The Linux world welcomes the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 that comes packed with a variety of new features and improvements. The new version has enhancements related to production stability, containerized application development, and hybrid cloud deployments.
Before we delve into the details of this release, let’s see what this operating system is all about. As you could tell from its name, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS mainly focuses on enterprises, with it being the most popular enterprise Linux platform. What separates it from other operating systems is the fact that it offers all the tools necessary for scaling your apps and releasing emerging technologies.
This release focuses on cloud-native flexibility and operational security and is the last installment to version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Accordingly, users are to see some new tools and enhancements, such as Kernel Livepatching, Red Hat Insights, and Full Support for image builder.
Red Hat has issued the final release of its Enterprise Linux 7 family with a handful of features to help IT professionals better manage data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, along with a suite of container creation tools aimed at developers.
To help IT operations teams weave legacy applications with cloud-native services and bare-metal services, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 includes Red Hat Insights, which the company calls an "expertise-as-a-service" offering that helps detect, analyze and remediate a range of security and configuration issues before they can bring down a system.
By tying legacy systems to cloud-native services in the new version, Red Hat backs up IBM's intention of transforming all of its legacy software to operate in cloud-native mode. IBM plans to tailor those applications to run best on Red Hat's OpenShift platform, according to Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software at IBM, during the IBM-Red Hat financial analyst meeting last week.
Sway 1.2 is tracking compatibility fixes/improvements against i3 4.17, Swaybar is now spawned as a Wayland client, XWayland support enhancements, wlr-output-management-v1 protocol support, output toggle support, layout handling enhancements, and a wide range of different fixes and other improvements to this promising lightweight Wayland compositor built off their WLROOTS project.
While AMD's hardware folks were launching the EPYC 7002 series, their software crew was pushing out the AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 2.0 with support/optimizations for the Zen 2 micro-architecture. Using the top-end AMD EPYC 7742 in a 2P Linux server configuration, here are C/C++ compiler benchmarks looking at the performance when built by the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), LLVM Clang, and AOCC 2.0.
All of these tests were done on the AMD EPYC 7742 2P configuration with the Daytona reference server running Ubuntu Linux. All of these benchmarks looking at the resulting binary performance were carried out using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. During all tests, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were set to "-O3 -march=znver2" for targeting the Zen 2 EPYC processors.
Copying documents used to require a dedicated staff member in offices, and then a dedicated machine. Today, copying is a task computer users do without a second thought. Copying data on a computer is so trivial that copies are made without you realizing it, such as when dragging a file to an external drive.
The concept that digital entities are trivial to reproduce is pervasive, so most modern computerists don’t think about the options available for duplicating their work. And yet, there are several different ways to copy a file on Linux. Each method has nuanced features that might benefit you, depending on what you need to get done.
Space Mercs from Bearded Giant Games who develop their games entirely on Linux, released on Steam recently and now you can also catch it on itch.io.
Haven't picked it up yet and want to know what to expect? It's a retro 3D arcade space shooter, designed primarily as a quick pick up and play experience. The developer said to think of it like a coffee-break game, only a bit more intense when some of it can be like a bullet-hell.
Nimbatus is all about piecing together blocks in the hope of creating a drone that's not terrible, with the ability to make them autonomous or have direct control of everything it's a very cool game.
A few days ago the released the Campaign Update (0.7.3) and it's huge. Before this, the campaign mode was pretty simplistic but it has been expanded quite a bit now with different captains, progression through unlocking drone parts, travel events, asteroid fields, drone skins and more.
Screeps Arena is a game for programming enthusiasts, as you get to design your own AI using JavaScript to have 1 on 1 battles.
If this sounds a bit familiar, it's because this same developer also made the game Screeps, an MMO RTS sandbox (some of it is open source too) which has all the same basic ideas. However, Screeps Arena has a much smaller and refined focus on simpler battles. This will likely make it a more manageable game and probably easier for a bigger audience to get into.
If you don't get frustrated easily and you enjoy a challenge, perhaps also a bit of speedrunning, MineRalph is probably a game you will enjoy.
The developer, Chop Chop Games, say it pays homage to classic difficult games. With gameplay that's a sort-of mashup of "Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Meat Boy - with the level design of Super Mario... and the control scheme of Angry Birds". Quite a simple game mechanically but it's by no means easy.
I haven't given a little overview of Linux games on sale for a while, so here's a fresh look ahead of another weekend for those of you looking to pick up something new.
Gear Worx Productions are currently working on Mind Trap, a four episode psychological thriller series and they've got in touch to mention that it's coming to Linux. Tagging us in a post on Twitter, they made it very clear that Linux will be supported.
X4: Split Vendetta is going to expand the size of X4: Foundations quite a lot, along with the upcoming big 3.0 update.
They're not currently giving out a lot of details on what exactly will be in the expansion or the update. The Steam page as well as the announcement sent out was pretty light. Egosoft did say it will increase the size of the universe, while also introducing "two new Split family clans" including new ships, weapons and station modules.
digiKam try to be the most powerful with all files provided by digital camera. Raw files support is a big challenge. Some applications have been especially created only to support RAW files from camera, as this kind of support is complex, long and hard to maintain in time.
Raw files are not like JPEG. Nothing is standardized, and camera makers are free to change everything inside these digital container without documentation. Raw files permit to re-invent the existing, to implement hidden features, to cache metadata, to require a powerful computer to process data. When you buy an expensive camera, you must expect that the image provided are seriously pre-processed by the camera firmware and ready to use immediately.
This is true for JPEG, not RAW files. Even if JPEG is not perfect, it’s well standardized and well documented. For Raw, for each new camera release, the formats can change as it depends in-depth on camera sensor data not processed by camera firmware. This require an intensive reverse-engineering that digiKam team cannot support as well. This is why we use the powerful libraw library to post-process the Raw files on the computer. This library include complex algorithms to support all different Raw file formats.
I tried to make this article to help everybody find a desktop choice among Deepin, Mint, and Elementary operating systems. I select them because they are solely focused on desktop and have developed their own user interface. They are all GNU/Linux systems from Debian family, but with several distinctions you may love to see. For example, they differ on their own file managers, user interface layouts and built-in apps and several more things. You will also find which one still supports 32-bit PC nowadays, which one supports Flatpak by default, and more. Finally, I wish you can empower your PC and laptop with one of them. Enjoy!
According to the project’s site, EndeavourOS came into existence because people in the Antergos community wanted to keep the spirit of Antergos alive. Their goal was simply to “have Arch installed with an easy to use installer and a friendly, helpful community to fall back on during the journey to master the system”.
Unlike many Arch-based distros, EndeavourOS is intending to work like vanilla Arch, “so no one-click solutions to install your favorite app or a bunch of preinstalled apps you’ll eventually don’t need”. For most people, especially those new to Linux and Arch, there will be a learning curve, but EndeavourOS aims to have a large friendly community where people are encouraged to ask questions and learn about their systems.
It has been quite a long time since the last post, unfortunately, but I’m not gone yet. I was fairly busy for a couple of weeks, and then taking a little break while waiting for the Fedora 31 Mass Rebuild to finish. But here we go with what’s been taking place.
The major bit of work leading up to the Mass Rebuild was getting all Go packages up do date to the newly approved Guidelines. This involved several refreshes of packages, newly created packages, and other general cleanup, implemented almost entirely by Robert-André Mauchin (eclipseo) for all the Go libraries. Unfortunately, this missed adding Obsoletes to the renamed packages, so I (manually) tracked commit notifications and wrote a script to add these in. There were nearly 200 of these, which is too many to list here, but you can find them on datagrepper.
Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS has just been released. For the Desktop, newer stable versions of GNOME components have been included, as well as a new feature – Livepatch desktop integration.
As usual with LTS point releases, the main changes are a refreshed hardware enablement stack (newer versions of the kernel, xorg & drivers) and a number of bug and security fixes.
For those who aren’t familiar, Livepatch is a service which applies critical kernel patches without rebooting. The service is available as part of an Ubuntu Advantage subscription but also made available for free to Ubuntu users (up to 3 machines). Fixes are downloaded and applied to your machine automatically to help reduce downtime and keep your Ubuntu LTS systems secure and compliant. Livepatch is available for servers and desktop.
Canonical's designers have been working to update their Yaru desktop theme ahead of the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine" release.
There has been a "huge" re-base to Ubuntu's Yaru theme against the latest upstream Adwaita theme featured in the latest GTK tool-kit.
One of the big focuses has been trying to avoid current problems with Yaru around customization theme issues and application developers having to target so many different theme variants.
Yaru, the default Ubuntu 18.10+ theme, was recently rebased on the new Adwaita theme that was released with Gnome 3.32. The target is to have this in Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine.
In the official announcement, Carlo Lobrano says the rebase of Yaru theme on the newest Adwaita was born out of the acknowledgement that "some application developers had serious problems developing for too many variants", and the desire to make use of the "great work upstream is doing".
The upcoming Ubuntu 19.10 release will — if all goes to plan — feature an improved version of the Yaru GTK theme, and in this post we take a look at some of the changes the revamp makes.
Conscious of the continued debate as to whether Linux distros should “theme” applications designed for upstream defaults (i.e., the Adwaita GTK theme) Yaru’s development crew have opted to more closely align their fork with the latest upstream versions.
“We tried to keep as much design as possible while aiming for minimum diff (yaru was always based on the upstream themes, but the tweaks went a bit out of scope lately and it became hard to keep track of the upstream changes,” Frederik Feichtmeier explains.
What this means in practice is a little hard to say because, at the time of writing, the “new” version of theme is not available for testing in Eoan (though it can be built from source, but hey: i’m lazy).
That said there are a couple of low-res screenshots which attempt to showcase the improved Yaru theme, and these do sport a few noticeable, if minor, differences.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
Like previous LTS series, 18.04.3 includes hardware enablement stacks for use on newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures and is installed by default when using one of the desktop images.
Ubuntu Server defaults to installing the GA kernel; however you may select the HWE kernel from the installer bootloader.
As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, the third maintenance update of Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) LTS.
This release includes hardware enablement stacks (HWE kernel) that support for newer hardware.
It brought Linux kernel v5.0, which is one of the major improvement in this release.
This enables the latest hardware and peripherals available from IBM, Intel, and others.
This point release comes with updated software, updated installation media, security updates, and other high-impact bugs.
It’s fully compatibility with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and also it improves the stability and performance.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023.
Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu specifically targets older machines with lower resources, but also runs great on newer hardware. Along with a simple but usable graphical user interface, Lubuntu comes with a wide variety of applications chosen for their small footprint so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive.
Advantech has launched a Linux-friendly “DLT-V72 Facelift” series of rugged, Intel Bay Trail based vehicle-mounted computers in 10.4- and 12.1-inch models with 802.11ac, LTE, and optional UPS, sensors, and screen blanking.
Advantech has updated its DLT-V72 line of rugged vehicle-mounted terminals (VMTs) for warehouse management, port management, heavy-duty operations, and manufacturing applications. New features on the DLT-V72 Facelift include a more stylish, compact design, as well as 802.11ac WiFi, LTE, and optional sensors and screen blanking.
“HarmonyOS 1.0 will be first adopted in its smart screen products, which are due to launch later this year. Over the next three years, HarmonyOS will be optimized and gradually adopted across a broader range of smart devices, including wearables, Huawei Vision, and head units for your car,” read an excerpt of an emailed press release.
But in an editor’s note on its website titled “An Awkward Goodbye,” the journal’s Kyle Rankin wrote that the publication “we didn't get healthy enough fast enough, and when we found out we needed to walk on our own strength, we simply couldn't. So here we are giving our second, much more awkward, goodbye.”
Linux Journal also went for a broad audience. The editors realized that a purely technical magazine would lose too many new users, while a magazine written for "newbies" would not attract a more focused audience. In the first issue, Hughes highlighted both groups of users as the audience Linux Journal was looking for, writing: "We see this part of our audience as being two groups. Lots of the current Linux users have worked professionally with Unix. The other segment is the DOS user who wants to upgrade to a multi-user system. With a combination of tutorials and technical articles, we hope to satisfy the needs of both these groups."
Linux Journal has closed with "no operating funds to continue in any capacity", according to a notice on its site.
First published in March 1994, Linux Journal was founded by Phil Hughes and Bob Young, the latter being the co-founder of Red Hat. The first issue, which you can read online, includes an article by Linus Torvalds where he talks about the imminent release of Linux 1.0, remarking that "1.0 has little 'real meaning', as far as development goes, but should be taken as an indication that it can be used for real work".
Linux took off, and Linux Journal grew with it as a highly technical publication for enthusiasts and professionals. That said, the impact of the internet on print media meant that in August 2011 the magazine was forced to abandon print and look for digital subscribers. "The lack of a newsstand presence meant we lost one of our main avenues for attracting new readers to the magazine," wrote editor Kyle Rankin in a reflection on the mag's history earlier this year.
Just five months ago at the RSA conference, the NSA released Ghidra, a piece of open source software for reverse-engineering malware. It was an unusual move for the spy agency, and it’s sticking to its plan for regular updates — including some based on requests from the public.
In the coming months, Ghidra will get support for Android binaries, according to Brian Knighton, a senior researcher for the NSA, and Chris Delikat, a cyber team lead in its Research Directorate, who previewed details of the upcoming release with CyberScoop. Knighton and Delikat are discussing their plans at a session of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas Thursday.
The report authors, led by John Maxwell, associate professor and director of the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, catalog 52 open source online publishing platforms. These are defined as production and hosting systems for scholarly books and journals that meet the survey criteria, described in the report as those “available, documented open-source software relevant to scholarly publishing” and as well as others in active development. This research provides the foundation for a thorough analysis of the open publishing ecosystem and the availability, affordances, and current limitations of these platforms and tools.
The “Mind the Gap” report, published Wednesday, describes the wide range of open-source publishing tools available for academic books and journals.
Open-source online publishing platforms have proliferated in the last decade, but many of these initiatives are small and face sustainability challenges. The authors conclude that development of these initiatives often is siloed and incentives for collaboration are lacking.
Mellon-funded report Mind the Gap catalogs and analyzes all available open-source software for publishing and warns that open publishing must grapple with the dual challenges of siloed development and organization of the community-owned ecosystem
While the tide may be eventually turning, as it stands today for those wanting to run Coreboot on x86 desktop/server hardware you are largely limited to generations-old platforms. But now there is a new option and that is a Coreboot port having been completed to a modern Supermicro motherboard for use with Intel Xeon "Kabylake" processors.
Through a partnership between 9elements Cyber Security and Mullvad, a port has been completed to the Supermicro X11SSH-TF motherboard that is for Xeon E3-1200 v6 series processors.
Your favorite open source test case management system is going on tour again.
Starting with Firefox 57, the famous web browser got a totally new extensions engine beside a lot of changes. Many of these changes rendered some famous theme addons void, as they no longer work with the new engine. However, it’s still possible to customize Firefox’s user interface to make it look great again.
This is done using a special CSS file called userChrome.css, which is capable of styling the Firefox’s user interface according to whatever CSS rules you place inside that file. If this is the first time you hear about this, then you may would like to check our previous post for more details about this.
In today’s article, we’ll show you 4 ready, already-built Firefox themes that work with Firefox +68 browser. All of these themes depend on the previous userChrome.css file, so you just have to visit the homepages of these themes and read the installation instructions in order to have them on your Firefox.
We tested every one of these themes, and they work on Firefox 68.
Libreoffice is one of the leading opensource cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOs) project, that offer Linux users specially a great free office suite alternative to the commercial MS office suite. The team behin it, continue their hard work to introduce us today as Linux users, the new update that brings remarkable improvements and notable changes.
GitLab has a unique approach to acquisitions. Unlike the secrecy that most modern companies adopt (who knew IBM was going to acquire Red Hat?), GitLab’s entire acquisition strategy is available publicly. In this panel discussion, three GitLab team members discuss the company’s approach to acquisition.
As already pointed out in a previous article titled Commenting Python Code you have learned that documentation is an essential, and a continuous step in the process of software development. The article mentioned above briefly introduced the concept of docstrings which is a way to create documentation for your Python code from within the code. This in-code documentation works for modules, classes, methods, and functions, and it is the preferred way to document all Python code.
There is a lot more to it, and that's why we will have a closer look at this subject in this article. We'll cover conventions on how to write docstrings correctly, as well as various docstring formats that are used in practice, followed by accessing a docstring from your Python script. And lastly, we'll present you a number of tools in order to use and evaluate docstrings.
DevNation Live tech talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions and code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Hibernate and Quarkus from Emmanuel Bernard, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Data at Red Hat.
Not only does Quarkus boot extremely fast and with low memory footprint, but it also brings supersonic development time to developers with live reload, fast tests, and streamlined code for 80% of common usages.
More than 30 professors will no longer serve on editorial boards of the journals unless Elsevier and the University of California can reach a contract.
Building on research that has been overlooked for years, I've introduced new techniques to desynchronize servers and demonstrated novel ways to exploit the results using numerous real websites as case studies. Through this I've shown that request smuggling is a major threat to the web, that HTTP request parsing is a security-critical function, and that tolerating ambiguous messages is dangerous. I've also released a methodology and an open source toolkit to help people audit for request smuggling, prove the impact, and earn bounties with minimal risk.
According to Kravets, he first reported the flaw to Valve Software, Steam developer, on 15 June via HackerOne, providing a "text description and a proof-of-concept as an executable file".
The next day, Kravets got a message that the vulnerability reported by him was rejected as out-of-scope due to the reason that "attacks that require the ability to drop files in arbitrary locations on the user's filesystem".
For years now many hardware vendors have failed utterly to implement even basic security protections on most consumer-grade routers. D-Link, for example, just settled with the FTC after being sued for shipping routers with numerous vulnerabilities and default username/password combinations, despite advertising its products as "easy to secure" and replete with "advanced network security." Asus was similarly dinged by the FTC for shipping gear with numerous flaws and easily-guessed default username and password combinations.
As such, it's not too surprising to see a new Consumer Reports study that found that a large number of mainstream residential routers lack even rudimentary security protections. 11 of the 26 major router brands examined by the organization came with flimsy password protection. 20 of the routers let users only change the password, but not the username of web-based router management clients. 20 of the routers also failed to protect users from repeated failed password login attempts, now commonplace on most apps, phones, and other services.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) this week announced the results of its recent audit performed as part of its ongoing commitment to continuously improve Kubernetes security.
CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk says as part of the effort, the CNCF later this year also plans to kick off a bounty program through which it will provide incentives to researchers who identify bugs and other cybersecurity flaws.
Aniszczyk says all highly severe cybersecurity issues identified by the Security Audit Working Group funded by the CNCF have been addressed by the committee that oversees Kubernetes development. The auditors narrowed their focus on eight core Kubernetes components: Kube-apiserver, etcd, Kube-scheduler, Kube-controller-manager, cloud-controller-manager, Kubelet, Kube-proxy and container runtime.
The growing popularity of IoT devices does not change the fact that they are also making news for the wrong reasons. From database leaks to the hacking of IoT cameras, to Amazon employees snooping on your Alexa conversations, it appears that many IoT device companies are struggling to build trust. Accordingly, we discuss in this article the top challenges that are impeding the security of smart devices.
A computer program may be vulnerable to buffer overflow if it handles incoming data incorrectly. Anybody who can provide suitably crafted user input data can cause such a program to crash. Even worse, a vulnerable program may execute arbitrary code provided by an intruder and do something that the author did not intend it to do. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are caused by programmer mistakes, which are easy to understand but not so easy to avoid or protect against.
The DOJ this week announced that AT&T employees have been paid more than $1 million in bribes to unlock millions of smartphones, and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on the company's network. According to the full DOJ complaint (pdf), Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan and a (presumed dead) co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, paid off AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington. In return, from April 2012 until September 2017, the two men unlocked iPhones so they could be used on another carrier's network.
Well thats the first page anyway. Correctly addressed to the “Current Occupier”. So why am I posting about this?
Phishing emails land in our inbox all the time (hopfully only a few because our spam filters eat the rest). These are unsolisitord emails trying to trick us into doing somthing, usually they look like somthing official and warn us about somthing that we should take action about, for example an email that looks like it has come from your bank warning about suspicious activity in your account, they then ask you to follow a link to the ‘banks website’ where you can login and confirm if the activity is genuine – obviously taking you through a ‘man in the middle’ website that harvests your account credentials.
The govoment is justifiably concerned about this (as to are banks and other businesses that are impersonated in this way) and so run media campaigns to educate the public in the dangers of such scams and what to look out for.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (postgresql-11, postgresql-9.4, and postgresql-9.6), Fedora (exiv2), openSUSE (python-Django and vlc), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (qemu-kvm-rhev), SUSE (evince, nodejs10, python, and squid), and Ubuntu (postgresql-10, postgresql-11, postgresql-9.5).
As you may have been made aware on some news articles, blogs, and social media posts, a vulnerability to the KDE Plasma desktop was recently disclosed publicly. This occurred without KDE developers/security team or distributions being informed of the discovered vulnerability, or being given any advance notice of the disclosure.
[...]
The fixed packages are now in that PPA, so all is required is to update your system by your normal preferred method.
This week at B-Sides LV, security researcher Pavel Tsakalidis presented his work on security defects in the Electron framework, a cross-platform development framework that combines Javascript with Node.js: apps built with Electron include Skype, Slack, Whatsapp, Visual Studio Code and others.
Tsakalidis showed how the lack of basic encryption for Electron code leaves users vulnerable to hackers who inject back-door code into their sessions, which exposes their communications, filesystem, and cameras and mics to third parties.
These changes are harder to make in Macos or GNU/Linux systems (where admin access is required), but Windows systems are wide open.
To make things worse, Electron's team had previously rejected a user request for encryption to protect its files, and when Tsakalidis presented his work to them, they ignored him.
What began as a movement against an extradition bill, which would have let criminal suspects in Hong Kong be handed over for trial by party-controlled courts in mainland China, has evolved into the biggest challenge from dissenters since Tiananmen. Activists are renewing demands for greater democracy in the territory. Some even want Hong Kong’s independence from China. Still more striking is the sheer size and persistence of the mass of ordinary people. A general strike called for August 5th disrupted the city’s airport and mass-transit network. Tens of thousands of civil servants defied their bosses to stage a peaceful public protest saying that they serve the people, not the current leadership. A very large number of mainstream Hong Kongers are signalling that they have no confidence in their rulers.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a dire report Thursday arguing that humanity can’t truly fight climate change without addressing the land problem—habitat degradation, deforestation, and soils beat to hell by agriculture. We now use nearly three-quarters of the world’s ice-free surface and waste a quarter of the food we produce, all while the global food system contributes up to 37 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions.
In short, we have to fundamentally rethink how we grow crops and raise livestock. There’s no panacea, and every potential fix is fraught with maddening complications. But if we can’t figure out how to feed our species in a more sustainable way, climate change will continue to accelerate, making it all the more difficult to grow enough food. Food systems will collapse, and people will die.
A study published Thursday in Current Biology warns that extreme marine heatwaves present “a distinct biological phenomenon from bleaching events,” according to the study’s authors, led by William Leggat, a coral reef expert at the University of Newcastle in Australia.
“Our study provides compelling evidence for the urgent need for society to execute global and local efforts to mitigate climate change for the protection of coral reef ecosystems,” the team said in the paper.
The UNESCO World Heritage site is hampered by visitors stomping around its vulnerable dunes, leaving dedicated paths and ignoring driving regulations, as well as letting their dogs barrel into sensitive habitats for migrating birds.
Of all the political plaudits or economic brickbats hurled at the European Union, this might be the least expected: simply because it existed, it somehow ameliorated or damped down the worst of the 2003 heatwave.
This moment of extreme summer heat is believed to have caused an estimated 40,000 excess deaths and cost the European economy more than €13 billion in economic losses and infrastructure damage.
And yet it could have been worse. Had what is now a 28-nation political and economic behemoth not been formed in 1993, the way the member nations used their land would not have changed, and the heatwave might have been more intense, more severe and more destructive still.
One year ago, on July 31, 2018, just after leaving home in the Ukrainian city of Kherson, Deputy Mayor Kateryna Gandziuk felt a splash of liquid across her head and face. An assailant had thrown a full liter of sulfuric acid on her, leaving her near death with burns across half her body. In the months leading up to the attack, she had accused several local politicians of illegal logging in the nearby Oleshky forest. She spent several painful months in the hospital, finally dying of her wounds on Nov. 4. After protests and international pressure, several suspects were arrested, but Gandziuk’s family and supporters allege a cover-up to protect the organizers of the assault that rises to the highest levels of the Ukrainian political elite.
Kateryna Gandziuk’s brutal attack is just one of 164 murders of environmentalists and land and water defenders that occurred in 2018, cataloged in a new report titled “Enemies of the State? How governments and business silence land and environmental defenders.” Published by Global Witness, an international nonprofit organization that works to protect human rights and the environment by confronting corruption, the report notes that “the real figure is likely to be much higher, because cases are often not recorded and very rarely investigated.”
The report is global in scale. Among the most dangerous places for land defenders in 2018 were the Philippines, Guatemala and Brazil. The pace of violence in Brazil has only accelerated since the right-wing, climate change-denying extremist Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency last January.
A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the United Nations, further confirms how meat consumption and production is fueling climate disruption.
“Meat—sometimes specified as ruminant meat (mainly beef)—was consistently identified as the single food with the greatest impact on the environment, most often in terms of GHG [greenhouse] emissions and/or land use per unit commodity,” the report states.
The IPCC’s report covered climate change and land, including the following issues: desertification, land degradation, land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluctuations in ecosystems.
It was commissioned in April 2016, and the “author team” that produced the report consisted of 107 experts from 52 countries.
As the report indicates, “The emissions intensities of red meat mean that its production has a disproportionate impact on total emissions. For example, in the U.S. four percent of food sold (by weight) is beef, which accounts for 36 percent of food-related emissions.”
Our new report BAN-BOOZLED: How Corruption and Collusion Fuel Illegal Rosewood Trade in Ghana reveals how despite a comprehensive ban in place since March 2019, the dry forests and rural communities of Ghana are still the victims of rosewood plundering. EIA estimates that since 2012, over 540,000 tons of rosewood – the equivalent of 23,478 twenty-foot containers or approximately 6 million trees – were illegally harvested and imported into China from Ghana while bans on harvest and trade have been in place. EIA’s investigation documents a massive institutionalized timber trafficking scheme, enabled by high-level corruption and collusion.
These aren’t the first concerns over ES&S’s security practices: in 2018, the company disclosed that it installed remote-access software on some voting machines from 2000 to 2006. Neither report found evidence suggesting that systems or voting tallies were manipulated. Still, the undisclosed vulnerabilities raise new questions about the security of the US voting system.
The top voting machine company in the country insists that its election systems are never connected to the internet. But researchers found 35 of the systems have been connected to the internet for months and possibly years, including in some swing states.
This week, Sanders repeated the strategy by appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience: a hugely popular but decidedly non-left-leaning podcast that features an eclectic buffet of guests ranging from fairly innocuous weirdos to overt reactionaries. In less than twenty-four hours, the episode has already garnered well over two and a half million views and, judging by its reception thus far, Sanders and his arguments proved a hit — even to those accustomed to getting their political bearings from the likes of Sam Harris and other dubious sources.
Scots are now very significantly poorer than the Irish, the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Danes, the Icelanders or any of their obvious comparators. Every one of those nations is in the top 10 of the UN Human Development Index. The UK is not, and Scotland is below the mean for the UK. It is not because Scots are stupid or feckless, it not because of climate and it is certainly not a lack of natural resources. It is because of the draining away of human and physical resource by London over centuries.
Against that fundamental fact, the cloud of stupid obfuscation around the minutiae of transition is a mere distraction, and a deliberate one at that. Countries which are far poorer than Scotland successfully run on their own currencies – scores of them. Why would people believe Scotland is unique among nations in being incapable of having a currency? Yet such pathetic shibboleths are pounded out by the media, and particularly the BBC, on a daily basis to make a significant number of Scots believe that what is possible for every nation that has tried it, is uniquely impossible to them.
The new agreement could signal the de-facto end of free speech on Facebook for French citizens. Self-censorship in Europe is already widespread: a recent survey in Germany showed that two thirds of Germans are "very careful" about what topics they discuss in public -- Islam and migrants being the most taboo. Knowing that a mere Facebook post could end you up in front of a judge in court is very likely to put a decisive damper on anyone's desire to speak freely.
Since the White House is convinced social media companies are kicking conservatives off left and (mostly) right, it has decided to do something about it. What this "something" is remains about as vague as the accusations.
Once you remove a handful of grifters and Nazi fans from the list, you're left with not that much to get upset about. But the few who fervently believe this is happening make a lot of noise and have the ears of powerful people, so stuff -- vague stuff -- is being set in motion while the First Amendment is set aside.
A leaked copy of what was supposedly a draft executive order on social media bias appeared late last year. If the leak was legitimate, the White House's proposal would not have been Constitutional. It would have used the pretense of bias to allow the federal government to directly regulate speech on social media platforms.
A resilient music search engine that's been operating for around nine years has given a very unusual reason for its system breaking down. According to the operator of Slider.kz, recent legal changes in Kazakhstan, where the site is hosted, means the government there now intercepts HTTPS traffic.
According to the report, Facebook plans to include these articles as part of dedicated news section its launching sometime this fall. Publishers would sign deals lasting as long as three years in some cases, and they would get control over how articles appear on Facebook and whether readers would receive only snippets, like a headline and some text, before being sent to the publisher’s website. The proposed terms stand in contrast to Apple’s approach to Apple News Plus, its new, magazine-focused subscription service with a dubious revenue share and reportedly poor payout metrics that has had many in the media industry warning against Silicon Valley’s pledge to rescue the news business.
People familiar with the matter told the Journal that Facebook is offering as much as $3 million a year to publishers to use their news articles, headlines and smaller snippets of stories.
Facebook has to face a class-action lawsuit over whether it violated user privacy with its facial recognition tools, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Thursday.
The three-judge panel agreed that Facebook can be sued under an Illinois law that requires businesses to obtain consent before using people's biometric information, including their fingerprints or face scans.
In 2015, Facebook was sued under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to make a public policy before collecting and storing biometric data, including faces scans, and to lay out how the data will be stored. Facebook has used the technology in its Tag Suggestions feature, which determines whether a photo includes a user’s friends.
The plaintiffs brought suit, arguing that Facebook had failed to meet the requirements of the law. When a lower court certified the suit as a class action, Facebook appealed, arguing that the plaintiffs had failed to show concrete injury, and that the lower court overstepped its power by certifying the class.
Long-term foreign residents are also required to report their whereabouts if they spend more than 24 hours at places other than their registered addresses.
Landlords and tenants who fail to comply face fines of between 800 to 2,000 baht, although the sum seems to differ across different immigration offices.
The memos reveal that the company spied on Canadian folk legend Neil Young and contemplated how they could neutralize his environmental activism, including an aborted plan to sue him. They also targeted the US nonprofit US Right to Know, with weekly reports for execs on the organization's activities.
We examine why it's so difficult to protect your privacy online and discuss browser fingerprinting, when to use a VPN, and the limits of private browsing.
Plus Apple's blaring bluetooth beacons and Facebook's worrying plans for WhatsApp.
Aldaoud had never been to Iraq and did not speak Arabic. He was deported in June as part of a crackdown on Iraqi immigrants with criminal convictions.
Edward Bajoka, an immigration attorney who was close to Aldaoud's family, said in a Facebook post that Aldaoud had diabetes and most likely died because he could not get needed insulin. Bajoka said Aldaoud had never been to Iraq and didn't speak Arabic.
As a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization, CAIR seems to have picked up a few tips from its Egyptian parent. While the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, however, works simply to buy political favor within the American democratic system, groups such as CAIR must work more intricately and more carefully to acquire and exploit political power. Consequently, CAIR’s activities are more complicated.
For federal workers, CAIR is at once the benefactor and the protester — sometimes offering solidarity in the name of “justice” and “civil rights”; at other times crying injustice and persecution. In all cases, CAIR is working to legitimize its ideology by presenting itself falsely both as a voice for American Muslims and as a champion of the American worker. Government and the public at large should remember that all of these actions ultimately serve one theocratic agenda.
Officials provided details only of the case of the only non-Muslim defendant, a Buddhist identified with the initials R.O. (photo). The police caught him inside a hotel room, with a woman who was not his wife. Usually, non-Muslims can choose whether to be punished or not under Islamic law, known in the region as Quanun. Therefore R.O. chose 27 lashes to avoid a lengthy judicial proceeding and imprisonment.
The next day, Mayor Usman warned hotels and businesses: "We have warned hotels not to even think about breaking the rules by renting rooms to unmarried couples. Otherwise, we will revoke their licenses," he told reporters.
Ironically, most people, including most Armenians, are unaware that the first genocide of Christian Armenians at the hands of Muslim Turks did not occur in the twentieth century; it began in 1019—exactly one-thousand years ago this year—when Turks first began to pour into and transform a then much larger Armenia into what it is today, the eastern portion of modern day Turkey.
Janine Jackson: Warren Kanders resigned from his position as vice chair of the board of the Whitney Museum July 25, saying he didn’t want to “play a role, however inadvertent, in [the museum’s] demise.”
The advertent role that Kanders played was to fund his philanthropy with profits from Safariland, a company that makes tear gas canisters used against protesters around the world, and Sierra Bullets, that sells ammunition used against Palestinian civilians in Gaza; activists, artists and other humans objected.
Kanders’ resignation doesn’t mean the end of the work of groups like Decolonize This Place, who organized around Kanders, as well as a planned event at New York’s Museum of Natural History involving fascist Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
As long as cultural institutions are important sites of public conversation, but the public doesn’t have much to say on who gets to lead that conversation or the stories they tell, activists will be asking us to talk about what that means, and what it would mean to change it. That’s what we talked about a few months ago with Decolonize This Place core organizer Amin Husain.
Listeners may have heard about the electronic soap dispensers whose light sensors can’t detect black skin, Google and Flickr‘s automatic image-labeling that—oops— tagged photos of black people with “ape” and “gorilla.” An Asian-American blogger wrote about her Nikon digital camera that kept asking, “Did someone blink?” And you can, I’m afraid, imagine what turns up in search engine results for “3 black teenagers” vs. “3 white teenagers.” Some examples of discriminatory design are obvious—which doesn’t mean the reasons behind them are easy to fix. And then there are other questions around technology and bias—in policing, in housing, in banking—that require deeper questioning. That questioning is the heart of a new book, called Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. CounterSpin spoke with author Ruha Benjamin; she’s associate professor of African-American studies at Princeton University and author, also, of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier.
Even where broadband is available, many people can't afford it. According to a Pew Research Center report, 19 percent of people who don't use the [Internet] cited the cost of [Internet] service or the expense of owning a computer as the reason they aren't online.
But even when stripping out the stock awards, the company was down about $1.3 billion, more than twice the reported losses from the same period last year.
Revenue rose just 14 percent compared with the same quarter last year, the slowest pace on record.
Lyft, which reported its earnings Wednesday, fared better but still posted a loss of $644 million during the quarter. The numbers for both companies look a lot better when adjusted for things like amortization of intangible assets and stock-based compensation for employees post-IPO. Excluding those expenses, Uber lost $1.3 billion and Lyft lost $197 million.
The High Court of Madras has handed down an injunction ordering dozens of ISPs to block 1,129 sites to protect a single movie that goes on worldwide release today. 'Nerkonda Paarvai' is marketed as a legal drama, which is perhaps fitting considering that the order handed down describes the respondents - the ISPs - as being involved in recording, camcording, and distributing content displayed in theaters.
For over a year now, we've been discussing a worrying trend in Japan, where the government is looking to severely ramp up its anti-piracy efforts. The worry lies in the implications of these various proposed programs, including the censorship of internet sites supposedly used for piracy, the criminalization of pirating content, and how all of this is going to impact the public. One of the largest barriers to doing any of these expansions to copyright law is the Japanese constitution and legislation, which are fairly restrictive on matters of both censorship and the invasion of privacy. How the government thought it was going to route around those provisions is anyone's guess.
But it seems there is confidence that it can do so, as every new proposal coming out looks to in some way violate Japan's constitution. The latest involves putting a system in place that would delivery popup warnings to anyone visiting a site that is deemed to be a "pirate site."
