This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
If you’re like me, you’ll have a few collections. Books, movies, coins, whatever takes your interest. Keeping track of that collection can be time-consuming, but it’s important to any serious collector. I was therefore keen to test a few open source collection managers on the RPI4.
I’ve tested Tellico, GCStar, and Alexandria (the latter not to be confused with Alexandra, a separate project).
Intel's diminutive NUC bare-bones computers are quite a bit of fun. Not only are they cute and tiny, but once you add RAM and storage, they can run both Windows 10 and Linux brilliantly. Hell, I am currently running macOS on one as a "Hackintosh" (Shh! Don't tell Apple). The only knock on the NUC is that you can't really upgrade the GPU. Unless your NUC has Thunderbolt 3 and you add a pricey eGPU, you are essentially stuck with Intel's ho-hum onboard graphics.
With the unveiling of the "Ghost Canyon" Intel NUC 9, however, this changed. While obviously bigger than earlier NUC models, this unit can accommodate a proper gaming card from AMD or NVIDIA (if you choose to add one). You can even eventually upgrade the CPU with what Intel calls replaceable "compute elements." And now, if you have some money to spare, you can finally buy the top model of Ghost Canyon -- the drool-worthy Intel NUC 9 Extreme is available today!
A new month means new Linux marketshare stats from net analytics company NetMarketshare and they show Linux and Ubuntu usage is up for the fourth consecutive month in a row.
The share of Linux desktops monitored by the firm’s technology has grown consistently and continually for several months. The figures for June 2020 don’t prove the exception with Linux rising from 3.17 percent in May 2020 to 3.61 percent in June 2020...
Take it with your usual dose of salt and scepticism but when looking over the Linux market share, at least on NetMarketShare it appears to continue rising.
While the latest from the Steam Survey shows a dip during June, the opposite is true here. We reported last month that NetMarketShare was showing a clear upwards trend. The sort of thing you can easily write-off across one or two months but now three months in a row it gives it a bit more credit.
Going from 1.36% in March 2020, up to 2.87% in April, 3.17% in May and now June's figure is in with 3.61%. Looking over past figures from them, this might be the first time we've ever seen it rise three months in a row without a break. This is not counting Chrome OS either, like some other stats end up bundling with Linux. Chrome OS has stayed around ~0.40%, with Ubuntu over this period rising from 0.27% in March to 2.57% in June which is crazy.
With the start of a new month comes the latest numbers out of Valve for the rough Linux gaming market percentage from the Steam Survey.
For June 2020 the company is reporting a 0.88% marketshare for Linux, or roughly 0.03% drop. Quite close to being flat month over month. But year-over-year it's up with last year's numbers for June coming in at 0.78%, which given the ever increasing Steam userbase is a good sign that the Linux gaming marketshare is growing albeit ever so slightly.
Brad Linder from Liliputing has been putting the OneGx1 mini laptop through its paces running Linux Ubuntu 20.04. Linder explains, “I decided to take Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for a spin, and I was pleasantly surprised that most of the OneGx1 hardware was supported. But there are a few things that could certainly work better.”
The One Netbook OneGx1 mini laptop is an unusual little computer that features a 7 inch display, an Intel Core i5-10210Y quad-core processor, and a physical design clearly inspired by gaming laptops. It supports an optional set of detachable game controllers that can clip onto the sides of the device. And One Netbook offers the OneGx1 with optional support for 4G LTE or 5G cellular networks.
As I discovered after spending a few days testing the OneGx1, it offers decent performance for general purpose computing, but gaming is a bit of a mixed bag. But that was with Windows 10. What about other operating systems?
In this episode, we discuss open source certification as well as career support offered through LPI. Doc Searls and Aaron Newcomb interview Jon "Maddog" Hall, who is a committed educator and a community developer. He is the board chair at LPI as well as the Co-founder and Senior Adviser to Caninos Loucos, which is a project to get Single Board Computers (SBCs) designed and built-in Brazil. This allows students to receive needed supplies to go to university. He is also the President of Project CauaÃÆ, which teaches university students how to run their own IT business and work part-time as they go to school.
Mozilla’s Firefox 78 rollout is not going smoothly, antirez steps down as the Redis Labs leader, Couchbase debuts a new managed service, the ArcMenu GNOME extension introduces new features, and manjaro32 closes its doors.
00:00:00 Intro 00:00:24 Welcome to DL180 00:00:45 What Ryan has been up to . . . 00:02:07 What Michael has been up to . . . 00:04:24 What Noah has been up to . . . 00:04:38 Discussion: ProtonMail and their aim at Google’s GSuite 00:06:42 Noah shows that his segues are legendary 00:07:00 Sponsored by Digital Ocean €· [do.co/dln] 00:09:07 Community Feedback about the Pinebook Pro and some issues with it 00:10:01 Ryan’s response to the feedback 00:11:03 Noah’s response to the feedback 00:12:14 DLN Forum & Telegram group are great places for tech help 00:12:45 News: Mozilla announces the Firefox VPN service 00:18:06 News: Linux Mint 20 Released 00:30:04 Main Topic: Matrix / Riot Might Be The Future of Communication 00:52:03 Linux Gaming: Ryan Gives Noah Suggestions for FPS Games on Linux 00:59:51 Software Spotlight: Tux Typing 01:01:14 Tip of the Week: Increase Your Terminal History Size 01:03:16 Outro 01:03:24 Get More DL by Becoming a Patron 01:04:20 DLN Store destinationlinux.network/store 01:04:55 How to Join the DLN Community 01:04:58 Noah’s delivery of this part is totally lit 01:05:40 Destination Linux Network destinationlinux.network 01:06:00 FrontPageLinux.com frontpagelinux.com 01:06:15 Patron Post Show (become a Patron to Join us each week!)
OpenBSD 6.7 on PC Engines, NetBSD code study, DRM Update on OpenBSD, Booting FreeBSD on HPE Microserver SATA port, 3 ways to multiboot, and more.
Chris is slow cooking some servers, Alex has self-hosted AI with a nasty gotcha and a damp basement.
This week we’ve been helping HMRC and throwing a 10th birthday party. We discuss “Rolling Rhino”, split personality snaps, UBPorts supporting Project Treble devices, ZFS on Ubuntu 20.04 plus our round-up from the tech news.
sodipodi, 3d printing a camper, arm supercomputer, novell, opensuse
I'm announcing the release of the 5.7.7 kernel.
All users of the 5.7 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.7.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.7.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Significant with this new version of the IGC compiler is the DG1 platform is supported, their first graphics card. IGC already supported Gen12/Xe while now the initial bits are in place for the forthcoming DG1 discrete graphics card. For weeks now we've been seeing Intel's many open-source developers posting new DG1 enablement patches from the Linux kernel through their Mesa stack to the media encode/decode driver and now working its way into DG1 for their compute stack. Obviously you also need to be running on the future Linux 5.9 kernel and more for getting this DG1 support all aligned but at least the IGC side work is now in place.
Hi all,
Here is the release schedule for Weston 9.0, the next major version:
- Alpha: July 30th, in 4 weeks - Beta: August 13th - RC1: August 27th - First possible release: September 3rd
Package maintainers are encouraged to pick up the pre-releases to make sure packaging can be tested (and fixed) before the stable release.
Let me know if there's something in particular you want merged for 9.0.
Thanks,
Simon Ser
With Weston 8.0 having shipped in January, Wayland developers are beginning to prepare for the next feature release of this reference Wayland compositor.
Simon Ser has once again stepped up to take over Weston release management duties. He is planning to tag the Weston 9.0 Alpha at the end of June, a Weston 9.0 Beta in mid-August, and a first release candidate at the end of April. If all goes well he hopes to ship Weston 9.0 on 3 September but could be delayed by some days if additional release candidates are warranted.
The LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver that provides a software/CPU-based OpenGL implementation for running on systems as a fallback path when no GPU / hardware OpenGL driver is available, a vendor-neutral path for debug purposes, and similar use-cases, now has OpenGL 4.0 support.
NVIDIA has quietly released Video Codec SDK 10 as the newest version of their proprietary video encode/decode implementation designed for their GPUs.
[...]
NVIDIA has already contributed to FFMpeg support for using the new NVENC presets, multi-pass encode modes, and low-delay key frame scaling for this video library as part of the Video Codec SDK 10 support. A follow-up commit added additional H.264 levels now supported.
While RDNA/Navi brought Wave32 support, the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for Linux has decided to switch to make greater use now of Wave64 for more shaders.
[...]
The change to use Wave64 for more shader stages was merged this week for Mesa 20.2. The commit does add the new "nggctess" perf flag for always using NGG culling for tessellation, complementing the existing nggc (for always using NGG culling) and nonggc for disabling NGG culling.
So let’s get down to pixels. The UBO indexing is now fixed-ish, which means moving onto the next step: setting up bindings for the UBOs.
A binding in this context is the numeric id assigned to a UBO for the purposes of accessing it from a shader, which also corresponds to the uniform block index. In mesa, this is the struct nir_variable::data.binding member of a UBO. A load_ubo instruction will take this value as its first parameter, which means there’s a need to ensure that everything matches up just right.
Back in March I benchmarked the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) as a means of achieving additional security safeguards for a ~5% performance hit. With LKRG 0.8 having been released a few days ago, here is a fresh look at the LKRG performance compared to the stock kernel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
LKRG adds runtime integrity checking to the Linux kernel and other runtime detection of security exploits. LKRG 0.8 was released last week and the focus of our latest benchmarking. LKRG 0.8 adds new safeguards as well as support for newer kernel builds, experimental 32-bit ARM and Raspberry Pi support, new tunables, and other changes.
So how does this unblock websites? GreenTunnel runs as a localhost HTTP proxy server that does the following.
For HTTP, GreenTunnel sends requests in 2 parts, for example GET / HTTP/1.0 \n Host: www.you as the first part, and tube.com \n ... as the second part. This way the Internet Service Provider (ISP) doesn't match the blocked word "youtube" in the packets, and as a result the data is not throttled or blocked.
In the case of HTTPS, the application splits the first CLIENT_HELLO packet into small chunks so the ISP can't parse the packet and find the SNI (Server Name Indication, an extension of TLS that indicates the actual destination hostname a client is attempting to access over HTTPS) field.
As for DNS (Domain Name System), GreenTunnel makes use of DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS to get the real IP address and prevent DNS hijacks.
An open-source photo editor that debuted on Unix-based platforms, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Today it's available in versions for Linux, Windows and Mac. GIMP offers a wide toolset – everything you're accustomed to is within easy reach, including painting tools, colour correction, cloning, selection, and enhancement.
The team that oversees development has worked hard to ensure compatibility too, so you'll be able to work with all the popular file formats without any trouble at all. You'll also find a very capable file manager built in, along similar lines to Adobe's Bridge.
Open-source Audacity can record and edit audio files on more tracks than you can imagine. It then outputs exactly what you need, even to MP3 if you use a plug-in. It is perfect for noobs and pros alike, on any desktop OS.
Task management apps have surely made life simpler for many. There are scores of software in the market which handle a variety of tasks such as accounting software, office suits, and management tools, etc.
However at times, despite having such software, it becomes challenging to hop from one task to another on your to-do-list because of priorities, different clients, and deadlines to meet. But, fortunately, there are lots of software that are dedicated for task management.
Such software not only organizes workflow but also improves one’s capability to handle challenging tasks, especially when it comes to an individual task with several requirements.
Through this article, we will introduce you to some of the best cross-platform task apps which will manage your business and work needs.
This is a follow-up patch release a mere week after the grand 7.71.0 release. While we added a few minor regressions in that release, one of them were significant enough to make us decide to fix and ship an update sooner rather than later. I’ll elaborate below.
Every early patch release we do is a minor failure in our process as it means we shipped annoying/serious bugs. That of course tells us that we didn’t test all features and areas good enough before the release. I apologize.
Microsoft Teams (preview version) is available on Linux. How to install in Ubuntu and Fedora.
Back in January, we exclusively reported that Google wants to add Steam to Chrome OS and introduce more powerful Chromebooks, possibly running on AMD silicon. Now further details have emerged. 9to5Google found a new Linux emulator in the Google's Chromium Gerrit codenamed "Borealis" that includes a pre-installed copy of Steam. It might even replace the current Linux implementation in the long term.
Chrome OS has had a virtual Linux emulator in beta for more than a year, codenamed Crostini. It's not a full-blown separate OS but more of a collection of compatibility software that helps seamlessly integrate Linux apps with the rest of the Chrome OS interface. We can assume this is the model Borealis and the pre-installed Steam will adopt.
What brings about such a big change? It’s a technology called Segment Heap, which Microsoft introduced in its Windows 10 May 2020 update. Segment Heap optimizes memory management and Microsoft said early tests on Chromium-based browsers immediately saw memory consumption reduced by as much as 27%. Google engineers concurred saying: “Experiments with per-machine opting-in to the segment heap for chrome.exe suggests that this could save hundreds of MB in the browser.”
But the shock here is how quickly Google has got this working, with Chrome programmer Bruce Dawson revealing “This change made it into today’s Chrome Canary (Version 85.0.4182.0 (Official Build) canary (64-bit)... I can confirm that the segment heap is enabled.”
Chrome Canary primarily targets developers, so I would not advise you use it as your primary browser. That said, this is no either/or situation and those keen to discover the benefits of Segment Heap can run Chrome Canary alongside the standard version, keeping any essential tabs away from the developer edition.
Chrome OS has the ability to run desktop and command line Linux apps now Google plans to expand this support to include Linux games too.
And when we’re talking about gaming on Linux we’re of course talking about Steam, the premiere games distribution platform created by Valve that is available natively for Linux desktop operating systems.
Google equipping Chrome OS’s gaming feature as part of a project called “Borealis“. This is not only enigmatic sounding but also hugely exciting if you are an Ubuntu fan.
Looks like Linux gaming may get yet another boost, thanks to Google? Yes. Backing up previous information on Steam support coming to Chrome OS it looks like the project is still going.
This isn't some kind of wild rumour either, given the previous info with Google's own Kan Liu confirming their plans. This time the report comes from 9to5Google, which points out something being worked on called "Borealis" which appears to be a kind of Virtual Machine with a full copy of Ubuntu and Steam pre-installed and ready to go. It's interesting as they already had Crostini with Debian but it appears they're going a different way for Steam.
Ready to spend another thousand hours building spaceships and now chasing comets? Take charge of the Kerbal Space Program once again in the latest free upgrade.
This is quite a significant update to KSP too, bringing in their European Space Agency (ESA) content including the ESA space-suit texture, new parts and variants, and two of their most iconic and groundbreaking missions into the game. So now you will be able to build the Ariane 5, visit comets and more.
Hellpoint from Cradle Games and tinyBuild is now set to officially release with Linux support on July 30. Originally funded on Kickstarter back in 2017, with 1,351 backers pledging around $63,553 Canadian Dollars we're keen to see the full release.
Set in the aftermath of a massive quantum cataclysm called the Merge. You wake up on board the Irid Novo space station, a beacon of galactic cooperation and scientific exploration where everything has gone horribly wrong. What happens next will be solely determined by your choices.
The 19th update for Dead Cells is a bit of a big one, overhauling quite a lot of game mechanics and the overall difficulty.
"Dead Cells is a rogue-lite, metroidvania inspired, action-platformer. You'll explore a sprawling, ever-changing castle... assuming you’re able to fight your way past its keepers in 2D souls-lite combat. No checkpoints. Kill, die, learn, repeat."
One of my favourite indie games by far, and awesome to see it continue to update and expand. This time they're not adding in new enemies and weapons but going over Dead Cells with a fine-tooth comb to ensure your play-through is as smooth as it can be.
The Dark Mod, a free and open-source first-person stealth game inspired by the Thief series has a huge new release up.
Powered by the open-source id Tech 4 game engine (the Doom 3 engine), The Dark Mod is an impressive stand-alone project that has quite a lot of community-created mission packs available. The Dark Mod 2.08 has been in development for over a year, and it's quite an impressive boost with lots of underlying modern tech upgrades like using more modern OpenGL techniques.
Burning Knight is a recently released action-packed roguelike, featuring slick pixel-art and fantastic lighting along with plenty of over the top action and a little sprinkle of comedy.
As part of our ongoing series of speaking to game developers, we sat down and had a chat with the developer about it and how the release went.
Roughly 25 years ago, I remember playing Panzer General for the first time. The game's hexagonal-map, turn-based, inventory-and-strategy style grabbed me instantly, and became one of the enduring classics on my proverbial digital shelf of good ole antiquities. A few days ago, I fired up DOSBox and had another go at Panzer General. Not sure what prompted me to play it again, perhaps inspiration following a recent bout of reading military history books on Stalingrad and Berlin, or perhaps a big-boy-toy warehouse management OCD itch that lurks in every grown man. Or just the fact it's a darn good game, and it's time to play it, enjoy it, review it.
It may sound unusual talking about a 1994 game title - but hey, classics be classics. I did mention it in one of my DOSBox compilations on old game revival, but now I want to give it a proper, in-depth review, even if most of you won't be able to play it, or even find it. Besides, it's a trip down the memory lane. I don't remember the full journey, but I did preserve the game and its save files carefully over the years, from floppy (maybe) to CD to DVD to a folder on a disk, which could be mounted and summoned at will. My original game saves are there, most of them, the earliest dating back to 2000, and the newest to 2007. So not only do I get to have fresh fun, I also have a glimpse of my own military cunning two decades removed. Well, let's blitz.
Earlier this year, it was reported that Google was working to bring Steam to Chrome OS. We’ve now discovered how Chrome OS will run Steam and which Chromebooks will support it to start.
For over a year now, Chrome OS has had support for running Linux apps, a project also known as “Crostini.” Under the hood, Crostini runs an entire Linux distribution in a virtual machine, vaguely similar to a developer running an Android emulator on their desktop. (You can think of a Linux distribution as a complete operating system package, usually with its own unique flair.)
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking a new project within the Chromium open-source code under the codename “Borealis.” Based on some of the related code changes, Borealis seems to also be related to virtual machines for Chrome OS.
Through a fair bit of digging, we were able to obtain a copy of Borealis, which turned out to be another full Linux distribution. Unlike Crostini, which is based on Debian, Borealis is based on Ubuntu, another popular variety of Linux. Just like the existing Linux apps support, we believe Borealis will integrate itself with Chrome OS rather than being a full desktop experience.
However, we found one key difference between Borealis and a normal installation of Ubuntu, as Borealis includes a pre-installed copy of Steam. This lines up with what we learned at CES 2020, when Kan Liu, Google’s director of product management for Chrome OS, shared that the upcoming Steam gaming support would be based on Linux.
There is finally a new release out of The Dark Mod, the original total conversion mod for Doom 3 that transformed into its own standalone game powered by the open-source id Tech 4 engine. This remains the lone flagship example of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine in action by the community (besides the DHEWM3 / RBDOOM-3-BFG engine work) with ioDoom3 having never taken off like ioquake3.
The Dark Mod 2.08 is shipping with fixes for its multi-threading support, uncapped FPS, and better x86 64-bit support.There is also improved coding standards, replacing legacy OpenGL usage with more modern OpenGL usage, better visuals thanks to SSAO and other rendering improvements, AI improvements, gameplay enhancements, better mapping toolkit support, and all around performance improvements. The multi-core support in particular is no longer considered experimental.
Crayta, the promising looking multiplayer game creation tool is now available exclusively on Stadia and there's more Stadia news to cover today.
[...]
The big one is Crayta, which allows people to jump into games together online and also make their own. It comes ready with multiple games like Prop Hunt, Crayta Cooking (looks like Overcooked), Disaster Party where you need to just stay alive as long as possible and more.
Although it already has tons of blocks to make crazy vehicles with, Payload Studios clearly aren't finished expanding TerraTech and this latest update looks fun.
Mixing together a block-based vehicle building system, open-world environments and a full sandbox-style campaign where you go at your own pace, TerraTech can be a lot of fun if you enjoy getting lost in a big world. It's satisfying mix of scavenging, crafting, combat and exploration together make for a fun experience.
You can build some truly insane stuff too and the latest set of blocks and missions are in with the Reticule Research update.
Monado is the in-development OpenXR runtime for VR / AR on Linux and Collabora continue to make excellent progress on bringing it up to eventually support more platforms and features.
Currently developed for Linux while they get as much feature and hardware support as possible, it's taken another big step recently. The team recently implemented OpenXR's XR_EXTX_overlay extension, which will now expose the multi-application capabilities of Monado which was recently merged into the project.
After a puzzle-platformer that's a little unique and challenging? Neko Ghost, Jump! blends together traditional 2D platforming and 3D modes to offer a fresh take.
Mentioned very briefly here on GOL back in February, it's quite a sweet idea. You're able to switch between modes at any time during a level and you need to do so in order to complete the puzzles since some paths, obstacles and enemies might be hidden in one view.
It's now crowdfunding on Kickstarter to get the monies needed to finish it, with a $15,000 base goal and it has until July 31 to hit it. The demo that was previously available was also expanded to include Ghost Blocks that you need to change into a special ghost form to interact with, 9 languages, new artwork and performance optimizations.
It seems the Atari VCS is not dead and will actually be seeing a launch this year, as Atari themselves have now confirmed.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo that raised over three million dollars they've seen repeated delays, a lawsuit or two and plenty of ridicule from other publications. Still, they kept at it, giving out updates on their Medium blog about the ongoing production and optimization process.
Back in April they claimed mass production had started, although when you saw the actual post details it was only 500 units total. Not exactly mass production but okay, whatever. Last month in June they mentioned they had 96 actually be delivered to them, although 500 were in fact produced with "more than 10,000 VCS units this summer" to be ready.
Atari have announced that their long in-development PC/console hybrid is going to be arriving with their crowdfunding backers this October before going on general sale in time for Christmas.
The Atari VCS looks lovely, but it certainly is going to be a hard sell to the wider public - we're still unsure who they're actually targeting. The system will be packed with a number of classic Atari titles along with support for AntStream Arcade for retro classics across other platforms. It supposedly is also a full PC that can run other OSes through the Sandbox mode meaning you can pop Windows 10 onto an external drive and access your Steam, Epic and other libraries.
The Atari VCS features an AMD Raven Ridge 2 CPU alongside an unspecified AMD Ryzen GPU. It will pack with 4GB or 8GB RAM and internal storage of 32GB with support for external hard drives.
The HDMI output supports 4K video and the OS is based on Ubuntu, but as mentioned you can install your own OS on there if you choose.
From the rise and fall of LinuxGamePublishing, Humble Indie Bundles, the indie store Desura rising and falling, Steam and GOG started supporting Linux, itch.io grew much bigger, the Vulkan API being formally released, Steam Machines plus SteamOS, Steam Play, the slow rise of game streaming services and more. We've seen such a huge amount of ups and downs over the years. We plan to continue going for the next 11 years and beyond too! So we hope you will stick with us for daily Linux + Gaming news.
Millions of Minions: An Underground Adventure is a brand new dungeon crawler that recently released into Steam Early Access, giving a slightly unique take on it.
With a setting and layout clearly inspired by the likes of Isaac and others, you crawl through a dungeon with small enclosed rooms as you fight off waves of enemies. Here though you're not using swords or anything like that, instead you gather energy and summon a bunch of little minions. You then use them as shields and send them flying towards enemies. It's actually a little amusing.
[...]
There's a demo up on Steam too if you want to try before you buy. I've spent a little time with it and while it feels a lot more simpler than the likes of The Binding of Isaac, the streamlined feel might be better for quick runs when you're shorter on time. It will be interesting to see how much they do expand this over Early Access.
FamiStudio, a pretty fun looking program designed for people making chiptune music and NES homebrewers recently had a big new release and it came with their first Linux build.
Quite an impressive feature set too with it being able to export to various formats, not only that though the editor itself has some sweet features. Some you would expect like Copy/Paste and Undo/Redo along with Volume, fine pitch, vibrato effect tracks and more. The latest release adds in some great sounding features too (on top of Linux support) like trackpad controls, a command-line interface, extended MIDI keyboard support, improved WAV export and import of instruments from any supported format.
Assemble Entertainment and Tritrie Games have confirmed that Jessika, a full-motion video mystery-adventure will be launching with Linux support on August 25.
Your job as a digital content specialist is to go through the footprint left behind by deceased people, on behalf of their relatives. In Jessika, the subject is a sensitive one as it's touching on suicide and it seems their family are determined to find out why. What at first seems to be a job like any other quickly develops into a dark drama with twists and turns.
FNA3D, the upcoming advanced graphics library for FNA has reached a new milestone on the way to full Vulkan support.
As a refresher - FNA was originally a fork of MonoGame, with an aim to be an accuracy-focused reimplementation of Microsoft's XNA. It's since expanded and improved in huge ways and FNA3D is the next step. FNA3D was announced back in May, as a more advanced rendering system for FNA that brings with it better performance and the ability to support other graphics APIs.
FNA is used in tons of games like TowerFall Ascension, Streets of Rage 4, FEZ, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Rogue Legacy, Chasm, Axiom Verge and the list goes on for a while.
The ArcMenu team announced the release of its latest version of the traditional and modern menu system for GNOME desktops.
Arc Menu 47, Popular Gnome Extension Released With New Layout
Arc Menu v47 with a new menu layout called “Tognee” is now available for the download. Arc Menu is a Gnome shell extension designed to replace the standard menu found in Gnome 3.
“Flip Layout Horizontally” and “Searchbar Location” options is now available in traditional panel layouts.
If I had to guess, I would probably say that a huge majority of Linux users have/had used GNOME Shell in one way or another. It’s the default Desktop Environment on a huge number of very popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and Pop!_OS, and it’s an option for installation on even more. This GNOME Shell review will cover performance, user experience, and recommendations on who will find GNOME Shell to be a good fit.
Believe it or not, ex-Solus leader Ikey Doherty is making a new operating system called Serpent Linux, which aims to be a truly modern Linux distro.
It’s been almost two years since Ikey Doherty, the founder and lead developer of the popular Solus distribution, left the project he loved the most in pursuit of new endeavors.
After a year long break from the Linux world, he created a new company called Lispy Snake, Ltd., an indie game studio with a focus on developing an open source game engine named Serpent for creating 2D games.
Once a year, Zenwalk Current is considered stable enough for a "milestone" release, here's Zenwalk 15 milestone 2020.
Based on Slackware Current July 2020, Zenwalk 15 milestone 2020 is fully compatible.
As usual, the goal is to provide fast simple setup, refined desktop, selection of the best apps, ease of use, with full respect of the Slackware philosophy.
Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" was recently released, and in this video we'll explore some of the highlights and even some of the controversial changes as well. The installation process, Warpinator, and the anti-snap changes are explored, and more.
We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 8. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 8. There have been large scale updates of all packages as well as new features implemented to improve what Mageia already offered.
The upcoming Mageia 8 Linux distribution now has a first alpha release that the community can download and test if they want to help the devs fix bugs before the final release or get an early taste of the new features and improvements.
Donald Stewart announced today the general availability of Mageia 8 Alpha 1, the first step towards the next major release of this wonderful GNU/Linux distribution that continue the legacy of the Mandrake Linux operating system.
And it’s packed with a lot of goodies, starting with the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series and continuing with better support for ARM devices with dedicated images for some of the most popular of them in the coming months, as well as a much-improved installer with better support for the F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System) and NILFS2 filesystems.
Mageia 8 also promises faster boot and installation times due to the use of the Zstd (Zstandard) lossless, real-time data compression algorithm that most GNU/Linux distributions are adopting these days. In addition, Zstd is being used to accelerate the package metadata parsing within urpmi package manager.
Mageia isn't one of the most popular Linux-based operating systems, but it has its share of fans. The operating system is primarily a KDE affair, although GNOME and Xfce are available desktop environments too. It is a quality distro that you should check out if interested.
The last major release of Mageia was version 7, which came out nearly a year ago. Today, Mageia 8 Alpha 1 becomes available for download. Despite many Linux distributions stopping development of 32-bit variants, Mageia is apparently not giving up -- you can download a special 32-bit ISO that uses the Xfce desktop environment.
The openSUSE release team is proud to announce the availability of community-developed openSUSE Leap 15.2. Professional users, from desktops and data-center servers to container hosts and Virtual Machines (VM), will be able to use Leap 15.2 as a high-quality, easy-to-use, enterprise-grade Linux operating system.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 is out today as the Linux distribution built from the same sources as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 sources.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 adds a number of new packages, particularly on the machine learning and artificial intelligence front. Tensorflow, PyTorch, ONNX, and other popular AI/ML solutions are finally packaged up for openSUSE Leap. Leap 15.2 also has Kubernetes support available as an official package for the first time. There are also a variety of other container additions to Leap 15.2 in catching up to the other Linux distributions catering to container workloads.
The openSUSE Leap 15.2 release is now available; see the announcement for a long list of new features. "In general, software packages in the distribution grew by the hundreds. Data fusion, Machine Learning and AI aren't all that is new in openSUSE Leap 15.2; a Real-Time Kernel for managing the timing of microprocessors to ensure time-critical events are processed as efficiently as possible is available in this release."
openSUSE Leap 15.2 has finally landed with some useful changes and improvements.
Also, considering the exciting announcement of Closing the Leap Gap, the release of openSUSE Leap 15.2 brings us one step closer to SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) binaries being integrated to openSUSE Leap 15.3 next.
Let’s take a look at what has changed and improved in openSUSE Leap 15.2.
The openSUSE Project released today openSUSE Leap 15.2, the second major installment in the latest openSUSE Leap 15 operating system series, based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2.
openSUSE Leap 15.2 comes more than a year after openSUSE Leap 15.1 to bring you not only software updates and security fixes, but also new applications and technologies. Most specifically, it brings exciting new Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) technologies.
Among these, there’s Tensorflow, a deep learning framework used by data scientists for numerical computations and data-flow graphs, PyTorch, a machine learning library, ONNX, a program that provides interoperability in the AI tool space, as well as the Grafana and Prometheus tools for creating interactive visual analytics.
Would I recommend the HP Pavilion 14-ce0830nd? To be honest, its a mixed bag on openSUSE. Installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2 was very easy. And installation of a dual boot system with Windows 10 was easy as well. The laptop has an attractive look and feel. The display, speakers, keyboard and external ports are all good. The touchpad is too sensitive. The machine has enough RAM, enough storage and the hard drives are performant. The Intel CPU/GPU is great. Which means that this is a great machine for multitasking. The gaming performance on the Intel GPU on openSUSE Leap 15.2 is good enough to play various open source games on medium/high settings.
Netpkg 7.0 has been released.
Netpkg is the original network package management tool provided in Zenwalk since 2005, and was the first tool of this kind available for Slackware back in the days.
Over the years, following users requests, netpkg has evolved into a graphical (GTK) application with CLI counterpart.
Netpkg is Slackgnostic ;) : it work for any Slackware system.
The CLI version has proven to be easier for the user, is faster, and requires no dependencies except bash, wget, and a few command line utilities found on any Slackware installation : so it can run in level 3 with just the "ap" packages installed (could even run from the setup from a chrooted mountpoint).
Flatpak is the freedesktop.org software deployment and package management standard for Linux, offering a sandbox environment in which users can run application software in isolation from the rest of the system.
In Zenwalk : Flatpak is managed through the App Outlet application (https://app-outlet.github.io/).
You can also browse https://flathub.org/apps, find what you're looking for (ie : VLC) and just launch "flatpak install VLC" in an unprivileged user terminal.
In the first day of every month, we see a new Arch Linux ISO snapshot being released, including the most recent package versions and, occasionally, brand-new GNU/Linux technologies, such as the bump to a newer Linux kernel branch.
Well, Arch Linux 2020.07.01 has been released today as July 2020’s ISO snapshot, and it’s the first to ship with the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series. While not the latest, Linux 5.7.6 is included in the Arch Linux 2020.07.01 image as the default kernel.
With it already having been a few months since systemd 245 debuted with systemd-homed, the systemd developers have begun their release dance for what will be systemd 246.
Portability alone does not offer the entire promise of Linux containers. You also need Compatibility and Supportability.
Red Hat recently announced key enhancements to the Ansible Automation portfolio, including the latest version of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and new Red Hat Certified Ansible Content Collections available on Automation Hub.
A lot of teams are involved in the development of Fedora Modularity and vastly more people are affected by it as packagers and end-users. It is obvious, that each group has its own priorities, use-cases and therefore different opinions on what is good or bad about the current state of the project. Personally, I was privileged (or maybe doomed) to represent yet another, often forgotten, group of users - third-party build systems.
Our team is directly responsible for the development and maintenance of Copr and a few years ago we decided to support building modules alongside building just regular packages. We stumbled upon many frustrating pitfalls that I don’t want to discuss right now but the major one was definitely not enough tools for working with modules. That was understandable in the early stages of the development process but it has been years and we still don’t have the right tools for building modules on our own, without relying on the Fedora infrastructure. You may recall me expressing the need for them at the Flock 2019 conference.
This blog is about my experience working in nmstate project and first month in GSoC coding period. I was able to start working on implementing the varlink support mid of community bonding period. This was very helpful because I was able to identify some issues in the python varlink package that was not mentioned in documentation and I had to spend more time finding the cause of the issue. There have been minor changes to proposed code structure and project timeline after the feedback from the community members. In the beginning it was difficult to identify syntax errors in varlink interface definitions. This has been slow progress because of new issues and following are the tasks I have completed so far.
Both Ubuntu Focal Fossa and Fedora 32 released in the same time April this year. They are two operating systems from different families namely Debian and Red Hat. One of their most interesting things in common is the arrival of computer companies like Dell and Star Labs (and Lenovo's coming) that sell special preinstalled laptops and PCs. I make this summary to remind myself and inform you all growth of these great operating systems. Enjoy!
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, which was released at the Red Hat Summit in May 2019, can provide significant performance improvements across a range of modern workloads.
As of March 31, 2020, SAP officially announced the support for SAP HANA 2.0 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 for SAP Solutions on Intel 64 and IBM POWER9 architectures.
With this offering, SAP HANA is fully certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 for SAP Solutions as documented in SAP notes 2777782 and 2235581. Beyond the benefits provided by the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, RHEL 8 for SAP Solutions offers the following components...
Red Hat has become the latest software company pledging to remove "problematic" language from its platforms.
In a blog post published to the company’s website, Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright said the company would be “standing up a team to audit our own work—our code, documentation and content—and identify potentially divisive language.”
“When we looked at why certain words are still being used in open source, we questioned why they persisted and what we could do about it,” Wright told Motherboard in an email.
You'll also need at least 15GBs of disk space, but I recommend 20GBs. Finally, you'll need a graphics card and monitor that supports a 1024Ãâ768 resolution. In short, you can pretty much run Mint on any PC you find in a second-hand junk store.
Under the hood, Mint 20 runs on top of the 5.4 Linux kernel. It's most notable new features are support for AMD Navi 12 and 14 GPUs, AMD Arcturus graphics cards, AMD Dali APU, AMD 2020 APU platforms, and Intel Tiger Lake CPUs.
One thing you can't do easily yet is upgrade from Mint 19.3 to 20. Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, Mint's lead developer, explained, you can't use the 19.3's update manager because "the process will be completely different since this is a new major version and a new package base." By mid-July, Mint will release an easy upgrade path. For now, you must install Mint 20 from scratch.
For my tests, rather than use old hardware, I used a 2019 Dell XPS 13. This model, which came with Ubuntu 18.04, was powered by an Intel Core i7-10710U processor. It also came with a 512GB SSD and 16GBs of RAM. This is vastly more powerful hardware than you need for Mint.
First, I installed Linux Mint 19.3 on it so I could get an idea of how well Mint 20 compares to its immediate ancestor. Then, I installed Linux Mint 20 on it with the Cinnamon 4.6 desktop. I did this by downloading the Mint 20's 2GB ISO image and then burning it to a USB stick. That done, I set the XPS 13's firmware to boot from the USB stick and installed 20, reset it to boot from the SSD and I was on my way. The entire process, from beginning to end took about half-an-hour.
There is something fun about the smattering of new releases of Ubuntu and flavors every six months. I don’t try them all as I just don’t have the time. I do like to try the new ones, see what they’re all about. It’s one thing to try Kubuntu, where you already know what you are getting, it’s another thing to try a respin, especially one that is brand new to the scene.
As part of the BDLL community, we are encouraged to try out the new shiny and then talk about it. We had the conversation on the 27th of June, 2020. I didn’t have much to contribute as I was late to the party in testing it. We also had the privilege of having the distribution maintainer and creator, Josh, there as well too.
Button line up front: Ubuntu Cinnamon, as a new remix was a remarkably enjoyable experience, especially since this is the first release and Josh is, not exactly a seasoned distro maintainer. I am not particularly a fan of Cinnamon and I knew this going into it but was interested in seeing a version of Cinnamon as an alternative to Mint due to their rather poignant stance on the universal Linux package system, Snaps. This is the first release of Ubuntu Cinnamon and I think it is well done. I would not switch to it but I do think it is worth trying, if nothing else, to hedge your Cinnamon bets.
This is my brief experience as a biased openSUSE User from installation to desktop usage perceptions.
The Ubuntu MATE team has been announced and released Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS On April 23rd, 2020. Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS is the fourth Long Term Support (LTS), It will be supported with security and software updates for 3 years, until April 2023, This release rolls-up various developments, fixes, and optimizations that have been released since the 19.10 LTS.
Ubuntu MATE 20.04 LTS ships with the latest MATE Desktop Environment 1.24 series by default, Added multiple colored theme variations, panel layout switching which is now stable and reliable via MATE Tweak Tweak and Ubuntu MATE Welcome, The key-bindings for window tiling have only worked on full keyboards, includes a new Indicator that provides a “notification center”
Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and powered by the most recent and advanced kernel, Long term Support of Linux kernel 5.4. which brings improved hardware support (among other features). A new GTK front end for the firmware update tool is added that lets you upgrade, downgrade, and reinstall firmware on devices supported by Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), including the LVM and the ZFS option.
The Linux Mint team has released Mint 20 Cinnamon, a long-term support (LTS) release. It is based on Ubuntu 20.04, will be supported until 2025, and new Mint versions will use the same package base until 2022.
Linux Mint comes in three flavours, all of which are now available in Mint 20 "Ulyana" editions. One uses the minimalist Xfce desktop environment. The second, called MATE, uses a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop, while the third, Cinnamon, uses a fork of the GNOME 3 desktop created and maintained by the Mint team. Cinnamon appears to be the most common choice among Mint users. More details on the origins and difference between MATE and Cinnamon are here.
The Raspberry Pi opened up a whole new world of DIY projects but it has ironically been more difficult to actually produce a “normal” RPi-powered computer that doesn’t look like a Frankensteined contraption. There are, of course, some kits that let you easily assemble a Raspberry Pi desktop, laptop, or even tablet, but those look more like things you’d rather leave at home than be caught dead using it outside. It’s for that exact use case that CutiePi was born and now the ready-to-use RPi Tablet has launched on Kickstarter to bring all that to everyone willing to take the risk.
HiSilicon Hi3559A is a penta-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor designed for 8Kp30 or 4Kp120 smart cameras thanks to DSP cores and a single or dual-core NNIE (Neural Network Inference Engine) AI accelerator. We first found the processor in an expensive development board and noted its integration into OBSBOT Tail 4Kp60 “auto-director” smart camera and a 4Kp120 action camera.
AAEON has now launched BOXER-8410AI AI Edge fanless embedded box PC based on Hi3559A V100ES processor to add an alternative to its Intel and NVIDIA based AI edge PC‘s.
MYIR’s $259 “FZ3 Card” SBC runs Linux with Baidu AI tools on a Zynq UltraScale+ via its MYC-CZU3EG module with 4GB DDR4 and 8GB eMMC. Specs include mini-DP, GbE, 2x USB, PCIe, 2x 40-pin GPIO, and CSI and BT1120 cam links.
MYIR has launched a 100 x 70mm, -40 to 85€°C tolerant development board built around its MYC-CZU3EG module, which integrates Xilinx’s FPGA-equipped Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC. The FZ3 Card, which is also referred to as the Deep Learning Accelerator Card, is available in an affordably priced $259 FZ3 Kit. Applications include AI cameras and computing devices, robotics, intelligent car, intelligent electronic scale, patrol UAV, and other intelligent embedded applications.
FriendlyELEC may have already released the NanoPi NEO4, but it now plans to release the NEO3. Brought to our attention by CNX Software via Liliputing, the SBC measures 48 x 48 mm, making it slightly smaller than the NanoPi R2S. The NEO3 is based on a Rockchip RK3328 SoC, which integrates four ARM Cortex-A53 cores and an ARM Mali-450 MP2 GPU. The board will be offered with 1 GB or 2 GB of DDR4 RAM.
There is no onboard storage, but FriendlyELEC has included a microSD card reader for use as a boot drive. There is also a 26-pin header that supports GPIO, I2C, I2S, UART and SPI, along with a 3-pin header for a serial console. The NEO3 runs off 5V/1A over USB Type-C or a GPIO pin and has a 2-pin header for a 5V fan. FriendlyELEC has included power and system LEDs too.
Additionally, the NEO3 has Gigabit Ethernet, a USB 3.0 Type-A port and two USB 2.0 8-pin headers that have a 2.54 mm pitch. FriendlyELEC has published a wiki for the SBC, but the company is yet to announce pricing or availability. CNX Software posits that the unit will cost around US$18-US$19 for the 1 GB model and an additional US$4 for the 2 GB model. The website also expects the NEO3 to support Debian 10 Buster with Linux 5.4.xx, FriendlyWrt (OpenWrt), FriendlyCore (Ubuntu 18.04 Core) and Armbian-built Ubuntu 20.04 Focal.
Following hot on the heels of my Pinebook Pro review come my impressions of the PinePhone: Community Edition (CE); a phone made by the same company, Pine64. This particular edition of the PinePhone is an updated version of their 1.1 Braveheart Edition phone, while still carrying the same $150 price tag.
Why did I decide to buy this even though I’ve already got one? Well, this new CE PinePhone has some enhancements to the printed circuit board (PCB). I wanted to see if, after buying this, I can use it as my day-to-day driver.
I ordered both the PBP and the PinePhone on the same day. Both devices suffered from delivery delay due to the COVID-19 crisis, so I upgraded my PinePhone shipping from Ascendia to DHL. I then got the phone in the mail a week after my PBP (the PBP already had DHL shipping). In all the shipping costed $30…a bit uglier than I expected, but if anything it’s probably because of the pandemic we’re in.
Before I go on ahead with my review, you may want to first skim through my original Braveheart Edition review from four months ago, as I will be skipping some of the details of the unit I’m reviewing here, since it is almost exactly the same, at least in terms of hardware.
OpenVX is an open, royalty-free API standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications developed by The Khronos Group that also manages the popular OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and OpenCL standards.
After OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4, and good progress on the Vulkan implementation, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has now announced that both Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 Model B SBC’s had achieved OpenVX 1.3 conformance (somehow dated 2020-07-23).
The Raspberry Pi is a super tiny computer that is highly programmable. People have used these to program everything from smart mirrors, to portable arcades, to COVID-19 case counters, and even super smart, super techie greenhouses. They are tiny boxes that — if you know how to code — can do pretty much anything.
For my build, I used the $50 HQ Camera Mod, a Raspberry Pi 4 computer, a USB-C portable 10,000mAh charger, a 3.5-inch touchscreen, jumper wires, a mini push button switch, the body of a Ninoka NK-700 35mm camera, and two vintage C-mount lenses.
So what is an open source project anyway? It seems like the answer should be easy. “It's openly available code,” right? Well, not necessarily. It all depends on how the project is licensed. A license tells other people what they can and cannot do with a project. A project like Unity is openly available but its license states it’s only available for reference, not for modification or redistribution. Other projects are openly available but have no license at all. According to copyright law, this means the project is automatically all rights reserved, meaning it’s illegal to do anything at all with the project without the author’s express permission.
Neither of these examples are open source projects, because neither of them are licensed in a way that’s in accordance with the Open Source Definition (OSD). This is a set of 10 requirements that a project must meet to be considered “open source.” If a project doesn’t meet each one of those 10 requirements, it violates the OSD and, by definition, is not an open source project.
The easiest way to make sure a project is actually open source is to look at the license under which it’s released. If it’s an Open Source Initiative-approved license, then you're guaranteed that the project meets all 10 of the requirements of the OSD and is definitely an open source project. That’s because the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the standards body that maintains and protects the OSD, has reviewed those licenses and confirmed that any project that uses one of them will provide the 10 requirements of the OSD. Projects that use a different non-approved license or no license at all cannot be guaranteed to be open source and may be risky or even illegal to use. Some popular OSI-approved licenses include GNU General Public License GPL, Apache License 2.0, MIT license, and the suite of Creative Commons licenses.
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Some people contribute because they believe in the Four Freedoms and the power that these freedoms have to foster equality and equity for all people. Whatever reasons you have for wanting to contribute, always remember that’s exactly what those reasons are: yours. No one else will have the same needs, goals, or constraints. Your reasons are unique and personal.
Mozilla today launched Firefox 78 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Firefox 78 includes accessibility features and video call improvements and is the last to support three older macOS releases. You can download Firefox 78 for desktop now from Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 250 million active users, making it a major platform for web developers to consider.
While Google and Microsoft had to adjust their respective browser release schedules due to the coronavirus pandemic, in April Mozilla committed to sticking with its 2020 Firefox release schedule and the browser’s four-week release cadence. While the schedule remains unchanged, Mozilla shifted its roadmap to avoid shipping changes that might negatively impact government and health services websites and to address video conferencing issues.
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“While Apple does not have a public policy governing security updates for older macOS releases, their ongoing practice has been to support the most recent three releases,” Mozilla says in a support article. “The last security update applicable to macOS 10.11 was made available in July 2018. Unsupported operating systems do not receive security updates, have known exploits, and can be dangerous to use, which makes it difficult to maintain Firefox on those versions.”
Mozilla has released Firefox 78 with a new Protections Dashboard and a bunch of updates for web developers. This is also the last supported version of Firefox for macOS El Capitan (10.11) and earlier.
Firefox is on a "rapid release plan", which means a new version every four to five weeks. This means that major new features should not be expected every time. That said, Firefox 78 is also an extended support release (ESR), which means users who stick with ESR get updates from this and the previous 10 releases.
The main new user-facing feature in Firefox 78 is the Protections Dashboard, a screen which shows trackers and scripts blocked, a link to the settings, a link to Firefox Monitor for checking your email address against known data breaches, and a button for password management.
Handy, but does the Protections Dashboard have much real value? It is doubtful; the more revealing thing is to click the shield icon to the left of the address bar on a web page, which tells you what is blocked on that site.
Mozilla Firefox 78 was released a few days ago with some new features and improvements.
Firefox 78 added “Refresh Firefox” button to the Uninstaller, which also available in about:support page, allows to reset Firefox to its default state, while saving your essential information like bookmarks, passwords, cookies.
Here I am again sharing with you the amazing experience of another All Hands.
This time no traveling was involved, and every meeting, coffee, and chat were left online.
Virtuality seems the focus of this 2020 and if on one side we strongly missed the possibility of being together with colleagues and contributors, on the other hand, we were grateful for the possibility of being able to connect.
Virtual All Hands has been running for a week, from the 15th of June to the 18th, and has been full of events and meetups.
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Thank you for your participation and your enthusiasm as always, we are missing live interaction but we have the opportunity to use some great tools as well. We are happy that so many people could enjoy those opportunities and created such a nice environment during the few days of the All Hands.
See you really soon!
As part of Mozilla’s ongoing commitment to improve the privacy and security of the web platform, over the next few months we will be making some changes to how the Gamepad_API works.
LibreOffice 7.0 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early August 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here.
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.0 on Monday July 6, 2020. Tests will be performed on the first Release Candidate version, which will be available on the pre-releases server the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows.
After getting simulated animation effects somewhat a presentable state in week 3 on my experimental branch, this week my goal was to make them saveable.
Since I wanted them to be saveable on SMIL hierarchies, like the rest of the animations, I’ve started by creating new xml tokens that’ll be used and named them “motion-simulated” and “animateSimulation”.
Made required connections for importing/exporting these animation effects mimicking how path motion is imported/exported.
Later created a new animation preset on Effects.xcu for testing purposes and called it arbitarily “Simulated Basic”. And lastly, connected stuff with animation effects panel creating a new category there for simulated animations.
In this LibreOffice tip, you’ll learn to create the famous Pareto chart in Calc.
June was an exciting month for WordPress! Major changes are coming to the Gutenberg plugin, and WordCamp Europe brought the WordPress community closer together. Read on to learn more and to get all the latest updates.
On your computer, with GIMP you can emphasize pictures in colorful ways. You can make red rectangle or ellipse to focus your readers to a point in a picture. Of course you can use blue, green, orange, and other colors too. It is easy to do once you know how. I present you here a new video again followed by short explanations, an example, and exercises. Lastly, don't forget that this tutorial is a part of GIMP Guide for Author. Happy editing!
Last month you may recall that the free software purists maintaining the GNU Linux-Libre kernel dropped the Intel "iGPU Leak" security fix for Ivybridge / Haswell as they considered the compiled shaders/kernels responsible for clearing those residual contexts to be binary blobs. A resolution is now pending for upstream.
Mitigating "iGPU Leak" for Gen7/Gen7.5 Intel graphics requires flushing the GPU between jobs by means of clearing EU/L3 residual contexts. That flushing code is compiled via the IGT user-space Intel compiler code and from the kernel side submitted to the hardware when needed. But because the GNU Linux-Libre maintainers viewed it as a "binary blobs as arrays of numbers", they dropped the fix.
if you have a USB wifi device which uses the ath9k or ath9k_htc kernel module, you should postpone upgrading to linux-libre 5.7.6; or the device may not work when you next reboot - PCI devices do not seem to be affected by this bug
Software deployment tools like Guix are in a key position when it comes to securing the “software supply chain”—taking source code fresh from repositories and providing users with ready-to-use binaries. We have been paying attention to several aspects of this problem in Guix: authentication of pre-built binaries, reproducible builds, bootstrapping, and security updates.
A couple of weeks ago, we addressed the elephant in the room: authentication of Guix code itself by guix pull, the tool that updates Guix and its package collection. This article looks at what we set out to address, how we achieved it, and how it compares to existing work in this area.
Looking for the best programming fonts? Well, your search ends here as this list of top 10 programming fonts will get you introduced to some of the best available fonts for programming. Just follow this post to know more!
I use tmux, a terminal multiplexer technology, to manage my terminal experience.
At the bottom of the image above, you can see my green tmux bar. The [3] at the bottom indicates this terminal is the third one: each terminal runs its own tmux session. (I created a new one to make the font larger, so it's easier to see in this screenshot; this is the only difference between this terminal and my real ones.)
The prompt also looks funny, right? With so much information jammed into the prompt, I like to stick in a newline so that if I want to do impromptu shell programming or write a five-step pipeline, I can do it without having things spill over. The trade-off is that simple sequences of commands—touch this, copy that, move this—scroll off my screen faster.
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The first bit in the prompt is the bit I like the most: one letter that lets me know the Git status of the directory. It is G if the directory is "(not in) Git," K if the directory is "OK" and nothing needs to be done, ! if there are files unknown to Git that must be added or ignored, C if I need to commit, U if there is no upstream, and P if an upstream exists, but I have not pushed. This scheme is not based on the current status but describes the next action I need to do. (To review Git terminology, give this article a read.)
This terminal functionality is accomplished with an interesting Python utility. It runs python -m howsit (after I installed howsit in a dedicated virtual environment).
As we were converting our Shell scripts to Python anyway I thought I could rewrite it in Python and go over the file once instead of 20 times and use the Regex engine of Python to extract the same information.
The Python version should be faster as we all know file I/O is way more expensive than in-memory operations.
After starting conversion it turned out to be incorrect. Our code became way slower. Let's see a simulation of it.
The regex engine in Perl is much faster than the regex engine of Python.
The are both slower than grep as measured when I compares Python with grep.
Why would you want this? Only as an option of last resort. A backdoor into your servers when, for whatever reason, nothing else works.
Why use certificates instead of public/private keys for emergency access?
Passive revocation. Certificates expire; public keys don't. You can mint an SSH certificate valid for 1 minute, or even 5 seconds. Once it expires, the certificate will become unusable for new connections. This is perfect for occasional emergency access.
You'll be able to create a certificate for any account on your hosts and send short-lived certificates to colleagues as needed.
Cartesi, the most recent Binance Launchpad IEO announced the launch of their Descartes SDK Documentation portal. The SDK Portal represents a leap forward for the Cartesi team in fulfilling their ambition in bridging the world of Linux open-sourced software, with the inherent security benefits of blockchain technology.
The Cartesi Foundation today announced the launch of the Decartes software development kit and developer portal to enable developers to build distributed ledger blockchain apps using the Linux operating system.
The SDK, which is currently an alpha test version, will allow developers to use mainstream software and libraries to develop distributed apps, or dapps, more easily while also keeping the security and capabilities of the blockchain.
Cartesi, an innovator in the blockchain space, today announces the publishing of the alpha version of its Descartes Software Development Kit (SDK) and developer portal in line with its roadmap.
Erick Demoura, CEO & Co-Founder of Cartesi said, "With this SDK release, we prove our continued commitment to making DApps powerful and easy to build. The SDK launch will allow developers who are already in the blockchain space to perform heavy computations and to get the convenience and the tools they were lacking before. Our vision is to make it possible, in the future, for any developer to build on top of Cartesi, to remove the boundaries and to make broad adoption of DApps a reality."
If you have multiple PHP web sites on a server in a default configuration they will all be able to read each other’s files in a default configuration. If you have multiple PHP web sites that have stored data or passwords for databases in configuration files then there are significant problems if they aren’t all trusted. Even if the sites are all trusted (IE the same person configures them all) if there is a security problem in one site it’s ideal to prevent that being used to immediately attack all sites.
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The Apache PHP module depends on mpm_prefork so it also has the issues of not working with HTTP/2 and of causing the web server to be slow. The solution is php-fpm, a separate server for running PHP code that uses the fastcgi protocol to talk to Apache. Here’s a link to the upstream documentation for php-fpm [4]. In Debian this is in the php7.3-fpm package.
I was wondering: What happens if I have a Haskell module with Template Haskell that embeds some information from the environment (time, environment variables). Will such a module be reliable recompiled? And what if it gets recompiled, but the source code produced by Template Haskell is actually unchaned (e.g., because the environment variable has not changed), will all depending modules be recompiled (which would be bad)?
At the recent Conference in the Cloud for Perl and Raku, Sawyer X (the pumpking of Perl) announced an ambitious plan for Perl 7. Since Perl 6 was renamed to Raku to better communicate its fundamental differences from the well known identity of Perl, major versions are now available again for Perl to leverage, and it is a very important step to show that the language is still developed and used. I completely agree with the motivation and ideals presented, and have thought a lot about the benefits and risks involved in such ideas long before I was aware of this project.
I do not generally work with ancient code that uses ancient practices. I work with CPAN modules that maintain compatibility with wider or narrower ranges of Perl versions for various reasons. I work with modern code for my own and business use that already will not function on older Perls. I work with newcomers that have written code based on modern Perl tutorials, and newcomers that have written code based on ancient Perl tutorials. It's from this perspective that I evaluate the proposed direction, the stated goal of which is to optimize for new users and active maintainers over abandoned code.
If you are an Emacs user, you might know or even use cperl-mode. I am using it, more or less since my first days with Perl. Back then, newsgroups were a thing, and Ilya Zakharevich recommended it occasionally. In older times cperl-mode was shipped with Perl, today it is part of Emacs.
I feel that in the upcoming version of Perl, the core team fixes the Unicode bug as a reason to break backward compatibility Perl 5.
Unicode in Perl internally has some inconsistencies due to conflicts between latin-1 and UTF-8.
this is true.
On the other hand, from the user's point of view, a Perl string works perfectly fine if you only accept it can't tell whether it's a decoded string or a bytes.
We are solving this problem by convention.
COVID-19 seems to be still haunting us but life is getting back to normal slowly. I had the pleasure to attend the first "Conference in the Cloud". It was 3 days event. I booked 3 days off from the work so that I can focus on the event without any interruptions. It was my first experience attending event in the cloud. I found it hard to focus on the talk in general.
Could it be as I was at home with kids running around?
The day one itself started on a very happy note with the announcement of "Perl 7" by Sawyer X. The entire day one was dedicated to this very topic. brian d foy even had his first book "Preparing for Perl 7" launched with the announcement. Thanks to the author brian d foy, I had the pleasure to read the first copy of the book. I simply loved it. The best introductory book on Perl 7 so far. Please go and check out yourself.
I have been attending Perl conference for many years now but never had the opportunity to meet Damian Conway. The "Conference in the Cloud" made it possible to watch him live for the first time. As expected, I loved his talk, although it was recorded.
When we’re doing data analysis with Python, we might sometimes want to add a column to a pandas DataFrame based on the values in other columns of the DataFrame.
Although this sounds straightforward, it can get a bit complicated if we try to do it using an if-else conditional. Thankfully, there’s a simple, great way to do this using numpy!
To learn how to use it, let’s look at a specific data analysis question. We’ve got a dataset of more than 4,000 Dataquest tweets. Do tweets with attached images get more likes and retweets? Let’s do some analysis to find out!
If you finished the first part of this series, then you may already have a lot of ideas for your own Django applications. At some point, you might decide to extend them with user accounts. In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to work with Django user management and add it to your program.
Today we've issued 3.0.8 and 2.2.14 bugfix releases.
The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index.
If you prefer to read rather than watch, then you should check out Python 101 – Learning About Tuples
A major improvement has landed which reduces memory usage on the server by between 30% and 40% and increases its speed by around 15%.
For the past 3 years, the PSF has been working on grant funded projects to improve our internal systems and platforms. This work has been done with the Packaging Working Group, and focused on our packaging ecosystem of PyPI and pip. We have been able to show that applying directed funding to open source projects has the ability to dramatically increase the speed of development, and move our community forward in a much more sustained way than relying solely on volunteer effort.
[...]
The PSF has created the Project Funding Working Group to help our community seek similar funding for their own projects. We hope to expand the amount of money going into the Python community as a whole, by providing resources and advice to projects who are interested in seeking funding from external sources.
Our charter starts with our intended purpose:
This Working Group researches, and advises Python community volunteers on applying for external grants and similar funding to advance the mission of the PSF, which includes, but is not limited to, things such as advancing the Python core, Python-related infrastructure, key Python projects, and Python education and awareness. You can read the entire charter for more information about the vision for the group that we intend to build over the medium and long term.
This blog post is the second of two covering some practical tips and tricks to get the most out of the Bash shell. In part one, I covered history, last argument, working with files and directories, reading files, and Bash functions. In this segment, I cover shell variables, find, file descriptors, and remote operations.
The bill of rights is a lengthy, multifaceted, non–legally binding document that seeks to address gender and race bias within the image-taking industry, setting up policy guidelines to address issues of pay, safety, accountability and documenting abuse in the world of lens-based media workers (photographers, videographers, visual editors, etc.).
In the wake of protests that swept the United States after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, teachers, unions, and activist groups across the United States have renewed pushes to remove police from school districts.
Several school boards voted or are in the process of voting on resolutions that would defund school police forces
Ivanka Brutus, a fifth-grade student in a Black and low-income county in Miami, Fla., struggled to complete her coursework when school moved online. Her Internet connection is extremely spotty—the beginning of Tropical Storm Arthur brought flood levels to the county that haven’t been seen in 20 years. And as hurricane season continues, it’s only expected to get worse. “I have experienced many tough things while learning online,” Brutus told The Nation. “I still don’t have access to my own computer, and our power can cut off at any time.”
"Voters are tired of politicians ignoring the problem or worse, trying to take their healthcare away, and they're rejecting that approach in even the deepest of red states."
“WE WON,” read the heading on the e-mail from Women with a Vision, a queer Black women’s group based in Louisiana. “We Won!” cheered the New Orleans Abortion Fund. All day long, triumphant messages flitted across my screen—from the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Vote ProChoice, Vote Mama, and many more. “We Are Shook,” was the headline from Rewire, the online reproductive justice news service. “SCOTUS just protected abortion access.”
After at least three complaints alleging lax reopening practices at West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice’s luxury resort hotel, a kitchen employee has tested positive for the coronavirus at a residential and sports club affiliated with The Greenbrier.
Local Health Department officials directed a 14-day quarantine for potentially exposed employees at The Lodge, a restaurant at the Greenbrier Sporting Club, and the venue will remain closed until July 10. Festivities planned at the club for July 4 will go on, but with food from other facilities.
At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday, the medical staff ran out of both space for new coronavirus patients and a key drug needed to treat them. With no open beds at the public hospital, a dozen COVID-19 patients who were in need of intensive care were stuck in the emergency room, awaiting transfers to other Houston area hospitals, according to a note sent to the staff and shared with reporters.
A day later, the top physician executive at the Houston Methodist hospital system wrote to staff members warning that its coronavirus caseload was surging: “It has become necessary to consider delaying more surgical services to create further capacity for COVID-19 patients,” Dr. Robert Phillips said in the note, an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments.
More than a month ago, on May 26, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had overcome its first wave of coronavirus infections. That was more than four weeks ahead of the start of nationwide voting on constitutional amendments and the “zeroing out” of the president’s own term clock (potentially allowing him to serve in office until 2036). In the time remaining before the plebiscite, regions across the country reported uniform declines in the number of new COVID-19 cases (or at least stabilized infection rates), while simultaneously lifting containment measures. Despite considerable evidence from overcrowded hospitals, the country seems to have forgotten the pandemic. Meduza special correspondent Liliya Yapparova spoke to doctors, patients, and scholars in Russia’s Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Sverdlovsk region, and St. Petersburg (which currently lead the nation in new cases) and found out how the disease is still spreading and where it would be the worst, if statistics were reported honestly.€
COVID-19 cases were climbing at Michigan’s McLaren Flint hospital. So Roger Liddell, 64, who procured supplies for the hospital, asked for an N95 respirator for his own protection, since his work brought him into the same room as COVID-positive patients.
Mabel Garcia had just said good morning to her grandson, who slept overnight in a chair near her hospital bed. Then suddenly, she stopped talking.
The right side of her face sank and her eyes fluttered as nurses at Memorial Hospital of Texas County in Guymon, Oklahoma, surrounded her bed. Her mouth gaped open.
If there’s one thing about the COVID-19 pandemic that’s been depressing to behold (other than the mass death, the lockdowns, and the utter failure of US national leadership to coordinate a policy to slow the spread of the disease), it’s the way that the pandemic has revealed just how polarized public health policy has become. (Also, it depresses me how prone to pseudoscience physicians like Dr. Cammy Benton, whom we will meet shortly, are.) The specific example I have in mind is the increasingly angry—and sometimes even violent—resistance to the requirement to do something as benign as wearing a mask in public in order to slow the spread of coronavirus. I realize that, in a way, this is not new. There was, for example, an actual “Anti-Mask League” formed in 1919 during the great influenza pandemic; so one could view history as repeating itself. However, thanks to social media and people of a certain political persuasion having decided that wearing a mask is more about “control” than public health and that the refusal to wear one brands them as a “free-thinking rebel,” resistance to masks among a small but unfortunately not insignificant minority of Americans has reached truly irrational and potentially violent levels. You don’t have to go too far to see videos of people angrily ranting and refusing to wear a mask, badgering and threatening underpaid workers at grocery stores and restaurants who try to enforce masking policies by politely asking them just to wear a mask.
From tomorrow, Dutch supermarkets will also no longer be allowed to display any tobacco products including cigarettes, rolling tobacco, cigars and e-cigarettes. This same ban will apply to other stores from January 1.
As the United States experiences the world’s worst outbreak of COVID-19, we speak with Ed Yong, science writer for The Atlantic, who warned of the country’s unpreparedness for a viral outbreak in 2018. Now he says “it’s truly shocking and disgraceful” how badly the pandemic has been handled in the United States, and blames a lack of federal leadership for most of the damage. “A country with the resources that we have should not be in this state,” he argues, and adds that Medicare for All could have saved lives.
"A mask is not a symbol," he said. "It's just a device that is going to help protect your community and your neighbors from the spread of a virus."
lthough respiratory distress is the predominant complication of COVID-19, there are also rare, yet serious, neurological ailments that may arise. A survey of UK hospitals found that some patients also experience strokes, dementia-like symptoms, and delirium. The findings were published on June 25 in The Lancet Psychiatry.
My wife and I recently stared rewatching ‘Smallville,’ the WB show about Superman’s young adulthood. She was a fan of the series when it was on the air and introduced it to me a few years ago. ‘Smallville’ is far from prestige television, but I kind of love it. In these dark times, the show is an optimistic, wholesome distraction.
Senator's condemnation came in response to an investigation into the handling of over 4,100 OSHA complaints from frontline workers.
"We are constantly at risk of new emergence of zoonotic pathogens and that farmed animals, with which humans have greater contact than with wildlife, may act as the source for important pandemic viruses."
CDC principal deputy director Dr. Anne Schuchat said we're "not even beginning to be over this."
Severe flooding in the northeast Indian state of Assam has submerged cropland and villages, pushing at least 27,000 people into relief camps.
Days of heavy rainfall over the past week caused riverbanks to burst. State authorities say the floods have affected at least 1.3 million people in 25 of Assam’s 33 districts, with more rain predicted in the coming days.
The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the disaster’s impacts on a population that was already struggling with lost jobs and livelihoods amid COVID-19 lockdowns.
The globalisation of vulnerability – made clear by the coronavirus pandemic and a global anti-racism movement – is putting into question traditional conceptions of humanitarian aid.
We are pleased to announce that the Call for Proposals for the Networking and BPF Summit at Linux Plumbers Conference 2020 is now open.
Thank you to everyone who attended the Linux Plumbers town hall on June 25th. It was successful thanks to your participation. We’re pleased to announce another town hall on July 16th at 8am PST / 11am EST / 3pm GMT. This town hall will feature Jon Corbet of LWN giving “The Kernel Weather Report”. This talk will focus on the current state of the kernel community and what is to come.
DevOps in the cloud has broken traditional procurement, which is now outsourced to engineers. Engineers spend company money at will and make financial decisions on cloud providers like AWS, GCP and Azure at rapid speed with little time to consider cost efficiency. Finance teams struggle to understand what is being spent on the cloud. Leadership doesn’t have enough input into how much will be spent or ability to influence priorities. Enter the concept of FinOps, and the need for a community of practitioners to advance best practices beyond vendor tooling, whose aim is to increase the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new set of processes.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce our intent to host the FinOps Foundation with the Linux Foundation to advance the discipline of Cloud Financial Management through best practices, education and standards. The FinOps Foundation focuses on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards to help the community. It currently includes 1,500 individual members representing more than 500 companies and $1B in revenue. They include Atlassian, Autodesk, Bill.com, HERE Technologies, Just Eat, Nationwide, Neustar, Nike, and Spotify among founding charter members.
Scality announced its founder status and membership of SODA Foundation, an expanded open source community under the Linux Foundation umbrella. As a founding member, Scality joins forces with Fujitsu, IBM, Sony and others to accelerate innovation in meeting the challenges of data management across multiple clouds, edge and core environments for end users.
LFD213, was developed in conjunction with LF Edge, an umbrella organization under The Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. The course is designed for IoT and/or edge software engineers, system administrators, and operation technology technicians that want to assemble an edge solution.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (bind, chromium, freerdp, imagemagick, sqlite, and tomcat8), Debian (coturn, imagemagick, jackson-databind, libmatio, mutt, nss, and wordpress), Fedora (libEMF, lynis, and php-PHPMailer), Red Hat (httpd24-nghttp2), and SUSE (ntp, openconnect, squid, and transfig).
The tool comes in both GNU-licensed and proprietary (Pro) versions. An enhanced “jumbo” community release has also been made available on the open-source GitHub repo. The Pro version, designed for use by professional pen testers, has additional features such as bigger, multilingual wordlists, performance optimizations and 64-bit architecture support.
Some of the key features of the tool include offering multiple modes to speed up password cracking, automatically detecting the hashing algorithm used by the encrypted passwords, and the ease of running and configuring the tool making it a password cracking tool of choice for novices and professionals alike.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In June, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 30h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 5.25h for ELTS (out of 20 max; all done).
While LTS is part of the Debian project, fellow contributors sometimes surprise me: suggestion to vote for sponsors-funded projects with concorcet was only met with overhead concerns, and there were requests for executive / business owner decisions (we're currently heading towards consultative vote); I heard concerns about discussing non-technical issues publicly (IRC team meetings are public though); the private mail infrastructure was moved from self-hosting straight to Google; when some got an issue with Debian Social for our first video conference, there were immediate suggestions to move to Zoom... Well, we do need some people to make those LTS firmware updates in non-free
Brazil's legislature is set to vote on its proposed "fake news" law. This law would criminalize speech the government doesn't like, under the handy theory that anything it doesn't like must be "fake." There was some mobilization on this not-even-legal-yet theory back in 2018, ahead of an election, when the Federal Police announced it would be keeping an eye on the internet during the election process. There are plenty of ways to combat misinformation. Giving this job to people with guns is the worst solution.
As expected, the EARN IT Act is set to be marked up this week, and today (a day before the markup) Senators Graham and Blumenthal announced a "manager's amendment" that basically rewrites the entire bill. It has some resemblance to the original bill, in that this bill will also create a giant "national commission on online child sexual exploitation prevention" to "develop recommended best practices" that various websites can use to "prevent, reduce, and respond to the online sexual exploitation of children," but then has removed the whole "earn it" part of the "EARN IT" Act in that there seems to be no legal consequences for any site not following these "best practices" (yet). In the original bill, not following the best practices would lose sites their Section 230 protections. Now... not following them is just... not following them. The Commission just gets to shout into the wind.
Representative David Cicilline, a Rhode Island Democrat who leads the probe as chairman of the antitrust subcommittee, has said he wants appearances by top tech company executives before wrapping up the probe and recommending changes to antitrust law.
Facebook and Amazon spokespeople declined to comment. A Google spokesman deferred to the committee. Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The company previously said that third-party app developers would be blocked from accessing user data if a person didn’t interact with the developer’s app for 90 days. At that point, the developer would be required to ask users for permission to re-access their data, including information like email addresses, birthdays and hometowns.
That failed to happen in some instances, Facebook said Wednesday in a blog post. If a user of a third party app was also connected to a Facebook friend through that app, developers are allowed to pull data from both users at once. But a flaw in the company’s system meant developers who pulled data from one active user could also see data from that user’s friend, even if the friend had not opened the app in more than 90 days, a spokesperson said. The issue applies to apps from some 5,000 developers, but the company didn’t disclose how many users might be affected.
The business is controversial. Anduril builds surveillance towers and drones, along with software to automatically monitor areas like international borders and the perimeter of military bases. “We founded Anduril because we believe there is value in Silicon Valley technology companies partnering with the Department of Defense,” Brian Schimpf, the chief executive officer of Anduril, said in a statement Wednesday.
But it’s Anduril’s work with other agencies that draws the greatest criticism. The company’s first government contracts were with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where it put up towers along the U.S.-Mexican border. Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of the agency, told Congress in February that immigration authorities planned to have 200 autonomous surveillance towers in place this year.
In addition to controversies surrounding the company allowing President Donald Trump to use its platform to disseminate hate speech — particularly leaving up a post about the George Floyd protests saying "when the looting start, the shooting starts" — the company has also been criticized for allowing hate speech that contributed to a 2017 genocide against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and for the fact that a terrorist used the site to livestream mosque shootings in New Zealand last year. The company has also done little if anything to crack down on misinformation about the George Floyd protests, and has enlisted fringe right-wing news site The Daily Caller as a fact-checking partner; it also lists the right-wing nationalist site Breitbart News as a "trusted" source.
Facebook reached out to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Anti-Defamation League and Color of Change last week to arrange a meeting with Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, a company spokesman said. The civil rights groups said they wanted Zuckerberg to be at the meeting, the spokesman added.
On 28 May 2020, the first Chinese Civil Code (CCC) was adopted. It will come into effect on 1 January 2021.
Chapter 6 (Privacy and Protection of Personal Information) of Part 4 (Personality Rights) of the CCC emphasises ‘privacy and personal data’ in particular and provides several principles and data rights for personal data collection and processing.
Combined with relevant legislation, regulations and standards, such as the cybersecurity law, the consumer protection law, the ninth amendment to the criminal law and the personal information standard, the protection of privacy rights and personal information is further strengthened in China. This marks overall improvement of the legal status of personal data protection in this country.
We need to end systemic racism and the militarism that makes it even deadlier—from Kabul to Atlanta and Baghdad to Minneapolis.
In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington has initiated its largest spending binge in history. In the process, you might assume that the unparalleled spread of the disease would have led to a little rethinking when it came to all the trillions of dollars Congress has given the Pentagon in these years that have in no way made us safer from, or prepared us better to respond to, this predictable threat to American national security. As it happens, though, even if the rest of us remain in danger from the coronavirus, Congress has done a remarkably good job of vaccinating the Department of Defense and the weapons makers that rely on it financially.
My grandmother passed away on Tuesday, June 16. She was 103 years old. One of my poems, “This Is Why We Dance,” begins with “Home, in my memory, is a green, worn-out couch / And my grandmother in every poem.”
Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola welcome Vincent Bevins, the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, to discuss his book.
He was the Brazil correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the southeast Asia correspondent for the Washington Post.
In her recently published memoir, Circle in the Darkness, the author and journalist Diana Johnstone recalls that only “a few decades ago, “the Left” was considered the center of opposition to imperialism, and champion of the right of peoples to self-determination.”
More than a half-century ago, exactly one year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. brilliantly identified the keys to the American political, economic, and social crisis that has worsened over the years.€ At the Riverside Church in New York City, King linked the militarism of the Vietnam War; the racism of American society; and the inequality and materialism of the American economy to demand a movement toward social justice that we seek today.€ The central civil rights leaders of the time, including Ralph Bunch, asked King to radically alter the speech and to dissociate racism from the Vietnam War.€ The central newspapers of the time, including the€ New York Times€ and the€ Washington Post, maligned the speech, terming it an “oversimplification” that would hurt both the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. Fifty-three years later, we are still trying to solve the ills of racism, militarism, and materialism that beg for social justice.
"National security," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, "means doing everything we can to improve the lives of our people, many of whom have been abandoned by our government decade after decade."
Khanna and Lee have a tremendous—indeed, historic—opportunity.
UN aid to Syria’s rebel-held northwest will come to a halt this month if Russia does not agree to a deal in the Security Council, potentially putting healthcare, food, and rudimentary shelter for millions of people in jeopardy.
After more than nine years of war, the government of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, controls most of Syria, except Idlib province and surrounding parts of the northwest, and the mostly Kurdish-controlled northeast.
Damascus has a history of blocking aid within Syria to the northwest and other parts of the country it says are controlled by “terrorists.” The UN estimates that some four million people live in the Idlib province and other opposition-held parts of northwestern Syria. Seventy percent of them are in need of some sort of assistance, including many displaced people who were forced to flee a recent government offensive and are now facing rising rates of hunger.
An Alaskan volcano once spurred climate change, darkening Mediterranean skies, launching a famine and possibly changing history.
This story is being co-published by The Guardian, The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 400 news outlets committed to transforming news coverage of the defining story of our time.
“I started looking online for other solutions and I found you can buy sensor equipment for about €60,” he says. Cavkovski and colleagues ordered around 50 sensors and distributed them to colleagues. The devices need to be placed outside, such as on a balcony, fixed to a wall and away from direct sunlight, rain and other sources of contamination, such as chimneys. They also can’t be higher than four storeys up if they’re to get an accurate indication of ground-level pollution.
Cavkovski created an app, PulseEco, collating all the readings, and made the data open source so that it shows on AirCare too. Cavkovski also published guidelines for how people can order and construct sensors themselves and how other cities can join the network.
However, the sensors are controversial because they don’t meet the European Air Quality Index’s (EAQI) measurement standards and give lower quality data. As a result, politicians in the country have spoken out against their use. “I do appreciate what civil society’s doing, because if they’re not making noise no one will be aware,” says Olivera Kujundzic, who is head of air quality at Montenegro’s environment agency and co-author of several studies for the EU and UN Development Programme into Macedonia’s air pollution. But she worries that DIY solutions may damage public trust in science and expertise. “We need to adhere to standards.”
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), joined by members of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, delivers remarks during a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on June 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. Pelosi joined her colleagues to unveil the Climate Crisis action plan, which calls for government mandates, tax incentives and new infrastructure to bring the U.S. economy's greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050.
As soon as weather permits following major natural disasters, the National Geodetic Survey begins aerial survey missions to assess damages to affected areas. Typical weather-related events include hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. NGS responds to other events, such as oil spills, as well. Directly georeferenced-imagery data are collected, rapidly processed, and made available via open-source Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These data and images provide emergency and coastal managers with information needed to develop recovery strategies, facilitate search and rescue efforts, identify hazards to navigation and HAZMAT spills, locate errant vessels, and provide documentation necessary for damage assessment through the comparison of before-and-after imagery. Images are also available to view and download by the general public as a tool to assess impacts to their homes and community.
On Monday, June 22, as Black Lives Matter protests continued nationwide, members of Philly Thrive, a local grassroots group, arrived outside the perimeter of the refinery complex in South Philadelphia.€ They posted “in memorium” placards bearing the names of deceased Philadelphians along the facility’s chainlink borders, handwritten fenceline memorials for departed members of the refinery's fenceline community. Speakers that day recalled less the fiery explosion that tore through the plant one year earlier and more the long-term harms caused by decades of fossil fuel production in the majority Black€ neighborhood.
The ad, which premiered on June 6th and is intended for both TV and the web, features scenes of traffic jams, vehicle crashes, and tailpipe pollution reflected on the surface of a sports car that eventually begins to melt, giving way to VanMoof’s new S3 e-bike. “The alternative to gridlocked freeways and overflowing subways,” the text reads. “Time to ride the future.”
It asked the company to modify the ad, but Djalo said: "We don't want to distort our video and water it down just to make the French auto industry happy."
But the industry failed to turn its vast new reservoirs of American oil and gas into profits. Chesapeake only saw prices fall as the industry grew. Its bankruptcy filings listed assets of $16.2 billion, and liabilities of $11.8 billion.
The winnowing of weaker players is intensifying. After averaging more than 30 bankruptcies per year since 2015, the number of US shale defaults is likely to roughly double in 2020, reports Deloitte. Oil demand has cratered with no signs of a quick return. Telecommuting and reduced international trade and travel have slashed millions of barrels from global consumption. Electric cars and renewable energy are offering a credible, competitive alternative to fossil fuels.
The remaining shale oil companies are hoarding cash to stay alive. With production expected to fall from 13 million of barrels per day to 10 million by year’s end, investment in new capacity has fallen by half.
A solar power company on June 23 began installing a 99MW photovoltaic (PV) solar power station in Jiadong Township, an area of Pingtung County severely affected by subsidence, after two years of negotiations with more than 1,000 landowners.
Speaking at the groundbreaking ceremony, Ysolar Co. (åŠâºÃ¦Å¡ËèƽæºÂÃ¥â¦Â¬Ã¥Â¸) President Huang Zhi-wen (é»Æå¿âæââ¡) said that the biggest challenge facing the development of solar energy is obtaining approval from landowners, CNA reported. He added that the company offered 20-year leases and NT$400,000 (US$13,333) for every 0.96992 hectare of land.
After two years of effort, more than 242.5 hectares of land have been leased to the solar energy company, the report said.
Land clearing for agriculture, urban development, mining and forestry had been the biggest factor in the fragmentation and loss of habitat for the animals in NSW, the country's most populous state, over several decades.
A prolonged drought-fuelled bush fire season that ended earlier this year was also devastating for the animals, destroying about a quarter of their habitat across the state, and in some parts by up to 81 per cent.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 has many thinking that a new economic and political order is inevitably under way. But is that so? In the U.S., the moneyed class, which has thrived under Donald Trump, won’t go down without pulling all stops to make sure that popular pressures for radical reforms will be blocked, says world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky. Chomsky also reminds us that overt racism has intensified under Trump, and that police violence is a symptom of the underlying white supremacy that plagues U.S. society. Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-environmental policies and his trashing of arms control treaties are bringing the world ever closer to an environmental and nuclear holocaust.
The past month’s activism has changed a great deal. One thing it’s helped with is brushing aside the tired old argument over whether government should be big or small. In its place we have the much more useful argument over whether government should prioritize force and punishment, or focus on services and assistance.
In a rare display of bipartisanship in an era of political division, Republicans and Democrats across Ohio are pressuring General Motors to repay millions of dollars in public subsidies after the company reneged on a promise to keep its sprawling Lordstown plant open.
Among the latest to join the chorus is Ohio Attorney General David Yost, a Republican, who in an unusual move Tuesday filed a blistering 63-page brief before state tax regulators demanding they seek full restitution of more than $60 million in tax credits the automaker received between 2009 and 2016.
At least four people were arrested in St. Petersburg during a “Stop the Amendments” rally against changes to the Russian constitution, reports OVD-Info. More than 100 people reportedly attended the protest.
The website where Russia’s Central Election Commission publishes official data on elections and referendums, vybory.izbircom.ru, has disabled automatic downloads of the constitutional plebiscite results. The site now includes a captcha test, to determine whether or not the user is a human, reports Grigory Melkonyants, the co-chair of the voter protection movement “Golos.”
David Frenkel, a correspondent for the outlet Mediazona (which covers Russia’s justice system), visited a polling station in St. Petersburg on June 30, in order to confirm the fact that the precinct had tried to expel a voting member of the electoral commission. When the site commissioner asked the police to remove Frenkel for supposedly “impeding” the commission’s work, two officers shoved him to the ground and pinned him against a doorway, breaking his arm. Thankfully, there is video footage of the event clearly showing that Frenkel doing nothing to provoke the officers. He was later hospitalized and treated in a four-hour operation on his arm.
July 1 marks the final day of voting in Russia’s nationwide plebiscite on constitutional amendments, which includes reforms that could keep Vladimir Putin in the presidency until 2036. After the first six days of early voting, turnout had already exceeded the Kremlin’s reported goal of 55 percent. To achieve this benchmark, teachers and doctors, along with subway and construction workers, and the employees of major enterprises close to the state, were forced to cast their ballots during the early voting period. Meduza shares a roundup of a number of these cases.
As a Labour party member, it is unavoidable that I should have an opinion on the party leader Keir Starmer’s sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey.
The Lincoln Project is producing the strangest and most memorable ads in the 2020 election cycle because it has a unique goal: to troll the president. Founded by Republicans who hate the Trumpian takeover of their party, the super PAC has so far been focused on creating ads that don’t really persuade voters, but do rile up Trump and entertain journalists and political insiders. The ads air in Washington, D.C., which is not a locale where you can reach swing voters who could shift the Electoral College. But Washington is the place to run ads if you want to get Trump to see them and get steaming mad.
Only by ousting obstructionists like McConnell and freeing the Senate from Republican control can a progressive vision be achieved.
"These were not races that progressives could afford to sit out, but too many organizations did."
Between 1500 and 1880 ten to eleven million Africans were moved by force and terror into “new worlds.” Sir Philip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett write of the immensity of the “physical suffering, anguish of spirit and unbearable cruelty” of their lot “from the time of … capture” (The€ Story of the Jamaican People [1997, p. 122]). Chained together in the “floating tombs,” Africans were bound for a strange land and doomed to serve a strange owner of another race for life. Gordon Lewis, author of the monumental Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: the historical evolution of Caribbean society in its ideological aspects, 1492-1900 [1983, p. 5], comments: “Caribbean society thus became a society of masters and slaves. It constituted open and systematic exploitation of chattel labour, therefore, based, in the final resort on the psychology of terror.”
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases regarding access to President Donald Trump’s tax filings soon. At the heart of the cases: Can House committees and a New York grand jury subpoena financial institutions for Trump’s personal and business tax filings?
If the Supreme Court rules against Trump, it opens the possibility that the public could eventually see his personal tax return and business records, though experts say it would be unlikely to happen quickly. Here’s why people want to see Trump’s tax returns and what they may reveal about the president.
Russia’s nationwide vote on constitutional amendments continued the country’s experiment with online voting, but only in the Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod regions. This time around, developers changed the voting system so that individual voters are guaranteed the ability to decrypt their own votes. On the one hand, this makes it easier to force people to vote. On the other hand, it could allow for a partial monitoring of the integrity of the vote count.
India’s decision strikes at a number of China’s leading technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. But perhaps none will be more affected than TikTok and its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance, which has built a huge audience in India as part of an aggressive and well-funded expansion around the world. TikTok has been installed more than 610 million times in India, according to estimates by the data firm Sensor Tower. In the United States, the app has been installed 165 million times.
China itself began putting up walls within the global [I]nternet years ago. By blocking Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook, Beijing created a controlled environment in which homegrown upstarts could flourish, and where the Communist Party could keep a tight grip on online conversation.
About 350,000 UK passport holders, and 2.6 million others eligible, will be able to come to the UK for five years.
And after a further year, they will be able to apply for citizenship.
In recent weeks, over 400 companies have pulled advertising from the social media giant. Coca-Cola, Adidas/Reebok, and Hershey’s are among the major brands to suspend Facebook advertising through the month of July, while others have pledged suspensions through the end of the year, or indefinitely. “When we re-engage will depend on Facebook’s response,” Levi Strauss CMO Jen Sey wrote in a blog post announcing the company’s decision to cease advertising. The decision, she wrote, was made out of “concern about Facebook’s failure to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech on its platform.”
Most of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers have not joined the boycott against the social media website and its sibling website Instagram, according to a CNN Business analysis released Wednesday.
Hundreds of companies have pledged to stop advertising on Facebook and Instagram as part of a monthlong boycott to protest how the social media company has handled hate speech and misinformation.
But CNN Business’s analysis based on data from market research firm Pathmatics found that most of Facebook’s top 100 advertisers, including Walmart, American Express and Home Depot, have not joined the boycott set to begin Wednesday.
The data suggest the ongoing boycott may have a limited impact on Facebook's bottom line, at least as it stands right now. Even if all 100 of Facebook's biggest advertisers joined in, they would account for just 6% of the company's annual ad revenue.
Two of Moscow’s districts saw more than 600 ballots invalidated due to irregularities involving at-home voting in Russia’s ongoing plebiscite on constitutional amendments, reports Ilya Massukh, the head of Moscow’s Community Headquarters for Election Monitoring.€
When considering debates about political formulations as nebulous yet as desperately crucial as “the Latinx vote,” it can be vexing to consider those Latinx who vote Republican. In the age of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter protests, and radical right Trumpism, how could they exist? What common ground could Latinx voters possibly find with the Republican Party and its current fusion of fascistic nativism and deadly bottom-line billionaire capitalism? After all, are Latinx not, in the eyes of the Trump faithful, the living embodiment of the dire threat that Samuel P. Huntington saw to “the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers”?
On June 30, Vladimir Putin made his first and only national address exclusively devoted to Russia’s now ongoing plebiscite on constitutional amendments. Unlike in recent marathon speeches about the government’s responses to the coronavirus pandemic, the president spoke for just three minutes this time, never once mentioning the most controversial amendment up for approval: the “zeroing out” of Putin’s presidential term clock, which could theoretically extend his administration to 2036. This comes as little surprise, of course; in the campaign to boost voter turnout, the Russian authorities have totally avoided the subject of prolonging Vladimir Putin’s access to the presidency.€
Roughly 90 percent of all voters registered to cast ballots online in Russia’s plebiscite on constitutional amendments (including reforms that could extend the Putin presidency to 2036) have already voted. As of the morning of June 30, election commissions had already issued more than 1.07 million ballots for remote voting.
Unreliable narrators are a staple of literature. Consider the delusional, self-serving narrator of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or the way Humbert Humbert used his cultured references and gorgeous prose to dress up his crimes in Nabokov’s Lolita.
Online voting in Russia’s plebiscite on amendments to the constitution closed at 8:00 p.m., Moscow time, on June 30. In total, 93.02 percent of all voters registered to cast ballots online had voted by the closing of the online polls: of the 1,107,644 ballots issued for remote voting, 1,090,185 votes were received.
Nearly all of the reports of electoral violations collected by the voter protection movement “Golos” during the plebiscite on constitutional amendments are false, says Alexander Brod, a member of Russia’s Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights and co-chair of the association “Civil Control.”
Over the last few weeks Parler has become the talk of Trumpist land, with promises of a social media site that "supports free speech." The front page of the site insists that its content moderation is based on the standards of the FCC and the Supreme Court of the United States:
One of the most frustrating lines that we hear from people criticizing internet website content moderation is the idea that thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, websites have no incentive to do any moderation. This is a myth that I consider to be the flip side of the claims by aggrieved conservatives insisting that Section 230 requires "no bias" in moderation decisions. The "no incentive" people are (often lawyers) complaining about too little moderation. For reasons I cannot comprehend, they seem to think that the only motivation for doing anything is if the law requires you to do it. We've tried to debunk this notion multiple times, and yet it comes up again and again. Just a couple weeks ago in a panel about Section 230, a former top Hollywood lobbyist trotted it out.
The Russian social network VKontakte has blocked a private community known as “Men’s State” (Muzhskoe Gosudarstvo) for inciting violent acts. According to the website TJournal, the misogynist group had roughly 160,000 members when administrators shut it down. About 4,000 members have since migrated to a reserve community page. Creator Vladislav Pozdnyakov has described the community’s ideology as “national-patriarchy.”€
One of the most worrying trends in today’s online world is a move by governments against “hate speech”. That’s a vague term in itself, so policing it is hard. Making things even worse, recent moves to rein in such hate speech typically involve placing the responsibility with online platforms such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. This effectively outsources censorship to private companies, which makes it much harder to scrutinize what they are doing, and why. Moreover, they will naturally tend to take down material which may or may not be “hate speech”, in order to avoid often major fines that can be imposed if they do not.
The new law is “asserting extraterritorial jurisdiction over every person on the planet,” wrote Donald Clarke, a professor of law at George Washington University. Alarmingly, the law has an even broader reach than mainland Chinese criminal law, which only holds a foreigner liable for a crime committed outside of China if the effect of that crime occurs in China. Hong Kong’s nationals security law has no such limitation, Clarke explained. “If you’ve ever said anything that might offend the [Chinese] or Hong Kong authorities, stay out of Hong Kong.”
The shooting took place around 9:30 pm local time in the city’s Kality area. Addis Ababa Police said a number of suspects have been detained and that an investigation is ongoing. Thousands of outraged fans across the country have taken to the streets demanding justice. In an attempt to quell the riots and prevent news coverage of them, the Ethiopian government has shut down [I]nternet services nationwide.
27 countries joint-statement – delivered by UK Ambassador Joshua Braithwaite at the United Nation Human Rights Council
The Great Firewall prevents users from accessing foreign news sites such as the BBC, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
The leaders of the Moscow Metro’s trade union are allegedly forcing subway workers to vote in Russia’s constitutional plebiscite, reports the BBC Russian Service.€
“Unheard,” a new public photography installation, is being erected Wednesday on the façade of the Anchorage Museum. Co-presented by the Anchorage Museum, Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica, the installation features 27 empowering portraits of survivors of sexual assault from across Alaska, along with quotes from them about their experiences. The portraits and stories were originally published by the Daily News and ProPublica throughout June as part of a joint reporting project of the same name. Occupying 27 nine-foot panels on the museum’s outdoor façade, the photography installation also includes recorded audio from most of the people featured, literally making their voices heard. It will remain on view through mid-September.
For more than a year, the Daily News and ProPublica have investigated sexual violence in Alaska, which has the highest rate of sexual assault in the nation — nearly four times the national average. Yet for some, it is a secret so embedded in everyday life that to discuss it is to disrupt the norm. The survivors featured in “Unheard” chose to speak publicly about their experiences.
Over the past year, the reporting teams at the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica have explored Alaska’s high rate of sexual assault and have worked to bring attention to the survivors who have gone unheard. On Wednesday, we’ll add another medium to the collection: an outdoor installation at the Anchorage Museum.
The installation launches at the close of a monthlong project about 29 survivors who chose to speak about what happened to them. Each day in June, we published a portrait and a story of a survivor of sexual assault on the front page of the paper. All of the participants worked closely with Daily News photographers to create a portrait true to them. (We wrote about that process in this essay.) These individual features culminate Wednesday with a “space of silence” dedicated to those who are not yet ready to share their stories.
Martin Luther King was arrested in April 1963 for publicly protesting, an act deemed illegal in Alabama at the time. While in jail, eight white clergy figures publicly admonished King, judging his actions “unwise and untimely”. It was this which prompted King to respond with his little-shared letter about the “white moderate”, a comment that is most often elided whenever progressive liberals feel the need to throw out some a cute meme on an auspicious “I’m not a Racist” occasion, like MLK Day.
Courts in Las Vegas overturned five drug convictions following reporting by ProPublica that detailed flaws in the field tests that police departments across the country have used for decades to make arrests.
The Clark County District Attorney’s Office only disclosed the 2017 wrongful convictions this year to the National Registry of Exonerations, which added them to its national database. The Las Vegas exonerees were convicted of possessing small amounts of cocaine between 2011 and 2013.
Die Jim Crow Records, the first record label for current and formerly incarcerated musicians, has recorded music in five prisons in Colorado, Ohio, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
The label released their first album on Juneteenth—BL Shirelle’s “Assata Troi”—and now they have released a single, “Domestic Terrorist,” by a musician who is unnamed in order to protect them while they remain incarcerated.
The NYPD has made internal discipline procedures a loop so closed that even its "independent" oversight -- the Civilian Complaint Review Board -- can't get in the door. The NYPD is effectively its own oversight. Decisions made by the CCRB can be overridden by the Police Commissioner. Even if the Commissioner agrees with the findings, recommended punishments can be departed from or ignored completely.
Last week, we wrote about the president's brother, Robert Trump, suing his (and the president's) niece, Mary Trump to try to block her from publishing her new book that criticizes the president. The initial filing to block the publication failed for being in the wrong court, but the follow up attempt has succeeded, at least temporarily. NY Supreme Court (despite the name, this is the equivalent of the district court in NY) Judge Hal Greenwald doesn't seem to have even bothered to do even a cursory 1st Amendment analysis regarding prior restraint, but agreed to rush out a temporary restraining order, while ordering the the parties to brief the matter before July 10th on whether or not the ban should be made permanent.
How sorrow breaks us and rage fuels us.
The passion organizers poured into DACA galvanized me and many others to keep organizing—and to aim for the collective liberation of all.
The ruling reaffirmed "that for the last 244 years we have been, and will continue to be, a country ruled by law, not men," said Human Rights First.
The way Wheeler was holding Smith prohibited him from putting his hands behind his back and caused Smith's wrist to break when he was slammed to the ground, Haugabrook said.
Body camera video shows Antonio Arnelo Smith handing his driver’s license to a Black police officer and answering questions cooperatively before a white officer walks up behind him, wraps him in a bear hug and slams him face-first to the ground.
“Oh my God, you broke my wrist!” the 46-year-old Black man screams as two more white Valdosta officers arrive, holding him down and handcuffing him following the takedown. One eventually tells Smith he’s being arrested on an outstanding warrant, and is immediately corrected by the first officer: They’ve got the wrong man.
As a surge of a progressive candidates of color see victories in Democratic primaries across the country, we speak with former Bronx middle school principal Jamaal Bowman about his upset victory over New York Congressmember Eliot Engel, the 16-term Foreign Affairs Committee chair. Bowman ran on a Green New Deal, Medicare for All platform and recently joined protests demanding an end to racism and police brutality. He says his upset over Engel came down to mobilizing people who are “disenfranchised and ignored” by the political establishment. “We didn’t just target those who consistently vote in primaries. We targeted everyone,” he says. Looking forward, he describes his support for Palestine, a rent strike and police accountability.
This week has not been a good one for the Australian legal system. For those who feel that an open justice process requires abuses of power to be exposed and held to account, it was particularly awful. It began with the Q&A program on the national broadcaster, the ABC, which supposedly gives an airing to the vox populi. The dominant theme of the conversation between the panellists was that of secrecy and the prosecution (read persecution) of lawyer Bernard Collaery and his client, a former intelligence officer known as Witness K.
Our country is experiencing a moment of honest reckoning, one that has been a long time building. To understand the enormity of this moment, one needs only to turn to the American South for the living, breathing memory of the struggle for civil rights.
Members of the Russian art group “Re:vansh” projected an advertisement promoting voting in favor of the amendments to the constitution on the building of the American Embassy in Moscow on the evening of June 29.
Scenes of sorrow spread across the US. Football teams apologize. Cops march with demonstrators. Democratic Party politicians call for “structural change” in police departments.
When Lawrence Bell, an orphan living in an abandoned house in Camden, New Jersey, went to prison he was 14-years-old. Barely literate and weighing no more than 90 pounds, he had been pressured by three Camden police detectives into signing a confession for a murder and rape he insisted at his trial he did not commit, although admitted he was in the car of the man who dragged a young mother into the bushes where she was sexually assaulted and strangled to death. It made no difference. The confession condemned him, although there was no scientific evidence or any independent witnesses tying him to the crime. He would not be eligible to go before a parole board for 56 years. It was a de facto life sentence.
"American taxpayers shouldn't be supporting policies that undermine our values and interests, in Israel, in Palestine, or anywhere."
As the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council continues to take decisive action to protect the Pikunni people from the coronavirus pandemic, another existential threat to the tribe and all of Indian Country will receive international focus this week on ESPN. Blackfeet Boxing: Not Invisible directed by Kristen Lappas and Tom Rinaldi will premiere on the “worldwide leader” this Tuesday at 7.30 pm EST. However, this isn’t a rags to riches “Cinderella Man” story, this is a story where victory is survival.
Filmed at the Blackfeet Nation Boxing Club in Browning, Montana, the 29 minute film follows the club’s owner and trainer, Frankie Kipp, as he uses boxing to empower Blackfeet women and girls in the all-too familiar struggle to avoid being the next MMIWG victim. Kipp’s club members are literally training for the fight of their lives. “If you don’t fight for your life, you won’t have a life,” said Kipp.
Under 7% of Montana’s population is indigenous, but indigenous people comprise approximately 26% of the state’s missing persons. The Urban Indian Health Institute logs Montana as the state with the fifth highest incidence of MMIW cases in the US. Blackfeet Boxing: Not Invisible is framed against the backdrop of one of Indian Country’s highest-profile MMIWG cases, the disappearance of Blackfeet tribal member Ashley Loring Heavy Runner.
#BlackLivesMatter and the COVID-19 pandemic are exposing the hypocrisies and structural problems that have long underpinned international humanitarian action, said activists, aid workers, and analysts during an online conversation recently hosted by The New Humanitarian.
In a departure from the diplomatic parlance that tends to dominate discussions about reform of humanitarian aid, they called for taking a “sledgehammer” to systems that perpetuate inequality, de-funding institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and abandoning the humanitarian principle of neutrality as ways of “decolonising” international aid.
The popularity of access-based consumption has obscured the rise of a range of fragmented ownership configurations in the digital realm. These provide the customer with an illusion of ownership while restricting their ownership rights. Companies such as Microsoft and Apple present consumers with the option to “buy” digital products such as eBooks. Consumers often make the understandable assumption that they will have full ownership rights over the products that they pay for, just as they have full ownership rights over the physical books that they buy from their local bookstore.
However, many of these products are subject to end user licence agreements which set out a more complex distribution of ownership rights. These long legal agreements are rarely read by consumers when it comes to products and services online. And even if they do read them, they are unlikely to fully understand the terms.
When purchasing eBooks, the consumer often actually purchases a non-transferable licence to consume the eBook in restricted ways. For instance, they may not be permitted to pass the eBook on to a friend once they have finished reading, as they might do with a physical book. Also, as we have seen in the case of Microsoft, the company retains the right to revoke access at a later date. These restrictions on consumer ownership are often encoded into digital goods themselves as automated forms of enforcement, meaning that access can be easily withdrawn or modified by the company.
Anti-monopoly enforcement has seen a significant shift since the 1970s. Where the Department of Justice once routinely brought suits against anticompetitive mergers, today, that's extremely rare, even between giant companies in highly concentrated industries. (The strongest remedy against a monopolist—breaking them up altogether—is a relic of the past). Regulators used to go to court to block mergers to prevent companies from growing so large that they could abuse their market power. In place of blocking mergers, today's competition regulators like to add terms and conditions to them, exacting promises from companies to behave themselves after the merger is complete. This safeguard continues to enjoy popularity with competition regulators, despite the fact that companies routinely break their public promises to safeguard users’ privacy and rarely face consequences for doing so. (These two facts may be related!) When they do get sanctioned, the punishment almost never exceeds the profits from the broken promise. "A fine is a price." Today, we'd like to propose a modest, incremental improvement to this underpowered deterrent:
Read on for three significant broken promises we'd be fools to believe again.
The apparent shutdown has not deterred a significant rise in Aggregators and Finance-backed entities along with increasing litigation being filed in the Western District of Texas. This has driven cases in Q2 to the highest since Q4 of 2016. Several NPEs have shown new strategies such as WSOU Investments who has focused on filing a large number of single patent cases against tech companies. It is not surprising though, once one realizes that the CEO was previously heading Uniloc, a well known NPE who was a profligate filer. In addition the PTAB saw a modest increase compared to previous quarters and Unified Patents was the #3 overall.
Highlights:
Litigation reached an all-time high since Q4 of 2016 with 1,069 new patent cases, with 66% of cases being asserted by NPEs.
The Western District of Texas has now become the leading venue for patent litigation, with a 6-time increase in NPE Aggregators and a 7-time increase in finance-backed litigation.
PTAB filings are up 12% from Q1 of 2020, also reaching an all-time high since Q4 of 2018.
NPEs continue to dominate High-Tech patent assertions with 88%; however, NPEs only accounted for 60% of High-Tech AIA challenges, an 8% decrease from Q1 of 2020.
On June 30, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 10,311,073, owned and asserted by MasterObjects, Inc., an NPE. The ‘073 patent is directed to partial search technology, including asynchronous retrieval of information from a database. MasterObjects has filed suit involving the '073 patents and others against several companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and eBay.
ECT sued ShoppersChoice on its US9373261, but the district court (S.D.Fla.) dismissed the case on the pleadings–holding that the claims were ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101.
According to a coalition of prominent copyright industry groups, piracy remains a widespread and serious problem among all African countries. United in the IIPA, they ask the US Government to make trade benefits for sub-Saharan African countries dependent on local copyright laws and the effectiveness of their anti-piracy enforcement.
Police officers from a Cyber and Serious Organised Crime Unit in the UK arrested a 24-year-old man yesterday under suspicion of operating a pirate IPTV service. Users of at least one service are now being presented with an anti-piracy warning delivered by Norfolk and Suffolk Police. The force in question informs TF that the warning is genuine and not part of a hack.
California law says all police training materials must be published "conspicuously" on its Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) website. This is part of the reforms to public records law that finally allowed the public to have access to law enforcement records related to misconduct and use-of-force. This is the law a bunch of cops sued over, as well as a bunch of journalists and activists. The former group is still trying to argue they shouldn't have to fully comply with the law. The latter is arguing cops aren't fully complying with this law.
