Forcing a gaming PC to update mid-game during a livestream to up to 130,000 followers isn’t best advert for the software
Shippable, the Seattle-based producer of a continuous delivery platform for software developers, recently quizzed 300 coders in the U.S. and found that more than half of them (52 percent) are using Docker or other container technologies to deploy their new applications in production. Fourteen percent are using containers for development and testing purposes.
Indicating that 2016 is the year that containers cement their hold on the enterprise, a whopping 89 percent of respondents told the startup that they were very or somewhat likely to increase their use of the DevOps-enabling technology within the next 12 months.
Developers are turning to containers when speed is of the essence. Containers have helped a majority of developers (74 percent) ship new software at least 10 percent faster. Eight percent are enjoying a 50-percent boost.
But for those committed long term to an on premise model, new tactics are required. In a market that is struggling with fragmentation, solutions must become less fragmented. In some cases this will mean traditional formal partnerships, but these can be difficult to sustain as they require time and capital resource investments from companies that are certain to be short on one if not both. History suggests, however, that informal aggregations can be equally successful: the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP combination, as one example, achieved massive success – success that continues to this day.
The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth of Linux, has recently published a new video starring the father of Linux, Mr. Linus Torvalds.
On top of the new ARC PGU driver and Allwinner driver there is yet another new Direct Rendering Manager driver set to land for Linux 4.7.
Being pulled into DRM-Next tonight is a Hisilicon DRM driver for supporting the Kirin SoCs. This DRM display driver was developed by Hisilicon themselves, one of the largest IC designers in China, and currently comes down to supporting the Kirin hi6220 SoCs. This new kernel display driver amounts to just under three thousand lines of new kernel code.
With recent benchmarks showing Intel's Clear Linux distribution even being faster for Intel HD Graphics performance compared to other more common distributions like Ubuntu 16.04, I decided to run some more tests and also test Fedora 23 Xfce into the mix.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. There’s a new release every week. Here are the highlights from this weeks 0.105 release.
The Mercurial project continues its fast pace of innovation in version control. Both major releases this year (3.7 and 3.8) have very important new features that promise to improve user experience to a large degree.
Unigine 2 has looked like a real beauty at least from screenshots, but sadly there hasn't been any tech demo / benchmark releases off it yet nor any major games to talk about using this updated engine. Fortunately, that's now changing.
Dual Universe is a science fiction MMORPG developed and published by Novaquark. This sci-fi game up to now has been developed with Unreal Engine 4, but its developers have decided mid-way to switch over to using Unigine 2.
Recently I put out an article about Blitzkrieg 3 coming to Linux. The Linux icon is prominently featured in their latest trailer, but after speaking to them on Facebook it seems it still has no ETA.
Valve has just pushed a new stable update to its cross-platform Steam Client software for all supported platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.
KDE's Project Neon has begun publishing daily images of the latest KDE Plasma stack powered atop Wayland rather than the X.Org Server.
Jonathan Riddell passed along word that daily ISOs are now being spun of the freshest KDE development code with KWin acting as a Wayland compositor. The OS base is still Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
The Qt Company is proud to offer a new version of the Qt for Application Development package called Qt Start-Up, the company's C++-based framework of libraries and tools that enables the development of powerful, interactive and cross-platform applications and devices. Now used by around one million developers worldwide, the Qt Company seeks to expand its user base by targeting smaller enterprises.
We made a tech preview release of KDE neon User Edition 10 days ago and I made up a survey to get results for how people’s experiences were. We got 59 responses, here’s a summary:
The GNOME Project thanks Red Hat for their recent donation of two new servers. The donation is part of a wider plan aiming to consolidate the location of the various GNOME servers around the globe into one single datacenter. This will help ease day-to-day operations and reduce intervention time in the case of network disruptions or outages.
Today I was having a rough time thinking on how to implement the new GtkPathBar, which is taking more time and frustration than expected given some technological limitations on animations in gtk+ and that responsive design is technologically hard to do.
I hereby announce the release of gNewSense 4, codenamed Ucclia. It's based on a solid Debian, modified to respect the Free Software Foundation's and is available for 3 architectures: i386, amd64 and mipsel (Lemote Yeeloong).
This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.19 – Core Update 102. This update contains various security fixes in the OpenSSL library. It is recommended to install this update as soon as possible.
Yesterday we reported news on the release of the IPFire 2.19 Core Update 102 Linux kernel-based firewall distribution, which brought many security patches and improvements, along with updated components.
Today, May 5, 2016, we're informing our readers about the immediate availability of IPFire 2.19 Core Update 102, a small maintenance build to the stable IPFire 2.19 distribution that updates the OpenSSL package to version 1.0.2h, fixing a total of six vulnerabilities discovered upstream.
Red Hat has announced the launch of a new program to help the company capture the mid-to-high market.
Known as the Independent Sales Representative (ISR) program, it consists of a partnership with Keating Technologies, a sales, marketing and technical support provider that will handle lead gen, and Tech Data, which handle fulfillment and sales execution.
In this digital age, there is still some use for having messaging that is easy to distribute and consume. While it may seem quaint and old-fashioned, hard-copy content is a useful way to deliver information at events like conferences and meetups.
Over the years, a number of times, people have asked us about migrating from our own custom Fedora Account System (FAS) to FreeIPA.
openQA has some integration with Open vSwitch and it’s what the SUSE folks use, so I went with that. You basically have to create a tap device for each worker instance and use something like OVS to connect those devices together with a virtual bridge or whatever so the test VMs can communicate. The VMs also need to access the per-job web server that os-autoinst runs for the worker to upload logs to and download scripts to run from (in some cases), so in the reference set up you have that bind to the bridge interface and ensure the firewalling is set up so the VMs can reach it. And if you need the VMs to have access to the external network, as we do for FreeIPA testing (dnf and rolekit just do not want to work without access to the repositories), you have to basically set up NAT routing for the traffic from the VMs. It’s lots of network configuration fun!
From (some of) the folks that brought you Pandora comes new Linux gaming handheld Pyra. Pre-orders are now being taken. The Free Software Foundation filed a comment with the U.S. Copyright Office calling for an end to JavaScript requirements on government websites. Red Hat recently donated two servers to the GNOME project and Nick Heath examined a draft of the Munich Open Source report. Douglas DeMaio posted of Tumbleweed updates and vulnerabilities in ImageMagick have webmasters scrambling.
The machine is a complete ARM-based PC with micro HDMI, SATA, USB plugs and many others connectors, and include a full keyboard and a 5" LCD touch screen. The 6000mAh battery is claimed to provide a whole day of battery life time, but I have not seen any independent tests confirming this. The vendor is still collecting preorders, and the last I heard last night was that 22 more orders were needed before production started.
Many people might not be aware of it, but since a couple of years ago, we have an excellent tool for tracking and recognising contributors to the Debian Project: Debian Contributors
Debian is a big project, and there are many people working that do not have great visibility, specially if they are not DDs or DMs. We are all volunteers, so it is very important that everybody gets credited for their work. No matter how small or unimportant they might think their work is, we need to recognise it!
Jessie was released one year ago now and the Java Team has been busy preparing the next release.
As you might have noticed earlier today on Google+, David Callé of Canonical teased the community with two mockups that suggested a brand new, tabbed design for the Scopes of the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS.
Some of the Ubuntu Touch developers (David Callé, Alejandro J. Cura, Paty Davila, Marcus Tomlinson, Stephanie Wilson, Alex Milazzo, and Pawel Stolowski) are having right now a live session called "Scopes design evolution," as part of the Ubuntu Online Summit 2016 for the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system.
As Microsoft continues its trend of converting Windows into an operating system of spyware, more and more computer users are discovering the security, privacy, and liberty of Linux. Now, the company behind the world’s most popular Linux distribution has publicly pledged that there will never be any back doors built into its product.
Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical — which sponsors the Ubuntu Linux distribution — told eWEEK Monday that Canonical “will never backdoor Ubuntu; we will never weaken encryption.” Shuttleworth’s statement — in a video interview ahead of the Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS) — is good news for computer users who have come to rely on encryption to protect both business and personal data.
While I earnestly anticipated the release of Unity 8 with Xenial Xerus (after watching a couple of videos that showcased its function), I was utterly disappointed that Canonical was going to further push its release — even though it was originally meant to debut with Ubuntu 14.04.
Back to the point at hand, I immediately went ahead and installed Unity Tweak Tool, moved my dash to the bottom (very important) and then proceeded to replace Nautilus with the extensive Nemo file manager which is native to Linux Mint and by far superior to the former (my opinion).
We published earlier an update to an article published last week about the fact that there was a nasty bug present in the GNOME Software application that made it impossible for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users to install third-party .deb packages.
On May 4, 2016, Canonical finally pushed the patched version of the GNOME Software app, which is called Ubuntu Software in the newly released Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system, allowing users to install various applications distributed in the .deb file format and obtained from third-party sources with a simple double mouse click on the file.
We told you last week that there's a pretty nasty bug in the GNOME Software application, a graphical package manager from the GNOME Stack, that does not allow Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users to install third-party .deb files.
Ubuntu Make developer Didier Roche announced the release of Ubuntu Make 16.05, a new maintenance release of his open-source CLI tool that lets developers install various third-party SDKs and IDEs.
Open source is increasingly standard operating procedure in software, but nowhere is this more true than Internet of Things development. According to a new VisionMobile survey of 3,700 IoT developers, 91% of respondents use open source software in at least one area of their software stack. This is good news for IoT because only open source promises to reduce or eliminate the potential for lock-in imposed by proprietary “standards.”
What’s perhaps most interesting in this affection for open source, however, is that even as enterprise developers have eschewed the politics of open source licensing, IoT developers seem to favor open source because “it’s free as in freedom.”
Qualcomm announced a deep learning toolkit for implementing neural processing and other AI functions directly on devices that integrate Snapdragon 820 SoCs.
The “Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine” is Qualcomm’s first deep learning software development kit for devices based on its Snapdragon 820 SoCs. The SDK, which is due for release in the second half of 2016, brings the company’s “Zeroth Machine Intelligence Platform” to Snapdragon 820 based devices.
Pi 2 Design’s 503HTA Hybrid Tube Amp is a HAT add-on for 40-pin Raspberry Pi’s that taps a 24-bit, 192Khz DAC for that old-time tube amplifier sound.
The Raspberry Pi has inspired a variety of retro technology hacks, from resurrecting ancient televisions to breathing new life into vintage gaming platforms. So it’s not surprising to see the SBC matched with the guts of an old-school tube amplifier system, as it is in Pi 2 Design’s 503HTA Hybrid Tube Amp.
Taking the age-old fight of man versus robots to the next level, the German sportswear maker Puma has unveiled a robot called BeatBot. This running robot has been developed to give a tough fight to the athletes and to train them for better performance.
Piote’s open source battery-powered “BreadBro” combines Arduino built-in circuitry with a breadboard, guide cards, and curriculum to help teach STEM skills.
Austin, Texas based Piote has so far more than tripled its modest $1,000 Kickstarter goals for its BreadBro Arduino clone. Packages are available through May 30 starting at $50, with starter kit and classroom pack versions running into the hundreds of dollars. Shipments are expected by Aug. 1.
Samsung’s Artik development boards are finally reaching hands of consumers in the US. The Artik development boards which were unveiled back in May 2015 at the IoT World 2015 have taken quite a lot of time to become consumer ready and take over the likes of the new Raspberry Pi 3, Pine 64,etc which have revolutionized the DIY Maker community with the “PC ona board” concept. And now, the Artik 10- the most powerful board from the Artik series is all set to intensify the ongoing competition. Priced at $150, which is more than what one would pay for 4 $35 priced Raspberry Pis, Samsung will sure have to do a lot to of work to impress the buyers and build a community around it.
Folks who are focused on container technology and virtual machines as they are implemented today might want to give a hat tip to some of the early technologies and platforms that arrived in the same arena. Among those, Puppet, which was built on the legacy of the venerable Cfengine system, was an early platform that helped automate lots of virtual machine implementations. We covered it in depth all the way back in 2008.
Fast-forward to today, and Puppet Labs is changing its name to mark a new era, and is out with several new product initiatives. The organization, now known as just Puppet, has also named its first president and COO, Sanjay Mirchandani, who comes to the company from VMware, where he was a senior vice-president.
After taking a break in 2015, Tracing is back at Plumbers this year! Tracing is heavily used throughout the Linux ecosystem, and provides an essential method for extracting information about the underlying code that is running on the system. Although tracing is simple in concept, effective usage and implementation can be quite involved.
This is a “Meet the Man Behind the Curtain” interview. It’s more about Sands than about either csnbbs.com or the LinuxFest he spends so much of his time organizing. But at the end of the interview, he talks about how the LinuxFest can always use more volunteers, even if all you can do is woman or man the registration desk for an hour. And sponsors? It’s a pretty healthy operation financially, but more sponsors are always welcome — especially ones from the Southeast, because this conference is proudly regional, not something identical to what you might find in, say, Los Angeles or Washington State.
In the end, I had to leave my job at ISC. Luckily, my work and my values brought me to Mozilla, where I've been both perseverant and lucky enough to have several meaningful roles. Today, I'm the senior program manager of diversity and inclusion. I work full-time on building a more diverse and inclusive Mozilla, standing on the shoulders of giants who did the same before me and in partnership with many of the smartest and kindest people I know. I've followed my passion for empowering people to find meaningful ways to contribute to the Internet I believe the world needs: an expansion of the one that excited me so long ago. And I get to see a lot of the world while I do it!
I wish the Nylas N1 team the best. I love that they took the time to build a Linux client. I love the idea of a hackable email client. But Nylas N1, as it stands now, is very limited. If you happen to like the defaults, you’re in for a treat. But if you’re looking for an email client that bends to your will and that you can easily customize as a non-developer, you’re probably better off with Thunderbird (especially now that people are thinking about its future). Thunderbird isn’t pretty—certainly not as pretty as Nylas N1—but it lets you build it into whatever email client you want it to be.
For open source developer Mike Gifford, founder and president of OpenConcept Consulting Inc., any mention of Drupal accessibility after his name is redundant. He has spent the better part of 10 years improving and cementing accessibility in Drupal, enough to earn the role of official core accessibility maintainer for the project.
Accessibility awareness has grown considerably in the Drupal community, but the Internet changes rapidly and the software needs to keep up to remain relevant. Recent press on the trend of decoupling Drupal—including the milestone post by project founder Dries Buytaert himself—tends to skirt the issue that so-called headless configurations can blot out accessibility functions designed for the theme layer.
It appears as if people have been using DuckDuckGo’s privacy centered search enough to make the company successful. Certainly not we-control-the-world successful like Google, but successful enough to give it some cash-on-hand breathing room. Also successful enough for the company to give back to the community by handing out $225,000 to some free and open source projects.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) submitted a comment to the U.S. Copyright Office calling for a method to submit comments that do not require the use of proprietary JavaScript.
Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web. When minified, the code can hide all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks. Savvy users can protect themselves by blocking scripts in their browser, or by installing the LibreJS browser extension and avoiding sites that require proprietary JavaScript in order to function. But some sites are harder to avoid than others. This is particularly the case when the site is required for citizens to communicate or interact with their own government. If no free alternative means are provided, then users can be blocked from participating in the democratic process.
So what's the EC's current stand with forcing citizens to use Adobe's proprietary, closed technology and only Windows or Mac for submission of H2020 projects?
With Adobe retiring Linux versions of Acrobat a couple of years ago (yes you can still download an obsolete version for Linux from Adobe's FTP but it won't work with ECAS "A forms"), this is a very "anti-open" situation.
Open source software has made its mark on desktop computing, mobile phones, and the internet of things. But one area yet to be cracked wide open with freely distributed software is mobility: from autonomous cars, software-assisted driving, to connecting vehicles to other devices.
On Wednesday, Arthur Taylor, chief technology officer at Advanced Telematic Systems, presented an open-source platform that he hopes will be the start of more innovation in software development for mobility technologies. But he also argued for the merits of open source software in a space pretty much dominated by the closed-off products of large corporates, such as Google and Uber.
The Hovalin, developed by Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, is a open source 3D printed violin that has received much attention since the first version was released. Now the next phase of development has begun for the Hovalin 3.0, and Matt Hova has posted a blog entry and started a Reddit thread about the project that always keeps improving in a collaborative effort by many Hovalin fans.
In the Hovalin website blog post, Hova explains what the most recent plans are for the latest version. First, version 3.0 will “move away from the current carbon fiber rectangle to an 8 mm rod.” Also, a lock will be created that will be used to keep the top and bottom pieces together. Custom brims to prevent warping will be added, as well as possible chin and shoulder rests. Finally, Hova wants to “work out a new system for distributing multiple options for the .stls including files with brim, files without brim, pre-sliced files with supports for the middle piece.” There are many changes in the works here, as you can see from just this list alone.
Asian students often face major barriers to a good quality of education. But the so-called “model minority myth,” which assumes Asian students always excel academically, can prevent them from getting the attention and support they need.
Asian American Pacific Islander students are a very diverse group — including Chinese, Laotian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Hmong, Guamanian, Chamorro, and Samoan Americans, to name a few — but they are all placed under the umbrella of “Asian,” making it difficult to see how different groups’ graduation rates and academic performance differ.
Cold War envy and fears did not make the announcement a pleasant one in the United States. First SPUTNIK, now this. “Just tell me how to catch up,” pleaded US President John F. Kennedy. “Let’s find somebody. Anybody. I don’t care if the janitor over there has the answer, if he knows how.” Knowledge moves in baffling ways indeed.
The herbicide used in Roundup is a probable carcinogen, but it’s uncertain what health risks it presents.
President Obama’s first visit to Flint, Michigan since declaring a state of emergency was heavy on the optics from the start. Flanked by Flint residents and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, Obama worked to restore faith in a city that’s been totally betrayed by local, state, and federal levels of government over its water crisis.
That is the single word we have for the President when he arrives in Flint.
President Obama deserves recognition for acknowledging the Flint water crisis before other decision makers would. His words helped push City, State and EPA officials to finally move on the issue. His trip to Flint this week will help keep the issue in the public eye. For that, we thank him.
But the Flint Water Crisis has been allowed to fester for two years. Enough.
If the crisis engulfing Flint, Michigan, had occurred in one tragic swoop, had the hard-bitten city been hit with a Superstorm Sandy or a Hurricane Katrina, the president of the United States would not have taken two years to come and personally inspect the damage. He would not have taken two years to hear directly from the victims about their needs, their losses.
But this was no act of nature wreaking mass destruction. Flint is a different kind of disaster – a totally avoidable, man-made catastrophe created by a state government hell-bent on imposing austerity at any cost.
Months after news of the lead crisis broke and years after the water poisoning began, U.S. President Barack Obama visited the embattled city of Flint, Michigan on Wednesday.
After meeting with state and local officials, hearing from residents, and sipping the (filtered) water, Obama blasted the austerity government that brought about the "man-made disaster" and promised to city residents that he "will not rest until every drop of water that flows to your home is safe to drink."
President Barack Obama sipped filtered water in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday and assured angry residents that their children would be fine in the long term despite the "complete screw-up" that contaminated their drinking water with lead.
Obama made the trip to the mostly African-American community to demonstrate that the water there was safe even as he predicted it would take more than two years to replace the city's aging pipes.
Pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has been ordered to pay more than $55m (€£40m) in compensation to an American woman who says its talcum powder caused her ovarian cancer.
Gloria Ristesund, 62, said she used J&J talc-based powder products on her genitals for decades.
The company - which faces about 1,200 similar claims - insists its products are safe and says it will appeal.
Researchers say links with ovarian cancer are unproven.
In February, Johnson & Johnson paid $72m (€£51m) in a similar case.
New findings published Tuesday shed more light on the rising problem of "superbugs," or antibiotic-resistant microbes, showing that at least 30 percent of antibiotics prescribed in the United States are unnecessary.
A cultural divide in farming communities squelches conversation about hot-button issues like pesticides.
Which open source projects can users trust? That's a question the Linux Foundation hopes to help answer by the introduction of "badges" from the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) project, which recognize open source platforms deemed to be safe and stable.
The popular image processing library ImageMagick has a number of critical vulnerabilities currently being used in the wild, allowing attackers to gain control of servers.
I woke up yesterday to find that a string of mysterious credit card payments had wiped out my checking account.
I spent the next few hours as a prisoner of the phone tree, being interrogated on the transactions that I wanted answers about. No, I did not have a Banana Republic credit card. I didn’t have a Capital One credit card either. And I had no idea who Michael was, or what he was doing with all my money.
The woman on the other end of the phone flagged transaction after transaction. For each one, she read me a long, pre-written paragraph of instructions and disclaimers—verbatim, even if she had repeated the same words just before. “Okay, so,” I said, when she was finally done. “It looks like this person is paying off credit cards through the web. What… am I supposed to do about that? What information do they have that lets them do it?”
“It looks like they have your routing number and account number,” she told me. “You should close this account and get a new one.”
I thanked her and hung up. Then my head exploded.
Russia is to deploy two new divisions in the west and one in the south to counterbalance NATO's increased military presence near Russian borders, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu announced.
US officials previously claimed that air strikes in Iraq and Syria had killed as few as 26 civilians. A senior Pentagon official who is briefed daily on the air war told USA Today that was unrealistic, since air strikes that have destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.
A major report is forcing Saudi Arabia to consider a future without its lifeblood: oil.
The veteran German diplomat speaks about the challenge of uniting Libya and ending a civil war.
Last weekend, Hillary Clinton dispatched her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to offer a defense of her alleged espionage. The espionage allegations against her are that in order to escape public and Obama administration scrutiny, she had all of her emails as secretary of state diverted from a secure government server to a non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, and, in so doing, failed to protect state secrets in at least 2,200 instances during her four-year tenure.
The FOIA system is broken. The administration pays lip service to transparency while aggressively deploying exemptions. Agencies routinely complain about FOIA response budgets and staffing levels, yet no one seems motivated to fix this perennial issue. FOIA reform efforts moving forward with bipartisan support are repeatedly killed after receiving pushback from the White House.
Then there's this: a single requester is being blamed for a backlog of FOIA requests at an agency that's never underfunded -- the Department of Defense.
Last weekend, Hillary Clinton dispatched her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to offer a defense of her alleged espionage. The espionage allegations against her are that in order to escape public and Obama administration scrutiny, she had all of her emails as secretary of state diverted from a secure government server to a non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, and, in so doing, failed to protect state secrets in at least 2,200 instances during her four-year tenure.
For one community attempting to stop fracking wastewater injection wells, civil disobedience just became a sanctioned civic right.
The community is Grant Township, Pa., which, in November 2015, had fought off the Pennsylvania General Energy Company (PGE) and the Pennsylvania Independent Oil and Gas Association (PIOGA), assertion that fossil fuel companies had a 'right' to inject wastewater by adopting the country’s first municipal charter establishing a local bill of rights codifying environmental and democratic rights.
Overall, environmentalists pay little attention to the military, and the anti-war movement does not address the climate. Both squander precious time. At a slow pace, industrialized countries have been “transitioning” to clean energy since the 1960s, without any specified and enforceable time frame. Renewables remain a very small part of the energy mix and will not remedy the carbon-intensive military or industrial agriculture. Transition fuels like natural gas and biofuels have proven to be disastrous to human communities and to the climate. By contrast is the fast pace rapidly rising temperature, accelerating greenhouse gas concentration (due to amplifying feedbacks), increased military spending including nuclear weapons, and new weapons/surveillance/pacification technology.[1] At some point recently, the climate goal shifted from elimination of greenhouse gases to mitigation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, mitigation means to render more gentle, milder, to appease, mollify, to lessen the stringency of an obligation. Naomi Oreskes identifies a strategy of distraction and delay. The option of enforceable regulation, of steep reduction or elimination of high-emitting economic sectors, remains off the table.
An estimated 10,000 people converged in Batangas City, Philippines on Wednesday to demand that the government halt the poisoning of "our land, water, and air" and cancel plans to build as many as 27 coal-fired power plants across the island nation.
The bankruptcy wave hitting U.S. fossil fuel companies is evoking comparisons with the dot-com burst more than a decade ago, as the number of oil companies filing for creditor protection hit 59 this week, Reuters reports—a number that's "closing in on the staggering 68 filings seen during the depths of the telecom bust of 2002 and 2003."
As the filings pile up, experts say the industry collapse has not even hit its midway point. Charles Gibbs, a restructuring partner at the Texas-based firm Akin Gump, told Reuters reporters Ernest Scheyder and Terry Wade that he expects to see more bankruptcies in the second fiscal quarter of the year.
At the same time, David Powell of the New Economics Foundation notes that BP’s annual energy outlook confidently predicts fossil fuels will account for 80 percent of global energy usage in 2035. Powell’s conclusion is that given the speed and depth of the shift required, political will on climate is a prerequisite, and the fossil-fuel industry is banking on politicians not having the chutzpah to do what it takes to keep it in the ground.
Sen. Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential race on Tuesday, making it almost certain that Donald Trump will win the GOP nomination and face Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in November. For those who've been in denial that this day could ever come, we figured a refresher course on the real estate developer's musings about climate and energy might be in order.
On the basic science: "I am not a great believer in man-made climate change," Trump told the Washington Post editorial board in March. "If you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don't know if they have global warming."
A raging wildfire in a Canadian tar sands town has forced tens of thousands of evacuations and destroyed several residential neighborhoods, offering a bleak vision of a fiery future if the fossil fuel era is not brought to an end.
The blaze in Fort McMurray, Alberta, started over the weekend, doubled in size on Monday, and grew into an inferno on Tuesday. It is expected to worsen on Wednesday as strong wind gusts and record high temperatures persist.
The US government agency responsible for interstate pipelines recorded a catalog of problems with the construction of TransCanada’s Keystone Pipeline and the Cushing Extension, a DeSmog investigation has found.
Inspectors at the US Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) observed TransCanada’s contractors violating construction design codes established to ensure a pipeline’s safety, according to inspection reports released to DeSmog under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The world made history last Friday when 175 countries signed the Paris agreement on climate change, the largest number of countries to initial an international agreement on its first day. The next step is for member states to officially join the agreement through their own ratification processes (15 countries did so on that first day). The treaty comes into force when its signatories add up to 55 percent of global carbon emissions. So far, in terms of countries that have pledged to join the agreement, supporters have counted up about 50 percent and expect the threshold to be reached later this year.
“We are breaking records in this chamber. But records have also been broken outside,” UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon said at the gathering on Friday. “Record global temperatures, record ice loss, record carbon levels in the atmosphere. We are in a race against time. I urge all countries to move quickly to join the agreement at the national level so the Paris Agreement can enter into force as early as possible.”
Any agreement that attracts nearly universal support will be either watered-down, unwieldy, or both. What insured the Paris agreement’s success is its lack of binding provisions.
Donald Trump markets himself as a business-savvy billionaire who will get American jobs back from countries like China. In the case of the coal industry, however, he appears to be just a very clueless politician making pro-pollution promises he can’t keep.
“I’m a free-market guy, but not when you’re getting killed,” he said recently at a rally in Carmel, Indiana. “Look at steel, it’s being wiped out. Your coal industry is wiped out, and China is taking our coal.”
Huh? “China is taking our coal”? If China were taking much of our coal (in the form of U.S. exports) that would be great for coal jobs.
The solar boom has been driven largely by individuals and companies (we’re looking at you, Apple and Google) who want to use clean, renewable energy. They are getting the message that solar is better for the planet — but it’s also proven to be a savvy investment. Through policies that pay customers back for the electricity they put on the grid, paired with an investment tax credit designed to help level the playing field, many Americans have seen significant returns on their investment in solar.
In a study published in Climatic Change Wednesday, researchers found people may donate up to 50 percent more money to a cause when encouraged to think about a problem in collective terms, instead of appealing to personal responsibility. In other words, climate action campaigns like the ones Canada and the European Union have launched may do better when they call for us to act, instead of asking you to act.
Extreme inequality is not in and of itself a human rights violation, but it is a profoundly important human rights problem.
TPP, TTIP, What?
First, some explanation. If you are reading this you’ve been hearing a lot about the TPP, which is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. There’s another “trade” agreement being negotiated called the TTIP, which is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. So for shorthand on the shorthand: TPP = Pacific, TTIP = Atlantic.
The TPP (Pacific) negotiations have been completed. The TPP negotiations took place in a secret process dominated by the giant multinational corporations, and the final agreement is waiting to be approved or rejected by Congress – probably during the “lame duck” session, because that is when members are least likely to be held accountable for their votes.
The TTIP (Atlantic; you may hear it referred to as “tee-tip”), on the other hand, is still being negotiated, also in a secret process dominated by the giant multinational corporations.
Is the digital revolution turning education into a Ponzi scheme? As Ponzi schemes are based on multiple deceptions, the answer is "yes!" Since the beginning of automation, there have been gains in paid work opportunities (along with immense suffering) and losses in different forms of craft knowledge and community patterns of mutual support. The digital revolution we are now undergoing involves a radical change from this centuries-old tradition.
Americans are deeply dissatisfied with their jobs. A 2015 Conference Board report stated, “for the eighth straight year, less than half of US workers are satisfied with their jobs.” It found that only 48.3 percent were satisfied, really happy, at work. In 2013, it reported that 47.7 percent of workers were satisfied with their jobs – a minuscule increase of 0.6 percentage points. The Conference Board has been conducting annual job satisfaction surveys since decades. It found that the country hit bottom in 2010 when only 42.6 percent reported satisfaction and, in the report’s words, “well below the historical level of 61.1 percent in 1987.”
Why do millennials like Bernie Sanders so much? I love that this is a mystery to Washington. It’s the authenticity, stupid. You can’t fake a 40 year record. This is a generation that grew up in a time when entertainment and media is based on authenticity and not the fakeness of television. Like Diogenes, when millennials went on their pursuit to find the one honest man in politics, it was obvious that man was Bernie Sanders.
Parents, teachers, and students took part in rallies and "walk-ins" across the country on Wednesday, seeking to "reclaim" U.S. public schools from the grips of corporate reformers and privatization schemes.
The coordinated actions are the second national event organized by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a coalition that includes the American Federation of Teachers, the Journey for Justice Alliance, and the Center for Popular Democracy, among other organizations and unions.
The corporate-influenced TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), exposed earlier this week as "an enormous corporate power grab," looks increasingly precarious.
French President François Hollande reportedly said Tuesday that he would "never accept" the current agreement, citing its negative implications for "the essential principles of our agriculture, our culture, of mutual access to public markets."
"At this stage [of talks] France says 'No,'" Agence France-Presse quoted Hollande as saying at a meeting of left-wing politicians in Paris.
Subsequently, French trade minister Matthias Fekl said a freeze in TTIP talks was the "most likely option" without concessions from the United States.
Amid all the hubbub about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it’s easy to lose sight of that other international trade deal that’s caused a worldwide backlash in recent months.
Detroit teachers are getting royally screwed, and Seth Meyers won’t stand for it. Like the Flint water crisis, Detroit’s schools have come under the rule of Gov. Rick Snyder’s emergency manager that was appointed by the state. Not long after that, $30 million disappeared.
In the US, all the main presidential candidates have now come out against TPP (the Trans-Pacific Partnership). Since the end of the second world war, the US empire has been the engine of trade liberalisation, and the consistency of views has been absolute among successive presidents, Democrat or Republican, from John F Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, George W Bush to Barack Obama. But suddenly, the neoliberal engine has stalled.
Detroit faces dual crises: The cash-strapped city doesn't have enough money to pay its teachers and has begun shutting off water to up to 20,000 residents who are behind on their water bill
Striking Verizon workers and their supporters are holding a day of protest on Thursday, May 5. There will be over 400 actions throughout the country as the work stoppage enters its third week. Workers will also descend on the company's shareholder meeting in New Mexico.
But what excuse do left liberals have? Most left liberals are upper middle class. They have the resources to build a party. Why don’t they? What keeps left liberals from pouring resources into the Green Party, which has always been at least truly left liberal? Clearly the number of people in the United States who are for Bernie Sanders convinces me that the population would welcome such as party. For decades surveys have shown that Americans say there should be more than two parties. What is the hold-up? It’s past time.
Voters are heading to the polls in a series of elections across the UK on what has been dubbed "Super Thursday".
Elections are taking place for the Scottish Parliament, National Assembly of Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly and for 124 councils in England.
New mayors will be elected in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Salford, with UK parliamentary by-elections held in Ogmore and Sheffield Brightside.
Police and crime commissioners are also being elected in England and Wales.
On planet Earth, where I thought I was until yesterday, accusing someone's father of helping to assassinate a president would be grounds for immediate disqualification, not fodder for double-digit domination that all but seals the Republican nomination.
Craig Mazin garnered national attention during the 2016 presidential campaign after revealing himself to be Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) college roommate, and taking to Twitter to both mock the senator and his primary opponents and share intimate details about him.
Now that John Kasich and Ted Cruz have dropped out, it's pretty much official: Donald Trump is the 2016 Republican nominee for president.
The pundits never saw this coming, but they should have. The Republican Party has been running a scam on its base for decades now, and voters were bound to discover this scam sooner or later.
The Greens now need to only do two things now to make their goal even more successful. First, Jill Stein and the Greens need to seriously consider branding themselves in a way that evokes Scandinavian democratic socialism, if not calling themselves Green Democratic Socialists outright. That is a perilous decision because it could alienate potential Green voters who are more moderate. I personally have seen and written in my own work about how the Greens are the actual democratic socialists of America as opposed to the Michael Harrington-Cornel West-Bayard Rustin Democratic Party kinda-sorta socialists. But there are an awful lot of Trump voters who call themselves “fiscal conservatives and social liberals” that have rejected neoclassical economic policies this election cycle that could be alienated.
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against Louisiana's top elections officials Wednesday, accusing the state of violating the rights of naturalized citizens by requiring proof of citizenship before they can fully register to vote.
The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana along with the Fair Elections Legal Network, asks the court to rule the practice, which was established in an 1874 state law, unconstitutional and issue a preliminary injunction against state and local officials from enforcing the provision while the suit moves forward.
Armed with a fresh win in Indiana and a platform that reflects a "bold agenda for change," Bernie Sanders is providing key lessons that the Democratic party would do well to heed, some analysts say.
It was "a remarkable victory, a statement of the extent and scope of the Sanders surge," Robert Borosage, founder and president of the Institute for America's Future, wrote of the Vermont senator's win in the Hoosier state.
Speaking to press Tuesday evening, Sanders said, "I sense some great victories coming, and I think while the path is narrow — and I do not deny that for a moment — I think we can pull off one of the great political upsets in the history of the United States and, in fact, become the nominee for the Democratic Party," he continued. "And once we secure that position, I have absolute confidence that we are going to defeat Donald Trump in the general election."
As governor of Ohio, Kasich drastically slashed income taxes on the wealthy and entirely eliminated the estate tax, while increasing the tax burden for the poorest 20 percent of the state. To balance his state’s budget, he pushed through deeply unpopular cuts to city budgets, which led to tens of thousands of workers getting laid off. The only other Republican governor in the nation to push such extreme tax and spending cuts was Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who signed a budget that left the state with a massive deficit, shuttered schools, and kicked 15,000 people off of food stamps.
It’s no secret that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is behind rival Hillary Clinton in superdelegates. The conversation is inevitably turning to the math of their contest—and the acknowledgement that, although the superdelegates haven’t officially voted yet, they are on Clinton’s side.
John Kasich formally suspended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, paving the way for Donald Trump to clinch the Republican nomination with a personal concession speech that barely touched on the political maelstrom his decision unleashes.
The Ohio governor was the last of 16 candidates to see their ambitions blown away by Trump’s unconventional entry into the presidential race, but he went quietly and with little of the drama that has marked earlier exits by other rivals.
The American two-party system is being scrutinized and criticized more than ever during this election campaign, and many say the reason is Bernie Sanders—an independent senator now running for president as a Democrat but whose chances at snagging the party’s nomination are increasingly slim.
But as the Democratic-Republican binary continues to dominate U.S. elections, how can truly independent voices break through? That’s the problem that the Progressive Independent Party, or PIP, is trying to solve. The new party, also listed as the “Honorary Bernie Sanders Party” on Facebook, is trying to bypass the delegate math and unfair campaign spending that so often determines the next American president. The founder, Araquel Bloss, writes on the party’s website that it is time to create a “long-term, truly viable third party.”
Now that - yes, Virginia - Drumpf is the presumptive if inconceivable GOP nominee following the inglorious and alas wife-punching surrender of Cruz, Argentina's merciless hordes of brown-skinned, Trump-trashed barbarians are making the most of it. With a new soccer-themed ad, they now join enthusiastic trollers like the defiant Hispanic kids in California wearing "Dump Trump" t-shirts, the Mexican filmmakers using his racist rhetoric against him, and the clueless wingnuts in this country freaking out at having suddenly become the moral equivalent of the KKK; notes Stephen King, "Conservatives who for 8 years sowed the dragon's teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon."
Last night, the Republican party effectively handed its presidential nomination to Donald Trump. And in doing so, they may have handed an easy general election victory to Hillary Clinton. What in the world were Republican voters thinking?
So if he were to win the presidency, what would Trump do to the economy? In short, the outlook is bleak.
Trump has built his campaign on racism, sexism, and xenophobia. There's more enthusiasm for him among leaders of the KKK than leaders of the political party he now controls.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is preparing to wage war to make sure that Donald Trump, the now-presumptive Republican nominee, "never reaches the White House."
Other responses to Trump’s comments bothered me, though. Elizabeth Warren said that Trump “wears the sexism out front for everyone to see,” which is undeniably true. More than just one man’s sexism, though, the whole affair is a stark reminder that we really need to change the conversation when it comes to gender. And, doing so has to go beyond attacking people for the same things women abhor—emphasizing our looks more than our words. For instance, Warren made fun of Trump’s hair in her response to his comments. There’s no need to play that same game; his remarks would be no more palatable were he to shave his head or sport a mullet. Likewise, Clinton’s recognition of the importance of equal pay would mean no less were she a supermodel.
As Donald Trump virtually clinches the Republican presidential nomination after Senator Ted Cruz suspends his campaign following a devastating defeat in the Indiana primary, we are joined by Tom Robbins, investigative journalist in residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, who has reported on Trump's history of close relationships with organized crime figures in the United States. We examine some of the characters and connections Robbins helped expose as a reporter who covered politics, labor and organized crime for the Daily News and The Village Voice from 1985 to 2011. His recent article for The Marshall Project is "Trump and the Mob." Robbins also critiques the media's coverage of Trump on the campaign trail.
Trying to predict the future can be fun, which is why — from office sports pools to stock market speculation — many do it. Generally, though, people make such predictions with at least some humility: with the knowledge that they do not actually know what the future holds.
But not America’s beloved political pundits. When they pronounce what the future has in store for us, it comes in the form of definitive decrees, shaped with the tone of authoritative certainty. With a few exceptions, those who purported to see the future of the 2016 GOP nomination process spent many months categorically assuring everyone that, polls notwithstanding, Donald Trump simply could not, would not, become the GOP nominee; one could spend all day posting humiliating examples, so a representative sampling will have to suffice...
Bernie Sanders forced the issue of wealth inequality into the presidential campaign, which presented a real problem for neoliberals of the Democratic persuasion. They want us to believe that the market rewards people in accordance with their merit and hard work. It doesn’t. They want us to believe everyone can get ahead if they get a good education and work hard. Not so. So the neoliberal dems fall back on their version of trickle-down: economic growth is the cure. So what is the future of economic growth?
On the eve of the New York state primary last month, as Hillary Clinton came closer to the Democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden went on TV and defended her husband’s 1994 crime bill. Asked in an interview if he felt shame for his role passing a law that has been the subject of so much recent criticism, Biden answered, “Not at all,” and boasted of its successes — among them putting “100,000 cops on the street.” His remarks sparked a new round of debate over the legacy of the crime bill, which has haunted Clinton ever since she hit the campaign trail with a vow to “end the era of mass incarceration.”
A few days later, on April 24, a lesser-known crime law quietly turned 20. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 — or AEDPA — was signed by Bill Clinton in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. While it has been mostly absent from the recent debates over the crime policies of the ’90s, its impact has been no less profound, particularly when it comes to a bedrock constitutional principle: habeas corpus, or the right of people in prison to challenge their detention. For 20 years, AEDPA has shut the courthouse door on prisoners trying to prove they were wrongfully convicted. Americans are mostly unaware of this legacy, even as we know more than ever about wrongful convictions. Barry Scheck, co-founder and head of the Innocence Project, calls AEDPA “a disaster” and “a major roadblock since its passage.” Many would like to see it repealed.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., called on an audience of business and political elites earlier this week to respond to populist anger by lobbying harder for a deficit-reduction package that would reduce corporate tax rates and cut public retirement programs such as Social Security.
Although a dominant populist sentiment is that the system is already rigged in favor of the rich, Warner suggested that the “business community” needs to get more involved in politics or face unpleasant repercussions.
The chairwoman for the Democratic National Committee said she “absolutely” believes the “party’s nominee should be chosen by someone registered with that party,” a statement which could further alienate independents who have tried to participate in the 2016 presidential election.
On the Bloomberg Politics show, “With All Due Respect,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz declared, “We should not have independents or Republicans playing games.”
When asked if that means she is opposed to the concept of open primaries, which allow citizens to vote in primaries regardless of their party affiliation, the chairwoman asserted the Party’s nominees “should be chosen by members of that party.” She claimed she did not want to do away with open primaries, but she does not want to see states with closed primaries move to open primary systems.
The Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) chairwoman and the party’s left-wing presidential contender are sparring in the media over how welcoming the party should be toward independent voters.
Heading into the Indiana primary on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is making the case that all party elections should be held as open contests. Primaries in the Hoosier state and nineteen others allow voters who identify as independents to participate in the Democrats’ nominating process.
Sanders once again finds himself pitted against DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.), who on Monday called for an entirely closed primary system.
Bernie Sanders won the Indiana primary by a slim margin last night, just 52 percent of the vote, yet immediately after announcing his victory, CNN was already hounding the Democratic candidate to drop out of the race.
“Tonight we have a new political reality ... where we have a presumptive Republican nominee [Trump], and the general election for him is very much beginning. ... So, staying in this race, aren’t you effectively making it harder for the Democrats to beat the man who you say would be so bad?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Bernie Sanders.
China's Internet censors are capricious and impossible to predict -- but this isn't because China's censors are incompetent, rather, they're tapping into one of the most powerful forms of conditioning, the uncertainty born of intermittent reinforcement.
Some examples of China's odd rule-changes: a viral video by comedian Papi Jiang has been expunged because it used the terms "wocao" ("fuck") and "xiaobiaozi" ("little whore"), though thousands of other videos that prominently feature the terms were left untouched. Apple's ebook and video platforms were also suddenly taken offline.
As C Custer writes at Tech in Asia, this caprice is by design: by not specifying a set of hard and fast rules, but rather the constant risk of being taken down for crossing some invisible line, China's censors inspire risk-aversion in people who rely on the net to be heard or earn their livings. It's what Singaporeans call "out of bounds," the unspecified realm of things you musn't, shouldn't or won't want to enter.
My second grade teacher, the truculent Mrs. Dunham, masking-taped my mouth shut. She pulled the shrieking roll of tape all the way around my head thrice in front of the entire class. My crime? Announcing in the middle of math drills that the Bookmobile was circling and circling the parking lot because its regular spot was blocked and it had nowhere to park.
My classmates' faces silently told me they were on my side and that I had shared news they needed immediately. What would the driver do? Why was that truck in the Bookmobile spot? It was almost Bookmobile time, so time was of the essence! Someone needed to go do something before the Bookmobile drove away!
For nine years, federal scientists in Canada couldn't talk to the press. Well, they could, but only after going through a dizzying amount of federal bureaucracy, a situation that turned into functional censorship.
Why? You can thank former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who instituted the policy shortly after his ascendancy in 2006. A huge proponent of exploiting the country's natural resources like oil and gas, Harper apparently feared that some of his own scientists would give reporters negative assessments of the environmental impacts of the country's energy work, according to Nature.
One can only hope that this recent undemocratic act by the New Ambassador Hotel management and its parent company, Rainbow Tourism Group shall not be repeated. Whatever their fears for the profit or relationship with the state, there is always a better way of addressing their challenges.
What they cannot do is to play a direct part in diminishing the independence of the press club, media freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.
In the final week of November 2015, a Special Agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Mark Burnett, knocked on the door of my family’s home and left his card, with an additional phone number penciled in. All my family members residing in America had planned a week-long vacation and were all on a remote island. When the FBI receives DHS flight records as if they’re the morning paper, I must admit that whatever reasons for why the Bureau didn’t know that I or my family were absent escape me entirely.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defend cryptography against the onslaught of quantum computers.
It hasn't happened yet, but it's pretty widely agreed that quantum computers pose a significant risk to cryptography. All that's needed is either a quantum computer specifically built to implement Shor's algorithm (which sets out how to factor integers using quantum computers); or a truly quantum Turing machine that can be programmed to run whatever program it's asked to run.
By now, most people are aware that Facebook advertisements can be quite targeted in nature, whether by age, gender, or location. Most people also are aware of the level of spending by politicians and government for Facebook ads to get their messages out to their targeted audience. But just how targeted can Facebook ads be in the service of politicians? Well, for that we turn to the story of Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska, and her attempt to get a road built between two towns in her state.
The proposed Rule 41 changes recently adopted by the US Supreme Court can't go into force fast enough for the FBI. The changes -- if approved by Congress (which needs to do nothing more than literally nothing for this to happen) -- would allow it to hack computers anywhere in the nation by removing jurisdictional restrictions.
Its decision to keep a child porn site up and running in order to deploy a hacking tool to sniff out obscured user information now appears to have been a colossal mistake. The warrant for the search performed by the FBI's NIT was issued in Virginia, but the actual searches took place all over the nation. While the seized server may have been located in the state, the users identified by the NIT were located as far away as the opposite coast. The FBI's decision to ignore jurisdiction limits under Rule 41 is now costing it loads of evidence.
There's apparently no situation legislators can't make worse. Self-driving cars are an inevitability, as are all the attendant concerns about autonomous vehicles roaming the streets unattended, mowing down buses at 2 miles per hour or forcing drivers behind them to obey all relevant traffic laws.
There are fears that people will just stop paying attention to driving, which is weird, because that's one of the few immediate advantages of self-driving vehicles. There are also fears that a robot car is nothing more than a tempting attack target for malicious hackers. There's some truth to this last one, especially as manufacturers have loaded up vehicles with on-board computers but given little thought to properly securing them.
Even so, that's no excuse for the sort of legislation being proposed by two Michigan politicians, which would reward self-driving car hackers with lifetime stays at the nearest prison.
Looks like someone might be getting their money back after CBP agents -- operating a great distance from the US borders -- seized $240,000 from a man traveling through Indiana. While driving along I-70 outside of Indianapolis last November, Najeh Muhana was pulled over for not signalling a lane change. That's when things got weird and a bit unconstitutional.
According to his filing for return of his money, Muhana's vehicle was searched "without consent, warrant or probable cause." The Hancock County Sheriff's Department officers even brought a drug dog to the scene, but failed to uncover any contraband. The $240,000 Muhana was carrying caught their eye, though.
Anyone who’s even halfway following the news of the proposed updates to Rule 41 probably can’t help but be struck by the irony of the situation. It’s actually humorous, in a Vonnegutian tragicomic sort of way.
In case you haven’t been following the news, the proposed changes from the advisory committee on criminal rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States would update Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and broadly expand law enforcement’s legal authority when it comes to hacking and surveillance. The Supreme Court has already passed the proposal to Congress, which must disavow the changes by December 1 or it becomes the governing rule for every federal court in the country.
City leaders in Akron, Ohio, are violating the First Amendment by threatening to arrest panhandlers who do not register with city police, a new lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) alleges.
Police currently use the registry to conduct background checks and then issue photo identification badges to certified beggars. The same law also prohibits panhandling in certain parts of town, bans it city-wide after sundown, and makes it a crime to solicit charity with a dishonest story of hardship.
The News Observer in North Carolina has filed a shocking and disturbing expose into the five-year cover-up by local deputies who tasered a mentally ill man to death.
Brandon Bethea was 24-years-old when Harnett County detention officers followed him into a padded cell and shot him in the chest with a taser. Bethea fell to the ground, still in leg shackles, as the officer pulled the trigger twice more jolting him with electricity. They left the cell, waiting 20 minutes to check if he was alive. He couldn’t be revived.
As an officer unlocked Bethea’s handcuffs, officer John Clark stood at the back of the group. Clark pulled his Taser from his belt and hid it behind his back. He walked into Bethea’s cell, pointing the Taser at him. Bethea stepped back.
Two prongs pierced Bethea’s chest, unleashing sharp electrical currents. Bethea clutched his chest, fell and rolled onto his stomach. While five officers stood over Bethea, Clark pulled the trigger on his Taser twice more. Then the officers left Bethea on the floor of the cell.
Twenty minutes would pass before anyone came into the cell to check on him. He could not be revived.
Criminal justice advocates and scientists have long considered solitary confinement a form of psychological torture that also causes damage to the brain. Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl proposed the ban, citing atrocious conditions and research that says solitary reduces the likelihood of juveniles’ rehabilitation.
Young people who previously spent hours, days, and years in solitary described their experiences Tuesday, before the Board voted unanimously to eliminate the practice.
The author is Eddie Glaude Jr. Glaude was raised in the Deep South, in Moss Point, Mississippi, and still remembers the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross at the fairground. He’s now a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, where he also chairs the Center for African-American Studies. This is his third book, and he’s a member in good standing of the black establishment, which he rigorously calls to account in Democracy in Black.
There's no exact count for how many dogs are killed by police every year, though, in 2014, an official with the Department Of Justice declared the shooting of dogs by police an "epidemic." But, hell, no one really knows how many human beings are killed by cops each year, so it's not exactly surprising that we're even less sure about man's best friend. Still, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) estimates that as many as half of all police firearm discharges involve a dog. When we brought that statistic up to "Tim," a police officer for 16 years, he said that sounded about right.
A police officer in North Catasauqua, Pa., responded to a 911 call about an injured cat, Sugar, by finding the feline and fatally shooting it.
The local district attorney, John Morganelli, told a news conference that the officer, Leighton Pursell, said he saw injuries on the cat's leg and a trail of blood before deciding to kill the cat, as my9nj.com reports.
There are stupid school discipline stories, and then there's this: a Houston, Texas, public school called the police after a 13-year-old girl attempted to purchase chicken nuggets from the cafeteria using a $2 bill.
Police officers in Neenah (Wis.) shot and killed 60-year-old Michael Funk as he fled a motorcycle shop where he was being held hostage last December 5.
Brian Flatoff had been allegedly holding Funk and two other men captive in the shop, apparently over a dispute over a motorcycle. Police had surrounded the shop and taken fire from Flatoff, with one officer sustaining injuries after a bullet stuck his helmet, so officers were understandably on edge when Funk frantically raced from the rear of the building holding a handgun.
Funk, who had a concealed carry permit and never pointed his gun at the police, was shot multiple times and reportedly laid on the ground for 25 minutes without medical care and died at the scene.
London – CAGE today releases a disturbing report based on a year-long investigation, that reveals the inner details of the covert Government propaganda programme, recently reported by the Guardian.
In this article we show how those orchestrating the campaigns have global ambitions – and despite the abject lack of debate – how the UK’s "industrial scale propaganda" programme is already being held up as best practice by the EU and UN.
It appears to have only taken the better part of the last decade, but we finally appear to be reaching the point where people have finally realized that broadband caps aren't about managing congestion, they're about turf protection. Here in the States, companies like Suddenlink, Comcast AT&T and CenturyLink have all rushed toward adopting caps and overage fees as not only a pointed weapon against streaming video competitors like Netflix, but as a nifty way to charge more money than ever for a product that's actually getting cheaper and cheaper to provide.
Ten years ago, there were two web browsers that anyone cared about: Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Each browser vied for favour with web publishers, begging them to optimise their pages for one browser or the other. The browser with the most pages would, the browser companies thought, win the most users and thus the web, and so the first browser wars were fought to win over publishers.
But that fight came at the expense of users, because the one thing publishers of web 1.0 really wanted was pop-up ads – and the more obnoxious the better. Remember ads that showed up one pixel square and ran away from your mouse-pointer if you tried to close them, while auto-playing sound adverts? And those weren’t even the worst! Browsers didn’t have pop-up blocking – they had pop-up “enhancing”. Any company that blocked pop-ups would be de-optimized by the big publishers and doomed to obscurity.
Then came Mozilla – a not-for-profit, openly developed web browser that didn’t care about publishers. It cared about users. It blocked pop-ups by default, understanding that users wanted the see the publishers’ sites but not their pop-ups, and if Mozilla had enough users, it wouldn’t matter if publishers hated them.
Skip to 2016 and the web is a very different place. The World Wide Web Consortium, the not-for-profit organization that creates the web’s open technology standards, made a brave effort to tame the web’s lunatic proprietary HTML extensions that paid off, making those “Best viewed with” badges on websites a relic of the past. All the browsers have changed, too: Netscape vanished, Mozilla begat Firefox, Internet Explorer morphed into Edge, and Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome grew from obscure side projects to two of the dominant forces on the web.
Ten years is an eternity in web years, and in a decade, everything can change.
However, that change might be coming to an end thanks to the existing web browser vendors and the World Wide Web Consortium. Since 2013 they’ve been working with Netflix, the cable industry, and the MPAA to create a standard to limit which browsers can display W3C-standardised data. It could mean goodbye to “just works” and hello again to “best viewed with”.
Trade mark opposition proceedings will soon be available in Mexico after the lower chamber of Congress approved an amendment to the country’s industrial property law
We're going to have to keep hammering this home until more people get it: trademark law is about preventing confusion in the marketplace. The reason why that needs to be understood is that just about every time you read a story about one entity going after another over a trademark issue, the refrain of "we must protect our trademarks or we lose them" is trotted out like some kind of bower card that trumps the rest of the discussion. That excuse is just that: an excuse. And it certainly doesn't lift from those that use it the burden of being called trademark bullies.
Here to show us all an example of this kind of bullying is Vice Media, which decided to fire off a cease and desist letter to ViceVersa, a barely-making-it punk band.
The answering guide is being translated in other languages, we hope to make them available by mid-May.
At the end of last year, Mike wrote about an attempt to keep the Diary of Anne Frank out of the public domain by adding her father's name as a co-author. As Techdirt wrote at the time, that seemed to be a pretty clear abuse of the copyright system. But it also offered a dangerous precedent, which has just turned up again in a complicated case involving the French composer Maurice Ravel, and his most famous composition, the hypnotically repetitive ballet score "Bolero."
Ravel died on December 28, 1937, so you might expect the score to have entered the public domain in 2008, since EU copyright generally lasts 70 years after the death of a creator. But by a quirk of French law, an extra eight years and 120 days is added for musical works published between January 1, 1921, and December 31, 1947 (on account of the Second World War, apparently). Ravel's Bolero first appeared in 1922 1928, and therefore receives the extra years of copyright, which means that according to French law, it entered the public domain on May 1 this year.