumblr post, that a new wall sculpture she made will not appear in an upcoming group show at Bucharest’s Galeria Nicodim. That work, titled Bucharest Molly, is a motion-activated fountain that features a woman wearing jeans that have the words “HEIL HITLER” written on them, and who holds a red teddy bear with a swastika on it. A small hole in the bear’s stomach oozes black liquid. According to Bajagić’s statement, Mihai Nicodim, the gallery’s owner, refused to show the sculpture, despite the fact that she didn’t even create the image—she found it online.
A few weeks ago Bitcoin Magazine published a report on the launch of AKASHA, a blockchain-based social network built on top of Ethereum and IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System).
Fairfax and Sky News have just signed deals with Chinese state-run media, including China Daily. A former China Daily "polisher" gives an inside look into how the Communist Party propaganda organ is run.
It's easy to say that "hate speech" is bad and that we, as a society, shouldn't tolerate it. But, reality is a lot more complicated than that, which is why we're concerned about various attempts to ban or stifle "hate speech." In the US, contrary to what many believe to be true, "hate" speech is still protected speech under the First Amendment. In Europe, that's often not the case, and hate speech bans are more common. But, as we've noted, while it seems like a no brainer to be against hate speech, the vagueness in what counts as "hate speech" allows that term to be expanded over and over again, such that laws against hate speech are now regularly used for government censorship over the public saying things the government doesn't like.
So consider me quite concerned about the news out of the EU that the EU Commission has convinced all the big internet platform companies -- Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft -- to agree to remove "hate speech" within 24 hours.
Burned by negative reviews, some health providers are casting their patients' privacy aside and sharing intimate details online as they try to rebut criticism.
In the course of these arguments -- which have spilled out publicly on ratings sites like Yelp -- doctors, dentists, chiropractors and massage therapists, among others, have divulged details of patients' diagnoses, treatments and idiosyncrasies.
One Washington state dentist turned the tables on a patient who blamed him for the loss of a molar: "Due to your clenching and grinding habit, this is not the first molar tooth you have lost due to a fractured root," he wrote. "This tooth is no different."
In California, a chiropractor pushed back against a mother's claims that he misdiagnosed her daughter with scoliosis. "You brought your daughter in for the exam in early March 2014," he wrote. "The exam identified one or more of the signs I mentioned above for scoliosis. I absolutely recommended an x-ray to determine if this condition existed; this x-ray was at no additional cost to you."
Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.
The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.
The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.
Thailand's government has never been considered a friend of internet services or users, thanks to its interest in suppressing dissent/ensuring its king remain unoffended. It has often claimed it has no interest in censoring the internet -- sometimes in statements delivered while shutting down livestreams of discussions with ISPs on how to better censor the internet.
Unsurprisingly, it's not a fan of encryption. The Thai government is currently amending its Computer Crimes Act in hopes of updating its censorship abilities. In addition to codifying ISP compliance with government demands, it's also looking to destroy anything standing between it and full control of internet activity.
Computer Weekly investigation reveals the extent of interception of MPs’ and peers’ email communications and data
GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) have access to intercepted emails sent and received by all members of the UK Parliament and peers, including with their constituents, a Computer Weekly investigation has established.
Time is running out to prevent complete totalitarian dictatorship until the end of human civilisation, Eben Moglen, the guardian of the GPL, told Ars in an interview.
But let's rewind a bit. Earlier this month, Moglen and Mishi Choudhary, both of the Software Freedom Law Center, told a packed crowd at the Re:publica conference in Germany about the worrying outlook for Homo sapiens.
"This is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice," Moglen said during the duo's opening keynote for the media and technology conference. "Most of the human race doesn't know what the choice is, and if we here, who do know, do not help them understand," he said, "if we don't give them proof of concept plus running code, the revolution becomes impossible."
Moglen is a Columbia law professor and a well-known stalwart of the free software movement. As general counsel to the Free Software Foundation for many years, he helped Richard M. Stallman draft the GPLv3. He received the EFF's Pioneer Award in 2003, and is the author of The dotCommunist Manifesto, among many other works. Choudhary is the SFLC’s legal director and previously practised as litigator before the High Court and Supreme Court in India.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was one of the few appeals courts to rule on the constitutionality of obtaining cell site location info without a warrant. And it was -- was -- the only appeals court to find warrantless access violated the Fourth Amendment. The decision was limited to the collection of historical cell site data for extended periods of time (the court appeared to believe anything beyond two weeks was questionable), mainly because there was a good chance the records would contain considerable detail about a person's movements in private places.
A full panel of judges at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals has now overturned last summer’s notable decision by the standard trio of appellate judges, which had found that police needed a warrant to obtain more than 200 days' worth of cell-site location information (CSLI) for two criminal suspects.
In the Tuesday en banc decision, the Fourth Circuit relied heavily upon the third-party doctrine, the 1970s-era Supreme Court case holding that there is no privacy interest in data voluntarily given up to a third party like a cell phone provider. That case, known as Smith v. Maryland, is what has provided the legal underpinning for lots of surveillance programs, ranging from local police all the way up to the National Security Agency.
In a major setback for privacy advocates, a U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ruled that cellphone location data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment and can be collected without a warrant.
By a 12-3 vote, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia upheld what is known as a third-party doctrine, which states that consumers who willingly give information to outside parties—like telecommunications companies—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" for that data, regardless of what it reveals. The case is United States v. Graham, in which two defendants were tracked by police without warrants for several months in 2010 and 2011 as part of an armed robbery investigation.
The ACLU discovered in 2015 that the collected data revealed information that went beyond the scope of the case—including that the wife of defendant Aaron Graham was pregnant.
A broad coalition of 45 signatories, including civil liberties, racial justice, human rights, and privacy organizations, published a letter Tuesday strongly condemning a proposal by the FBI to exempt its massive biometric database from certain provisions of the Privacy Act. Known as the Next Generation Identification system, or NGI, the FBI database houses the world’s largest collection of fingerprints, DNA profiles, palm prints, face images, and other biometric identifiers. The letter, signed by groups such as La Raza, Color of Change, Amnesty International, National LGBTQ Task Force, as well as the companies Uber and Lyft, criticized the agency’s May 5 proposal on the grounds that the “system uses some of the most advanced surveillance technologies known to humankind, including facial recognition, iris scans, and fingerprint recognition.”
Since 2008, the FBI has been assembling a massive database of biometric information on Americans. This database, called Next Generation Identification (NGI), includes fingerprints, face recognition, iris scans and palm prints—collected not just during arrests, but also from millions of Americans for non-criminal reasons like immigration, background checks, and state licensing requirements. Now the FBI wants to exempt this vast collection of data from basic requirements guaranteed under the federal Privacy Act—and it’s giving you only 21 business days to object.
Courts across the country are grappling with a key question for the information age: When law enforcement asks a company for cellphone records to track location data in an investigation, is that a search under the Fourth Amendment?
By a 12-3 vote, appellate court judges in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday ruled that it is not — and therefore does not require a warrant.
The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld what is known as the third-party doctrine: a legal theory suggesting that consumers who knowingly and willingly surrender information to third parties therefore have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in that information — regardless of how much information there is, or how revealing it is.
Research clearly shows that cell-site location data collected over time can reveal a tremendous amount of personal information — like where you live, where you work, when you travel, who you meet with, and who you sleep with. And it’s impossible to make a call without giving up your location to the cellphone company.
Companies increasingly hoover up larger and larger oceans of consumer data, promising that security and privacy aren't much of a worry because data is "anonymized." But as research has shown time and time again, anonymous data isn't all that anonymous -- since it takes only a modicum of effort to either analyze the data -- or cross reference it with other data -- to ferret out personal identities. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about NSA surveillance troves or social networking data: anonymous data just isn't anonymous.
With the Obama Administration’s unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers, Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear speaks with National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower William Binney about the growing American police state.
"They [the NSA] don’t care what they do, they feel that they have the right to do anything that they feel necessary, and they will cover up crimes and procedures and violations of regulations that they’ve done to achieve whatever their ends are," Binney tells Loud & Clear host Brian Becker.
Facebook could be listening in on people’s conversations all of the time, an expert has claimed.
The app might be using people’s phones to gather data on what they are talking about, it has been claimed.
Facebook says that its app does listen to what’s happening around it, but only as a way of seeing what people are listening to or watching and suggesting that they post about it.
The feature has been available for a couple of years, but recent warnings from Kelli Burns, mass communication professor at the University of South Florida, have drawn attention to it.
Your phone is like your best friend. It holds all of your secrets, and there’s a bond of trust—at least, you hope that there is. Advertisers may already be exploiting this trust and turning your phone against you, by using its tiny quirks to track you across the web.
Because people are becoming savvy to advertisers’ bag of tricks, the usual methods of following folks around online just aren’t paying off like they used to. Now and in the future, advertisers may track you with “fingerprinting”—identifying a particular device by, say, tracking its screen dimensions and plugins, alongside lots of other personalized information which is then communicated and collected through a browser before being sent to advertisers.
Recent research has pointed to a method of device fingerprinting that uses the miniscule, unique imperfections in each phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope—basically, its hardware—to create a profile of that phone that can be used to track its user’s activities across the web, without her knowledge. Unlike location data, most sites don’t ask for permission to access a phone’s motion sensors.
Iran has ordered foreign messaging apps to store all data on its citizens within the country's borders, Reuters reports, giving the companies one year to comply. Iran's Supreme Council of Cyberspace announced the measures on Sunday, saying they are based on the "guidelines and concerns of the supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, according to the local IRNA news agency.
"Foreign messaging companies active in the country are required to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity," the council said.
Shortly after 14-year-old Radazz Hearns was shot seven times in the legs and buttocks by Trenton, New Jersey police, an officer used a juvenile court database to find and leak the teenager’s mugshots.
Last August, a state trooper and an officer from Mercer County were responding to gunfire near an apartment complex in Trenton when they saw a group of three teenagers, including Hearns, in the area of the reported shots. When they exited their unmarked patrol car and ordered the teenagers to put their hands up, Hearns tried to flee. According to the police, the teenager pointed a gun in their direction, so they gunned him down in self-defense. But one eyewitness claimed Hearns was trying to pull up his pants, and findings by the state attorney general’s office differed from the officers’ account of what happened.
Freshman U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a firebrand darling of the extreme right, thinks the United States has a problem with incarceration—underincarceration, that is. That’s right.
Cotton criticized congressional efforts to reform the country’s broken prison system, arguing instead that federal and state governments ought to be building more prisons and jailing even more Americans, rather than fewer.
According to The Sentencing Project, the U.S. leads the world in incarceration, with 2.2 million people in prison or jail, a 500 percent increase over the last 40 years.
Mohamedou Slahi has been unlawfully detained for 14 years at Guantánamo Bay and is the author of a best-selling book about the ordeal he suffered there. A hearing Thursday could result in his freedom.
After years of waiting and litigation, Slahi will finally receive a Periodic Review Board hearing. President Obama ordered PRB hearings for the men at Guantánamo five years ago. The board is made up of senior officials from military and intelligence agencies who are tasked with determining whether a detainee poses a “significant threat” to the United States or can be cleared for release. A PRB does not determine whether the initial detention was justified — that is a task for the federal courts deciding habeas corpus challenges. In Slahi’s habeas case, a federal court judge — still the only neutral person to have reviewed all the evidence — found in 2010 that Slahi’s detention was unlawful and ordered him released. But the Obama administration appealed, and the federal habeas case languishes still.
It’s a worrying state of affairs when expressing your political opinions on Facebook on a particular day is all it takes for police to gain access to all your data without a warrant or court order.
Last Friday Singapore’s Elections Department announced that its Assistant Returning Officer had lodged police reports against news website The Independent Singapore and two individuals, Roy Ngerng and Teo Soh Lung, for breaching election rules relating to Cooling-Off Day during the Bukit Batok by-election held earlier this month.
The Dalai Lama said in an interview published Thursday that Europe has accepted "too many" refugees, and that they should eventually return to help rebuild their home countries.
"When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we can feel their suffering," said the Tibetan spiritual leader, who has himself lived in exile for over half a century.
Collective rebellions are episodic. Expanded technologies of control and limited leftist movements on the outside have made such rebellions even rarer in prisons. But the long-standing black critique of the American criminal justice as a system of racial dominance continues, aided and abetted by the existence of resurgent opposition to prisons beginning in the late 1990s and with added ferocity since the economic collapse of 2008. In 1998, two organizations formed with direct connections to the previous generation of prison protest. Bo Brown, who spent seven years in prison for her involvement with the Seattle-based clandestine George Jackson Brigade, and Angela Davis were part of the intergenerational founding collective of Critical Resistance (CR). CR helped popularize a systemic analysis of prisons as part of a wider organization of the political economy -- a prison-industrial complex. Alongside feminist antiviolence organizations such as Incite!: Women of Color against Violence, CR has worked to reengage a politics of (prison) abolition that updates 1970s innovations.
A Cincinnati man was jailed after he allegedly stripped naked in front of an employee at the Kroger store in Hyde Park and defecated on a U-Scan machine.
Colin Murphy, 23, was charged with public indecency and disorderly conduct for his actions, which took place on Sunday, according to police.
According to a court affidavit, Murphy smelled of alcohol, had slurred speech and staggered walk.
Yle has obtained new evidence of cyber-attacks on Finnish targets by a cyber-espionage group linked to Russian state intelligence. The group, known as Sofacy or Pawn Storm, has attempted to hack into data communications of Finland's largest group, Sanoma, as well as of a Finnish member of Bellingcat, an international group investigating the Ukraine conflict.
Seeking to shine some light into the dark world of Internet trolls, a journalist with Finland’s national broadcaster asked members of her audience to share their experience of encounters with Russia’s “troll army,” a raucous and often venomous force of online agitators.
The response was overwhelming, though not in the direction that the journalist, Jessikka Aro, had hoped.
As she expected, she received some feedback from people who had clashed with aggressively pro-Russian voices online. But she was taken aback, and shaken, by a vicious retaliatory campaign of harassment and insults against her and her work by those same pro-Russian voices.
“Everything in my life went to hell thanks to the trolls,” said Ms. Aro, a 35-year-old investigative reporter with the social media division of Finland’s state broadcaster, Yle Kioski.
Abusive online harassment is hardly limited to pro-Russian Internet trolls. Ukraine and other countries at odds with the Kremlin also have legions of aggressive avengers on social media.
People smugglers capitalizing on the refugee crisis created by the Syrian conflict gleaned some $6 billion from those attempting to reach the European mainland in 2015, according to a report released by world policing bodies Tuesday.
Interpol and Europol, the international and European cross-border crime agencies, issued a report on “Migrant Smuggling Networks” that showed that 90 percent of the influx of refugees into the European Union is facilitated by smuggling networks in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
THE European Union’s flagship naval mission to crack down on migrant crossings has today been branded a spectacular failure which has HELPED the people smugglers.
A Muslim in eastern Uganda strangled his wife to death this month for leaving Islam, relatives and neighbors said.
Awali Kakaire, 34, early in the morning on May 8 killed Mariam Nakirya for embracing Christianity in Mbaale village, Imanyiro Sub-County, Mayuge District, the area residents told Morning Star News. She was 30.
For the fifth time since 2010, Florida prosecutors were forced to dismiss criminal charges against PINAC reporter Jeff Gray before even going to trial, proving once again what we have known all along.
That his arrests are always unlawful and unconstitutional; nothing but an attempt to keep him from doing his job.
Jose Oliva, 71, went to the El Paso Veterans Affairs Clinic for a check up. But what happened that afternoon still has him shaken up three months later.
Oliva says he was attempting to enter the VA clinic. But his interaction with the guards went horribly wrong leaving him in cuffs and, he says, with injuries.
"You know, they could have killed me," Oliva said.
Oliva, a Vietnam vet, said he's had shoulder and throat surgery after what happened at the VA clinic on Feb. 16.
Turkey sentenced a former beauty queen to 14 months in prison on Tuesday, deepening concerns that the country is swaying toward an increasingly authoritarian form of rule.
An Istanbul court found Merve Buyuksarac, 27, guilty of insulting a public official, after she shared a poem on her Instagram account in 2014 that was deemed insulting to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president.
Youtube user Jhan DABOMB who witnessed the recent assault of Amos Yee in Jurong Point and has released his video footage of the incident. He said that when he saw one youth chasing another in Jurong Point, with a girl in tow, it looked to him like a case of molestation. Only when Amos was dragged out of NTUC Fairprice did the Youtube user realise that it was Amos Yee.
There is a regular experience I have that I assume is common for anyone that operates within the technology industry: I will often hear non-technical people make claims about a specific kind of technology that are wildly overstated. To clarify, I am technically proficient in the barest sense, mostly meaning that I have enough of an understanding of the underlying process by which things work that I can explain them, but not implement them. To those without even that barest understanding, I can understand how technology can simply seem like magic. That can open the doors for others who know better to try to take advantage of this.
Enter into the conversation Israeli startup company Faception, which claims its facial recognition software can look at your features and then determine if you're a terrorist, pedophile, or criminal.
In a small but significant victory for free speech, Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo Bay, announced a $100,000 settlement Tuesday in his lawsuit against the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service.
Davis was fired from the CRS in 2009 for authoring two opinion pieces (one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in the Washington Post) that criticized President Obama for prosecuting some terror suspects in federal courts and others in military commissions — what Davis called a “dangerous legal double standard.”
Davis became an assistant director at CRS after retiring from a 25-year career as an Air Force lawyer in 2008.
The ACLU sent a letter to CRS in 2009 asking for Davis’s reinstatement, noting that his work at CRS had nothing to do with Guantánamo Bay. When CRS refused, the ACLU sued on Davis’s behalf.
The U.S. military judge overseeing the trial of the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks should step down and the case should be scrapped because he effectively conspired with prosecutors to destroy evidence, defense lawyers said in a court filing.
The motion said Judge James Pohl, an Army colonel, and prosecutors had tainted the case against Pakistan-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by keeping defense lawyers from learning that the evidence had been destroyed.
The judge in charge of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay allegedly colluded with prosecutors to hide evidence that supported the defense of suspected 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "irreparably" harming his case, according to a court document obtained by the Guardian on Tuesday.
The accusation could be the impetus to reform the highly controversial tribunals at the U.S. military prison in Cuba altogether, according to Karen Greenberg, the director of Fordham University Law School's Center on National Security.
"This may well be the straw that breaks the camel's back in underscoring the unviability of the military commissions," Greenberg told the Guardian.
According to the recently unsealed defense filing, Army Colonel James Pohl "in concert with the prosecution, manipulated secret proceedings and the use of secret orders."
On 19th April 2015, the sinking of a single refugee boat off the coast of Lampedusa led to the drowning of over 700 people. By the end of the month, an estimated 1300 had drowned in the same way, making it the deadliest month on record in the Mediterranean refugee crisis. The tragedy was the direct result of a successful British-led campaign to end the Italian search-and-rescue operation Mare Nostrum, which had prevented such mass drownings before its closure in October 2014. Those events led to a public outcry and pressure to restart search-and-rescue operations; but resisting such pressure, on 23rd April 2015 the European Council instead adopted a British-drafted resolution vowing to “undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy [refugee] vessels”. The EU was giving notice that its response to the refugee crisis would no longer be based on humanitarian commitments, but on military force. It was, not coincidentally, a proposal originally made by the British fascist Nick Griffin five years earlier.
Robocop is not only a movie. It’s real life in Chile where grown men, disturbingly silly, dress up in armored uniforms, similar to the movie Robocop (Orion Pictures, 1987) bashing peaceful demonstrations of students wearing blue jeans.
Yes, they beat up and intimidate kids, which is a glaring example of a world gone mad! Ruled by horrifying neoliberal principles of financial domination, controlled by elitist, kicking the daylights out of teenagers. The whole affaire is simply one more example of the spirit of meanness from which neoliberal principles pit the elite class against all others.
A new petition released Tuesday calls on Democratic Party leadership to make ending mass incarceration a core part of the party platform.
"So far, both [parties] have fallen short," reads the petition created by non-partisan public policy institute the Brennan Center for Justice. "Even Democratic Party platforms haven't merely been silent; they have actually called for policies creating more imprisonment.""
Two and a half months ago, asked by award-winning playwright Lin-Manuel Mirandaabout imprisoned Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar López Rivera – whose only crime, according to Nobel Peace Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, is “conspiracy to free his people from the shackles of imperial justice” – President Barack Obama told the Hamilton creator that he “had [the case] on his desk.” Miranda, whose parents hail from Puerto Rico, used his invitation to the White House to bring up the issue of López Rivera’s continued incarceration, which is of tremendous importance to Puerto Ricans. Both on the island and in the diaspora, freedom for the 73-year-old political prisoner enjoys overwhelming popular support and has united people across the political spectrum.
In her 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” Samantha Power lambasted former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his role in genocidal foreign policy. “[T]he [Ford] administration had very little credibility,” she wrote. “Kissinger had bloodied Cambodia and blackened his own reputation with past U.S. policy.”
Now, in an ironic twist, Power is set to receive The American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize—and it will be presented to her from Kissinger himself. The award is given “annually to a renowned figure in the field of international diplomacy.” Power, a “human rights celebrity,” began her career as a journalist reporting from war-torn regions such as “Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.” She eventually became a member of President Obama’s administration when he made her the United States’ youngest U.N. ambassador.
A new documentary called “Watchers of the Sky” tells the moving story of Raphael Lemkin, Polish lawyer and resistance fighter who spent his final years seeking to secure legislation against the crime of genocide at the United Nations. Lemkin’s struggle to guarantee a legal order capable of preventing the slaughter of civilians is brought to life through the narration of Samantha Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and famed diplomat who earned renown with her 2002 book, “A Problem From Hell,” documenting the international community’s failure to stop genocide in Rwanda.
The student protest outside of Boston City Hall was winding down. Of the 1,000 students who’d walked out of their schools for the second time this spring, about 100 were left, waiting to get inside in hopes of testifying before a City Council committee against proposed school budget cuts. First, though, the students had to pass through a metal detector, a process as inefficient as an airport TSA line. “This is what democracy looks like,” they chanted, a protest staple that for once felt almost true. “The whole world is watching,” they shouted, amplified by the hulking architecture of City Hall.
Oscar Salinas, from the Amor for Alex coalition [formed after police fired 59 shots killing Alex Nieto while he was eating a burrito], gave a strong message of solidarity from the Black and Brown alliance that is fighting police impunity.
Anna has made the trip to Rikers hundreds of times in the nearly six years her son has been awaiting trial. Each time, a friend picks her up early in the morning near her apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and drives her out through the city, past the brick houses and manicured lawns of northwestern Queens. They park near the Q100 bus stop and sit silently in the car until the bus pulls up.
British involvement in controversial and clandestine rendition operations provoked an unprecedented row between the UK’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, at the height of the “war on terror”, the Guardian can reveal.
The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in abductions that led to suspected extremists being tortured, she threw out a number of her sister agency’s staff and banned them from working at MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.
According to Whitehall sources, she also wrote to the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to complain about the conduct of MI6 officers, saying their actions had threatened Britain’s intelligence gathering and may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants.
So wait, just so we're clear, your ingenious solution for the cable industry's aggressive walled garden anti-competitive stranglehold over set top box hardware is -- to regulate Google? And for years we've pointed out that the idea of "search neutrality" is bullshit. Throughout the net neutrality debate it was the cry of a telecom sector and its various policy tendrils, all pretending to be willfully oblivious to why physical, last mile services without competition (broadband) aren't regulated exactly the same as Internet services that users can choose not to use.
And buried under the Op-ed's conflations and bizarre omissions, that's just the thing the editorial intentionally misses -- quite painfully. Increasing set top box competition means that consumers would have a choice of set top boxes. As such, they could choose one that doesn't rely on Google technology if this is really such a concern for them. Of course it isn't -- the great Google set top antitrust albatross is a giant red herring being pushed by cable operators via an endless number of similar editorials. All of them carry the same message: don't open up the stagnant cable set top box market to competition or Google will run away with your daughter and pee on your azaleas.
Again it's a bunch of nonsense intended to misdirect the public from a central truth of the set top box debate: the cable industry is absolutely terrified of losing a central pillar in its quest to ensure cable remains a closed, walled garden ecosystem. Opening the set top box market to competition not only kills $21 billion in captive annual revenues, it suddenly opens the door to cheaper, better, more open hardware platforms -- built by companies with no qualms about pushing traditional cable customers toward alternative streaming options.
If you're a consumer, that piece of digital wordsmithery you purchased probably isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on. Like most digital media available for "purchase," ebooks are often "sold" as licenses that allow the publisher to control use of the product indefinitely, whether through DRM or by simply attaching EULAs no one will ever read to every download.
“Civic tech is a great potential solution, but it is a solution that is vulnerable to being monopolised by elites if we don’t try to push the service beyond its traditional user base.”
[...]
Should be accessible to all citizens
The long running dispute between Twentieth Century Fox Corporation (Fox) and Comic Enterprises Limited (CEL) finally came to a head in February when the Court of Appeal upheld a decision from the High Court that Fox had infringed a series of trade marks registered by CEL. As reported in a guest post by Eibhlin Vardy (A&O) here, Fox’s appeal was dismissed save for one outstanding point which concerned the validity of the series registration.
Ten years ago today The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would shut the site down once and for all, they inadvertently helped to create one of the most resilient websites on the Internet.
The Democratic Party has appointed a committee tasked with drafting the party’s platform. The 15-member panel includes MPAA lobbyist Howard L Berman, an attorney and former U.S. Representative who not only co-sponsored SOPA and tried to enshrine P2P network sabotage in law, but has also been funded by Hollywood throughout his career.
The German Constitutional Court today ruled in favour of the “freedom to sample” – or freedom to remix – in a case between the singer/songwriter Sabrina Setlur and the band Kraftwerk.
The latter had filed complaints against the sampling of two seconds of rhythm from its 1977 song “Metall auf Metall” in Setlur’s 1997 “Nur mir”. The Federal High Court and several lower courts ruled in favour of Kraftwerk, pointing to German copyright legislation underlining the difference between re-using snippets from the original recording medium to re-performing them.
Police in Italy are reporting the execution of a large operation against a network offering live sports, movies and TV shows online without permission. The Guardia di Finanza say they targeted 50 sites running on 41 servers located on three continents. Five suspects were detained in what police estimate to be a 40 million euro business.