Germany-based open source company SUSE has appointed former SAP official Melissa Di Donato as its chief executive in a move it claims will mark "the next phase of growth and momentum" for the firm.
A statement from the company said Di Donato had a proven record in sales, business operations and leadership, having been the chief operating officer and chief revenue officer at SAP where she was responsible for global revenue, profit and customer satisfaction.
Di Donato replaces Nils Brauckmann, who is scheduled to retire in August, having spent eight years at SUSE, including three in the top job.
"I am incredibly proud of SUSE's progress and growth over the last eight years, which has culminated in it securing independent status," he said, referring to the $2.5bn deal that saw the company leave the auspices of British software museum MicroFocus, bankrolled by private equity fund EQT.
"With this chapter of SUSE's corporate development complete, I could not be more pleased to hand off the leadership of SUSE to Melissa."
SUSE is the world's largest independent open-source software company, primarily known for its distributions of Linux and OpenStack.
London-based Di Donato spent almost three years as SAP's chief revenue officer, before being promoted to the COO position in July 2018. Before SAP, she worked at Salesfoce, IBM and Oracle. Her CV also includes a stint as managing director of Uccelli, a business consulting firm in London.
On Twitter, Di Donato describes herself as a mother, wife and drone pilot. In her spare time, she chairs the Technology Group of the 30% Club – an organization with the lofty goal of achieving 30 per cent female representation on S&P 100 boards of directors by 2020.
I've recently been working on optimizing the diff construction and application routines for waypipe, making use of SIMD instruction sets when available. So far, the speed improvement due to vectorization is small for AVX and generally negative for SSE, because the existing diff routine is already rather fast, and because determining which data has changed and then writing only that data is an inherently branchy procedure.
The following plots shows diff construction and application speeds for an initial and an final frame, using a variety of diff formats and vectorization approaches. The plots on the left correspond to a pair of frames sharing about 60% of their bytes in common; on the right, for a pair sharing about 80%. To keep this post short, I will only explain some of the formats and algorithm combinations.
There are far-ranges of Linux bioinformatics tools available that are widely used in this very field for a long while. Bioinformatics itself has been characterized in many ways; however; it is frequently defined as a combination of mathematics, computation, and statistics in order to analysis the biological information. The main goal of bioinformatics tool is to develop an efficient algorithm so that sequence similarities can be measured accordingly.
This release of scikit-survival adds support for scikit-learn 0.21 and pandas 0.24, among a couple of other smaller fixes. Please see the release notes for a full list of changes. If you are using scikit-survival in your research, you can now cite it using an Digital Object Identifier (DOI).
Developed by the Ukrainian solo outfit Muzt Die Studios, Knightin'+ is a real-time 2D dungeon crawler with a simple pixel-art style and streamlined gameplay. They're calling it a "Zelda-lite adventure".
Likely riding on the popularity of the recent Chernobyl series, Escape from Chernobyl is a puzzle game with multiple endings where you take on the role of a scientist based in some secret lab.
That's another tick for a game funded and coming to Linux! Supra Games managed to reach their funding goal on Kickstarter earlier this month for Supraland 2.
With a few days left of the crowdfunding campaign, which ends on July 31st, they've managed to get €26,404 which is quite a bit over their base goal. Nowhere near enough for their first stretch-goal, sadly, which was to pull in combat and narrative designers to help improve it.
Here’s week 81 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! And boy is there some delicious stuff today. In addition to new features and bugfixes, we’ve got a modernized look and feel for our settings windows to show off...
KDE developer Nate Graham has posted his latest weekly summary of KDE's development happenings as the team wraps up work for July.
It was another busy week for KDE development even when accounting for the summer holidays. Some of the KDE developments for the past week include:
Goodforbitcoin is a simple cryptocurrency market-tracker. It displays daily market rates, including high, low and close valuations, alongside market trade volume for a range of popular cryptocurrencies. It comes with built-in support for BTC, ETH, LTC, EOS, XRP and BCH currencies, with EUR, USD and GBP as base currencies for valuations.
The only Bitcoin I own I was given by some random chap on the internet. I am by no means knowledgeable about cryptocurrencies, this app is just for fun.
Read on for an overview of how the application is put together, including interacting with APIs from PyQt5, plotting data with PyQtGraph and packaging apps with PyInstaller.
Pango follows Unicode UAX14 and UAX29 for finding word boundaries and line break opportunities. The algorithm described in there is language-independent, but allows for language-specific tweaks. The Unicode standard calls this tailoring.
While Pango has had implementations for both the language-independent and -dependent parts before, we didn’t have them clearly separated in the API, until now.
In 1.44, we introduce a new pango_tailor_break() function which applies language-specific tweaks to a segment of text that has a uniform language. It is meant to be called after pango_default_break().
Today, Saturday 27 July 2019, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close. Hosting more than 380 attendees from 50 different countries over a combined 145 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings, workshops, and activities, DebConf19 was a large success.
The conference was preceded by the annual DebCamp held 14 July to 19 July which focused on individual work and team sprints for in-person collaboration toward developing Debian and host to a 3-day packaging workshop where new contributors were able to start on Debian packaging.
On Monday after FOSDEM there will be again the Copyleft-Event from SFC, so maybe 3 days of hacking before FOSDEM would be better, but still, whatever, for planing these details there's now #debconf-fosdem on OFTC
1€½ years ago, when I was still a daredevil that was biking in Philly I got interested in these fancy strips of LED lights that you put into your bike wheel and when you drive fast enough, they form a stable image, both because of the additional visibility and safety, but also because the seem to be fun gadgets.
There are brands like Monkey Lights, but they are pretty expensive, and there are cheaper similar no-name products available, such as the YQ8003, which you can either order from China or hope to find on eBay for around $30 per piece.
Lubuntu 18.10, our first release with LXQt, has reached End of Life as of July 18, 2019. This means that no further security updates or bugfixes will be released. We highly recommend that you update to 19.04 as soon as possible if you are still running Lubuntu 18.10.
The only currently-supported releases of Lubuntu today are 18.04, with LXDE, and 19.04, with LXQt. All other releases of Lubuntu are considered unsupported, and will not receive any further updates from the Lubuntu team.
Anavi Technology has created a new open source wireless development board created specifically to aid developers build quality and gas detection systems. The ANAVI Gas Detector is powered by an ESP8266 and can monitor air quality and detect dangerous gases. Launched by Crowd Supply the open source development board is now available for $25 with free shipping throughout the United States and worldwide shipping available for just $12.
The general idea is that the PocketAdmin appears to the host computer as either a USB Human Interface Device (keyboard, mouse, etc) or a USB Mass Storage Device. In either event, the user has the ability to craft custom payloads which can exploit the operating system’s inherent trust in locally connected devices. The most common example is mimicking a USB keyboard that starts “typing” once connected to the computer.
You can even configure what vendor and product IDs the PocketAdmin advertises, allowing you to more accurately spoof various devices. [Radik] has included some other interesting features, such as the ability to launch different payloads depending on the detected operating system. That way it won’t waste time trying to bang out Windows commands when it’s connected to a Linux box.
Edge computing is already in use all around us – from the wearable on your wrist to the computers parsing intersection traffic flow. Other examples include smart utility grid analysis, safety monitoring of oil rigs, streaming video optimization, and drone-enabled crop management.
When I started playing around with drawing images on the e-ink screen with the official Waveshare Python driver, I noticed a blank and an image update took around 50 seconds with 100% cpu. This is too slow for a status display so I started profiling with a simple test program. The Python profiler concluded that writebytes was called for the most of the time, which is a function of the python SPIDev module. It does a write call to the SPI device for every pixel individually which was the first issue to tackle. A newer version of this driver included the 'writebytes2' function which can write a Python iterable at once, this led to a significant improvement in this commit.
Waveshare also sells e-ink panels with a third color which lead to unrequited looping since my panel is black and white. The example code first clears the panel, then generates a buffer and writes it to the device simply generating the buffer up front saved a small amount of "panel updating" time. The code to generate the buffer was also optimized.
Modern "smart" phones are designed for surveillance: multiple cameras, microphones, location tracking, permanent wireless networking, and tons of data-collection apps disguised as useful programs turn them into a blackhole that no personal data can escape.
They also offer such useful functionality that even privacy-aware people find it very hard to resist them: looking up information on the go, getting maps and directions, keeping in touch with friends, family and business partners from anywhere are extremely valuable indeed.
All of these desirable features are currently available on laptops, but their bulk, interaction modes and even power-up times can make their use on the go not quite as convenient. How hard could it be to build an instant-on, touchscreen "laptop" in a phone form factor, so that we could carry it in a pocket rather than in a backpack?
That is part of the solution, but it's not the complete solution: that will require some work on networking, software, and hardware. It's all in-reach and doable today, and I refer to the combination of such lightweight hardware, software and networking, that enable us to escape the surveillance blackhole, as '''0G'''.
Jolla has updated Sailfish, the Linux-based mobile OS aimed at those who prefer a little less Android and Apple in their lives.
Trumpeting the version as the "biggest update since the launch of Sailfish 3", Jolla has named the code "Seitseminen" after a national park 50km from the company's HQ in Tampere, Finland.
Things have had a jolly good buffing in this release, with the cosmetics coming in for attention. To be fair (and in our very subjective opinion) Sailfish was already an attractive OS (certainly when compared to some of the more alarming Linux efforts out there) but redesigns to core apps such as People, Phone and Messages will be welcome, as will improvements to email and calendar.
The next revolution in information technology – 5G + Edge Computing – is here and it brings an unprecedented opportunity for the telecom industry and all enterprises. Just as companies like Uber, Venmo and Snap could not have launched without the connectivity innovations brought by 4G, the next telecom revolution will birth companies and innovations we can’t yet fully imagine.
More than just an incremental advance in our telecommunications infrastructure, 5G is being called a foundation of the fourth industrial revolution, where hyper-fast data speeds and bandwidth rich networks will enable transformative products, processes and services. The real-time insights spawned from the massive datasets generated, collected and analyzed at the EDGE of these networks will be critical to the development of things like IoT, autonomous vehicles, and factory safety monitoring.
The Common NFVI Telco Task Force (CNTT) is meeting face-to-face in Paris this week at a "coming out party" -- in the words of Mark Cottrell, AVP Domain 2.0 and Cloud at AT&T -- for the latest networking open source group, with a goal of standardizing NFV infrastructure.
I was there for the first day of the three-day event held at Orange's R&D office in the outskirts of the French capital. At slightly over 60 attendees, the count was a step up from the dozen or so that participated in the CNTT's inaugural meeting at MWC Barcelona in February.
Andy Baker, Absa CTO, agrees. “Open source is everywhere. If you go out and buy a product from a vendor, I guarantee you that 80% of it is open source.
“Open source allows for fast and more effective development. The diversity of input is what makes open source innovative – this really is development on demand. Today, people are developing software in order to find a solution and not just for the sake of developing software,” he says.
The days are long gone when open source was only used by startups and smaller companies, adds Grant Bennett, country manager for SUSE South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, today, it’s being viewed as one of the top engines for innovation and is driving mission-critical applications for many businesses across a wide range of industries. Our perceptions around open source have also changed, he adds.
Most of the opensource technologies revolve around some well-known opensource languages such as java, python, perl, C, C++, scala and databases choices are usually MySql, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc. Learning and understanding them is relatively easy and supported by a strong community for each of those technologies.
Generally speaking, it is software that can be freely accessed, changed, used, and shared by anyone. The Open Source Initiative’s definition outlines 10 criteria that must be met by any software license to be labeled as such including free redistribution, integrity of the author’s source code, technology neutrality, and no discrimination against persons or groups.
Open Infrastructure Summit agenda features at-scale operators of infrastructure using open source technologies like OpenStack and Kubernetes...
DataStax is, of course, the company that produces the most popular (commercially supported… or ‘production-certified’ as DataStax would put it) database built on open source Apache Cassandra.
Cloudera has had a busy 2019. The vendor started off the year by merging with its primary rival Hortonworks to create a new Hadoop big data juggernaut. However, in the ensuing months, the newly merged company has faced challenges as revenue has come under pressure and the Hadoop market overall has shown signs of weakness.
Against that backdrop, Cloudera said July 10 that it would be changing its licensing model, taking a fully open source approach. The Cloudera open source route is a new strategy for the vendor. In the past, Cloudera had supported and contributed to open source projects as part of the larger Hadoop ecosystem but had kept its high-end product portfolio under commercial licenses.
You should be extra careful about what document files you open using the LibreOffice software over the next few days. That's because LibreOffice contains a severe unpatched code execution vulnerability that could sneak malware into your system as soon as you open a maliciously-crafted document file. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. Earlier this month, LibreOffice released the latest version 6.2.5 of its software that addresses two severe vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-9848 and CVE-2019-9849), but the patch for the former has now been bypassed, security researcher Alex Inführ claims.
The AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) project, which was first announced by Google in 2015, is an open source framework designed to speed up mobile webpages. The company asserts that it cuts load times to under a second by balancing clickthrough probability with device and network constraints, and it claims that AMP is actively used by hundreds of thousands of web domains across billions of pages.
The open-source MATLAB/Octave implementation is available free of charge at http://quadriga-channel-model.de.
The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute has released QuaDRiGa 2.2, a comprehensive update of the well-established open-source radio channel model. Short for "QUAsi Deterministic RadIo channel GenerAtor", QuaDRiGa is mainly used to generate realistic radio channel impulse responses for use in system-level simulations of mobile networks.
Facebook said it will open its Map With AI service to the OpenStreetMap project, which aims to be an open source mapping data source.
In conjunction with the Map With AI service, Facebook also said it would release RapiD, an AI version of the OpenStreetMap editing tool iD.
Mapping data is increasingly critical and Google currently dominates even as Apple, Microsoft and other vendors aim to secure mapping data for everything from search services to directions to local business directories.
Nor-Tech is the only enterprise offering groundbreaking Open OnDemand, which makes open source HPC as easy as using a desktop or website; it is also the only company able to integrate it into OpenHPC. This means that even those without HPC expertise can take advantage of the significant cost-savings of open source.
The government of Belgium considers the source code of software solutions created for or by its public services to be public information that must be made available on request. The federal government now wants to discuss with the country’s regional governments how to accommodate such requests. “This requires a clear legal basis, as part of the rules on open data,” an advisor to the country’s Minister for the Digital Agenda told the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory.
eLife, the Cambridge non-profit organisation that provides a platform for research communication, has announced the first working example of its open-source journal hosting and post-production publishing system, Libero Publisher.
Showcasing some of the key components of a journal, including a homepage and research articles with author lists and affiliations, figures and references, the demo is designed to show how publishers can deliver attractively presented content on any device.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba claims to have designed the fastest RISC-V processor to date, and reckons it will open source at least some of the blueprints for others to use.
The chip was unveiled this week at Alibaba's Cloud Summit in the Middle Kingdom, though details are curiously thin. Word reaches us of the development, though, amid China's soaring interest in RISC-V, which at its heart is an open-source instruction set architecture backed by Google, Nvidia, Western Digital, Qualcomm, Alibaba, and others.
Italian 3D printer manufacturer WASP has launched a free add-on for open source 3D modelling software Blender that allows users to model orthopedic devices with 3D scans. Designed for use by medical professionals, the add-on runs on Blender 2.8 and contains step-by-step commands to model a shape on a 3D scan, with the final design intended for 3D printing.
The tool was developed by WASP MED, WASP’s division focusing specifically on 3D printing in healthcare. After a year of research and intensive work, the WASP MED Blender Add-on was created in order to prepare professionals in using 3D technology and tools. WASP also collaborated with Alessandro Zomparelli, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, to develop the tool. In a press release, the company states that the intention of the add-on is to fill the gap between expensive and rigid professional software, and the powerful open-source software available that isn’t optimized for medical use.
In this chapter, we will get a number of top 100 coins by their market cap with python. If you have read the previous chapter of this cryptocurrency project then you will find out that in this chapter we have only changed the GET’s url content a little bit to achieve the above-mentioned outcome.
The real problem isn’t the CSS background-image property itself. Rather it is that it’s been used in places where it really shouldn’t be, such as for the main CTA hero image or for UI images.
Used improperly, background-image can be an anti-pattern. Are there legit use cases for background-image? Of course.
However, there are some serious downsides to using the CSS background-image property, and more importantly, we have better ways to implement images in our browsers today.
In the past few rounds of astronaut applications, prospective candidates cited the space-shuttle missions, not the moon landings, as motivation, according to those who reviewed them. This year, Millennials will surpass Baby Boomers as the largest adult population in the United States, according to an analysis of government data by the Pew Research Center. The Apollo program was not the defining moment of space exploration for members of this generation, born from 1981 to 1996. They remember their teachers wheeling bulky televisions into classrooms to watch a space-shuttle launch or tuning into livestreams on their laptops to watch a SpaceX rocket fly. They summon images of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos more readily than of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
The sample-collecting spacecraft, Hayabusa2, has been in orbit around the asteroid Ryugu since July 2018, and it has already delivered robots and rovers to the asteroid. In the new video, you can see the shadow of the spacecraft grow steadily as it nears the surface of the asteroid. As the outstretched sample-collecting limb makes contact, a flurry of dust and rocks explodes from the surface while the spacecraft quickly ascends back into space.
It was found that half the products attributed 30 per cent of their calories to sugar, while only one-third of them listed sugar, concentrated fruit juice and other sweetening agents as an ingredient.
A vulnerability in GNU Binutils could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on a targeted system.
Investigative news site Bellingcat has confirmed several of its staff were targeted by an attempted phishing attack on their ProtonMail accounts, which the journalists and the email provider say failed.
“Yet again, Bellingcat finds itself targeted by cyber attacks, almost certainly linked to our work on Russia,” wrote Eliot Higgins, founder of the investigative news site in a tweet. “I guess one way to measure our impact is how frequently agents of the Russian Federation try to attack it, be it their hackers, trolls, or media.”
Kazakhstan is telling citizens to download a cryptographic certificate, letting authorities monitor their traffic. Mozilla and Wikimedia are discussing how to respond from afar.
Researchers from Kudelski Security, a Swiss cyber security solutions provider, is set to launch a “purposefully vulnerable” blockchain to highlight vulnerabilities in blockchain ecosystems. According to a report by IT news site Computerworld, the company will demo the blockchain during the Black Hat conference in August.
After 6 years, I removed Docker from all my home servers.
If you're one of the 147 million people in the United States affected by the egregious Equifax credit bureau hack in 2017, you were probably resigned to getting some free credit monitoring out of it and moving on. But nearly two years later, attorneys general from 50 US states and territories, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finally have your back. Sort of. They've negotiated a settlement with Equifax that entitles all victims to 10 years of free credit monitoring, or $125. Here's how to make sure you get yours.
See, while Equifax has agreed to a $700 million settlement — compare to its revenue of $880 million last quarter alone — it’s technically only a $425 million settlement as far as affected consumers are concerned, with the rest of the money going to pay penalties.
And of that $425 million, it turns out only a paltry $31 million is actually set aside for those individual $125 cash payments — the rest is all for free credit monitoring, reimbursements, or if you could somehow miraculously prove you actually suffered identity theft as a result of the breach.
And, according to cyber security provider Keeper Security, which commissioned a study of more than 500 senior-level decision makers at companies with 500 employees or less, cyber security efforts are not at the top of the list of SMBs when it comes to where leaders are putting their focus and efforts – with US businesses “ripe for the picking”.
At a Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Caracas, Venezuela, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif accused the United States of America of “economic terrorism.” Unilateral U.S. sanctions have clobbered Iran, which—like most countries on earth—is reliant on the financial system that remains dominated by the United States.
The United States has had a sanctions regime in place against Iran for decades, almost since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The U.S., France, and Germany later reneged on their nuclear energy contracts with Iran and kept billions of dollars of Iranian money. Matters sharpened in 1996, when the U.S. administration of Bill Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. Since then, the U.S. pressure on Iran has increased, then decreased, and increased again—but it has not been withdrawn.
Iran released drone footage on Friday that it said refutes President Donald Trump's claim that the U.S. Navy downed an Iranian aircraft in the Strait of Hormuz.
As Reuters reported, Iranian state TV said "the drone had captured the footage and timing notations showed the drone was still filming after Washington said it had been downed."
On July 16, 1945, the U.S. detonated the first-ever nuclear device in the New Mexico desert. Less than a month later, it dropped two more atomic bombs, destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and injuring more than 200,000 civilians.
Today, 74 years later, President Donald Trump has elbowed his way to the precipice of war threatening fire, fury and obliteration against one state that has nuclear weapons (North Korea) and one that doesn’t (Iran). In June, shortly after Trump reportedly called off a military strike against Iran with just 10 minutes to spare, he lashed out on Twitter: “Iran cannot have Nuclear Weapons!”
Meanwhile, the United States is pushing forward with plans to modernize, upgrade and rebuild its own aging nuclear stockpile. Over the next 30 years, the U.S. will spend at least $1.2 trillion on maintaining and modernizing nuclear weapons. With inflation, cost overruns and common under-estimation of weapon systems, the final cost of the U.S. nuclear enterprise could be as high as $2 trillion.
Trump’s 2020 budget alone calls for $16.5 billion (an increase of 8.3 percent over 2019) for the Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which maintains the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
From our present vantage point, it seems clear that, by 2019, the United States had passed a point of no return. In retrospect, this was the moment when indications of things gone fundamentally awry should have become unmistakable. Although at the time much remained hidden in shadows, the historic pivot now commonly referred to as the Great Reckoning had commenced.
Even today, it remains difficult to understand why, given mounting evidence of a grave crisis, passivity persisted for so long across most sectors of society. An epidemic of anomie affected a large swath of the population. Faced with a blizzard of troubling developments, large and small, Americans found it difficult to put things into anything approximating useful perspective. Few even bothered to try. Fewer succeeded. As with predictions of cataclysmic earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, a not-in-my-lifetime mood generally prevailed.
During what was then misleadingly known as the Age of Trump, the political classes dithered. While the antics of President Donald Trump provoked intense interest -- the word “intense” hardly covers the attention paid to him -- they also provided a convenient excuse for letting partisan bickering take precedence over actual governance or problem solving of any sort. Meanwhile, “thought leaders” (a term then commonly used to describe pontificating windbags) indulged themselves with various pet projects.
‘Nationalist’ channel Times Now has joined the rank of left-liberals in peddling the fake narrative that Hindus are forcing Muslims to chant Jai Shri Ram. They used a cropped video to accuse a BJP minister in Jharkhand of spreading hate in the name of Hindutva.
The contaminant was found in groundwater at Fort Jackson six years ago as part of an Army initiative to check military bases for pollution from explosives. At first, the Army reported that it had not found unsafe levels in groundwater wells off the base. But further testing in 2014 found elevated levels of RDX in wells that served five homes across from Fort Jackson.
Since 2013, the Army has conducted more than 800 tests involving 186 wells off the military base, finding 31 wells polluted by RDX. That's 16.6 percent. Of those 31 wells, 16 exceeded federal standards for safe drinking water or were over a risk limit established by the federal government, according to data released this week by Fort Jackson and the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
The Brazilian Amazon rainforest is being cleared away at such a fast rate that it is approaching a "tipping point" beyond which it may not be able to recover, an expert has warned.
As trees are lost, researchers say there is a risk that large swathes of the forest could transition to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall via evaporation and transpiration from plants. This could have significant implications for global warming, given that the rainforest absorbs vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.
The authorities often begin making arrests before a crowd can gather, as happened on Saturday as lines of riot police officers in body armor and helmets — an outfit protesters called “the cosmonaut” — blocked streets and chased demonstrators down alleys far from City Hall.
More than 1,000 people were arrested Saturday at an election protest in Moscow, according to Russian police. Leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny, who called for the demonstration, has been jailed for 30 days.
The core purpose of the Constitution is to prevent tyranny. That’s why its Framers distributed power between the president, Congress and the judiciary. That’s why each of the three branches was designed to limit the powers of the other two.
In other words, the Framers anticipated the possibility of a Donald Trump.
Fortunately, they also put in a mechanism to enforce the Constitution against a president who tries to place himself above the law and to usurp the powers of the other branches of government.
Article I, Section 2 gives the House of Representatives the “sole Power of Impeachment.” Article I, Section 3 gives the Senate the “sole Power to try all Impeachments.”
Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a “portal” that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows. The agreement also requires police to “keep the terms of this program confidential.”
Because the African American vote is crucial, the conventional wisdom nowadays is that for Democrats to end up with a nominee who can defeat Donald Trump, Democratic candidates must win over African Americans’ hearts and minds. This is a rare case in which the conventional wisdom is spot on.
Because South Carolina will be the first state to hold a primary or caucus in which a majority of likely Democratic voters are African American, its primary is bound to draw more national attention next year than it usually does. South Carolina is where candidates will do their best to figure out which way the wind is blowing. It is where they will put the most effort into tailoring their messages and marketing schemes to appeal to African American voters.
But because demography is destiny, and because generals are always fighting the last battle, the thinking behind the conventional wisdom is, by now, somewhat superseded.
With the United Kingdom and Iran in the midst of a tense and dangerous standoff after the tit-for-tat seizure of oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, international observers are warning that the British government has fallen into a trap set by hawkish U.S. national security adviser John Bolton that could lead to a devastating military conflict.
After British commandos earlier this month swarmed and detained Iran's Grace 1 oil supertanker in waters east of Gibraltar, Bolton applauded the move as "excellent news" and said "America and our allies will continue to prevent regimes in Tehran and Damascus from profiting off this illicit trade."
What on Earth were the British politicians and officials thinking who gave the go-ahead for the seizure of the Iranian oil tanker Grace 1 off Gibraltar on 4 July? Did they truly believe that the Iranians would not retaliate for what they see as a serious escalation in America’s economic war against them?
The British cover story that the sending of 30 Royal Marines by helicopter to take over the tanker was all to do with enforcing EU sanctions on Syria, and nothing to do with US sanctions on Iran, was always pretty thin.
The Spanish foreign minister, Josep Borrell, has said categorically that Britain took over the tanker “following a request from the United States to the United Kingdom”.
One fact about Iranian foreign policy should have been hardwired into the brain of every politician and diplomat in Britain, as it already is in the Middle East, which is that what you do to the Iranians they will do to youat a time and place of their own choosing.
The US and UK backed Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Iran in 1980, but this was not unconnected – though it was impossible to prove – with the suicide bombing that killed 241 US service personnel in the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983.
Driving up Daniel K. Inouye Highway on the Big Island of Hawai‘i at 4:30 in the morning is a sight few will forget: a silent, pitch-black road, with black lava and sparse trees. The dark air is a chilly 50 degrees. In our backpacks are packaged tuna, crackers, water, walkie talkies, and a voice recorder. However, the most important items are without a doubt our blue ACLU of Hawai‘i legal observer vests and first aid kit, which is stocked with goods like antacid (to rinse our eyes of pepper spray) and earbuds. Sitting in the car, we Sharpie the names of a friendly board member who promised to help bail us out on our arms. We take a deep breath. We are steps away from the largest, most controversial protest to hit Hawai‘i this century. We are heading to the tallest mountain in the world: Maunakea.
This marks the second week that hundreds of people — who call themselves “protectors” — are camping out at the base of the access road leading up to the summit of Maunakea to peacefully protest the planned construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, known as TMT. While the ACLU of Hawai‘i takes no position on the TMT itself, our concern for the free speech rights of everyone and the cultural access rights of Native Hawaiians — strongly guaranteed in the Hawai‘i State Constitution — drive us to get involved.
After crunching the numbers, the researchers found that some of the phone features really did predict some of the personality traits for the 52 participants. While they worked with a small sample size, it's interesting to see that phone data best predicted neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion.
The logs weren't as useful at predicting the other two traits, especially openness. And this makes sense, since some personality traits are linked to activity, and some are more internal.
The snippets have allegedly included “countless instances” of discussions between doctors and patients, sexual encounters, business deals, and criminal activities such as drug deals, accompanied by the user’s location, contact details, and app data. While contractors aren’t specifically listening for private activities in the recordings, the whistleblower claims that Apple doesn’t do “much vetting of who works there, and the amount of data that we’re free to look through seems quite broad … If there were someone with nefarious intentions, it wouldn’t be hard to identify [people on the recordings].”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government thinks there is genuine cause for concern that Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook will get around the server location norms by sharing user data among its associate entities. The social media platform Facebook-owned chat platform WhatsApp and photo-sharing app Instagram are prime suspects for this kind of manipulation, according to government sources. Sharing of data between the entities could constitute a breach of security, privacy and commercial information guidelines, media reports say.
The government has asked the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to examine the matter and ensure that user data collected through payment services such are not shared. In this matter, the authorities have specifically flagged WhatsApp and Google Pay, the payment service that Google owners Alphabet Inc acquired by taking over Tez, a report on the Economic Times website said citing unnamed top officials. NPCI operates the country's retail payment and settlement systems.
Unfortunately, patient privacy wasn’t a guiding product development principle over at Abbott when making the Libre 2. Depending on your choice of clothing, no one can tell that you’re wearing the sensor just by looking at you.
However, the sensor itself broadcasts every three-minutes to anyone within Bluetooth range that you’re wearing a glucose monitoring device. Thereby revealing personal information about a chronic medical condition to anyone nearby.
Security expert Jon Callas breaks down the fatal flaws of a recent proposal to add a secret user — the government — to our encrypted conversations. Note: This is part one of a four-part series where security expert Jon Callas breaks down the fatal flaws of a recent proposal to add a secret user — the government — to our encrypted conversations.
Twenty-five years ago, the FBI decided it needed a surveillance system built into the nation’s telephone network to enable it to listen to any conversation with the flip of a switch. Congress obliged by passing the Communication Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), forcing telephone companies to rebuild their networks to be “wiretap ready.” In the more than two decades since then, the FBI has been seeking both legislative and judicial approval to expand this authority to internet communications, insisting that its investigations have “gone dark” because of increasingly widespread use of encryption. Technologists and civil libertarians have so far been successful in opposing those efforts, warning that requiring technology companies to build a backdoor into our encrypted communications would compromise security for everyone and would empower not just the FBI, but repressive governments like China and Iran, to demand or gain access to private communications. But law enforcement and intelligence agencies have not given up.
Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire, and has claimed responsibility for dozens of bomb threats and “swatting” incidents, where police are tricked into visiting potentially deadly force on the target’s address.
And Chicago wasn't the only place this happened. What would come to be referred to as the country's Red Summer was a series of race riots that occurred for several months in different places around the country. In Chicago, Eugene Williams' death was what sparked the city's riots, but kindling for that fire had been building for at least a few years.
In recent years, YouTube creators have consistently spoken out about changes to the massive platform that they say they are rarely consulted on that affect their ability to make money. For example, YouTube has repeatedly changed how it handles copyright takedown requests (allowing copyright holders to assert copyright on and monetize videos that they didn’t upload, for example.) YouTube has also controversially “demonetized” or issued content warnings to some innocuous channels. One of the creators leading the unionization charge, Jörg Sprave, has had his popular slingshot videos removed by YouTube.
An 18-year-old U.S. citizen from Dallas who was held for more than three weeks by U.S. and Customs and Border Protection despite carrying U.S. birth certificate documents says he lost 26 pounds during his detention and was not allowed to shower or brush his teeth while in custody.
Galicia spoke to The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday, one day after he was released by federal officials who had earlier refused to acknowledge his citizenship when presented with his birth certificate.
In the United States, we live in a “post-genocide” society, whether or not we are cognizant of this fact or not. What do I mean by that? In order for the United States to have fulfilled its so-called “Manifest Destiny”—the divine right to conquer the lands west of the Mississippi River—we needed to wipe out the remaining Native Americans living on western lands. The idea was coined by the journalist John O. Sullivan in 1845when he stated: “…In the spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Today, unfortunately, many indigenous peoples are still broken because of this past genocidal history. Native Americans were put on reservations, their lands were stolen, and their cultural heritage was dismissed and eradicated through the boarding school system.
Those Natives currently living on reservations do so forty to sixty-percent below the poverty line. While Native Americans are also 82% more likely to die from suicide than Caucasians and 177% more susceptible to diabetes and alcoholic problems endemic. Statistically, more than a quarter of American Indian and Alaska Natives are more likely to live in poverty, more than double the general population, and more likely to experience violence and traumatic events than other populations.
If anyone needed further proof that fascism is still alive and well in Italy, the footage of Carola Rackete, the 31-year-old captain of the migrant-rescue ship Sea-Watch 3, getting arrested in Lampedusa for trying to save 42 asylum seekers, provides a graphic illustration.
The late Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, would have been proud of Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini for creating a country in which a young woman may face up to 10 years in prison for the unforgivable crime of saving human lives.
Salvini currently heads Italy's largest political force and also recently launched the new Identity and Democracy populist group in the European Parliament, which includes other far-right parties such as France's National Front (FN) and Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Earlier today, Senator Lindsay Graham discussed Donald Trump's outrageous and racist tweets from Sunday which told representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna S. Pressley to “go back” to the countries they “originally” came from. And then he bolstered them. Live on Fox News, Graham escalated Trump's attacks calling the four congressional representatives—all women of color—“communists.”
“We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists. They hate Israel. They hate our own country. They're calling the guards along our border, the Border Patrol agents, 'concentration camp guards.' They accuse people who support Israel of doing it for the Benjamins. They're anti-Semitic. They're anti-American,” Graham said. “Don't get down. Aim higher. We don't need to know anything about them personally. Talk about their policy.”
The Real News Network's Marc Steiner spoke to Dr. Kimberly Moffitt, an Associate Professor of the Language, Literacy and Culture PhD program and the American Studies department at the University Of Maryland Baltimore County, and Dr. Gerald Horne, John J. And Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African-American Studies at the University of Houston about ongoing and escalating racist rhetoric by the president and the GOP.
On Tuesday, May 7th, 2019, SFLC President and Columbia Professor of Law Eben Moglen delivered a keynote address titled Why Freedom of Thought Requires Attention at the re:publica 2019 conference in Berlin, Germany. Professor Moglen’s keynote directly engages with the consequences of humanity’s technological prowess on the abilities to self-govern, communicate, and even think.
His thesis relates digital technology to freedom and self-government: [...]
A recent Federal Circuit ruling could leave many IP owners rethinking their patent transfer agreements and arrangements with transferees, write Paul Poirot and Jason Hoffman of Baker Hostetler
Your company’s patents are reaching expiration. There could be some untapped value in them. But you are not interested in suing your competitors. You decide to transfer the rights to a non-practising entity in order to monetise them. But you need some assurances. You want to be sure that certain customers and business partners will be shielded from any infringement suits. You want to make sure that the new owners do not transfer the patents to your competitors. You also want to be certain that your company will not be required to join in any enforcement litigation.
What has been a common practice for monetising patents may now result in your company being forcibly dragged into litigation. In a recent Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision – Lone Star Silicon Innovations LLC v. Nanya Technology Corp – the court relied on the combination of numerous rights retained by the transferer to hold that the transferee did not obtain “all substantial rights” and could not bring suit in its own name. The Federal Circuit then went on to clarify the ease with which the transferee can invoke Rule 19 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to forcibly join the transferee in the litigation if it is found that the transferee does not have sufficient rights to bring suit in its own name. This decision could leave many IP owners rethinking their patent transfer agreements and arrangements with transferees.
This month's Ninth Circuit motions panel (consisting of Judge Mary M. Schroeder, Judge William C. Canby, and Judge Morgan B. Christen) now has all the briefing in front of it to decide on Qualcomm's motion for a partial stay of the FTC's antitrust remedies, filed earlier this month after Judge Lucy H. Koh in the Northern District of California denied a motion for a stay. Former Qualcomm attorney and now-DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim's division, with support from Department of Defense and Department of Energy officials, unsurprisingly spoke out in favor of Qualcomm's motion by filing a statement of interest. Amicus curiae briefs were submitted by Ericsson and former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Michel.
Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of the CASE Act, a new bill that proposes to institute a small claims court for copyright disputes. As the bill moves to the Senate, tensions are rising between supporters and opponents, with familiar names, trying to rally support for their positions. Some see it as the ideal tool for rightsholders to protect their works, while others see it as a copyright-trolling threat.
"Unfortunately, recent legislative changes in the Netherlands, confirmed by our host, has made it impossible to keep the status quo going," Tenboro wrote in a post to the e-hentai forums on Friday. "While it may have been possible to move the necessary servers to some other country with more lenient laws, at this point in time it's probably a game of whack-a-mole, so even if I wanted to attempt it, the aforementioned tendon injury makes it impossible for me to play that game."
While it's not clear what law they're referring to, specifically, it's possibly the European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which the European Parliament voted into law in April 2019.
This law is designed limit how copyrighted content is shared online, but critics say the directive—specifically, Articles 11 and 13—are a disaster for internet freedoms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it a "controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place."
