I’ve now had my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga laptop for about 6 months, so I thought I’d provide a quick update about how it’s going to use this laptop every day with openSUSE Tumbleweed running KDE Plasma. Let’s explore what’s changed since then...
Initially, I complained about some aspects of the keyboard layout, but I’ve gotten used to the Home/End/PageUp/PageDown positioning, and the swapped position of the Fn and Ctrl keys. These are fine now. Lack of media keys is okay too since I’ve used the Shortcuts KCM to set my own. However I just can’t get used to the PrintScreen key being between the right Alt and Ctrl keys. I probably press it by accident 10 times a day and bring up Spectacle when I don’t mean to. One of these days I should get around to using xmodmap or something to turn it into a right Meta key, and they maybe make the F11 key which currently does nothing be the new PrintScreen key.
It all started with an upgrade.
In October, 2020 version 20.10 of Ubuntu came out. As I usually do, I duly clicked the button to start the process.
That upgrade seemed to go smoothly — everything installed quickly with no conflicts or error messages. I walked away to make a cup of white tea, and when I came back the installation had finished and my laptop rebooted.
It was then that I noticed a problem. A fairly big one. Instead of a login screen, I saw a field of aubergine (the colour, not the vegetable). I thought that my laptop was sleeping, so I pressed some keys to try to wake it up. It didn't work. I rebooted, but I was faced with the same problem.
The best laptop I have ever owned (and still own, despite being purchased 6 years ago) is a ZaReason Strata.
It is still working great, but I was one of these days fishing the market for Linux laptops, just in case.
When I visited the ZaReason page several months ago this year, I saw that they had very few products. This year has been tough.
If you are a Linux administrator, or you want to become one, there are certain tasks that can become repetitive and boring. In fact, back in the day, some tasks were so incredibly repetitive that it became very hard to keep track of all the servers; this is why automation tools were created to help with such tasks. These tools help you manage and administer different servers or systems at once, and some of them allow you to do a particular task with only a click or a command line. These tools mentioned below will definitely help you automate some of the tasks of a system administrator so that you can concentrate on other interesting concepts and tasks.
Here are the top 10 Linux Admins to boost office productivity and ease of access. Click on the links to visit the homepage.
Google’s Anthos hybrid cloud platform now runs on bare metal servers. The move targets enterprise workloads running in on-premises data centers or edge locations, and the announcement preempts a ton of new products and capabilities that rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) will undoubtedly rollout at its annual re:Invent, which kicks off today.
Anthos is Google’s fully managed, Kubernetes-based platform that allows users to manage their data and applications in an on-premises environment or across cloud platforms from rivals like AWS and Microsoft. Google announced the platform at its Cloud Next event in 2018, and made it generally available last year.
So many people do their "top distros" list or a "top apps" list. It's past time that someone did a "top window managers" list. So here is my top eight window managers that are available on Linux.
A few months back I made a video on the Vivaldi browser licence and they liked the video so much that they decided to send me a box of merch so today we're going to unbox it and see what this web browser company sent me.
This month, we have the Librem 5 finally shipping to backers, a new open source Chrome OS alternative, Google being more open with Chromium, and tons of Linux gaming improvements.
A problem that just kept getting worse and worse. What it was, and why it led us to "check in" on EndeavourOS.
This Monday, ZFS on Linux lead developer Brian Behlendorf published the OpenZFS 2.0.0 release to GitHub. Along with quite a lot of new features, the announcement brings an end to the former distinction between "ZFS on Linux" and ZFS elsewhere (for example, on FreeBSD). This move has been a long time coming—the FreeBSD community laid out its side of the roadmap two years ago—but this is the release that makes it official.
Xe HP is Intel's discrete GPU aiming to compete against the latest-generation AMD and NVIDIA compute accelerators. Xe HP isn't scheduled to reach general availability until well into 2021 while now as they begin ramping up their sampling of Xe HP to potential customers, the Linux open-source driver support is preparing to roll-out.
While Xe HP is about scaling up Intel Xe Graphics (Gen12), the Xe HP driver support is introducing it as a new "Gen12.5" target rather than just "Gen12" that is used by Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake / Xe LP.
NVIDIA is working on allowing their proprietary driver to support passing buffers as DMA-BUF. In turn this should allow for better supporting their proprietary driver on Wayland compared to the EGLStreams mess.
A Phoronix reader tipped us off to NVIDIA developer comments last month in response to a KDE EGLStreams bug. A bug report was opened regarding that restarting the compositing breaks the EGLStreams back-end for KDE's KWin.
Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has just merged one of his largest set of optimizations in recent times: 2~5x faster performance for SPECViewPerf.
SPECViewPerf is the common industry benchmark for measuring graphics performance for professional applications with benchmark viewsets from 3ds Max, CATIA, Maya, Solidworks, Siemens NX, and other programs. The performance when using Mesa drivers have been lagging but now thanks to common Mesa infrastructure improvements by Mesa, the performance is wildly improved.
One of the best things that come with Linux is its large collection of applications and tools. Linux has established a respectable name for itself and is well known for having some of the most excellent and stable applications, several of which are free and open source. 2020 has been another excellent year for the production and development of several amazing and outstanding applications, and the story is mostly going to be the same next year, as well. This article covers the top 10 applications that are expected to be extremely popular in 2021.
This article will cover a list of free and open source dual-pane and multi-pane file managers available for Linux. These file managers provide a broader look at various files and folders stored on your storage devices. They also improve overall productivity and file handling experience, especially if you regularly navigate through a lot of files using keyboard shortcuts.
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These are some of the most popular dual-pane and multi-pane file managers available for Linux. While these file managers may seem cluttered and a little verbose at times, they are really useful if you want to quickly navigate through multiple files at once and run simultaneous file operations.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Etherpad on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Etherpad is an open-source, web-based, and real-time collaborative editor. It comes with tons of plugins that help you to customize your instance to suit your needs. With Etherpad, you can write articles, press releases, and to-do lists with your friends, students, or colleagues at the same time.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Etherpad on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
When you have enabled caching in Nginx Plus, it stores responses in a cache disk, and these are further used to respond to clients without holding a proxy request for every time with the same content. Nginx Plus’s caching has more capabilities in which the most useful features, such as cache purging, delayed caching, and dynamic content caching, are included.
In this article, we will learn more about caching, such as how to enable and disable the caching in an Nginx server on a Linux system.
SCP is a utility used to move files and directories securely via SSH. With the SCP command, you can transfer files from your computer to your Linux server and vice versa. As this utility uses SSH to move files, you’ll need the SSH credential of your server to transfer files.
SSH comes pre-installed on most Linux servers, but if not, you can install and enable it using the following steps.
The standard proxy server only works according to their client’s requests by providing filtering and content privacy. When we talk about the reverse proxy server, it works on behalf of server requests, used for intercepting and routing traffic to a separate server. This proxy feature is useful for load distribution and improves performance among various available servers. It shows all the content which it takes from different online sites. Using the proxy method, you can pass requests for processing to the server applications over specified protocols other than HTTP.
There are many reasons due to which you might install the reverse proxy. One important reason is content privacy. The reverse proxy method provides a single centralized point to contact with clients. It can give you the centralized logging feature and can report across several servers. Nginx quickly processes the static content and passes dynamic requests to the Apache server; this feature improves the overall performance.
Tar is quite a popular archive format, especially on Linux. In many cases, distros use tar archives to deliver package updates. Tar archives are also common to find when it comes to sharing files online.
Check out how to untar files in Linux.
There are two different types of interfaces to interact with an operating system that is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Command Line Interface (CLI). In the Command Line Interface, we interact with the system directly using system commands on the terminal. We give commands to the system, then the system executes operating system functions according to the given commands, and we receive responses from the system in the form of simple text. The command-line interface is not commonly used by beginners. It is mostly used by developers and system administrators to configure systems and install packages as using Command Line Interface is much faster than using Graphical User Interface. Also, tasks can be automated by writing simple scripts (bash script for Linux and batch scripts for windows) using a command-line interface. We can perform way more functions using the command line interface.
For GUI, we have a nice representation of files and folders in the operating system using icons and indicators. It is much easier for non-professionals to use a graphical user interface instead of a command-line interface.
SSL (stands for secure socket layer) is a web protocol that makes the traffic between server and client secure by encrypting it. Server and clients safely transmit the traffic without the risk of communication being interpreted by third parties. It also helps the client to verify the identity of the website they are communicating with.
In this post, we will describe how to setup SSL for Nginx. We will be demonstrating the procedure using the self-signed certificate. A self-signed certificate only encrypts the connection but does not validate the identity of your server. Therefore, it should be used only for testing environments or for internal LAN services. For the production environment, it is better to use the certificates signed by CA (certificate authority).
The KVM, or Kernel Virtual Machine, is the virtualization solution for Linux. It is a Linux kernel module that allows the Linux kernel to act as a hypervisor program like VMware ESXi or VSphere.
Earlier it was impossible to get KVM running on the Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi OS (also known as Raspbian). This is because KVM only works on a 64-bit operating system. Raspberry Pi OS was a 32-bit operating system. Another reason was that Raspberry Pi 3 and earlier models had only 1 GB of memory, and this is insufficient to run KVM. Docker was a better solution for devices with 1 GB of memory.
At the time of this writing, it is possible to run KVM on the Raspberry Pi using the Raspberry Pi OS. Because Raspberry Pi OS officially ships with a 64-bit kernel, and the Raspberry Pi 4 has an 8 GB model (it has 8 GB of memory). Sadly, the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS kernel is not enabled by default. You have to enable it manually.
If you have been using a Linux distribution with a GNOME based desktop environment for a long time, you must be aware about the transition of GNOME 2 / GTK2 libraries to GNOME Shell / GTK3. With the advent of GNOME Shell, many useful settings that existed in GNOME 2 based desktop environments were removed, hidden or relocated, making it difficult for the average user to find these settings. This article will discuss a tool called “GNOME Tweaks” or “GNOME Tweak Tool” that reveals some of these settings to end users in GNOME Shell based Linux distributions like Ubuntu. These settings are usually not available in main system settings (also known as GNOME Control Center).
In networking, an IP address is a label assigned to a computer connected to the network. In that network, an IP address identifies a unique device. It enables devices to communicate with each other over an IP-based network like the internet or LAN.
In the case of Linux, there are multiple tools that you can use to check the IP address. Some of the tools come pre-installed with most of the distros; some don’t.
Check out how to get IP address in Linux.
Blender is a popular 3D modeling tool. Along with modeling, it offers the entire production pipeline of 3D creation, and that includes shading, texturing, compositing, video editing, and animation. Animations are the most effective way to communicate and convey the message. It has now become a marketing tool, and many businesses are getting benefitted from it. Blender is probably the best 3D modeling program that lets you create beautiful-looking animations and motion graphics.
If you have learned how to make a 3D animation in Blender, then it’s time to export it. This article focuses on exporting Blender animations that include selecting render engine, resolution, quality, codec, etc.
In the present era, technology has become a core part of our lives, as devices such as smartphones, computers, tablets, and more are being used every day. As technology becomes more and more advanced, it has turned out to be a huge blessing for us as our lives are becoming easier and much more efficient.
However, the Internet has also paved way for issues such as data breaches and identify theft, which, as time goes on, have become increasingly more frequent and more hostile. Our data is constantly under threat of becoming exposed and leaked. Even if security breaches do not occur, there are often cases where data is lost due to accidental deletion or hard drive crashing, which can cause users to lose their valuable stored information. It is imperative to implement backup strategies to keep a record of your data and avoid losing all your information. This article shows you how to back up your data in the Ubuntu operating system.
The latest version of Arkime (The Sniffer Formerly Known As Moloch) can now be fed with a real-time stream of decrypted HTTPS traffic from PolarProxy. All that is needed to enable this feature is to include "pcapReadMethod=pcap-over-ip-server" in Arkime's config.ini file and start PolarProxy with the "--pcapoveripconnect 127.0.0.1:57012" option. PolarProxy will then connect to Arkime's PCAP-over-IP listener on TCP port 57012 and send it a copy of all TLS packets it decrypts.
The btrfs file system is quickly becoming more widespread. It's used on a number of Linux distributions and offers plenty of features that make sense in a data center environment--features like snapshots, load balancing, online defragmentation, pooling, and error detection.
To get the most out of the btrfs file system, you're going to need to know how to use some of the more advanced features. One such feature is called balancing (or rebalancing).
In this video, we are looking at how to install NetBeans 12 on Linux Mint 20.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AnyDesk on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, AnyDesk is the world’s most comfortable remote desktop application. Access all your programs, documents, and files from anywhere, without having to entrust your data to a cloud service. You can say it’s an alternative to the TeamViewer, which is available free. Anydesk provides a faster remote connection than any other existing remote desktop application.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of AnyDesk Remote Desktop on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (SRB2Kart) on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Suppose you want to taste multiple Linux Distribution but your skeptical about which Linux distribution you should choose which will be the best for you. It cannot decide easily, for that you have to try the distribution after using you can say yes this OS or Distribution is best for me.
For FreeBSD 13 there is now the import of the WireGuard kernel module. This follows OpenBSD adding WireGuard earlier in the year, various Linux kernel back-ports have been adding WireGuard too now like the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, and Android 12 looks to support WireGuard. The WireGuard port for Windows was also recently updated.So, we will share with you the process to get out of this kind of dilemma. Thanks to Virtualization, You can use multiple Operating Systems or Distribution without affecting your primary OS.
Many years ago, I also struggled to select which version should I use for my daily drive, and thanks to Virtualization, I have tried different OS and Linux Distribution.
After this, I was not convinced which virtualization software I should use, But after trying different virtualization, I decided to use VMware for virtualization.
If it's not clear yet - Stadia Pro is an entirely optional subscription. You get to claim and keep free games, as long as your subscription remains active. If you stop it, you lose those games until you subscribe again and then you get them back - it works like PSPlus on the PlayStation. Otherwise, you buy games from Stadia like any other store.
You can also now play Super Bomberman R Online, the 64 player Battle Royale game completely free to play on Stadia. That's now the second free to play game following Destiny 2 going free on Stadia back in November. Giving you another easy game to try the service with which is what it has been lacking.
As you may already know, I now have been hired for a month to work on the TileMap and TileSet editors. My goal here is to improve the UX of working with tiles, making it both easier to use and more powerful. So here is a first progress report on how things are going.
All the work presented here is based on the proposal I made on the godot-proposals repository. The implementation might end up a little bit different, but the proposal will give you a preview of what I am aiming for.
Ah, my favourite mix of genres. Space, sci-fi and strategy. I am a self-confessed huge space nerd, so a bundle of games like this is right up my street. The Linux-supported titles are great in this bundle but there's not many of them in total, it's a small bundle. Here's what to expect from it.
Want to get a bunch of awesome games and support numerous charities? The Yogscast Jingle Jam 2020 Bundle is live.
Unlike other years, they're not doing it through Humble Bundle but instead with Tiltify which is a dedicated charity-based fundraising platform. The whole event runs from now until December 14, 2020 which various livestreams being done which you can see the schedule for here.
The KDE Plama desktop component in the KDE suite has been updated to 5.20.4. This is a bug fix update and available through the Synaptic Package Manager for users that are using the KDE Plasma desktop.
PinePhone Linux phone first launched as an early adopter phone without any OS when the “Brave Edition” was first introduced in November 2019. Since then Pine64 launched variant with different Linux mobile OS including PinePhone Community Edition: UBports, the PostMarket Edition that also added support for mobile/desktop convergence with a model with more RAM and storage, as well as a USB-C Dock, and more recently there was a batch with PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition.
If you haven’t already gotten your hand on one of the earlier models, you’ll be glad to know the PinePhone KDE Community Edition is now available for pre-order for the same $149.99 price tag for the phone only or $199.99 with the convergence package.
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
Not so long ago, I was using macOS as my daily driver. The main reason why I got a macbook was the underlying BSD Unix and the nice graphics it provides. Also, I have an iPhone. But they were also the same reasons for why I left macOS.
I did not want to write this post right after the migration, I wanted to take my time, use FreeBSD daily, see if I will ever miss macOS.
Back in July SUSE announced its intention to acquire Rancher Labs. That deal has now closed for acquiring the Kubernetes focused cloud company.
Just as they said back in July and reaffirmed today, they intend to keep Rancher's software "100% open-source" moving forward.
Imagine powerful technology that is both leading-edge and reliable.
Second month of doing these posts. In short not much has been happening the past weeks, but that would be a slight lie.
I have sponsored rgacognes Trusted User application. The application was posted to the mailing list, and it’s currently being voted and decided by a weeks time.
There has also been some discussion for years about bringing debug packages into Arch. This has largely been stalled but I brought it back to life again. Essentially the problem might be solved by utilizing the new debuginfod project, and we can later distribute the packages itself when we understand the new mirror requirements. There is currently a discussion on [arch-dev-public] about it.
Along with the above, chugging along nicely with packages. Python has been rebuilt for the Python 3.9 release. This means there hasn’t been as many python package updates. Currently everything is in testing and we should see packages move to the stable repositories early next week. I simply haven’t been bothered going through the hoops of releasing package updates into stable and then deal with a rebuild for python 3.9 for testing.
To celebrate the season of giving, we’re launching a tech for good campaign as part of the Master the Mainframe enterprise coding contest. For students who spend an hour checking out IBM’s enterprise computing coding challenge, IBM will donate four meals to World Food Programme’s #ShareTheMeal initiative.
IBM announced new cloud services and technologies to protect existing data in the cloud and prepare for potential threats associated with advances in quantum computing.
IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a series of cloud services and technologies designed to help clients maintain the highest available level of cryptographic key encryption protection to help protect existing data in the cloud1 and prepare for future threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing. Pioneered by IBM Research scientists, the company is now offering quantum-safe cryptography support for key management and application transactions in IBM Cloud€®, making it the industry's most holistic quantum-safe cryptography approach to securing data available today.
When we surveyed IT leaders this year to learn about their technology goals for 2021, we were curious about the impact of COVID-19 on planning and how we can best meet our customers where they are for the coming year. What we learned? Digital transformation and security remain important, and more than a quarter of those surveyed have a hybrid cloud strategy heading into 2021.
From July through September we surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals — most from companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. This included a mix of Red Hat customers and a broader industry panel.
Red Hat Software Collections 3.6 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 10 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are now Generally Available. An alternative to the default RHEL toolset, Software Collections provides a differentiated and eclectic mix of tools that developers can use on a desktop or in production.
Red Hat Software Collections are use case-specific tools and include the most current, stable version of dynamic languages, open source databases, web servers, and other critical development components. The Red Hat Software Collections 3.6 release features four new collections and four that have been updated.
The latest version of Red Hat Software Collections is now generally available, bringing the latest, stable and supported open source developer tools to Red hat Enterprise Linux 7.
While holiday festivities will look different this year, December—for many of us—will likely still include a flurry of closing out projects and tying up loose ends to set up for the upcoming year. As you sit down at your kitchen island with a cup of hot chocolate (or tea, coffee, lemon water, etc.) and open your mobile banking app to begin planning your 2021 budget, will you pause to wonder how Red Hat technologies have been in action behind the scenes to help shape not only the device you’re accessing but also the environment you’re sitting in? Maybe not, but we’re here to help get those thoughts flowing.
As this month is a time to look ahead both at home and at work, we’re sharing some new customer success stories that may help you strategize goals for IT optimization in your enterprise or think about how digital transformation can also lend to agile practices for your staff. Let these success stories begin to frame how Red Hat technologies can help your enterprise meet customer needs in the new year.
For any integration platform to be effective in a hybrid multicloud environment, it must support different cloud providers. You require flexibility to select cloud providers that most effectively address your needs across cost, performance, and security requirements, without fear of vendor lock-in. With this in mind, Cloud Pak for Integration is built on Red Hat OpenShift and supports all the major cloud providers including IBM Cloud, Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Need hands-on experience? Want to jump-start a proof of concept? Not sure what integration capabilities you’ll need? IBM, working closely with our partners at AWS, makes it easy with the Quick Start for IBM Cloud Pak for Integration on AWS. Employing best practices from both IBM and AWS, you can deploy a full range of integration capabilities in a production-grade multi-availability zone topology with a single click. So, jump in and start experimenting with different integration patterns that can help facilitate your transition to hybrid cloud.
We have just published the seventh point release: UCS 4.4-7 comes with various improvements and some new features, for example in the Self Service app and in the portal. We have also added a new Samba version and worked on the S4 Connector. In this article, I’d like to describe the most important changes.
The 11th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2020...
Here’s my (fourteenth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
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This was my 23rd month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/
Apart from doing a bunch of activitites like attending KubeCon + RubyConf (blog to follow!), et al and simultaneously giving my undergrad exams, I did (relatively) more work than I had really anticipated!
After more than two months of development, Ubuntu Unity 20.10 is now available in a final form for the Raspberry Pi. Like I said in my previous report, this distro is better run the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B series, as well as the recent Raspberry Pi 400 complete personal computer built into a compact keyboard, which is also based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
According to the developer, you can also run Ubuntu Unity 20.10 on the older Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ models, but the entire experience might be a bit sluggish, especially when surfing the Web with the Mozilla Firefox web browser.
We have the pleasure to announce the results of the Ubuntu Membership Board elections, in no particular order...
Open source fragmentation is enabling innovation and efficiency, but also increasing security risks, writes Lech Sandecki, Product Manager at Canonical – the publisher of Ubuntu
In 2020, 99 percent of enterprise codebases contain open source components. Businesses have come to realise that the collective approach of open source toward innovation has incredible benefits, and will help them to integrate technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine-learning (ML), and microservices into their solutions.
But with this goldrush, which has brought a sharp rise in new applications, it’s becoming more difficult to see, or simply just to know, how many open source components are involved. This fragmentation is consequently hurting compliance officers, who are unable to keep up with the software supply chain. These same officers are struggling with visibility and cannot keep up pace.
The challenge is that the landscape is unrecognisable from just a decade ago. Back then, a much smaller pool of commercial open source vendors licensed their software to customers, understood everything about the code, and dealt with every security patch.
Today, we’re excited to announce that EKS is available outside of AWS, on any Ubuntu system, with the EKS snap. This announcement builds on the existing collaboration between Amazon and Canonical to ensure the quality, security, and usability of Ubuntu-based EKS clusters on AWS.
Since its release, the Raspberry Pi 4 has been getting a lot of attention from hobbyists because of the noteworthy changes it came with. The CPU got more powerful, got an amazing ability to run dual 4K displays, and the gigabyte ethernet has increased the overall performance. Getting all these amazing features at such a low price is sure to make you go crazy! Even we were confused at first about which projects will be the best choice with the new Pi. After much research and experiments, we came with these 15 Raspberry Pi 4 projects that every Pi geek should try at least once with the newly improved Pi.
We truly think of the Librem 14 as our dream laptop here at Purism, and because of that and because this is a brand new design compared to the Librem 13 we find ourselves nitpicking a bit more than usual as our design becomes a reality.
As part of this nitpicking process we make EVT (Engineering Verification Test) samples which allow us not only to fine-tune our manufacturing process, it also allows us to physically examine the laptop. Using kill switches, using the keyboard, examining the print on the case and keyboard–all these and other tests help us refine things so that the final product is something we are proud of. In addition to the more cosmetic bugs we list below, it also helps us find larger bugs. For instance we discovered issues not just with the microphone but also an issue that limited the 2nd SO-DIMM slot to 16GB RAM. We needed to re-do the PCB to address both of these issues.
We know a lot of people have been interested to see pictures of the actual Librem 14 instead of just renders. We have made the second round of EVT samples a few weeks ago and have finally gotten a chance to take some high-quality pictures to share. We are almost there! There are just a few more tweaks we want to make that will only add a few weeks to our shipping plan, but we think it’s important to get everything perfect. With the holidays this will likely mean shipping won’t start until the beginning of January.
Traditional IP-KVM systems may cost you hundreds of dollars. DIY Pi KVM over IP is a very simple and fully functional Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP that you can make yourself. If you do not know what IP-KVM is, it stands for keyboard, video, and mouse. It allows you to connect to a computer or a server remotely. With this, you can fix problems such as configuring the BIOS or reinstalling the OS using a virtual CD-ROM or flash drive.
Earlier this year, Seeed Studio introduced the Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino that included the Arduino UNO compatible Seeduino Lotus board placed at the center and ten pre-wired and detachable Grove modules to get started with sensors on Arduino with no cabling whatsoever apart from the USB cable. Arduino must have seen and liked the design, and Seeed Studio has collaborated with the Italian company to create the Arduino Sensor Kit Base with a very similar design, but with a twist as instead of an all-in-one platform with modules and an Arduino board, it’s a very large shield that seats on tops of Arduino UNO.
Let the holiday countdown begin! With the Arduinoliday Calendar, everyday is a new window, and every window is a new surprise…
To unlock the surprises, click on the Arduinoliday window on the Arduino homepage. The calendar is packed with inspiration, projects, and wonderful surprises for makers — and their beloved ones — who love to create with Arduino!
Getting started with electronics and sensing the world around you is now easier than ever with the new all-in-one Arduino Sensor Kit from Arduino, in partnership with Seeed.
The 10 most popular modules and sensors for your Arduino UNO have been integrated onto a single board, providing plug-and-play convenience without the need for any soldering or wiring! Combining basic Grove sensors and actuators for the Arduino UNO, the kit contains a base shield featuring the following modules that can be connected either through the digital, analog, or I2C connectors
As an open-source company, Arduino aims to ensure that open-source continues to thrive and remains sustainable for the long term. The Arduino Donation Program is intended to fund projects and institutions that make a lasting difference in the worldwide open-source community.
Arduino’s corporate giving efforts are focused on not-for-profit and charitable organizations supporting the free and open-source software movement. Arduino Donation Program recipients have been selected according to the importance of their project, and above all, their dedication to making technology accessible to everyone.
OpenUK is looking for two charismatic and diligent individuals to be judges in the 2021 OpenUK Awards. After a successful first edition in 2020, OpenUK are looking to find two judges from the Community to judge the Awards with Katie Gamanji, our head Judge for 2021.
This year, OSI Board member Elana Hashman began a project to survey OSI's stakeholders. This was the first time in our history that we have formally surveyed people in our community. Some of the results were surprising and some were expected, but on the whole, the participants we spoke with want to see OSI do "more." Let's take a look at some of the highlights.
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Elana Hashman, OSI Board Director said, "I'm very excited to present the report for the OSI's first members survey. As the Membership Committee Chair, I think it is crucial to seek input from our members in order to ensure that the OSI's strategy is informed and representative. Participants have put many hours into sharing their thoughts on how they view the OSI and how we can improve the organization, and I am so appreciative of the community's thoughtful responses and contributions."
As we announced back in October, Bootlin has participated to the organization of a new online conference around embedded systems: Live Embedded Event, which will take place on December 3. The registration is totally free, and the event will propose 4 tracks throughout the day, covering a wide range of topics. We encourage you to register and participate to the event!
WordPress 5.6 is slated for release on December 8, 2020, and we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.6 yet, now is the time!
Server Side Public License-Beginning with v4.0, Graylog Open Source will be licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL). First introduced by MongoDB, the SSPL license provides similar open source rights to GPL v3, and additionally extends those rights to cover cloud and SaaS offerings.
PHP 8 is the first major update of the widely deployed web programming language in years, bringing new features that could help expand its adoption and usage.
Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. Arthur Anderson, one of the “Big Five” accounting firms, which audited the financial statements was dissolved as a result of the Enron scandal.
The Enron email and financial datasets are big, messy treasure troves of information, which become much more useful once you know your way around them a bit. Enron’s complete data may be downloaded from this link here, and the refined pickle files may be downloaded from the following Github repository along with the complete code used in this article.
If you read the recent Qt Marketplace blog post, you may have noticed that something called Qt Quick MultiEffect has become available. This blog post gives more details on what Quick MultiEffect actually is and why you might want to consider using it in your Qt Quick projects.
Let's start with a bit of background information. Qt Graphical Effects module contains a set of effects which can be used in Qt Quick user interfaces. These cover blur, shadow, mask, contrast etc. effects which can be easily applied into Quick items. When you need a single effect, these are great. But when you want to use multiple effects at the same time, performance is not optimal, because each effect renders into FBO texture which next effect then uses as its source. Because of this separation of effects, shaders also can't share calculations and textures. So multiple Qt Graphical Effects increase GPU and memory usage a bit more than desired.
‘Perl is dead’, is a meme that’s just plain wrong. Perl isn’t dead. It’s just dead to some programmers. Complicated regexes? Sigils? There’s more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI)? Sometimes when programmers encounter Perl in the wild they react with fear. “WTF!?”, they cry! But fear needn’t be a Perl killer. If you take the time to see past Perl’s imperfections and walk the learning curve, there are rich rewards: Perl is an imperfect but pragmatic and expressive language that for 30+ years has helped programmers get the job done.
When Larry Wall designed Raku he fixed most of Perl’s imperfections and doubled down on Perl’s DNA. Perl values pragmatism, expressivity, and whipupitude and Raku does too! Why stop at sigils ($@%) when you can have twice the fun with twigils ($!, %!, @! etc)?
For some programmers, however, the mere sight of a twigil can induce fear. Like Perl, Raku’s expressive power is a double-edged sword – potentially stopping other programmers in their tracks. A Raku programmer’s, “DWIM” (do what I mean) can be another programmer’s “WAT!?”
Python provides many built-in modules, functions, and statements that help the programmers to perform various complicated tasks easily. It also provides many built-in data structures like lists, tuple, and dictionaries, which ensure the efficient creation and management of data in applications. A queue is a data structure that stores and manages the data. It stores the data in a first-in, first-out (FIFO) order. The element that is inserted first will be removed first. We can understand the working of the queue from our daily life example. It‘s like a queue of customers; the customer who comes first is facilitated first.
Every programming language provides a mechanism to add comments to projects. Comments are the simple lines in computer programs that are ignored by the compiler or interpreter. Comments are often written in natural language to increase programmer comprehensibility. Developers use comments to ignore some parts of the code in the debugging or testing phase.
Writing comments in Python can be very simple, and creating a comment in Python begins with the ‘#’ symbol. This article explains how to create multi-line comments in Python.
Lists are an important data structure in Python, used to store multiple elements in a single container. Python lists can store both similar types and heterogeneous types of elements. In Python, you can join or concatenate two or more lists. Joining a list merges numerous lists into a single list. This article explains the joining or concatenation of Python lists in several ways.
Python is a general-purpose programming language. It is widely used in machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and data sciences projects. Python is loaded with handy built-in modules, functions, and statements. Therefore, it helps the programmers a lot to perform many types of tasks. Performing the file related task in Python is super easy due to the availability of related modules. We can perform any type of file-related tasks, i.e., reading, writing, searching, and deleting a file.
ZIP is a popular format of files that offers lossless compression. A ZIP file contains one or many compressed files and is a single file. The compression algorithms ensure that we can recreate the actual data from the compressed data without any loss. There are several benefits of using the zip file. By using the zip files, we can put all the related data in one single file with reduced file size. Encryption can also be applied while creating zip files. ZIP files are mostly created and used when we need to transfer data through online sources like social media applications and email. It ensures the fastest delivery of data. Python provides a built-in zipfile module to work on the ZIP files. In this guide, we will learn to perform various zip file-related tasks with examples.
In programming language, variables are used to store information. For example, in developing a student management software system, the name, email, and age of a student will be stored in the respective variables. Like other programming languages, Python has both global and local variables. In Python, global variables are declared outside of the function and can be used everywhere in the program. This article explains global variables in Python in detail with some examples.
The scope of the global variable is very wide, and it is not limited to any specific function. These variables can be used both inside and outside of the function for storing and retrieving information.
The vast variety of Python built-in modules, functions, and statements helps programmers to perform various tasks. The getattr() function is a Python built-in function that allows programmers to access the attribute value of an object. If the value is not found, then the getattar() function returns the default value. This is the reason why the getattr() function is used mostly to access the attribute values of objects. This article will provide a detailed explanation of the getattr() function with some examples.
They paid them to cut their olive trees down.
You paid them to cut their olive trees down.
The conglomerate is now negotiating how much stake it would purchase in Innovative Retail Concepts Pvt., which is commonly known as BigBasket.com, the person said, asking not to be identified discussing details of private talks. Mint newspaper reported earlier that Tata may buy close to 80% for $1.3 billion.
The bank drilled open and emptied thousands of safety deposit boxes across the country in 2012 in an effort to get rid of those no longer being used or paid for. It says its policies require the contents to be set aside for safe keeping.
It would be wonderful for these two things to be severed as ideas and associations at the soonest possible moment – a day for each, if you will.
Let’s have a day of pure-hearted gratitude spent with those we love, and let’s have a day to – what – have that conversation that’s been ringing in our ears for centuries now.
For Guy Debord, the radical lyricist and founder of the Situationist International – a rather strange and short lived revolutionary organisation which privileged authentic human action over theory and headed some of the early student protests, wasn’t interested in reform. To Debord’s mind, we have become enslaved to a form of life which not only dehumanises us, but lulls us into a state of comatose compliance. Accordingly, his goal was not to further the demands of any particular interest group, but to highlight the shared emptiness of our degraded existence. Debord blamed this desolation on the fact that life had become completely colonised by capitalism. To the extent that even our relationships with each other are now reflected through the prism of the market. Like many at the time, Debord believed that the Left had betrayed the working class in accepting the so called ‘post war consensus’, which insisted on the ‘logic of the market.’ By accepting the promise of jobs over power, the Left had failed those they were supposed to represent and condemned them to irreversible enslavement. And not just the working class, for now all of society was caught up in a rampant consumerism from which there was no escape. Debord saw how that fatal acceptance had locked us into a global system, creating “one consensual organisation of the world through the market”: a totality we can neither escape nor change.
This totality Debord famously dubbed ‘The Spectacle’, which he described with excoriating brilliance in ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, published a year before the riots. Written in aphoristic style, it is not so much a guide book to a new world as a handy compendium of poignant snapshots as to why we need to quit the old one. All the phrases Debord used to exemplify his concept of the Spectacle bespeak a weltanschauung of deadness. The Spectacle is “a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.” It is “A concrete inversion of life”, “an autonomous movement of non-life”. The Spectacle describes capitalism in its cultural form; shaping and managing all of life in accordance with the demands of the market. What Debord realised, which many on the Left did not, and still don’t, is that it is no longer possible to distinguish the forces of capitalism from culture, art, the state, corporations, public institutions such as education or healthcare, entertainment, the media and just about every other aspect of life, because everything is now joined up and infused by the market. It is a totality of commodification in which we exist merely as a network of representations. It is “a worldview turned into an objective force”. The Spectacle denotes a world in which life has been given over to function and representation, in which we have been hollowed out and repurposed to serve needs other than our own. We have roles and identities which we perform, but we no longer live authentic, self-determining human lives. In fact, Debord goes so far as to assert that “all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power and completely shaped by that power has assumed a social character. Indeed it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear.” Because “nothing is allowed to appear which contradicts the spectacle.”
A little over five years ago, I wrote about the seeming emergence of a new trend in the video game space: living and evolving game worlds instead of single-serving "games". While MMOs and other online games certainly weren't new even then, what with World of Warcraft having a decade under its belt at that point, the post did focus on several game publishers beginning to make noises about focusing on these breathing ongoing experiences rather than selling shiny discs, or even digital downloads of one-and-done games. And if that trend became the norm, it really would change the industry. Development cycles for the release of games wouldn't so much be a thing compared with the ongoing and time-spanning development that would go into consistently creating new experiences within an existing game. For those interested in the gaming industry, or those concerned with how traditional development cycles and "crunch" have impacted design labor, this really could be something of an inflection point.
He played with the skills of a unique talent, skills that only a few players can put on display. This was evident from his earlier years with Argentinos Juniors and when he burst onto the international stage in Tunisia in the 1979 Coca-Cola World Youth Championship which Argentina won beating the USSR in the final. Italian commentators referred to this stocky youth as ‘l’astro nascente’ (prodigy, a young man of tremendous promise). I recall seeing him score a goal of exquisite beauty for Argentina against a Rest of the World XI to commemorate one year since Argentina’s 1978 World cup win. These are skills which place him in the same bracket as such other Argentinian greats as Alfredo di Stefano (la saeta rubia), Lionel Messi and perhaps Omar Sivori. Unlike the contemporary Messi, he was both a leader and the street urchin (scugnizzi they call them in Naples) who would ally mesmerising skills with his questionable arts of hoodwinking referees with quick thinking and guile. The ‘hand of God’ goal in 1986 was a classic example. He also has the wits of the street urchin. Who can forget how he played on the traditional North-South divide of Italian post-Risorgimento politics, known as ‘La Questione Meridionale’? With the 1990 World Cup semi-final being staged in Naples, the city where he played his club football, taking Naples, just as he single-handedly took an otherwise modest Argentinean eleven, to international heights, he cleverly stirred Neapolitan feelings. “For 364 days you do not consider Naples as Italian,” he quipped to this effect “Now for just one day you want Neapolitans to be Italian”. Maybe the minds of Neapolitans would have already been made up by then. It is well known that Maradona had become such a cult figure in Naples that several Neapolitans inside the Stadio San Paolo (soon to be named after Maradona) rooted for their hero’s Argentina. Argentina went through on penalties and so, four years on from his 1986 success, Diego steered the blue and white stripes to another World Cup final against West Germany. But Italians are an unforgiving lot. Any team playing Argentina in the final, and that could have been England who also lost their semifinal on penalties, would have had a hostile Italian home crowd rooting for them or rather baying for Maradona’s and Argentinean blood. He was given the treatment in Rome said to have been meted out to the Early Christians when thrown to the lions inside the Colosseum. Argentina lost the contest to a dubious penalty and had players sent off.
Being however the subaltern hero par excellence, Diego Armando Maradona, born in one of the poorer quarters of Buenos Aires, found in Naples, with its impoverished quarters and Hispanic residues (it had been under Spanish control before the Risorgimento and some people felt that they were treated better by the Bourbons than by the so-called Northern liberators), the ideal environment for cult hero status. One would argue that with his sublime almost extra-terrestial skills he would have been a demigod anywhere. Well, it would have been difficult for him to have the same status with his previous European club, Barcelona. Neither Messi would be that cult status figure, despite leading them to four Champions leagues and numerous La Liga (Spanish league championship) victories. That role was secured by the great Johann Cruyff, the star of the 1974 World Cup and of the Ajax team which won three European cups, who, after moving to Barca, took them from mid-table mediocrity, to the sunlit uplands of Spanish football both as player and later manager; he won them their first ever European cup. Furthermore, he set them a style which has become their trademark ever since. He argued “If the opponents do not have the ball, they cannot score”. This is possession football at its most scintillating, tiki-taka, or simply the Johann Cruyff style. So an icon already existed in Catalan folklore, especially as far as Cruyff as player was concerned; his managerial successes came during the twilight of and after Maradona’s stint in Naples.
It is the second largest radio telescope in the world and had been operating for more than half a century.
International students play an especially prominent role in generating economic activity. A fresh reminder of the significance of these students’ spending surfaced last month when data from Nafsa: Association of International Educators revealed that the amount international students contributed to the U.S. economy in 2019-20 fell to $38.7 billion from the year before. The 4.4-percent decline was the first drop in the more than two decades that Nafsa has been calculating economic impact data. The number of jobs created or supported by international students fell, too.
The country has documented nearly 13.7 million confirmed cases and over 270,000 deaths from the disease, more than any other nation.
"This is a time where it's not an overstatement to say that for many people, eviction can lead to death."
In the morning, I shower right after I wake up. I choose from a number of products to clean myself, yet they are made by just two companies: Unilever and Johnson & Johnson. I brush my teeth with a toothbrush and toothpaste made by Procter & Gamble but sold under the separate brands Oral-B and Crest. Before I eat breakfast, because I have Type 1 diabetes, I take insulin, a drug that, because of pharmaceutical consolidation and anticompetitive patent hoarding allowed to run amok, cost about $20 for a vial in 1996 but now costs $275. Lunch isn’t any better. The peanut butter for my sandwich almost certainly comes from one of three companies; same with the jelly. We all have “choices,” but do we really get to choose?
Shortly after the Covid-19 pandemic struck the United States, a reporter asked Donald Trump if he now considered himself a wartime president. “I do. I actually do,” he replied. Swelling with purpose, he opened a press briefing by talking about it. “In a true sense, we’re at war,” he said. Yet the press and pundits rolled their eyes. “Wartime president?” scoffed The New York Times. “It’s far from clear if many voters will accept the idea of him as a wartime leader.” His “attempt to adopt the military mien raised more than a few eyebrows,” NPR reported. What few noted at the time is that Trump, of course, was a wartime president, and not in a metaphorical sense. He presided—and still does—over two ongoing military missions, Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan and Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria. More quietly, thousands of US troops patrol Africa and in recent years have endured casualties in Chad, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan. US planes and drones, meanwhile, fill the skies and since 2015 have killed more than 5,000 people (and possibly as many as 12,000) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
"More than 10 months into this pandemic, the Trump administration still refuses to learn from its repeated failures, leading to more disease, more deaths, and more economic devastation across this country."€ €
When someone in the building died, a notice was often taped to a window in the lobby: “WE REGRET TO ANNOUNCE THE PASSING OF OUR FRIEND….” The signs did not say how or where the friend had died, and because they were eventually removed, they could be easy to miss. In March, as these names began to appear more frequently at Bronxwood, an assisted living facility in New York, Varahn Chamblee tried to keep track. Varahn, who had lived at Bronxwood for almost a year, was president of its resident council. Her neighbors admired her poise and quiet confidence. She spoke regularly with management, but as the coronavirus swept through the five-story building, they told her as little about its progress as they told anyone else.
Some residents estimated that 25 people had died — that was the number Varahn had heard — but others thought the toll had to be higher. There was talk that a man on the second floor had been the first to go, followed by a beloved housekeeper. An administrator known as Mr. Stern called in sick. Around the same time, Varahn noticed that the woman who fed the pigeons had also disappeared.
As of today, the Microsoft Teams web app no longer supports Internet Explorer 11, as the Windows giant foretold in August.
Microsoft says that customers using IE 11 with Teams can expect either degraded capabilities or the inability to connect at all. Redmond noted earlier this year that Teams usage had surged with so many people working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The end of Teams support for Internet Explorer is a prelude for a broader abandonment of Microsoft's legacy browser planned for August 17, 2021, when the other Microsoft 365 apps and services shut the door on the creaking software.
Salesforce is paying $27.7 billion for Slack, according to the press release. “Under the terms of the agreement, Slack shareholders will receive $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of Salesforce common stock for each Slack share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion based on the closing price of Salesforce’s common stock on November 30, 2020,” the announcement reads.
Krebbers and Liz Dennett (pictured, left), lead solutions architect at Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke with Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit. They discussed how the Open Group OSDU Forum is reinventing the energy data platform. (* Disclosure below.)
New to technology and want to get an IT job that doesn't end in help desk hell or technician torture? You should check into The Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate (LFCA), the new entry-level IT certification offering from the nonprofit, open-source powerhouse The Linux Foundation.
Josh and Kurt talk about cybersecurity statistics and the value of the data we have.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxstream-java, musl, mutt, pdfresurrect, vips, and zsh), Fedora (libuv, nodejs, thunderbird, and xen), openSUSE (libssh2_org, mutt, neomutt, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, rh-nodejs12-nodejs, rh-php73-php, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (libX11, mariadb, mutt, python-pip, python-setuptools, and python36), and Ubuntu (containerd, php-pear, and sniffit).
Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative has uncovered two more security issues with the aging X.Org Server that as we roll into 2021 is still powering most of the Linux desktops.
The security researchers found multiple input validation failures with the X.Org Server's XKB keyboard extension. Insufficient checks on different checks could lead to out-of-bounds memory accesses or buffer overflows.
X.Org server security advisory: December 1, 2020
Multiple input validation failures in X server XKB extension ============================================================
These issues can lead to privileges elevations for authorized clients on systems where the X server is running privileged.
* CVE-2020-14360 / ZDI CAN 11572 XkbSetMap Out-Of-Bounds Access
Insufficient checks on the lengths of the XkbSetMap request can lead to out of bounds memory accesses in the X server.
* CVE-2020-25712 / ZDI-CAN-11839 XkbSetDeviceInfo Heap-based Buffer Overflow
Insufficient checks on input of the XkbSetDeviceInfo request can lead to a buffer overflow on the head in the X server.
Xorg-server 1.20.10 has been released. This version fixes security issues that could lead to privilege escalation, or other problems.
For American Amazon Alexa users, Amazon Sidewalk is already on and needs to be turned off explicitly by the user. The point is to create an extended network outside of peoples’ homes where Amazon devices are allowed to roam free, but stay connected. Amazon continued:
The French government says the measure is to protect police officers from online calls for violence. But critics point out that it would hinder the legitimate work of journalists reporting on police brutality, and would also discourage members of the public from filming the police committing crimes. These are particularly relevant concerns given two recent cases of police brutality in France. In July, three police officers were charged with the manslaughter of a man of North African heritage, in part thanks to a video recorded by a member of the public. More recently, a video was posted of French police officers beating a black music producer in and outside his studio.
Levin wrote that Monsanto “adopted a multi-pronged strategy” to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who had reported on the likelihood of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer causing cancer. Monsanto also monitored a nonprofit organization focused on the food industry, US Right to Know, and the Twitter account of musician Neil Young, a prominent critic of Monsanto. An ongoing legal case over the dangers of Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer led to disclosure of the internal documents. As Levin reported, company communications “add fuel to the ongoing claims that Monsanto has ‘bullied’ critics and scientists and worked to conceal the dangers of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide.”€
Abi Hassen joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss the rise of facial recognition technology, how this increasingly powerful identification tool is ending up in the hands of law enforcement, and what that means for the future of public protest and the right to assemble and associate in public places.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, all U.S. wireless networks are vulnerable to the types of weaknesses reportedly exploited by Circles. A majority of networks around the globe are similarly vulnerable.
A private surveillance firm that exploits mobile network vulnerabilities to spy on calls, texts and location data is doing business with at least 25 governments around the globe, including some with histories of human rights abuses, concludes a report released Tuesday.
The findings from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab scrutinize the work of the company Circles, which is a sister firm of the Israeli software surveillance broker NSO Group. Human rights activists frequently criticize NSO Group for selling its equipment to repressive regimes, a charge it rejects, even as it is the subject of a lawsuit from Facebook, which alleges that attackers used NSO Group tech to spy on thousands of WhatsApp users.
Facebook announced on Monday that it planned to acquire Kustomer, a customer relationship management start-up, to help it build its e-commerce business. The deal values Kustomer at close to $1 billion, said two people with knowledge of the talks. Kustomer, which is based in New York, had raised roughly $170 million in venture funding, according to data compiled by Crunchbase.
The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, could provide businesses and customers more support for interactions that occur on Facebook and its other apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. More than 175 million people contact businesses using WhatsApp, Facebook said.
A look at the activities carried out over the past five years allows some conclusions about who is particularly committed to the new crypto war. In its wake, Europol is also developing new capabilities for using Trojans and cracking encrypted storage media.
Another large American law enforcement organization has belatedly admitted it uses facial recognition tech after spending years denying it.
On October 10, the deputies of the majority LREM submitted a draft law for “global security”. The National Assembly will debate it on November 4, with unheard-of, unjustified urgency. Its article 21 seeks to deregulate the use of mobile cameras carried by police force. Its article 22 seeks to legalise surveillance by drone. Its article 24 seeks to forbid the public to spread images of police officers.
A top Georgia elections official on Tuesday lashed out angrily at the rhetoric surrounding the election and the threats of violence that have resulted, specifically calling on President Donald Trump to rein in his supporters.
Gabriel Sterling is a Republican who oversaw the implementation of the state’s new voting system. During a routine news conference at the state Capitol to provide an update on the recount of the presidential race requested by Trump, Sterling admonished the president and Georgia’s two U.S. senators, who are both locked in tight runoff races against Democrats and have called on GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to resign over claims that he mishandled the election.
“Mr. President, it looks like you likely lost the state of Georgia,” Sterling said. “You have the right to go to the courts. What you don’t have the ability to do — and you need to step up and say this — is: stop inspiring people to commit acts of violence. Someone’s going to get hurt; someone’s going to get shot; someone’s going to get killed. And it’s not right.”
A top election official in Georgia had scathing words for President Trump and other top Republican leaders who have been attacking Georgia's election system in recent weeks after a spate of reported harassment and death threats during the state's recount.
A Twitter thread accusing a young technician of altering votes in Gwinnett County led to his identity being released and calls for him to be "hung for treason." Caravans of horn-honking Trump supporters constantly parade past Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's private residence and his wife has received sexually explicit threats. President Trump himself has suggested that Republican Gov. Brian Kemp "call off election" and falsely suggested he won the state's 16 electoral votes.
Given how the post-election period has developed, it’s not enough to remove this man from power. His authoritarian presence on the political stage, the cancer that he represents on the American body politic, must be obliterated, leaving absolutely no possibility of a second act. For he has in this past month declared total war on American democracy. And in this struggle, there can be no middle ground.
Trier police said the motive was unknown, that the suspect has no police record and his background shows an indication of political motivation.
[...]
State police in western Germany's Rhineland-Palatinate, where Trier is located, asked people in a Twitter post to not spread disinformation.
The state interior minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Roger Lewentz, said the suspect had used a Land Rover SUV to seemingly target the busy crowd.
"We cannot let anyone drag us into a new war."
Fifty-six of the 193 countries belonging to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have condemned the “Novichok” nerve agent poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. This was announced in a joint statement at the 25th Session of the Conference of State Parties to the OPCW on Monday, November 30.€
What does all this praising and access-drooling amount to?
While campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Biden tried to give a different impression.€ Biden the militarist was gone.€ “It time to end the Forever Wars, which have cost us untold blood and treasure,” he stated in July 2019. Pinching a leaf or two out of Trump’s own playbook, he insisted on bringing “the vast majority of our troops home – from the wars on Afghanistan and the Middle East”.€ Missions would be more narrowly focused on Al-Qaeda and ISIS.€ Support would also be withdrawn from the unpardonable Saudi-led war in Yemen.€ “So I will make it my mission – to restore American leadership – and elevate diplomacy as our principal tool of foreign policy.”
This was an unconvincing display of the leopard desperately trying to change its striking spots.€ During the Obama administration, the Vice-President found war sweet, despite subsequent attempts to distance himself from collective cabinet responsibility.€ These included the current war in Yemen, the assault on Libya that crippled the country and turned it into a terrorist wonderland, and that “forever war” in Afghanistan.€ In 2016, Biden claimed to be the sage in the administration, warning President Barack Obama against the Libyan intervention.€ An impression of combative wisdom was offered.€ He had “argued strongly” in the White House “against going … to Libya,” a position at odds with the hawkish Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who insisted on something a bit more than going to Libya. After the demise of Muammar Gaddafi, what then?€ “Doesn’t the country disintegrate?€ What happens then?€ Doesn’t it become a place where it becomes a – petri dish for the growth of extremism?”€ So many questions, so few answers.
"We urge President-elect Joe Biden and U.S. senators to choose a secretary of defense who is unencumbered by a history of advocating for bellicose military policies and is free of financial ties to the weapons industry."
"American involvement in this brutal catastrophe is shameful and must come to an end."
For many American Jews, the 2020 presidential election marks the end of two pillars of their political identity. The first is the very idea of a Jewish community. There is not one; there are several, and they are growing ever more in conflict with one another.
In a€ recent post, I wrote about “externalities” – the ability of companies to offset the true costs inherent in the production process. The burden of these costs are covertly shifted on to wider society: that is, on to you and me. Or on to those far from view, in foreign lands. Or on to future generations. Externalising costs means that profits can be maximised for the wealth elite in the here and now.
Defense spending increased sharply in the Trump years and is now substantially higher than it was during the Korean or Vietnam War eras or during the massive military buildup President Ronald Reagan oversaw in the 1980s. Today, it consumes well over half of the nation’s discretionary budget, which just happens to also pay for a wide array of urgently needed priorities ranging from housing, job training, and alternative energy programs to public health and infrastructure building. At a time when pandemics, high unemployment, racial inequality, and climate change pose the greatest threats to our safety and security, this allocation of resources should be considered unsustainable. Unfortunately, the Pentagon and the arms industry have yet to get that memo. Defense company executives recently assured a Washington Post reporter that they are “unconcerned” about or consider unlikely the possibility that a Biden administration would significantly reduce Pentagon spending.
"We must not allow that to happen. Diplomacy, not murder, is the best path forward."
Incarcerated activist Kinetik Justice Amun filed a lawsuit on September 28, 2020 seeking damages and injunctive relief against Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) employees, who he claims engaged in retaliation against him in violation of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The defendants in the lawsuit are Jeremy Pelzer, Correctional Sergeant at Limestone; Dustin Brewer, Correctional Officer at Limestone; Denise McKenzie, Correctional Captain at Limestone; Stephen Langford, Correctional Captain at Limestone; Deborah Toney, (former) Warden at Limestone; Scarlette Robinson, Deputy Warden at Limestone; Cheryl Price, ADOC Institutional Coordinator; Jefferson Dunn, ADOC Commissioner.€
The Chinese fleet, made up of squid jiggers and pair trawlers, scooped up a staggering amount of squid—equal to almost as much as the entire squid catch in Japanese and South Korean waters combined over the same period, the report estimated. The Chinese decimated the squid population off North Korea to such a degree that Japanese and South Korean fishers saw their own take of the usually plentiful, migratory species plummet.
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon surged again over the past year, hitting a 12-year high, according to official figures released Monday that drew a chorus of condemnation of President Jair Bolsonaro's government.
This year's recipients of the annual honor hail from the Bahamas, Ecuador, France, Ghana, Mexico, and Myanmar.
The effort aims to hold governments and corporations accountable for the "mass, systematic, or widespread destruction" of the world's ecosystems.
They are different worlds, one an ocean, the other a continent. But a polar link keeps them in touch with each other.
Only by keeping the worst of climate change at bay will we also limit the wrath of hurricanes, saving lives, property, and resources.
[Note: The US military’s status as the world’s worst polluter was story #2 on Censored 2011’s top 25 list; see, “US Department of Defense is the Worst Polluter on the Planet,” in Censored 2011: The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009–10, eds. Mickey Huff, Peter Phillips, and Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2010), 15–24, https://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/. For a synopsis and update of Project Censored’s original story, see Chapter 2 of State of the Free Press | 2021.]
While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fever. Buyers — led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors — are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from the data firm Chainalysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, Chainalysis and other industry firms said.
The original ideas and arguments organizers used to create roadless wilderness were created by New York’s Bob Marshall. All our ideas about the value of wilderness began with him. € If we ever have to mobilize to save public lands, or if we want to create more of it we need to revisit his arguments that motivated the country to acquire it in the first place. Unfortunately, in the last 50 years many of his arguments have been lost and forgotten, but they worked well once and will work again if we can recover and reintroduce them into the next generation’s advocacy conversation.
From the 1930s through the ‘70s, the arguments used to persuade voters that roadless wilderness must be preserved, originated in Bob Marshall’s 1930 essay, “The Problem of the Wilderness.”[1]€ In that essay, parts of which ended up in the 1964 Wilderness Act, he creatively explained the many diverse and marvelous reasons the preservation of roadless wilderness was essential if mankind’s basic humanity and civilization itself were to survive.
With Indigenous languages, we can turn from a narrative of apocalypse—toward multispecies kinship, care, stewardship, protection, and love for the living Earth.
It isn’t just that they claim to practice it either. It’s that they take a metric ton of money premised on their willingness to reduce conflicts, both from federal* and private sources. They suck up federal and private compensation money when their cows get killed by lobos (even when confirmations are sketchy, at best). And don’t even get me started on the artificially low federal grazing fee for public lands livestock. And really don’t get me started on the truckload of other subsidies these folks get for the privilege of producing a tiny fraction of U.S. beef on national forests and arid BLM lands. I. Can’t. Even.
Collectively, we throw a ton of taxpayer money at these folks and they still can’t deal with sharing space with Mexican wolves. Instead, they believe they are entitled to the have the cake they are already eating. It all seems insane until you realize that the whole cowboy myth is built on that same sense of entitlement, whether it’s wolves or bison or prairie dogs or southwestern willow flycatchers or … you name an imperiled species in the western United States and there’s very likely a close connection to livestock being part of the problem. (It’s a twisted and less-fun version of the Kevin Bacon game.)
"We can either have billionaires, or we can make sure all children are fed, with warm beds to sleep in. Pick one. We cannot have both."
As the World Socialist Web Site reported, an August 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report concluded that poor Americans are nearly twice as likely as their rich counterparts to die before reaching old age; while Truthout reported on 2018 data from the€ US Census Bureau€ that showed the gap between the richest and poorest households in the United States is now the largest it has been in more than fifty years, with wealth more concentrated than ever before. “Democrats and Republicans may have different interpretations of these facts,” De Maio wrote, “but in public health, decades of research are coming to a consensus: Inequality kills.”
And the rest of the nation? Tens of millions of Americans are paying precious little attention to the chirpy tale of Wall Street’s ticker. The simple reason: They own no stocks at all. Millions of other Americans who do own stocks don’t see any reason to celebrate either. They’re finding themselves forced, amid pandemic economic collapse, to start selling the stocks that make up the bulk of their retirement savings.
How best to start understanding this story? The best place to begin: The latest numbers on stock ownership from the Federal Reserve. Fed researchers have been tracking who exactly owns the stocks that trade every business day on Wall Street ever since 1989.
Joe Biden lost Florida by more than double the margin that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. Democrats lost at least five seats in the Florida House, and Republicans defeated two Democratic members of Congress in South Florida. An amendment to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour, however, won by 22 points.
The€ Act€ doled out€ nearly $150 billion€ in corporate tax savings in 2018 alone. Because the tax cuts were not “paid for” with corresponding reductions in government spending, the move will likely cause an increase of some $1.9 trillion in the national debt over the next decade.
The Trump-appointee's comments came as the president's reelection campaign filed yet another lawsuit challenging the election outcome.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
With a legislature devoid of opposition, a population cowed by national security legislation and a tone-deaf chief executive operating in a made-in-China protective bubble, a much clearer picture of Hong Kong’s future is emerging — and it’s pretty scary.
The most audacious component of this unwanted promised land is the government’s Lantau Tomorrow Vision, which aims to solve the city’s chronic housing problem with a massive HK$624 billion reclamation project that would wipe out Hong Kong’s fiscal reserves and turn the waters east of Lantau into an environmental disaster zone.
The “big mo”, as the elder George Bush called it back in 1980, seemed to be on his side. But then it all went to seed.
First, there was Rudy Giuliani’s disastrous November 19 press conference, in which the president’s personal lawyer accused Democrats of “mass cheating”, while his colleague, attorney Sidney Powell, raged about “the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba and likely China” that was being used to hack election computers and steal the election on Joe Biden’s behalf. Reporters had a field day describing the brown hair dye coursing down Giuliani’s jowls, as his rhetoric grew more and more heated. Two days later, a federal judge tossed out a Giuliani lawsuit seeking to overturn the vote in Pennsylvania on the grounds that it was filled with “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence”. Then Powell told a rightwing TV news channel the next day that not only were Venezuela and Cuba in on the conspiracy, but top Georgia Republicans “probably” were as well – at which point the Trump legal team had no choice but to give her the boot so as to preserve Republicans unity in the face of a Democratic bid to win two Senate seats in a special Georgia election set for January 5.
Russian President Vladimir Putin got after a group of officials in Siberia for removing their hoods and hats while on a teleconference with him on Sunday, November 29. The officials were standing outside in sub-zero weather, but despite the cold and the president’s urging, they kept their heads uncovered for the duration of the meeting.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has submitted a draft law to the State Duma on banning foreign citizenship for any government officials and military personnel who have access to state secrets.
An unsuspecting couple is walking through a subway station in the working-class neighborhood of Bushwick in Brooklyn. The station is eerily empty. They hear gunfire outside. The boyfriend goes out to investigate, and you know from the conventions of a zombie film that this is a very bad idea. No need for a spoiler alert: he dies.
The girlfriend ventures out to find the residents of Bushwick fighting an invading horde.
White evangelicals fought fiercely for Republicans this year. They gave about 80 percent of their votes to President Trump and strongly favored conservatives in state elections. These born-again fundamentalists have shrunk to only 15 percent of America’s population, but they’re so politically intense that they were 28 percent of voters who went to the polls. Undoubtedly, they tipped some marginal states to the GOP, causing early Democratic consternation on election night. But they couldn’t swing the whole nation. And maybe – with the relentless decline of religion – they never can do so again. Let us hope.
The rise and fall of right-wing, born-again politics is a significant episode in America’s history. Until after World War II, many fundamentalists shunned government, choosing to ignore this world and focus on heaven and hell instead. But white evangelicals – the most racist element of society, some research says – were jolted by several breakthroughs that threatened their vision of America as a Christian “city on a hill” favored by God.
Trump, who’s been pissing on us for four years, bequeathed to us the legitimatization of white supremacists, white nationalists, Nazis and other armed posses disguised as protectors of a “free” America. He made it all right to be openly racist because he is.
It's no secret that Donald Trump doesn't like Section 230. Wait. Actually, let's back up and try that again: it's no secret that Donald Trump doesn't like what he thinks Section 230 is about, which has little-to-no-resemblance to what Section 230 is actually about. However, over the long weekend, things took an even more ridiculous turn than usual. It started on Thanksgiving when the President was signing some legislation and taking some questions from the press. For unclear reasons, the setup where he had to sign things was with a very small desk affixed with the Presidential seal. While this desk has been used before for such things -- and Trump has even joked about the size of it, the framing of the shot -- the lack of people around him, the wide frame of the shot, the tread over carpet, and just... everything really made it look like the President was sitting at an elementary school desk.
The centrist and corporate Democrats were quick to gloat and declare themselves vindicated. They had, after all, resisted the progressives’ call from inside the party to mobilize the electorate around a social-democratic agenda on labor, healthcare, education, and environment. “The progressives said we need a base candidate,” said Rahm Emanuel. “No we didn’t. We needed someone to get swing voters. If you campaign appropriately, you can make that a governing transformation.” That the former White House Chief of Staff under President Obama and former mayor of Chicago whose own 2015 reelection hinged on his cover up of the police murder of the 17-year-old Laquan McDonald designated himself party spokesperson was telling. The obsession with the swing voter has plagued the Democrats for many decades. They continue to ignore the basic predicament of electoral politics in the U.S.: on average less than 50% of eligible voters participate in major elections. The foundational rift in the party’s electoral strategy lies there. The progressives argue that the only path forward is to tap into the marginalized 50%, the others are resolved to hold the increasingly untenable center.
Winning the White House in an election in which by all accounts Democrats performed abysmally has deepened the rift in the party. In a widely publicized phone conversation with the members of the House Democratic Caucus, Abigail Spanberger, who represents the 7th Congressional District in Virginia, derided the “liberal” wing of the party for promoting radical ideas at the expense of winning local elections. Spanberger, who barely survived her reelection in her district, was adamant that “We need to not ever use the words ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter. And we lost good members because of that.”
Candidate stories are initially identified by Project Censored professors and students, or are nominated by members of the general public, who bring them to the Project’s attention. Together, faculty and students vet each candidate story in terms of its importance, timeliness, quality of sources, and corporate news coverage. If it fails on any one of these criteria, the story is not included.€
The Iranian Writers Association announced on Sunday that Iranian intelligence agents detained Amin Moradi, a poet and member of the organization.
The statement says the security forces stormed Moradi's home on Saturday morning. They ransacked the place for two hours, confiscated Moradi's belongings, including two laptops, a computer, a cellphone and an unknown number of books, and transferred him to Tehran's infamous Evin Prison.
Dong’s video has since been deleted from her account. Twitter is banned in China but can sometimes be accessed through a VPN.
Facebook Inc.’s Oversight Board announced today that it has chosen its first batch of cases to review.
The board, which was announced at the beginning of the year, is made up of academics, media specialists and human rights advocates from around the world. These people are tasked with looking at problematic content that Facebook has taken down and will assess if the company made the right decision.
A new 78-page Amnesty investigation - “'Let us Breathe!': Censorship and criminalisation of online expression in Vietnam” - paints a dark picture of the systematic repression of peaceful online expression in Vietnam, including the widespread “geo-blocking” of content deemed critical of the government, and of attempts to intimidate users into silence.
The investigation is based on dozens of interviews with those impacted, including former prisoners of conscience, lawyers and human rights activists. The organisation reveals that Vietnam is currently holding 170 prisoners of conscience, of whom 69 are behind bars solely because of their social media involvement.
Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for campaigns, said the authorities increasingly saw peaceful online expression as an “existential threat” to the regime.
“Today these platforms have become hunting grounds for censors, military cyber-troops and state-sponsored [astroturfers]. The platforms themselves are not merely letting it happen - they’re increasingly complicit,” she claimed.
Vietnam is one of the biggest markets in South East Asia for tech firms.
In 2018, Facebook's revenue from Vietnam was nearly $1bn (€£750m) - almost one third of its revenue from South East Asia - according to industry estimates quoted by Amnesty. Google is said to have earned $475m during the same period, primarily from YouTube advertising.
Vietnam has never banned social media companies, but in April this year, two sources at Facebook told news agency Reuters that their local servers were taken offline until they agreed to significantly increase the censorship of "anti-state" posts for local users.
Facebook’s decision follows years of efforts by Vietnamese authorities to profoundly undermine freedom of expression online, during which they prosecuted an increasing number of peaceful government critics for their online activity and introduced a repressive cybersecurity law that requires technology companies to hand over potentially vast amounts of data, including personal information, and to censor users’ posts.
"Facebook’s compliance with these demands sets a dangerous precedent. Governments around the world will see this as an open invitation to enlist Facebook in the service of state censorship. It does all tech firms a terrible disservice by making them vulnerable to the same type of pressure and harassment from repressive governments,” said William Nee.
“Facebook’s compliance with these demands sets a dangerous precedent. Governments around the world will see this as an open invitation to enlist Facebook in the service of state censorship,” the group said in a statement on Wednesday.
Facebook has faced pressure to take down anti-government content in many countries over the years.
In Vietnam, despite sweeping economic reform and increasing openness to social change, the ruling Communist Party retains tight control of media and tolerates little dissent, ranking 175th of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
License plate rules are weird. Vanity plates are something anyone can obtain for a fee to personalize their vehicle… just as long as they follow a set of shifting rules arbitrarily enforced by their license plate overseers. There's a lot of talk about only forbidding what's "objectively" offensive, but digging around in DMV databases -- as several litigants have done -- show there are a lot of rejections based on DMV employees' subjective ideas of what is or isn't offensive.
A United States counterintelligence strategy document signed by President Donald Trump warned the “number of actors targeting the United States is growing.”
Lumped in with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and terrorist groups were “ideologically motivated entities, such as hacktivists, leaktivists, and public disclosure organizations” that U.S. intelligence agents view as “significant threats.” [PDF]
President Emmanuel Macron's ruling LREM (La République En Marche) party earlier agreed to rewrite a draft law that would have curbed the right to film police officers in action after large protests over the weekend drew 133,000 people nationwide and 46,000 in Paris alone, according to the official count.
The rallies followed the publication of video footage of the brutal beating of a Black man by three police officers last week, an incident that Macron branded as "shameful" for France. Four officers were charged over the beating on Monday.
A provision in the draft law known as Article 24, a key measure in Macron's plans to court right-wing voters by being tougher on law and order ahead of his likely 2022 re-election bid, had sparked outrage in the media and on the left flank of his own party.
Christophe Castaner, the president of the parliamentary group "The Republic on the Move" (LREM), announced that French lawmakers will once again "rewrite" Article 24 of the "Global Security" law.
Uganda is due to hold presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 14. Incumbent President Yoweri Museveni is seeking to extend his 34 year-rule — but has been accused of muzzling the media and has clamped down on political opponents.
The report recommends that countries prioritize the issuance of emergency visas to allow journalists to flee danger in their home countries and seek temporary refuge until such threats subside. It was authored by human rights lawyer Can Yeginsu and the panel was chaired by former U.K. Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger and Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer and recent CPJ Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award winner.
As a member of the advisory network for the Global Media Freedom Coalition, a board established by the U.K. and Canadian governments, CPJ contributed to the report’s formulation and recommendations, and CPJ Advocacy Director Courtney C. Radsch joined a panel marking the report’s release.
An independent international panel of legal experts on media freedom called on countries to create an emergency visa for journalists at risk.
The High Level Panel of Legal Experts on Media Freedom – an independent body convened in 2019 at the request of the United Kingdom and Canada – released on Monday, November 23, a new advisory report directed to members of the 40-strong Media Freedom Coalition of states.
The report, Providing Safe Refuge for Journalists at Risk, was authored by Professor Can Yeßinsu, a member of the panel and one of Rappler CEO Maria Ressa’s international lawyers.
Abu Ghosh—imprisoned for 15 months after joining a banned college organization that opposes Israel's illegal occupation—described torture by her jailers.€
With some notable exceptions, the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls receive little to no major news coverage: A January 2020 article in the New Republic described one New York Times report on the subject as “a small recognition in a sea of loss.” Both the crisis and Native responses to it—epitomized by the burgeoning Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement—are dramatically underreported.
"I stayed over my brother's scattered poems until noon, but they had taken those three books," Farkhondeh remembers, adding, "His Samsonite briefcase was broken and covered in blood. The scene of the bizarre murder was like that of the Forouhars'. They had killed him with the same number of stabs, and in the same way, they had assassinated [political dissidents] Darioush Forouhar and his wife, Parvaneh."
In their interview with Radio Farda, Hamid's sons, Arvand and Aras Hajizadeh, referred to two people, named Mahmoud Jafarzadeh and Morteza Fallah, as the team sent from Tehran to kill their father and brother. The two names have also appeared on the suspects' list for killing Dariush and Parvaneh Forouhar, two prominent political dissidents. Jafarzadeh was a member of the Ministry of Intelligence's Operations Department who stabbed Dariush Forouhar to death, while Morteza Fallah was the head of the operation to kill the two activists.
Frustrated, she found a template online for a standard cease and desist order and sent emails to various platforms threatening legal action.
Last week, Loujain al-Hathloul, a young activist who fought for women to be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia, appeared in court to hear that her crime has been deemed equivalent to national security and terrorism cases. Al-Hathloul, 31, hadn’t been seen in person for over a year, while reports trickled out about torture and threats of rape and being “thrown in the sewer.” Her parents, in court, reported that she looked weak, exhausted and shaking. So Saudi authorities have already reduced this vibrant, healthy woman to a quivering sick shell of her former self — but apparently that is still not punishment enough.
Violent conflict continues to plague the Papuan provinces, while West Papuans voicing independence aspirations are routinely arrested amid ongoing human rights abuses.
Wenda will be the provisional government's interim president, with the rest of his cabinet to be unveiled in coming months.
He said the new government-in-waiting aimed to mobilise West Papuans to achieve an independence referendum "after which it will take control of the territory and organise democratic elections".
The Asia Pacific Report reported the demonstrations in Manokwari and Sorong were commemorating the anniversary of the West Papua New Guinea National Congress at the weekend.
A shocking video which appears to show a police officer telling a YouTuber who was filming High Wycombe police station to show his ID or “f*** off” before handcuffing him is being investigated.
Thames Valley Police say they are “reviewing” viral video footage posted by YouTuber koleeberks on November 28, which shows him being confronted by two officers outside the Queen Victoria Road station.
Two strangers attacked Russian activist Pavel Krisevich at the railway station in Tver, he told the student journal Doxa on Sunday, November 29.€
"For millions of Vietnamese netizens, Facebook was the great hope for helping to build a free and open society—and it still has the power to be," said Amnesty's lead regional campaigner.€
"It gives me lots of hope to know that the judges in the European Court of Human Rights recognize the urgency of our case," said 12-year-old plaintiff André Oliveira.
Last December we called attention to plans€ by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to require mug shots of all travelers entering or leaving the US by air or sea, including US citizens.
Within days, CBP issued a press release falsely accusing us of incorrectly reporting€ the official CBP notice of its plans, and saying that it would withdraw its notice the next time the regulatory agenda was published.
So what happened?
And while we can have differing opinions of what constitutes good literature, for me it’s books like Battle of Belonging,The:On Nationalism, Patriotism, and What it Means – Shashi Tharoor. From what little I have understood, the book makes the case of civic nationalism which is far more inclusive than the narrow confines of patriotism. Now this begs the question when you have such books and many books which do tell you about different aspects of social, political and knowledge, why are so many people prone to disinformation in India similar to U.S. and probably other countries as well. One of the biggest reasons per-se is lack of education and quality education. When the number of graduates is less than five percent how do you expect that population to be able to take decisions in their economic self-interest? So sadly the understanding is ingrained from WhatsApp and there is no need to check from alternate sources. And just like Mr. Trump followers, they believe those versions to be the unvarnished truth. I do understand that no truth is immutable except for life and death. All others are imperfect unless it is validated by some sort of scientific validation behind it. At the same time, these truths may themselves be invalidated if a stronger scientific evidence establishes itself. This is the reason why hypothesis and facts themselves are challenged again and again. Sharing couple of examples below.
(prior posts in the Broadcasting Act Blunder series include Day 1: Why there is no Canadian Content Crisis, Day 2: What the Government Doesn’t Say About Creating a “Level Playing Field”, Day 3: Minister Guilbeault Says Bill C-10 Contains Economic Thresholds That Limit Internet Regulation. It Doesn’t, Day 4: Why Many News Sites are Captured by Bill C-10), Day 5: Narrow Exclusion of User Generated Content Services, Day 6: The Beginning of the End of Canadian Broadcast Ownership and Control Requirements, Day 7: Beware Bill C-10’s Unintended Consequences, Day 8: The Unnecessary Discoverability Requirements)
The current chair, said one critic, "will go down in history as one of the most corrupt government officials of the century."
For decades, U.S. taxpayers have thrown countless subsidies, tax breaks, and other perks at entrenched broadband monopolies, hoping that this time we'd finally put that pesky "digital divide" to bed. And while there certainly are countless communities that have been helped by taxpayer-funded projects, there are just as many examples where this money was effectively wasted by unaccountable telecom monopolies, which often receive millions to billions in handouts in exchange for fiber networks that are routinely only half-deployed.
While many GOP members continue to happily undermine democracy by fueling Trump's baseless electoral fraud claims, FCC boss Ajit Pai won't be coming along for the ride. In a statement, Pai confirmed that, as is custom, he'll be stepping down as agency head on January 20 as the Biden administration takes over. Historically, the party that controls the White House controls both a 3-2 commissioner majority, and the top spot at the agency.
(prior posts in the Broadcasting Act Blunder series include Day 1: Why there is no Canadian Content Crisis, Day 2: What the Government Doesn’t Say About Creating a “Level Playing Field”, Day 3: Minister Guilbeault Says Bill C-10 Contains Economic Thresholds That Limit Internet Regulation. It Doesn’t, Day 4: Why Many News Sites are Captured by Bill C-10), Day 5: Narrow Exclusion of User Generated Content Services, Day 6: The Beginning of the End of Canadian Broadcast Ownership and Control Requirements, Day 7: Beware Bill C-10’s Unintended Consequences)
Disney Television entertainment chief Dana Walden is reshuffling her executive team as she consolidates the company’s programming operations. The moves will see Disney streamline its three distinct studios into two and integrate programming teams at ABC and Hulu.
Karey Burke will move from her role as head of ABC Entertainment into a new position as president of studio 20th Television. Craig Erwich, longtime head of originals at Hulu, will add oversight of ABC Entertainment to his purview. Burke and Erwich will continue to report to Walden.
In October, Quibi announced that its board had decided to shut down the company, less than seven months after its April 6 debut. The startup, led by Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, had promised subscribers a daily dose of “quick bite” originals, chopped into episodes of 10 minutes or less, featuring recognizable Hollywood talent.
There’s a reason Spotify shelled out millions to bring Joe Rogan’s podcast exclusively to its platform. The Joe Rogan Experience was the most popular podcast on Spotify in 2020, the audio streamer revealed as part of its year-end Wrapped campaign.
Spotify has been investing aggressively into podcasts in recent years, buying up audio-first studios and striking exclusive deals with top podcasters. In May, the company made its biggest bet yet on a podcasting personality when it inked a reported $100 million deal with Rogan to bring his show to its listeners.
The often controversial Joe Rogan Experience hit Spotify on Sept. 1 and becomes exclusive to the platform in December. After making its debut on Spotify, it quickly rocketed to the top of the service’s podcast rankings and, in just three months, has become the most popular audio show of 2020 among its global listenership.
"We believe that eliminating the decades-old revolving door between Silicon Valley and your administration will only help your cause."
Interferences were rendered unnecessary with the passage of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act in 2011, but they linger in disputes between patents and applications claiming priority to applications filed before the change to a "first-inventor-to-file" system. The Federal Circuit recently upheld the Patent Trial and Appeal Board's priority determination in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. University of Wyoming Research Corp. in a decision based on the Board's construction of an undisputedly dispositive term.
[...]
Because "[w]hen claims are copied to provoke an interference, the copied claims are [to be] construed in light of the application from which the claims are copies" the Judge opines, citing Agilent Techs., Inc. v. Affymetrix, Inc., 567 F.3d 1366, 1375 (Fed. Cir. 2009).
In addition, in light of these differences, Judge Newman believes that "Wyoming proved neither conception nor reduction to practice of the Count" (which is a function of the parties' priority status regarding Wyoming being declared the Senior Party and thus not having this burden). But both the law and PTAB rules (specifically 37 C.F.R. ۤ 41.202) contain that requirement which was not complied with here. Seeing this as threshold issue, Judge Newman would have dissolved the interference and permitted both parties to have patents claiming their distinct inventions.
Several RIAA labels have secured a major win in their court battle against the popular hip-hop mixtape service Spinrilla. A federal court in Atlanta has ruled that the company is liable for direct copyright infringement after it streamed thousands of infringing works. In addition, the mixtape service can't rely on the DMCA's safe harbor since it failed to register an official agent.
But as the opening paragraph notes, the precise charges are not currently public.
Copyright lawyer Richard Liebowitz has been repeatedly sanctioned by federal courts. The controversial attorney has a long track record of disregarding court orders. To protect the public from future missteps, the grievance committee of the Southern District of New York decided to suspend Liebowitz until further order.
