Cartesi, an innovator in the blockchain space, today announces the start of the Cartesi DApp Incubation Program. Developers can apply for the program until October 12, 2020.
Erick Demoura, CEO & Co-Founder of Cartesi said, “Cartesi is the only infrastructure that allows developers to use a Linux environment to build DApps. Developers can now conveniently build their DApps outside of the frustratingly restrictive, blockchain development environment. With the Incubation Program we are not only giving developers the opportunity to finally build the DApp of their dreams, but we are also rewarding them handsomely for their achievement.”
Regular contributor Jon Honeyball has fallen for the charms of Linux Mint – and we can understand why – but Mint is far from the only flavour on offer. Each distro has a different style and skillset, with variants to suit every taste.
In this instance, we’re more interested in usability than we are in raw numbers, as this is about the computing experience as much as it’s about what you can do with each OS.
Moreover, we’ve cut each candidate greater slack than we’d usually be prepared to do. We had issues with each distro – without exception – when installing them on our current-specification laptop, spanning wobbly Wi-Fi, touchpads that stopped working, mute speakers and, in some cases, distributions that wouldn’t install at all.
This is by no means an unusual occurrence in the world of Linux, which often works on a system of trial and error. Linux has a reputation as being the sole province of hardcore tech-heads, and while that's not quite true any more, it certainly not for the faint of heart, and we'd advise anyone who's worried about using a command-line interface to turn back now.
The winner, then, isn’t so much the quantifiably “best” open-source operating system on test, but rather the one we’d be most likely to stick with if it was time to wave goodbye to Windows altogether.
Google Summer of Code is a global program that is geared towards introducing students to open source. Students are matched with open-source organizations to work with them for three months during the summer.
My name is Somtochi Onyekwere from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (Nigeria) and this year, I was given the opportunity to work with Kubernetes (under the CNCF organization) and this led to an amazing summer spent learning, contributing and interacting with the community.
Specifically, I worked on the Cluster Addons: Package all the things! project. The project focused on building operators for better management of various cluster addons, extending the tooling for building these operators and making the creation of these operators a smooth process.
In our Innards section, NonFree vs FOSS
And finally, the feedback and a suggestion
So I was searching through the Snap Store for interesting terminal applications. Instead, I kept coming across really lame and corny terminal apps. Some were so lame that I just had to install them and check them out.
For well over a decade now and in fact closer to two decades, NVIDIA generally provides launch day support in their official, proprietary Linux driver. I think there's just been a few times where there has been a few day delay. But thanks to their largely shared driver code-base between Windows and Linux (and BSD), it's generally right on time. Generally speaking the first-cut support is quite good if using this proprietary driver. The performance and features are generally close to on-par with the Windows driver albeit with exceptions from time to time. So as long as you aren't strictly abiding by free software principles and don't oppose to using the binary blob, all should be well for the RTX 3080 beginning to ship this week or in the days ahead.
Fragments is an open-source GTK+ 3 BitTorrent client with a modern and easy to use user interface.
For just over a decade the Lightworks high-end, cross-platform video editing software has been owned by EditShare after it was acquired from Gee Broadcast. Now though LWKS Software Ltd has been established and acquired this video editing software from EditShare.
LWKS Software Ltd is the new owner of Lightworks as a "forward-thinking company dedicated to the content creation industry." EditShare's QScan software was also part of this deal.
One of the defining features of snaps is their strong security. Snaps are designed to run isolated from the underlying system, with granular control and access to specific resources made possible through a mechanism of interfaces. Think of it as a virtual USB cable – an interface connects a plug with a slot.
Security and privacy conscious users will certainly be interested in knowing more about their snaps – what they can do and which resources they need at runtime. To that end, you can use the handy snap interface and snap connections commands.
Unvanquished was one of the most promising open-source game projects nearly a decade ago with its "Daemon" engine but since abandoning their monthly alpha release regiment and their beta/stable releases never materializing either, it's been relatively quiet the past few years. But their developers have been persisting and today they are announcing that following a three-year cleanup the game is fully free/open-source including all assets under applicable licenses.
Look out for improved fractional scaling support in Xfce 4.16 when it arrives later this year.
The feature is one of several betterments the nimble desktop environment will boast in the upcoming release, alongside the switch to CSD we ferried word on back in January.
Adaptive screen handling on high-resolution displays is a basic ask of any modern desktop environment. Alas, some manage it better than others. GNOME, for instance, still only offers ‘experimental’ support for fractional scaling in Xorg sessions (though Ubuntu has patched the relevant settings into its GUI).
The latest pre-release of Xfce 4.16 carries additional scaling values in the Display module. These settings range from 100% (1x), 150% (1.5x), and 200% (2x) scaling. There’s also a ‘custom’ option for manually entering values in-between. I find 125% (1.25x) to be the sweet spot in most DEs on my 14-inch laptop.
Kate did a long time not have tabbing. My initial design was a MDI editor with a list/treeview for the file selection.
We had splitting very soon and some when in-between we had tabs around the split areas (like in good old Konqueror). But we had no tabs for documents. The tabbing for the split views was removed again later, as close to nobody understood or even found it ;)
Here is some good old Kate, (alias Kant) screenshot from the good old KDE 2.2 times.
In this video, we are looking at Manjaro 20.1 XFCE. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at Manjaro 20.1 XFCE. It is based on Arch, Linux Kernel 5.8, and uses about 800MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
The Gentoo Distribution Kernel project is excited to announce that our new Linux Kernel packages are ready for a wide audience!
The project aims to create a better Linux Kernel maintenance experience by providing both ebuilds that can be used to configure, compile, and install kernel entirely through the package manager as well as prebuilt binary kernels.
Organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference are pleased to announce the schedule for the conference is published.
All times on the schedule are published in Coordinated Universal Time. The conference will take place live Oct. 15 through Oct. 17 using the https://oslo.gonogo.live/ platform.
There are more than 100 talks scheduled that range from talks about the openSUSE and LibreOffice projects to talks about documentation. There are talks about open-source projects, cloud and container technologies, embedded devices, community development, translations, marketing, future technologies, quality assurance and more.
There will be multiple sessions happening at the same time, so some talks might overlap. Attendees have an option to personalize a schedule so that they are reminded when the live talk they would like to see begins.
The openSUSE community is ready for Hacktoberfest, which is run by Digital Ocean and DEV that encourages people to make their first contributions to open source projects. The openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference will take place during Hacktoberfest and is listed as an event on the website. The conference will have more than 100 talks about open source projects ranging from documentation to the technologies within each project.
IBM was ahead of its time in relationship to the upstart Linux operating system in the mid-1990s. Twenty years later and a huge amount of innovation later, IBM and the open source system are partners in thousands of systems globally.
A2O POWER processor core, an out-of-order follow-up to the A2I core, and associated FPGA environment
The Robotic Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help developers create robotics applications. It can be described as a software development kit (SDK). As stated on ROS.org : "The ROS user community builds on top of a common infrastructure to provide an integration point that offers access to hardware drivers, generic robot capabilities, development tools, useful external libraries, and more." This allows users to get their robotics projects up and running a lot faster than starting from scratch.
Embedded systems developers have usually had two choices when setting off to create exciting new devices based on Linux and built using the latest embedded SOCs. Use a binary distribution typically optimized for laptops, desktops and servers and hope it either fits or painstakingly customize it. Use an embedded Linux product which makes customization easy but has a rather large learning curve and doesn't have an easy way to even determine if the learning curve is worth the journey.
Wind River Linux now provides access to binary images of our industry leading embedded Linux OS, allowing you to get the best of both worlds. Binary images, which are optimized for embedded devices, are available to be used for deploying on your embedded device and keeping it up to date. Or these same images can be used to try out on your embedded device to evaluate the capabilities of Wind River Linux while you ease into the workflow required to use our source based embedded Linux product.
Avnet’s $72.50 “MaaxBoard Mini” SBC offers Linux and Android images to run on an i.MX8M Mini with 2GB DDR4, GbE, 4x USB 2.0, MIPI DSI- and -CSI, WiFi/BT, and 40-pin GPIO.
A year ago, Avnet’s Embest unit launched a $60 MaaXBoard SBC featuring NXP’s i.MX8M. We missed the company’s July announcement of the promised, i.MX8M Mini based MaaxBoard Mini, but since the board did not receive wide coverage, we figure better late than never.
There are already several industrial dust and waterproof panel PCs on the market, but with its Intel Apollo Lake powered Titan-AL Series, ADLINK goes a step further with IP69K-rated stainless steel panel PCs that provide resistance against corrosion from all sort of chemicals.
For those with certain physical restrictions, interfacing with a computer can be a difficult task. As a possible solution, Shu Takahashi and Pato Montalvo have come up with the Magpie MIDI hands-free interface. The adaptive tool, inspired in part by a harmonica, has 13 air holes that enable its user to “sip” and “puff” all 26 letters of the alphabet.
That means you could easily try out different distros or desktop environment, without having to juggle with multiple microSD cards or reflash the internal flash. You can check out a short demo filmed a few days ago with “only” 9 distros.
Megous explains the image is based on btrfs subvolumes and file level deduplication, so if something goes wrong, it’s easy to revert each distribution to original state using pre-created btrfs snapshots.
I had assumed the toll would be $1 or so–everything else up to that point had been relatively affordable in Cancun–but was shocked when I slowed down and discovered the toll was $10! This was about three times what the Golden Gate Bridge charged back then! I felt taken advantage of, yet once we got to the toll booth, there was no easy way to turn around or avoid it, so we just paid the fee and I blamed myself for being a dumb tourist who should have researched things better.
We spent the day in Chichen Itza and on the way back I vowed I would not be taken advantage of again. This time we would take the indirect, free route through the jungle. I was so glad I made that choice as I passed through one village after another and saw local people living their lives. While it wasn’t as fast or smooth a road as the toll road, I felt like less of a tourist on a curated tour of someone else’s property and more like I was seeing what “real” Cancun was like.
Society is getting pretty used to the idea that the data and applications on phones are completely controlled by large corporations.
Purism is working hard to change that with the Librem 5.
Because of the market capitalization and duopoly control of the phone OS vendors, the hardware tool vendors use are trapped into one of those two OSes (Android or iOS).
[...]
The available GPS antenna tuning procedure is a GPS simulator, but the simulator requires feedback from the phone OS to help tune the antenna. If you are on Android the simulator vendor provides an apk that converts the NMEA to a format that the tools can use to do the tuning.
So now we have a tool to do the tuning but no way to use it.
The majority of Linux distributions come supplied with a wide range of software that lets individuals use their PC to watch movies and television programs, listen to a music collection, and view photos. However, if you are looking for a more harmonious approach, turning your Linux box into a state of the art media center with an integrated easy-to-use interface, media center software will be just the ticket.
In the media center department, Linux has a fairly narrow range to choose from. Fortunately, the software featured in this article ticks all the boxes. We have also chosen to include some distributions which are dedicated media centers, as they significantly simplify the installation process particularly on esoteric hardware. At the heart of each of these distributions is Kodi.
There’s a new Sync back-end! The past year or so has been a year of a lot of changes and some of those changes broke things. Our group reorganized, we moved from IRC to Matrix, and a few other things caught us off guard and needed to be addressed. None of those should be excuses for why we kinda stopped keeping you up to date about Sync. We did write a lot of stuff about what we were going to do, but we forgot to share it outside of mozilla. Again, not an excuse, but just letting you know why we felt like we had talked about all of this, even though we absolutely had not.
So, allow me to introduce you to the four person “Services Engineering” team whose job it is to keep a bunch of back-end services running, including Push Notifications and Sync back-end, and a few other miscellaneous services.
[...]
Sync needs to run with new versions of Firefox, as well as older ones. In some cases, very old ones, which had some interesting “quirks”. It needs to continue to be at least as secure as before while hopefully giving devs a chance to fix some of the existing weirdness as well as add new features. Oh, and switching folks to the new service should be as transparent as possible.
Mozilla and AfriLabs – a Pan-African community and connector of African tech hubs with over 255 technology innovation hubs spread across 47 countries – have partnered to convene a series of roundtable discussions with African startups, entrepreneurs, developers and innovators to better understand the tech ecosystem and identify new product ideas – to spur the next generation of open innovation.
This strategic partnership will help develop more relevant, sustainable support for African innovators and entrepreneurs to build scalable resilient products while leveraging honest and candid discussions to identify areas of common interest. There is no shortage of innovators and creative talents across the African continent, diverse stakeholders coming together to form new ecosystems to solve social, economic problems that are unique to the region.
Firefox is an independent browser, backed by Mozilla, the not-for-profit organization. We believe you should be able to decide who sees your personal info, not just among your friends, but with advertisers and companies on the internet — including us. In contrast to other major tech companies, Firefox products don’t harvest, sell or monetize your personal data. So you do you online. We’re here for it.
After months of work, we have a new stable release series! If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.5 on thedownload page. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser by some time next week.
Tor 0.4.4.5 is the first stable release in the 0.4.4.x series. This series improves our guard selection algorithms, adds v3 onion balance support, improves the amount of code that can be disabled when running without relay support, and includes numerous small bugfixes and enhancements. It also lays the ground for some IPv6 features that we'll be developing more in the next (0.4.5) series.
Whenever there is a mention of a Wiki, the first thing that always come to thoughts is: Wikipedia.org. So first let's draw a like between Wiki and Wikipedia.
A Wiki is a software that built to ease collaborative writing and editing processes for teams. They are designed with a specific goal to provide productive writing environment for writers and editors, as well as a set of management tools for moderators and managers.
Wikis have been around since the dawn of the modern internet as we knew it, and the most popular Wiki system is MediaWiki which Wikipedia uses.
Over the years we used many wiki engines in work, starting from MediaWiki, DokuWiki, PmWiki, Wikkawiki, and TiddlyWiki. All of them are still popular wiki engines with loyal communities.
[...]
Wiki.js is a fully customizable and modular wiki engine written entirely in JavaScript. It comes with a rich set of features, and works smoothly on different systems and environments.
It's also a blazing fast web application, with an eye-candy design, furthermore, It supports many database interfaces with primary support for PostgreSQL (Note that the other database engines may be dropped in the next major release).
With a developer-friendly tool set, developer can integrate Wiki.js with any existing system as they can build modules, and create custom themes for it.
Wiki.js is a perfect solution for scientists, researchers, business managers, writers, historians, software developers and technical writers. It's also a polished solution for the enterprise. Here in this article we will explain why.
With the world moving around the web, and the dynamics of marketing changing every hour, it is essential now to keep the website customer-ready. Push notifications are one way to keep your audience tied to your website, even when they are not visiting your website. You can send Push notifications to both desktop and mobile from the WordPress site.
But, first of all, let’s see what WordPress Push notifications are. All clickable messages that you receive in the notification area of your mobile device or the messages that you see on the desktop of your computer are WordPress Push Notifications.
Qt 6.0 is on its way, but it’s shaping up to be different than developers were expecting. Qt product manager Santtu Ahonen has taken to the company’s blog to let users know that in order to “focus on the essential key features”, the Qt team will limit the number of targets and omit some operating systems in the next major release.
[...]
A second edition of the CNCF end user technology radar has been released and this time, the CNCF end user community took a long, hard look at observability. As in the first edition, members of the end user community were asked to let the editors know which products they had assessed, trialed, and adopted in their chosen field. The result is meant to give organisations that are new to the cloud native space some guidance of what to look into first.
Moment.js has been successfully used in millions of projects, and we are happy to have contributed to making date and time better on the web. As of September 2020, Moment gets over 12 million downloads per week! However, Moment was built for the previous era of the JavaScript ecosystem. The modern web looks much different these days. Moment has evolved somewhat over the years, but it has essentially the same design as it did when it was created in 2011. Given how many projects depend on it, we choose to prioritize stability over new features.
Moment.js, the de facto standard JavaScript library for date and time manipulation, has announced that "we would like to discourage Moment from being used in new projects going forward." The project cited multiple reasons for the recommendation. The first is that moment objects are mutable; another is the unnecessarily large size of the library when compared to other internationalization and time-zone support options available to modern browsers. According to the post, "we now generally consider Moment to be a legacy project in maintenance mode. It is not dead, but it is indeed done." The project offers multiple recommendations of alternative options, including "the evolution of Moment", Luxon, authored by long-time Moment.js contributor Isaac Cambron.
The PHP 7.3 was released on December 2018, although were not much improvements as it were in the version 7 and version 7.1 it is worth to check the news added features.
If your GNU/Linux distribution does not have the 7.3 version in its official repositories, see How to compile PHP-7.3 en Debian
In this tutorial, we will learn how to integrate Summernote WYSIWYG Editor in Django Application.
In this video tutorial, you will learn how to add icons to your wxPython application’s title bar. This is a nice feature to add to your application to give your program some branding.
Some things about the Ruby community have always impressed me. Two examples are the commitment to testing and the emphasis on making it easy to get started. The best example of both is Ruby Koans, where you learn Ruby by fixing tests.
With the amazing tools we have for Python, we should be able to do something even better. We can. Using Jupyter Notebook, PyHamcrest, and just a little bit of duct tape-like code, we can make a tutorial that includes teaching, code that works, and code that needs fixing.
First, some duct tape. Usually, you do your tests using some nice command-line test runner, like pytest or virtue. Usually, you do not even run it directly. You use a tool like tox or nox to run it. However, for Jupyter, you need to write a little harness that can run the tests directly in the cells.
DialogFlow is a natural language understanding platform (based on Google’s AI) that makes it easy to design and integrate a conversational user interface into your mobile app, web application, device, bot, interactive voice response system, and so on. Using DialogFlow, you can provide new and engaging ways for users to interact with your product.
The command described in this post is useful in data checking, but it's a little hard to explain what it actually does. It answers this question: Are there records with non-blank entries in field 1 that have multiple corresponding entries in field 2?
Oracle on Tuesday marked the arrival of Java 15, known as Oracle JDK 15 among those concerned about formalities and trademarks, in the 25th year of the programming language's existence.
"As Java celebrates its 25th birthday, we continue to make technical investments that drive Java innovation forward and help address the rapidly changing technology landscape," said Georges Saab, VP of development for Oracle's Java platform group, in a statement.
Java, the database giant insists, continues to be the number one programming language used by 69 per cent of full-time developers worldwide, though others frame the matter differently.
In TIOBE's September 2020 ranking of programming languages, Java is the number two programming language and isn't doing so well. "Java is in real trouble with a loss of -3.18 per cent in comparison to last year," said CEO Paul Jansen, who clearly isn't concerned that pedantic devs might read the loss of a negative value as an increase.
The PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language Index shows less of a percentage decline, though still puts Java behind Python. And Redmonk's July 2020 ranking of programming languages puts Java at number three.
I talked about RSS a lot earlier this year, mostly defending it from the charge that it’s irrelevant, and from weak arguments that it’s only useful for plumbing. But there’s one aspect I missed: it used to be assumed that a site would come with it. Now you have to use third-party tools, or write your own scraper.
When I first heard that Toots Hibbert had been hospitalized a couple of weeks ago for mysterious respiratory problems — just a few days after he released his latest album, Got To Be Tough — I own that I thought it might be a publicity stunt to stir souls who’d long written him off and to sell CDs. I playfully imagined Toots tokin’ on a bone back home, waiting for his career to pull a Lazarus, before a sudden planned announcement of his ongoingness broke through dark clouds of sentimental sorrow, and People were forcing themselves to reach catharsis by buying his latest release. Got to be tough to make a buck in the present climate, I thought.
In an age of visual profusion, when the vividness and abundance of images consumed for distraction and commerce is breathtaking, it might seem naive for an artist to try to create images of incantatory, even magical power. To seek a holy relationship to the image today is often seen as foolhardy.
Was it that right-wingers were too ignorant or benighted to accede to scientific realities? Or was it more sinister than that: They knew full well what the science said, but were too selfish and cruel to care, and also selfish and cruel enough to lie about it to our faces?
Well, with the West Coast on fire, a pandemic spreading across the land, and a pathological liar in the White House as the Republican standard-bearer, I think we can consider that debate settled: It's not ignorance. It's malice.
It should serve as no surprise that school district superintendents are not somehow universally amazing people. Like any population, there will be good ones and bad ones. All of that being said, it seems that the COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly good at highlighting just how bad at the job, not to mention at public relations, some superintendents can be. The most useful example of this came from Georgia, where a school district suspended, then un-suspended, students for posting pictures of just how badly their schools were failing at managing bringing students back during the pandemic.
My Not-So-Terrible Experience With Remote Teaching
Hundreds of emails obtained by Public Citizen and American Oversight offer a rare inside look at the meat industry's power and access to the highest levels of government.€
"We need a Secretary of Health and Human Services who will look out for the American people, not President Trump's political interests."
In a hearing Monday, Illinois lawmakers pressed officials with the state’s child welfare agency to answer the same question they asked two years ago: What is the agency doing to find homes for the growing number of children stuck in psychiatric hospitals after they have completed treatment?
The questioning followed reporting Friday by ProPublica Illinois that the number of children in state care held in psychiatric hospitals after being cleared to leave has continued to increase, even though the state vowed to fix the problem in 2018.
Drug Use in the Covid-19 Moment
News from the Himalayas is scant this year. No Everest or K2 summiting; nothing about the railway from China; no new Sherpa biographies.
"Study after study—including from the State Department—has demonstrated that this neocolonialist policy has inflicted a crushing blow to healthcare access for people around the world."
The online giant Amazon has made an extraordinary amount of money during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many people shelter at home and shop online. A new Public Citizen report documents how Amazon set prices for essential products during the crisis at levels that would violate price gouging laws in many states, and marked up some products by as much as 1,000%. “This is an ongoing thing. They are doing this currently. They’ve been doing it throughout the pandemic,” says Alex Harman, competition policy advocate for Public Citizen and author of the report. “They are looking to maximize profit during a pandemic.”
For long-term security and the prevention of future breaches, Mr Sathit said a budget of 1.9 billion baht will be set aside to install a security system capable of protecting data stored in hospitals run by the Public Health Ministry nationwide.
Recently -- perhaps far too recently -- the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court said the bulk phone records collection the NSA engaged in for years was most likely unconstitutional and definitely a violation of the laws authorizing it. The Appeals Court did not go so far as to declare it unconstitutional, finding that the records collected by the government had little bearing on the prosecution of a suspected terrorist. But it did declare it illegal.
Allowing this powerful technology to be taken from overseas wars and turned inward on American citizens isn’t something that should happen without a robust public debate.
As it’s been doing for years, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still lying about the state of compliance by states with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005.
The latest DHS whopper is this DHS press release issued September 10, 2010:
The “deal,” if it even is a deal, as no cash terms were announced, is still pending a U.S. Treasury department review. And it sounds suspiciously like a compromise that saves face for both sides, and saves ByteDance from losing their most lucrative asset — either the U.S. portion of its user base, or its vast Asian market of users, which it was never clear it would give up.
The 75th Commemoration of the End of World War II is Sept. 2, 2020. This fall, three new books cover foreign-policy issues from the conclusion of that war. Those issues are still with us today: how to care for the plight of millions of displaced and desperate immigrants, how to apply international laws to punishing enemies, and how to justify (if we can) the use of nuclear weapons. They’re worth a read this fall.
Servicemen from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, a division of€ Russia’s Airborne Troops stationed in Pskov, have arrived in Belarus to participate in the 2020 Belarusian-Russian “Slavic Brotherhood” military exercises, the Belarusian Defense Ministry says.€
Russia’s Finance Ministry has developed a new draft budget for the next three years. It was created with a new reality in mind: the coronavirus pandemic has left Russia facing a severe crisis, one made worse by this year’s fall in oil prices. Like many other countries, Russia has increased spending in response to the crisis, creating a significant deficit in the budget. But now that this year’s one-time distribution of budgetary funds is coming to an end, the government faces a choice: spend heavily going forward, which will require dipping into the country’s reserves and borrowing trillions of rubles, or cut government spending. Initially, the Finance Ministry opted to make cuts, but then it changed its mind. There’s still a chance that the Russian economy will be able to recover quickly and cutbacks won’t be necessary.
From the West Bank and Gaza to Washington, D.C. and beyond, Palestinians and their allies stress that only an end to Israel's illegal occupation can bring peace to the Middle East.€
In Teen Vogue, Sarah Souli called the political rehabilitation of Bush an “amnesic view of our history,” citing his administration's unconstitutional and inhumane Iraq war, and its response to Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately killed and displaced Black communities. When it comes to immigration, Bush’s legacy is similarly beyond repair. Sure, Bush endorsed the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which would have provided a very lengthy path to citizenship for the undocumented migrants who could afford a hefty fine, pass a background check, and demonstrate a consistent employment history, while ballooning the Border Patrol’s budget and expanding enforcement in the interior. The Bush administration also created an entire agency that has disappeared migrants from our communities.
A viral phishing scheme is targeting people across the country with scammy text messages claiming to be from the United States Postal Service (USPS). Now, QAnon conspiracy theorists have jumped into the fray, falsely claiming the scheme is tied to human trafficking, as reported by Insider.
There’s no evidence to suggest this is true. The rumor has spread on Facebook and Instagram, echoing the Wayfair conspiracy theory that went viral earlier this summer. Unlike the Wayfair conspiracy, however, the USPS myth is obfuscating a real phishing threat.
From the west to the east, climate change is super-charging our warming world.
The company has also not said if it will tag or remove posts containing climate change misinformation from Facebook groups, or if its climate change misinformation efforts will be limited to News Feed posts.
Climate change is now driving mass migration, which will only worsen unless governments take global heating seriously.
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By midmonth, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperature ever measured on earth — 130 degrees in Death Valley — and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky. From Santa Cruz to Lake Tahoe, thousands of bolts of electricity exploded down onto withered grasslands and forests, some of them already hollowed out by climate-driven infestations of beetles and kiln-dried by the worst five-year drought on record. Soon, California was on fire.
Over the next two weeks, 900 blazes incinerated six times as much land as all the state’s 2019 wildfires combined, forcing 100,000 people from their homes. Three of the largest fires in history burned simultaneously in a ring around the San Francisco Bay Area. Another fire burned just 12 miles from my home in Marin County. I watched as towering plumes of smoke billowed from distant hills in all directions and air tankers crisscrossed the skies. Like many Californians, I spent those weeks worrying about what might happen next, wondering how long it would be before an inferno of 60-foot flames swept up the steep, grassy hillside on its way toward my own house, rehearsing in my mind what my family would do to escape.
"We can no longer afford to cast nature aside. Now is the time for this massive step up—conserving, restoring, and using biodiversity fairly and sustainably."
Enbridge, the Canadian-based energy pipeline corporation behind the controversial Weymouth compressor station, sent a written notice to Massachusetts state regulators on Friday, September 11 informing them of the mechanical failure and “unplanned” gas release. The compressor station’s approval plan requires this notification when there is an unplanned gas release exceeding 10,000 standard cubic feet in volume. According to Enbridge, 265,000 standard cubic feet of gas and 35 pounds of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were leaked during the€ incident.
We examine California’s history of forest management and how a century of fire suppression has made the current climate fires even more destructive. For thousands of years, Native American tribes in California would regularly burn the landscape to steward the land, but colonization led to the suppression of these tactics and decades of misguided policy. A return to these Indigenous practices could help better steward the land and foster greater climate resiliency, says Don Hankins, a pyrogeographer and Plains Miwok fire expert who teaches geography and planning at California State University, Chico. “If we all work together and we use the same mindset in terms of process, being able to use fire within the landscape, we can start to put fire back in at the scale that it needs to be for the right ecological and cultural purposes,” Hankins says.
We examine California’s history of forest management and how a century of fire suppression has made the current climate fires even more destructive. For thousands of years, Native American tribes in California would regularly burn the landscape to steward the land, but colonization led to the suppression of these tactics and decades of misguided policy. A return to these Indigenous practices could help better steward the land and foster greater climate resiliency, says Don Hankins, a pyrogeographer and Plains Miwok fire expert who teaches geography and planning at California State University, Chico. “If we all work together and we use the same mindset in terms of process, being able to use fire within the landscape, we can start to put fire back in at the scale that it needs to be for the right ecological and cultural purposes,” Hankins says.
The median U.S. worker salary would be around twice as high today if wages kept pace with economic output since World War II, new research revealed.€
It is the height of moral and fiscal irresponsibility not to borrow massively to meet life- saving needs.
America has millions of people in poverty because Americans choose not to demand the policies that would lift them out of poverty.
Ten Trump-Away Haiku
Influential academic David Graeber had been invited to Berlin to present his new book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by current German President Steinmeier who at the time was preparing to run for office of German Chancellor. The year was 2012, massive debt of Greece and many other European nations were threatening a free-fall of the Euro currency, and the topic of how to save Europe was at the top of the political agenda.
Twenty years ago, this country faced a drawn-out electoral dilemma—and we were woefully unprepared. The Democratic campaign had no what-if plan in 2000. Ultimately, all it took to seal our nation’s fate was the Republican Party shutting down the Miami-Dade recount.
"This information is explosive. We have a crony at the helm of our nation's Postal Service. A man rife with conflicts of interest and potential violations of law."
During a House hearing Monday examining Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s myriad potential conflicts of interest, researcher Lisa Graves testified that the former North Carolina logistics executive donated more than $600,000 to the GOP and President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in just a two-month period after the top Postal Service job opened up late last year.
The Trump administration’s orchestrated attack on China is commonly assumed to stem from upset over China’s human rights violations and its aggressive behavior in the South China Sea and along the border with India. Where once Trump was fulsome in praise of Xi Jinping’s leadership, now official statements on China are uniformly critical and alarmist.
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House Democrats are set to issue a subpoena Tuesday to compel the National Labor Relations Board to hand over documents as part of an inquiry into potential ethical lapses at the board, according to congressional aides. The move, by Democrats on the House Committee on Education and Labor, marks a significant escalation of a long-running investigation and follows the repeated refusal by the NLRB’s chairman, John Ring, to produce the documents voluntarily.
The subpoena demands that the labor board produce a set of documents linked to its efforts, under the Trump administration, to undo one of the landmark decisions of the Obama-era NLRB, which expanded worker protections by broadening what is called the “joint employer” rule. That decision left companies on the hook for labor law violations against workers not directly employed by them, like temp staff and employees of fast-food franchisees. It meant that a parent corporation like McDonald’s, one of the companies embroiled in litigation over the rule, could be held liable for a franchise owner’s wrongdoing, such as retaliating against workers for trying to unionize. That had implications for the profits of corporations that operate on a franchise model and for contract-staffing firms, like cleaning services.
While lawmakers from both parties have used the tactic in the past, Democrats, hoping to flip the Senate, look to block GOP opposition in 2021.
The former Trump campaign aide-turned-federal official baselessly claimed "there are hit squads being trained all over this country" to prevent the president from winning reelection.
There's a strong possibility that the period after Election Day could make Bush v. Gore in 2000 look like a tea party.
Why do we settle for mediocrity when we should be insisting on excellence? Having spent the past few weeks working on a report card grading the Democratic super PACs and the more than $600 million they’re planning to spend on the fall elections, my main takeaway is that we tolerate far too much mediocrity in progressive politics.
With just seven weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election, the battle for the White House is increasingly being fought in courts across the country. From Wisconsin to Florida, Pennsylvania to Colorado, judges are making major rulings deciding who gets on the ballot, how a record number of mail-in ballots are handled and distributed, and who ultimately gets to vote on November 3. Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America,” says Republicans are carrying out a nationwide attack on voting rights aimed at keeping a shrinking white minority in power. “This is the Republican Party’s game: Don’t do anything for the American people, make it as hard as you can to vote, and then put in place judges who will then uphold those new voter suppression laws.”
The campaign occurred over the course of months, and the Post identified at least 4,500 tweets that came from the Turning Point Action effort. “In 2016, there were Macedonian teenagers interfering in the election by running a [astroturfer] farm and writing salacious articles for money,” Graham Brookie, an expert in digital forensic research, told The Post. “In this election, the [astroturfer] farm is in Phoenix.”
BirdLife International (BirdLife), a global bird conservation organization, has been accused of removing its Taiwanese partner after it refused to give in to Chinese political pressure intended to undermine Taiwan’s sovereign integrity.
Starting in early spring, as the coronavirus took hold, a conservative lawyer at the forefront of raising alarms about voting by mail held multiple private briefings exclusively for Republican state election officials, according to previously unreported public records.
The lawyer, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.
The lawyer, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, is a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.
Among the participants in these meetings has been an official from the office of Georgia’s secretary of state; the secretary, Brad Raffensperger, recently elevated concerns about voter fraud by contending that 1,000 Georgians had voted twice in elections this year.
GOP congressional staffers and a Trump administration appointee have also joined in these meetings, which were open to officials from states across the country, including Missouri and Nevada, the records show. No Democratic state election officials appear to have been invited.
The biggest problem with all the proposals to reform Section 230 is that way too many people don't understand *why* they are a terrible idea. And the EARN IT bill is one of the worst of the worst, because it does not just break Section 230 but also so much more, yet too many people remain oblivious to the issues.
A key protection for internet freedom has run headlong into a Trump administration determined to stifle all criticism of the president and ensure that social media remain tools for the unchecked spread of the president's brand of disinformation and bigotry.
When the president of the United States has...
Continuing testimony that began yesterday, U.S. lawyer Eric Lewis explained that under President Trump, the Department of Justice is not an independent agency but rather one that takes its direction from the top down. Lewis said that he isn’t questioning the integrity of lower-level prosecutors, but they are taking direction from their Attorney General.
Things became not merely dramatic in the Assange courtroom today, but spiteful and nasty. There were two real issues, the evidence and the procedure. On the evidence, there were stark details of the dreadful regime Assange will face in US jails if extradited. On the procedure, we saw behaviour from the prosecution QC that went well beyond normal cross examination and was a real attempt to denigrate and even humiliate the witness. I hope to prove that to you by a straightforward exposition of what happened today in court, after which I shall add further comment. B Today’s witness was Eric Lewis. A practising US attorney for 35 years, Eric Lewis has a doctorate in law from Yale and a masters in criminology from Cambridge. He is former professor in law at Georgetown University, an elected member of both the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He is Chairman of Reprieve. He has represented high profile clients in national security and terrorism cases, including Seymour Hersh and Guantanamo Bay internees.
During an extradition trial, witnesses for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team said he could spend the rest of his life in a federal prison in the United States if convicted of all the offenses he faces.Judge Vanessa Baraitser, the presiding British judge, also heard testimony related to how authorities in the U.S. government would likely pressure Assange to plead guilty instead of going to trial.Assange, who is 49 years-old, is accused of 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the United States government. It targets common practices in news gathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.
Eric Lewis, a U.S. defense attorney, said the “base level” for a sentence if Assange was convicted of all the above offenses would be about eight to 10 years. However, Assange pled guilty to 24 charges in a case brought against in Australia for allegedly hacking into Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications company. That criminal history could potentially increase his sentence.
A whistleblower complaint directed toward the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) alleges that detainees at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Georgia were medically neglected, including not being tested for COVID-19, and that an alarmingly large number of hysterectomies were being performed on detainees.
A 1998 statement is twisted to support a scenario of prejudice and hate.
The complaint alleges numerous health and safety violations in regards to Covid-19 in addition a disturbing number of procedures performed on detained women.
When we meet him, the first father in Emma Cline’s story collection Daddy is just chilling on the patio, eating salami off a paper plate, dressed California casual in “jeans, his white socks, his white sneakers, a knitted sweater.” The sweater almost definitely belongs to his wife, Linda, but John is too old to worry over silly things like necklines. “Who would care?” John considers himself a simple creature, but there are many hints that this man can’t be trusted to know himself. As he putters around, Cline plants suggestions of his violent temper: how his default stress response is to “knock things over,” how he used to throw food at his oldest daughter when she wouldn’t eat it, and how that daughter, age 9, called the police on him. John doesn’t divulge why any of this happened and hardly approaches coming to terms with whatever it was—“he guessed it would have been after one of the bad periods—though Cline obviously wants us to wonder why. What did this sexless father, dreaming only of filial affection, do or not do to his family? John isn’t totally clueless, but “these things seemed so far away,” he thinks. “And then eventually they got further away, and then nobody talked about them anymore.” In other words, who still cares? The past has passed. John remembers the Disney movies his children once loved, in which “the fathers were basically Jesus, the kids crowding around whenever the dad came into a room, hanging off his neck.” That he is not “basically Jesus,” pains him enough to compel him to open three bottles of wine, but his sins are anyone’s guess.
Ableism, broadly defined, is any expression of discrimination that favors nondisabled people, but it is not a prejudice that harms only those with disabilities. Ableism is a systemic oppression that finds common ancestry with white supremacy.
Lesbos—For years, the squalor of overcrowded metal container homes and a sprawling tent city of flimsy plastic tarps amid open rivers of sewage made life in the Moria Refugee Camp a grim manifestation of Fortress Europe. That cruel regime changed abruptly last week, when four nights of fires turned the 12,000-person camp into a scorched-earth wasteland of char and ash.
On Tuesday, September 15, Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny published his first social media post since his poisoning with a Novichok-type nerve agent on August 20.
The U.S. government late Monday deported a crucial witness in an ongoing investigation into allegations of sexual assault and harassment at an El Paso, Texas, immigrant detention center, the witness’s lawyers said.
The 35-year-old woman has been held in the facility, which is overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for about a year and told lawyers about a “pattern and practice” of abuse there, including that guards systematically assaulted her and other detainees in areas that were not visible to security cameras.
Police officials in Moscow have launched a criminal case against 39-year-old Roman Shirokov, a former midfielder for the Russian national soccer team, reports TASS citing an anonymous source in law enforcement. This was first reported by the Telegram based news outlet Baza.€
During a plenary session of the European Parliament on Tuesday, September 15, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, put forward the idea of naming a global human rights sanctions regime after Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny.
Let’s get to work.
Sending out armed law enforcement officers to handle mental health crises has often been a bad idea. Situations that require compassion, de-escalation, and nuance are far too often greeted with force, more force, and deadly force. Since there's always "excited delirium" to excuse the deaths caused by officers ill-equipped to deal with mental health issues, very little has changed. Until now.
The city has vowed to implement police reforms, but Taylor's mother demanded officials "move forward with the criminal charges because she deserves that and much more."€
After hearing the charge, I went to the Internet to look for the video of this alleged protest. Here is what the LA County sheriffs were apparently talking about. As you can see in the video, the “protest” appears to be about four guys hovering around the emergency entrance, shouting invectives. It wasn’t a protest, and they weren’t preventing any medical vehicles from entering or exiting the hospital. It was a few people who gave into the justified-yet-wrong anger I myself overcame this morning through the grace of coffee and the backspace key.
To call this group of individuals “protesters who blocked the entrance,” as the police did, is misleading at best. To repeat the disinformation, as journalists did, simply because it was on a police Twitter account, is bad journalism.
It was the technology that was supposed to change the world. According to carriers, not only was fifth-generation wireless (5G) supposed to bring about the "fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to revolutionize everything from smart cities to cancer treatment. According to conspiracy theorists and internet imbeciles, 5G is responsible for everything from Covid-19 to your migraines.
The open internet win comes from the Court of Justice of the European Union's first-ever interpretation of the EU's 2015 net neutrality law.
We recently filed comments in the still ongoing FCC comment period regarding the NTIA's petition to get the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 to match with the President's bizarrely warped view of social media content moderation. I filed personal comments from my perspective running Techdirt, and we also filed more official comments as an organization. Both were filed during the initial comment period, but we're now in the middle of a second comment period -- officially for "responses" to the initial comments -- which are due by September 17th.
Altering content or raising costs through licensing to support Canadian content is precisely what Guilbeault and the government have in mind. In doing so, the government’s longstanding commitment to net neutrality will be badly undermined as it abandons the principle of equal treatment of content online.
Both peer-review and the patent prosecution, of course, have their problems. Peer-review is considered, to paraphrase, the worst system for reviewing academic papers except for all the others. However, the comparison between peer-review and patent prosecution puts many of the problems of peer-review into sharp relief, and perhaps sheds some light on why science struggles to retain those from unrepresented groups.
Patent prosecution is a codified system in which professional patent office examiners determine whether a patent should be granted. The examiner assesses the claims of the patent application for novelty, inventiveness, and utility, as defined by the patent law. If the examiner raises an objection, the applicant is given some number of months to respond to the objection, either by arguing their case or by amending the claims. The to and fro between the applicant and the examiner may go on for many iterations, before final acceptance or rejection.
Peer-review is similar to patent prosecution except that the place of the examiner is taken by experts in the field, who are presumed to be in the best position to assess the truth, originality and significance of the research. Manuscripts submitted to a journal by an author are sent by the journal editor to expert academics in the field to review. Like the patent examiner, the peer-reviewer passes judgement on the merits of the paper and recommends publication, potentially subject to revisions, or rejection. The author is then invited by the editor to respond to the reviewer's comments and to make the suggested revisions. The editor takes the final decision on whether the paper should be accepted or rejected based on the reviewer comments and the author's reply.
Before beginning the comparison between peer-review and patent prosecution, it is noted that academic purists may be scandalised by any attempt to equate the world of peer-review with the commercial world of patents. However, such critics may be reminded that published papers are the currency of science, on the basis of which grants are awarded, jobs offered, and promotions given. A published paper therefore has economic value to its authors, albeit a more indirect one than a patent. The process by which papers are accepted and rejected should thus be as arguably fair and robust as those by which a patent is granted.
Last week we released version 1.16 of the Compendium of Federal Circuit Decisions, which is a publicly-available dataset containing information about all documents published by the Federal Circuit on its website since 2004 (which includes all opinions and, since 2007, all Rule 36 summary affirmances). The Compendium was designed from the ground-up to be used for empirical research rather than as a conventional legal research tool.
Generally, there haven’t been any striking changes in the statistics for the court’s opinions and Rule 36 summary affirmances so far in 2020. The below two graphs are the basic ones that I usually show: opinions and Rule 36 affirmances by the Federal Circuit in appeals arising from the PTO and district courts.
[...]
One noteworthy shift is the relative drop in Rule 36’s. So far in 2020, the court has decided more appeals via the mechanism of nonprecedential opinion and fewer through summary affirmance–especially in appeals arising from the PTO.
Affirmance rates continue to be in line with the past: the vast majority of decisions result in the affirmance of the lower tribunal.* Over the last few years, the court has consistently affirmed the PTO outright about 80% of the time, and affirmed-in-part another 7% of the time. The district courts have been affirmed a bit less often: about 70% of the time the court is affirmed entirely, and another 13% of the time it has been affirmed-in-part. The court’s decisions in 2020 have been consistent with these metrics.
Nearly a year ago we wrote about the somewhat complex (and misunderstood by many) trademark dispute involving Banksy. There is a lot of background here, so I'm going to try to go with the abbreviated version. Banksy -- who has claimed that "copyright is for losers" -- has always refused to copyright his random graffiti-based art. However, as it now becomes clear, one reason he's avoided using copyright is because to register the work, he'd likely have to reveal his real name. Instead, it appears he's spent a few years abusing trademark law to try to trademark some of his artwork, including his famous "flower bomber" image, which was registered to a company called Pest Control Office Limited. Of course, to get a trademark, you have to use it in commerce, and many Banksy creations don't fit that criteria.
Back in July, Google announced a new organization named Open Usage Commons. The aim of the organization is to help “projects protect their project identity through programs such as trademark management and usage guidelines”.
Google believes that “creating a neutral, independent ownership for these trademarks gives contributors and consumers peace of mind regarding their use of project names in a fair and transparent way”.
In 2019, the High Court of England and Wales ruled that by offering an index of non UK-based or unlicensed radio stations to UK residents, radio aggregator service TuneIn breached copyright. In response the service has now geo-blocked thousands of stations leaving UK customers without their favorite sounds. Unless they use a VPN, then it's business as usual.
The European Commission is working on a guidance document for member states, clarifying how Article 17 of the new Copyright Directive should be implemented. The proposal has reinvigorated the 'upload filter' debate. According to copyright groups, the EU is watering down the earlier agreement by suggesting the "likely legitimate" content should not be immediately removed. At the same time, upload filter opponents are calling for more human reviews.
