As Open Source has become increasingly mainstream and widely accepted for its numerous benefits, the use of Linux as a flexible, transparent and highly secure operating system has also increasingly become a prominent choice among corporations, educational institutions and government sectors alike. With national security concerns at an all time high heading into 2020, it appears that the implementation of Linux could effectively meet the United States government’s critical security needs for application development and installations.
Because of its open-source roots, Linux is foundationally secure, highly reliable, and incredibly adaptable. Linux incorporates a "defense-in-depth" approach to security, meaning robust security measures are implemented at every level of development and deployment. Unlike obscure closed-source counterparts, Linux has a fundamental focus on security through transparency.
In order to be approved for use in critical government functions, software and applications must be certified to ensure that they meet certain security standards. Common Criteria, FIPS 140-2 and Secure Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIG) are three security certifications required by the United States Department of Defense. These certifications indicate that technology meets standardized security protocols and cryptographic tools implement their algorithms properly. Linux has been certified to meet all of these criteria, a rare and notable achievement.
For these reasons, Linux is not only an ideal operating system for the development of critically secure government applications, but the inherent openness and flexibility of Linux also make it a great operating system for installations that demand the highest level of security and precision. However, it should be noted that as with any operating system, Linux must first undergo additional stringent testing and development before being further incorporated into the US government’s IT infrastructure.
We are thrilled to announce that today A Cloud Guru has acquired Linux Academy, and we are joining forces to teach the world to cloud with the largest and most effective cloud computing training library in the world. The combined organization now represents THE school for the future of IT: hands-on, practical, and updated daily as technology changes.
Linux remains the number one destination for hackers: white hat, black hat or any colour in between. A key part of that is the ability to engineer open source code to do your bidding, but also that the tools are open source and available under open licenses.
With Jonni fully refreshed and updated from his sabbatical now – packing a techno boat to live on – he’s crowbarring Kali Linux onto the DVD and writing up a handy guide to using its hacking playground the Metasploit framework. We’re not saying you’re going to become elite hackers overnight, but it might offer a sense of how systems become vulnerable and the basic ways you can stop attacks.
With the holidays just around the corner, many of us are racking our brains, trying to figure out what to buy our family and friends. If you are like me, you are probably struggling to come up with a gift that feels meaningful or useful. Honestly, who wants to get a gift card or another pair of socks? Not me! So, we've done the thinking for you this year.
Cloud adoption continues to grow as organizations seek to move away from legacy and monolithic strategies. Cloud-specific spending is expected to grow at more than six times the rate of general IT spending through 2020, according to McKinsey Research. But cloud adoption raises fear of vendor lock-in, which is preventing many companies from going all-in on public cloud. This has led to a rise in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, which also have their challenges.
Open source technology is the key to unlocking the value in a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
The tools you use should help you grow from newbie to power user. OpenShift’s command line is one such tool. When getting started with Kubernetes development, the new-app option to the oc command line can help movbe you along the spectrum.
In case you missed KubeCon 2019 in San Diego, the CNCF have been very diligent about putting the talks up online. That includes the 5G focused keynote delivered by Azhar Sayeed with Heather Kirksey (Linux Foundation) and Fu Qiao (China Mobile). A short summary of the talk is below, and naturally, the video is above.
In this video we will look at different ways to scale the worker nodes of an IPI based cluster up and down. We will see how easy it is to scale up and scale down a cluster manually. We will understand the architecture concepts behind the scaling. Next we will look at the concepts of auto scaling and create the necessary openshift components, generate workload and autoscale the cluster. We will see how the cluster sizes itself up and down based on the workload.
With Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 Red Hat introduced automated cluster provisioning by using openshift-installer binary. Installer based cluster provisioning enables users to deploy fully functioning OpenShift Container Platform cluster by running a single command ( openshift-install create cluster ).
Cluster parameters (like machine CIDR, cluster network, number of masters and workers or VM size ) can be changed according to user needs by updating the install-config.yaml file before cluster installation.
When running openshift-installer to provision OpenShift Container Platform 4.2, wildcard DNS is set to *.apps.<cluster name>.<base domain> by default.
Sometimes user might want to have a different wildcard DNS for applications. In order to change the default wildcard DNS, user needs to generate cluster manifest files and change the domain name. Following procedure explains how this can be achieved.
The Kubernetes with OpenShift World Tour is a series of in-person workshops around the globe that help you build the skills you need to quickly modernize your applications. This World Tour provides a hands-on experience and teaches the basics of working with the hybrid-cloud, enterprise container platform Red Hat€® OpenShift€® on IBM Cloudââ¢. You learn coding skills in the world of containerized, cloud-native development with expert developer advocates, who have deep technical experience building cloud microservices and applications with Red Hat OpenShift.
If your organization wants to succeed in today’s fast-paced, digital economy, you need to operate like a software company, and that means rethinking the way you design, build, and use applications.
Organizations are getting the message, and there’s a growing number of IT teams adopting development tools like containers to create cloud-native apps that work in a consistent manner across private, public, and hybrid clouds.
But how do you know which container platforms are best for your organization? And how do you make the right decision about container orchestration to manage the lifecycles of your containers so you can operate at scale and accelerate innovation? We break it down in a new, on-demand webinar: "10 important things to consider when selecting a container platform," including the relationship between Linux and containers and the various options available if you want to move to Kubernetes for container orchestration.
30 million Raspberry Pis sold, GNOME Shell gets classic, and some strange Google bugs.
With the new version of KDE 5.17 pretty much on every KDE distro out now, we need to talk about how KDE is now just as light or even lighter than XFCE!
Released last month on November 24th, the Linux 5.4 kernel series brings exciting new features for Linux users everywhere, including the long-anticipated support for Microsoft's proprietary exFAT file system, as well as a new kernel lockdown feature for extra security, and a bunch of improvements for AMD gamers.
Linux Kernel 5.4 also adds a new security feature for detecting file tampering called fs-verity, a new dm-clone tool for live cloning of block devices, a new high-performance virtio driver for sharing files between hosts and guests called virtio-fs, improved app memory management on Android devices, and support for Intel Tiger Lake CPUs.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.4.3 kernel.
All users of the 5.4 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.4.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.4.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
XFS filesystem maintainer Darrick Wong summarizes the significant XFS developments from the last year
Making Mir's XWayland support much more usable now is initial server-side decoration support in order to handle window resizing and window movements.
Mir's XWayland support to date hasn't supported server-side decorations and thus losing out not only on window decorations but functionality like window resizing and movements. Now in the newest Mir development code is this SSD support wired up.
NVIDIA's "VideoProcessingFramework" is an open-source set of C++ libraries that are wrapped around by Python bindings for interacting with their closed-source Video Codec SDK. The function of this framework is to make it easy to exploit GPU-accelerated video encode/decode from Python.
While Python isn't the most performant language, it's easy-to-use and with its mass following NVIDIA has decided to publish this Video Processing Framework that amounts to a Python wrapper around their existing Video Codec SDK C++ stack for GPU-based video encode/decode on Kepler and newer.
MoltenVK has now caught up against the latest Vulkan upstream specification for the time being in supporting Vulkan translated to Apple's Metal API on macOS and iOS.
MoltenVK's latest release on Monday is aligned with the current latest version of the spec/SDK, Vulkan 1.1.130 as shipped just over one week ago. Granted, not all Vulkan extensions are supported by MoltenVK.
While both Librem laptops and smartphones are running "PureOS" as their Debian derivative, it's not the same software stack right now on both. Among other differences, Librem laptops are running straight-up GNOME Shell while the Librem 5 is running some GNOME applications but on their custom WLROOTS-based Phosh compositor/shell. They have been working with their libhandy library and related efforts to make various programs adaptive to the screen resolution/orientation they are running on, but there hasn't been anything in place as far as allowing a converged experience of plugging a monitor and keyboard/mouse into the Librem 5 and having a working desktop experience. But then again, they are still tackling woefully short battery life issues, even the ability to make calls from the device, and other more critical tasks with the librem 5.
Last week AMD launched the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card as the sub-$200 Navi 14 graphics card in versions with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. In our launch-day Radeon RX 5500 XT Linux testing the benchmarks of this budget 7nm graphics card was done using the 4GB review sample, but with Phoronix readers being curious about the 8GB version, I bought the GIGABYTE Radeon RX 5500 XT GV-R55XTOC-8GD for some additional Linux testing. Here are those results.
The RX 5500XT 8GB features the same specs as the 4GB version aside from the vRAM: 22 compute units, 1408 stream processors, up to 5.6 TFLOPS of compute, 130 Watt board power, PCI Express 4.0, and other common Navi/RDNA features.
Smartphone systems can be used through a computer system to some extent. You can always use Android emulators, or virtual devices, or even Android for x86 architecture systems, but what about your very own phone? How would you use the interface of your Android phone through your computer?
Well, this is where we introduce Scrcpy.
Scrcpy is a desktop program that can be used to access your Android phone’s system and interface through your computer. The app is quite convenient, and some of its best features are highlighted below.
With the news earlier about D9VK being merged into DXVK, to make DXVK the all-in-one solution for D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan - we now have a fresh release of DXVK with it all together.
Today, DXVK 1.5 is out and the big headline feature there then is D3D9 support included! D9VK did actually have a standalone release just before all this happened with D9VK 0.40/0.40.1 and this DXVK release includes a few extra fixes too.
What does all that above mean? Simply put: DXVK will now run games that use D3D9, 10 and 11 and turn it into Vulkan when paired with Wine/Proton as of DXVK 1.5.
DXVK 1.5 has been released today and starting with this version, D9VK is now part of DXVK. The new version also brings HUD improvements and bug fixes.
DXVK, a Vulkan-based Direct3D translation layer, supported D3D11 and D3D10 until this release, but with the merge of D9VK, DXVK now has Direct3D 9 (D3D9) support out of the box. This means that DXVK now allows running 3D applications and games (via Wine) that use Direct3D 9 directly, without having to use D9VK separately.
DXVK 1.5 also brings some D9VK corrections on top of the latest D9VK 0.40.1 version, like some fixes for memory and resource leaks in state blocks, deletion and device resetting, and a fix for the black screen issue happening with some drivers on Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition.
Philip Rebohle has released DXVK 1.5 as the newest version of this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation and is a big release considering last night's merging of D9VK / Direct3D 9 support.
So with the just-released DXVK 1.5 is now Direct3D 9 support thanks to this new back-end and should be offering up better performance for Direct3D 9 games under Wine / Steam Play (Proton) compared to the WineD3D code-path translating to OpenGL, especially in cases of CPU bound games.
DXVK 1.5 also brings an improved HUD with some UI enhancements, memory allocation stats for per-heap metrics, and other heads-up display tweaking. DXVK 1.5 also now advertises all GPUs as being NVIDIA hardware to Crysis 3 for working around an issue plus has fixes affecting Halo MCC, Star Citizen, and Atelier Ryza.
The team behind the Atari VCS have finally given out some details on developing games for it, along with their revenue share model.
For developers that have already ported their game to Linux to have it on the likes of Steam, GOG, itch.io, Humble and so on—you're probably in for a somewhat easy ride. The standard Atari VCS system is powered by a slightly custom Debian Linux, so it works with "standard 64-bit Linux code, APIs and tools".
Klei Entertainment's online survival game Don't Starve Together continues getting bigger and better, with another free content update out plus a sweet animation.
Need a laugh? Fail to Win certainly gave me a reason to smile, with a completely ridiculous idea for a game that surprisingly works quite well.
It's a 3D puzzle game, where you need to carefully guide your avatar across a series of explosive devices, to throw your body across the screen in the hopes of hitting the next checkpoint. If you manage to hit a new checkpoint, you revive there to progress through the level.
Wx3 Labs have now opened up the Beta for Starcom: Nexus to everyone who owns the game (or picks it up now), plus they're looking for some feedback.
Sound familiar? We wrote about this one recently, but then access to the Linux version wasn't public—it now is. If you decide to pick it up on Steam, you can try the Linux version simply by opting into the Linux Beta on Steam with no password needed.
Stone Story RPG is probably one of the most surprising indie games released this year, as it pulled me in far quicker than expected for a game animated entirely with ASCII.
The Yellow Update released last week, as the first of a series of planned updates which brings a bunch of new fun features and balance changes. There's a whole new tier of difficulty, brand new encounters with mini-bosses and a powerful new weapons.
Courtesy of Google, we have an extra Buddy Pass to give away for their game streaming service Stadia. Google gave Founders an extra Buddy Pass, so instead of hogging it we're giving it away.
What is the Buddy Pass? It gives you three months of Stadia Pro with any games that can currently be redeemed like Destiny 2, Farming Simulator 19 and Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, giving you a chance to try out Stadia before the masses when it opens up next year.
Thylacine Studios have announced the next generation of their monster taming RPG games with Siralim Ultimate, what's essentially going to be Siralim 4.
Already confirmed to be releasing for Linux, it sounds like it's going to be a huge improvement over the previous games. For starters, the graphics are getting updated with all original creatures from the previous games getting redrawn to be more unique and many other visuals will see a revamp like battle backgrounds.
The UI is also going to be overhauled, to make it more accessible and streamlined. The Siralim games have always been deep, full of options and things to do but the UI wasn't exactly the most inviting. With Siralim Ultimate they're adding in plenty of quality-of-life features such as on-the-fly sorting and filtering for all menus and more icons.
Set in a madcap, Ren & Stimpy-esque world, Dead End Job is a crazy twin-stick shooter where you're sucking up ghosts. Made by Scottish developer Ant Workshop, who also made the clever and brain-twisting Binaries and Linux-friendly publisher Headup Games.
KDE Frameworks 5.65 is a monthly update to the open-source software suite used by the KDE Plasma desktop environment, adding more than 200 changes across various components. Among some of the highlights, we can mention implementation of an install directory for systemd units, new Baloo and Preferences Search icons, new document notifiers setting in KConfig, new protocol for 7z archives, document configuration file path on Android, and a new Quick Charts module in KQuickCharts for high-performance charts.
"The Quick Charts module provides a set of charts that can be used from QtQuick applications. They are intended to be used for both simple display of data as well as continuous display of high-volume data (often referred to as plotters). The charts use a system called distance fields for their accelerated rendering, which provides ways of using the GPU for rendering 2D shapes without loss of quality," reads the release notes.
Arc Menu, a traditional applications menu for GNOME Shell, was updated recently with 3 new layouts in the style of Budgie, Windows 10 and KRunner, a few new customization options and bug fixes.
GNOME Shell gives users the alternative of using a traditional application menu by using the official Applications menu extension. Arc Menu was created as a replacement for this with extra features like search functionality, quick access to files on your system, and on top of this it's also highly customizable.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of ArcoLinux 19.12.15 and some of the applications pre-installed.
SUSE€® officially released SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP5 on Dec 9, 2019. With this new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise, we also announce the availability of the latest SUSE YES System Certification Kit (SCK), version 8.4. The 8.4 SCK provides certification support for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP5 including Xen and KVM virtualization certification.
The 8.4 SCK continues support for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Arm, SUSE Linux Enterprise for Power, and SUSE Linux Enterprise for z Systems. Certifications for servers, workstations, desktops, laptops, point of service systems, virtualization hosts, and third-party hypervisors are also supported.
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. The elections have ended. Congratulations to the winning candidates.
This release fixes a problem when starting Tails 4.1 on some Mac computers.
If Tails 4.1 starts successfully on your computer, you do not have to upgrade to Tails 4.1.1.
The FAI.me service for creating customized installation and cloud images now supports additional kernel cmdline parameters. After toggling to the advanced settings, you can add your options. These will replace the default grub "quiet" option.
This feature is currently only available for the installation images, but not for the cloud images.
Now, don’t get me wrong: ‘Eye of GNOME‘ (which is often referred to by the package name of ‘eog‘) does its job well. It lets you view images stored on your computer without any fuss.
But therein lies the rub; eog can’t do much more than that. The app is simply no where near as featured as the default image viewers being shipped on other platforms, including Android, and even Chrome OS!
It’s for this reason that I made changing the image viewer a step in my list of things to do after installing Ubuntu 19.10.
During the development cycle of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS operating system, which should debut in late April 2020, Canonical wants to make the Ubuntu Server installer faster and more comfortable for its server users by dropping support for the Debian-installer based classic server installer and replacing it with their more modern, in-house built subiquity server installer.
"With [Ubuntu] 20.04 LTS, we will be completing the transition to the live server installer and discontinuing the classic server installer based on debian-installer (d-i), allowing us to focus our engineering efforts on a single codebase. The next-generation subiquity server installer brings the comfortable live session and speedy install of Ubuntu Desktop to server users," said Michael Hudson Doyle, software engineer at Canonical.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 609 for the week of December 8 – 14, 2019. The full version of this issue is available here.
The Ubuntu 20.04 LTS survey which is going run until January 10, 2020, is collecting feedback from the pubic for it’s upcoming Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 20.04 is the next long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu.
While the Raspberry Pi folks have been making thermal/power improvements to the Raspberry Pi 4 firmware, running this budget-friendly ARM single board computer with a heatsink or some form of cooling is certainly recommended if you want to sure it operates at the optimal clock frequencies. A Phoronix reader devised the CooliPi 4B and it's wound up being one of the best Raspberry Pi 4 cooler we have tested to date.
The CooliPi 4B is a passive cooler -- it's simply a large aluminum heatsink measuring in at 87 x 66 x 40 mm and weighing around 215 grams. For going with the aluminum heatsink are 3D printed cases out of PETG and tightly fits the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC.
Onion’s $69 “Omega2 Dash” SBC combines its WiFi-enabled, Linux-on-MIPS based Omega2S+ module with a 3.2-inch, 320 x 240 resistive touchscreen. There’s also a microSD slot, micro-USB port, and header for adding optional LAN, ADC, servo, and NFC/RFID modules.
Onion has gone to Crowd Supply to successfully fund an open-spec, touchscreen-enabled SBC for IoT applications that runs Linux on its MIPS-based Omega2S+ module. Back in May, Onion similarly leveraged the same Omega2s+ module for use on its Omega2 LTE SBC.
Cloud adoption continues to grow as organizations seek to move away from legacy and monolithic strategies. Cloud-specific spending is expected to grow at more than six times the rate of general IT spending through 2020, according to McKinsey Research. But cloud adoption raises fear of vendor lock-in, which is preventing many companies from going all-in on public cloud. This has led to a rise in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments, which also have their challenges.
Open source technology is the key to unlocking the value in a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.
As I mentioned before, Tor is a free open source software which defends users’ privacy. Specifically, The Onion Router software is being used by students, companies, universities, reporters who maybe want to share an idea anonymously for many years. In order to conceal users’ identities, Tor routes traffic through a worldwide overlay network which consisting of thousand of relays.
In addition, it has a very handy functionality as it encrypts the data multiple times, including the next IP address for the node it is intended for, and sends it through a virtual circuit that includes a random node. Each node decrypts a layer of encrypted information in order to reveal the next node. The result is that the remaining encrypted information will be decrypted at the last node without revealing the source IP address. This process builds the Tor circuit.
Private.sh has released a Private Search Google Chrome Extension as well as a Private Search Firefox Add-On. The release of these Private.sh browser extensions allows private search engine users a new layer of control over their private internet searches by having the code stored and run locally.€
We decided to try to tackle the pile of issues which needed contacts. Before we had dedicated persons: Adam and myself. But we now kind of switched roles. So without daily love, the piles of needscontact (we need to find a contact) and contactready (we need to actually contact) tends to grow. So this week, I made a special effort specifically on the contactready list. One of my axioms for Webcompat:
Indeed. The site disappears, has been redesigned, the libraries have been changed. With Adam, we had determined that if we were doing the full process quickly, we had more chances to catch bugs and solve issues for users. Reality and the volume of incoming bugs make this difficult.If you wait long enough, a bug goes away.
Fixing the Web requires a dedicated will from the whole industry to change its practices. Web compatibility issues share some of the aspects of the climate change (except no mass extinction if the Web disappears).
This outreach week was a mixed bag of not valid anymore bugs and still ongoing issues. Once contacted, it doesn't mean the issue will be fixed. Note that this process is open to everyone. If you want to help, you are more than welcome.
Over the weekend, this post by Dave Rupert made the rounds, and I totally agree with what he is saying.
In his post, Dave showcases a problem with the gap between intent and developer assumption about what a certain element or set of elements, are intended or should be used for, and what not to be used for. In this case, the details and summary elements being used as accordions, or not.
If you are running his example with Firefox and either NVDA or JAWS, you are actually very lucky, because all features of his accordion are supported, including the headings. Because unlike some other browsers, because h elements are allowed within summary elements, we do not nuke the heading semantics, and thus it is possible with both screen readers to navigate by heading even inside the summary elements, which get mapped to the button role. Since Firefox 70, both screen readers will even announce properly when you toggle the details open or closed.
However, this is not the case with all browser and screen reader combinations. And according to the spec, details and summary are not intended to be used as an accordion, even though the interaction model totally mimiks that. And here’s indeed one of the big problems I have encountered time and again when working with developers internally at Mozilla and on the outside: The specification does not always do a good job of explaining in an understandable form of English what an element is intended for or not. Especially if it mimiks a design pattern that fits the developers use case, but is for some reason not what the developer wants to use it for. This divide is made very obvious in Dave’s post. Even in accessibility land, there is this divide. For example, the spec allows for buttons or elements that map to buttons to have semantic children like headings. Why then do buttons, according to the accessibility specification, nuke their children’s semantics? Or should nuke them? Because traditional desktop buttons didn’t have headings?
Our newest Friend of Add-ons is Jocelyn Li! Jocelyn has been an active code contributor to addons.mozilla.org (AMO) since May 2018, when she found a frontend issue that involved broken CSS. She had known that Mozilla welcomed code contributions from community members, but hadn’t been sure if she was qualified to participate. As she looked at the CSS bug, she thought, “This doesn’t look that hard; maybe I can fix it,” and submitted her first patch a few hours later. She has been an avid contributor ever since.
Jocelyn says that contributing to a large public project like Mozilla has helped her grow professionally, thanks in part to positive interactions with staff members during code review. “They always give constructive comments and guide contributors,” she says. “When I learn either technical or non-technical skills, I can apply them to my own job.”
Mozilla and contributors alike benefit from the open source model, Jocelyn believes. “Mozilla receives contributions from the community. Contributors are like seeds all over the world and promote Mozilla’s projects or languages and improve their own companies at the same time.”
On the Firefox UX team, a human-centered design process and a “roll up your sleeves” attitude define our collaborative approach to shipping products and features that help further our mission. Over the past year, we’ve been piloting a Usability Mentorship program in an effort to train and empower designers to make regular research part of their design process, treating research as “a piece of the pie” rather than an extra slice on the side. What’s Mozilla’s Firefox UX team like? We have about twenty designers, a handful of user researchers, and a few content strategists.
Firefox announced a new partnership with NextDNS to provide Firefox users with private and secure encrypted Domain Name System (DNS) services through its Trusted Recursive Resolver Program. The company has committed to putting user privacy first in efforts to modernize DNS.
For more than 30 years, DNS has served as a key mechanism for accessing sites and services on the web. DNS is the Internet’s directory. It translates names we know like ââ¬â¹www.firefox.comââ¬â¹ to numeric Internet addresses that a computer understands. Almost every activity on the Internet begins with a DNS request.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the oldest parts of internet architecture, and remains largely untouched by efforts to make the web safer and more private. Malicious actors can spy on or tamper with users’ browsing activity and DNS providers, including internet service providers (ISPSs), can collect and monetize a user’s browsing activity.
Over the last two years, Firefox, in partnership with other industry stakeholders, has been working to develop, standardize, and deploy DNS over HTTPs (DoH). DoH aims to protect that same browsing activity from interception, manipulation, and collection in the middle of the network.
Today I've completed another semester of teaching open source, and wanted to write something about what happened, experiments I tried, and what I learned.
This fall I taught the first of our two open source classes, cross-listed in our degree and diploma programs as OSD600 and DPS909. This course focuses on getting students engaged in open source development practices, and has them participate in half-a-dozen different open source projects, making an average of 10 pull requests over 14 weeks. The emphasis is on learning git, GitHub, and how to cope in large open source projects, code bases, and communities.
This is the 15th year I've taught it, and I had one of my largest groups: 60 students spread across two sections. I don't think I could cope with more than this, especially when I'm also teaching other courses at the same time.
This tutorial explains briefly how we work with LibreOffice Writer's user interface. This includes its Menubar, Toolbar, Sidebar, Statusbar, and Window in general, particularly frequently used buttons. The goal is for us to familiarize the most important features first in Writer. This article is intended for beginning LibreOffice users even if they are also new in computing. Happy learning!
Whenever you start LibreOffice, you may encounter its welcome dialog with buttons to create new documents in Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation, and others. It shows you recently edited documents if any. The more you edit documents, the more recent items showed here. The purpose of this starting point is to ease you to access all of your existing documents and create new ones. To create new Writer document, simply click blue button Writer Document on the left.
As part of Fedora 32's bleeding-edge compiler toolchain with the likes of GCC 10 and LLVM 10, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved making use of GNU C Library 2.31. Glibc 2.31 will be out early next year with more features in tow.
The change proposal and acceptance isn't much of a surprise thanks to Red Hat engineers always working to ensure the latest GNU toolchain bits are shipped as part of new Fedora releases -- after all, it's many of the same Red Hat folks working on the upstream improvements.
Recently I saw a tweet where someone mentioned that you can include /dev/stdin in C code compiled with gcc. This is, to say the very least, surprising.
When you see something like this with an IT security background you start to wonder if this can be abused for an attack. While I couldn't come up with anything, I started to wonder what else you could include. As you can basically include arbitrary paths on a system this may be used to exfiltrate data - if you can convince someone else to compile your code.
There are plenty of webpages that offer online services where you can type in C code and run it. It is obvious that such systems are insecure if the code running is not sandboxed in some way. But is it equally obvious that the compiler also needs to be sandboxed?
How would you attack something like this? Exfiltrating data directly through the code is relatively difficult, because you need to include data that ends up being valid C code. Maybe there's a trick to make something like /etc/shadow valid C code (you can put code before and after the include), but I haven't found it. But it's not needed either: The error messages you get from the compiler are all you need. All online tools I tested will show you the errors if your code doesn't compile.
Synthesiser? Synthesizer? Whichever it is*, check out this video of Floyd Steinberg showing how he set up his Raspberry Pi as one of them.
Over 30 years in the making, this is not just a cute tool to generate combinations. It is both a novel algorithm and the fastest implementation we have for complex combinatorics. It is faster than python's itertools, faster than numpy, faster than Perl, faster than Perl XS, faster than comb in R, faster than every library I have found and tested over the past 5 years.
The BH package provides a sizeable portion of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R. It is quite popular, and frequently used together with Rcpp. The BH CRAN page shows e.g. that it is used by rstan, dplyr as well as a few other packages. The current count of reverse dependencies is at 193.
Boost releases every four months. The last release we packaged was 1.69 from last December, prepared just before CRAN’s winter break. As it needed corresponding changes in three packages using it, it arrived on CRAN early January of this year. The process was much smoother this time. Yesterday I updated the package to the Boost 1.72 release made last Wednesday, and we are on CRAN now as there are no apparent issues. Of course, this BH release was also preceded by a complete reverse-depends check on my end, as well as on CRAN.
As you may know, CRAN tightened policies some more. Pragmas suppressing compiler warnings are verboten so I had to disable a few (see this patch file). Expect compilations of packages using Boost, and BH, to be potentially very noisy. Consider adding flags to your local ~/.R/Makeconf and we should add them to the src/Makevars as much as we can. Collecting a few of these on a BH wiki page may not be a bad idea. Contributions welcome!
Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Besides scalability, Elixir is noted for its speed, good garbage collection, dynamic typing, immutable data, and high reliability.
Elixir is a relatively new functional programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir builds on top of Erlang and shares the same abstractions for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications.
The language is published under the Apache License 2.0.
Let us say you are in a country where the English language is commonly spoken and you only understand the English language. For some office or personal work, you visit a country where English is not used as a common language. Let us say the country you are in is China. You want to talk to a person but you don’t understand Chinese at all. Normally Chinese people know English as well but let’s just imagine for this Example, the person you want to talk to can only understand Chinese. Verbal communication will be impossible in this situation. You see around and find a person who can understand both languages English and Chinese. Its time to thank god because the person you just found can listen to you and translate that into Chinese and make the other person understand what you want to communicate.
In this example, the person you want to talk to is a Computer. The person you just found who can understand English, as well as Chinese, is a Code translator. I hope you understand the example.
The same thing happens in the programming world. The language you write your program in is called High-Level Language. The language that your computer understands is called Low-Level Langauge.
The examples of High-Level Languages are C#, C++, Java, HTML etcetera.
The example of Low-Level Langauge is Binary code. Your computer only understands Binary code nothing else. When I say your computer, I mean your computer’s processor.
Vadim Belman has extensively reviewed the way Roles work in Raku, and came to the conclusion that quite a lot of work would need to be done on them to make them fully accessible and malleable from a MOP perspective. And they did that lot of work. This work of the past months has now been merged. Kudos to Vadim Belman for this extensive and intricate work!
Creational Design Patterns, as the name implies, deal with the creation of classes or objects.
They serve to abstract away the specifics of classes so that we'd be less dependent on their exact implementation, or so that we wouldn't have to deal with complex construction whenever we need them, or so we'd ensure some special instantiation properties.
They're very useful for lowering the level of dependency between our classes and controlling how the user interacts with them as well.
Design Patterns are reusable models for solving known and common problems in software architecture.
They're best described as templates for dealing with a certain usual situation. An architect might have a template for designing certain kinds of door-frames which he fits into many of his projects, and a software engineer, or software architect, should know templates for solving frequent programming challenges.
This article is inspired by a tweet from Peter Baumgartner. In the tweet he mentioned the Fisher-Jenks algorithm and showed a simple example of ranking data into natural breaks using the algorithm. Since I had never heard about it before, I did some research.
After learning more about it, I realized that it is very complimentary to my previous article on Binning Data and it is intuitive and easy to use in standard pandas analysis. It is definitely an approach I would have used in the past if I had known it existed.
I suspect many people are like me and have never heard of the concept of natural breaks before but have probably done something similar on their own data. I hope this article will expose this simple and useful approach to others so that they can add it to their python toolbox.
The rest of this article will discuss what the Jenks optimization method (or Fisher-Jenks algorithm) is and how it can be used as a simple tool to cluster data using “natural breaks”.
In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning have become essential in many fields of science and technology. A necessary aspect of working with data is the ability to describe, summarize, and represent data visually. Python statistics libraries are comprehensive, popular, and widely used tools that will assist you in working with data.
The past two decades have seen massive growth in the language, community, and ecosystem of Python. The career of Pete Fein has occurred during that same period and his use of the language has paralleled some of the major shifts in focus that have occurred. In this episode he shares his experiences moving from a trader writing scripts, through the rise of the web, to the current renaissance in data. He also discusses how his engagement with the community has evolved, why he hasn't needed to use any other languages in his career, and what he is keeping an eye on for the future.
Summary
The past two decades have seen massive growth in the language, community, and ecosystem of Python. The career of Pete Fein has occurred during that same period and his use of the language has paralleled some of the major shifts in focus that have occurred. In this episode he shares his experiences moving from a trader writing scripts, through the rise of the web, to the current renaissance in data. He also discusses how his engagement with the community has evolved, why he hasn’t needed to use any other languages in his career, and what he is keeping an eye on for the future.
So, without further due, lets pickup from where we left last time. (Nope wait! if you havent, go check part 1 and part 2 then get back here. We'll be waiting!) So far our code creates the main player and allows us to move it, create the enemies, and randomly place them in the battle field.
Teachers, educators, and Pythonistas: come and share your projects, experiences, and tools of the trade as you teach coding and Python to your students. The Annual Python Education Summit is being held at PyCon 2020, taking place on Thursday April 16th .
As unfortunately my old fancy sound lights setup only works on Linux, it stopped working after I switched to a new laptop. So I decided to make a cross-platform solution.
Five years ago, the Python developers announced that they will stop supporting Python 2 in 2020. For a long time, nobody cared and Python 3 adoption was slow. But things have changed a lot lately as the deadline is right around the corner (1st January).
You can use IPv6address.has-a.name as a domain name for any of your containers or VMs. The required format is 1234-5678-9abc-def0-1234-5678-9abc-def0.has-a.name. This is already a valid name and points to the IPv6 address 1234:5678:9abc:def0:1234:5678:9abc:def0.
In October 2018 the voters of Ann Arbor, Michigan, approved an amendment to the City Charter for a commons in the center of the city. These remarks formed the basis of a brief talk to the Task Force charged with planning its implementation.
An account of a journey from Croatia to Kosovo, by way of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia, and with a detour into Montenegro. This is part IV of a series.
She is the latest executive to depart HBO following the management shakeup in March, when Bob Greenblatt was named WarnerMedia Entertainment chairman, prompting the exit of longtime HBO CEO Richard Plepler. The news also comes as WarnerMedia merges its communications departments under Kevin Brockman, who joined WarnerMedia after a lengthy stint at Disney in May. Mikialian’s fellow HBO vet Nancy Lesser, to whom she previously reported, also left the company in October.
Meanwhile, a number of service members were also reporting shakedown calls to military investigators and police. Taken individually, each case probably would have been too trivial to motivate law enforcement to do much. But eventually, their sheer numbers started to get the attention of authorities. According to documents I obtained from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a variety of federal agencies, including the NCIS and its counterparts with the Army and Air Force, began investigating reports of the underage girl scam in 2015. The FBI eventually ceded its investigation to the NCIS, handing over the information it had gathered from Fodeman and other sources.
Support was voiced by the candidates for community schools, increased school funding for Title I schools, increased pay for teachers, support for unions, fully-funded pre-schools, increasing the number of teachers of color, student loan forgiveness, and other equity issues which have commonly appeared in candidates’ platforms.
Mohammed should be in a 9th grade classroom right now. Instead, he spends his days selling napkins and dry-cleaning clothes. Mohammed has lived in Jordan for seven years, since his family fled Syria. He desperately wants to study, but his family struggles to meet their most basic needs, and they can’t afford the cost of transportation to school. He is just one of millions of refugee children denied an education today.
Human Rights Watch recently spoke with refugees in Jordan whose children are out of school. The reasons vary. Some cannot afford basic costs. Others faced administrative barriers when they tried to enroll. Still others lament the quality of instruction, as teachers are not trained to work with students dealing with trauma. And children with disabilities often find that schools do not accommodate their needs. Refugee children all over the world face these challenges, which are only compounded as they grow older.
Garcetti said that instead of encouraging people to return books, fines have sometimes forced people to hold onto them because they couldn’t pay. Or, they avoided the library altogether. He explained that in 2016, when LAPL went fine-free for two weeks, 64,000 overdue books ended up back on the shelves and more than 7,900 new library cards were issued.
“And we know that eliminating fines works,” City Librarian John Szabo said Friday. “Libraries across the country that have become fine-free experience [upticks] in materials borrowed, library card registration, staff morale and customer satisfaction.”
Patrons will still be charged for replacing books that are more than 45 days overdue, officials said. They will also still be charged for replacing damaged books. Patrons who take out items for more than 108 days will have their cards blocked until the books or DVDs are returned, or, until they pay.
The Los Angeles Public Library system will stop charging late fees beginning in spring 2020, making it the largest free public library system in the country.
"We need to fix the broken system," said the White House hopeful. "That means protecting family farmers and ranchers and holding corporate integrators responsible for the harm they are causing."
In an ideal world, companies that profess to be dedicated to protecting users from malware and privacy threats probably shouldn't contribute to the problem. In the world we live in however, that's often not the case--as everybody saw when Facebook tried to sell its users on a "privacy protecting VPN" that actually hoovered up their browsing data, providing insight into user behavior when they aren't using Facebook. Facebook did ultimately shut the project down, but it took a year before they were willing to do so.
You might remember that this time last year, we started seeing adverts (mostly for other Microsoft products) in the native Mail and Calendar UWP apps for Windows 10. At the time Microsoft passed it off as just "an experiment" and duly, they disappeared soon after Chrimbletide.
However, a report from MSPowerUser this weekend suggests they're back with a vengeance and worse than before.
At Mozilla, we think of open leadership as a set of principles, practices, and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. Open leaders design and build projects that empower others to collaborate within inclusive communities.
Mozilla's Open Leaders program connects and trains leaders from around the world whose communities can help one another address the challenges and opportunities they face in creating a healthier internet, more trustworthy AI, and better online lives for all.
[...]
While Mozilla staffers have historically organized the program, returning graduates have served as the experts, mentors, and community call co-hosts of each subsequent round of programming, contributing their time and expertise back to the program and its participants. They have also helped us at Mozilla better participate in discussions of engagement, value exchange, sustainability, power-sharing, care, and labor (among many, many other interwoven open topics).
Today Uber, a Platinum Member of the OpenChain Project, announces their conformance to the OpenChain Specification. This builds on their long-standing engagement and commitment to the project and a deep engagement with developing our industry standard, accompanying reference material, and our evolution into a formal ISO standard.
The OpenChain Project establishes trust in the open source from which software solutions are built. It accomplishes this by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. The OpenChain Specification defines inflection points in business workflows where a compliance process, policy or training should exist to minimize the potential for errors and maximize the efficiency of bringing solutions to market. The companies involved in the OpenChain community number in the hundreds. The OpenChain Specification is being prepared for submission to ISO and evolution from a growing de facto standard into a formal standard.
“Consistent and transparent compliance standards are critical for building trust among the open source community and our business partners,” said Matthew Kuipers, Senior Counsel, Uber. “ We’re increasing our commitment to the community and our partnerships by adopting the Linux Foundation’s OpenChain Specification.”
“Kubernetes is one of the technologies being in the hype cycle. So there’s a lot of attention. People look at it and they know that they need to do something with Kubernetes, but not everybody has yet figured out what exactly it is and how it fits into the portfolio of modern operations,” Julian Fisher, CEO and Founder of anynines.
With an aim to simplify enterprise edge networking software, Linux Foundation has launched a new open source project called DENT. The project will help in the creation of Network OS for Disaggregated Network Switches in campus and remote enterprise locations.
Linux Foundation said it expects DENT to unify silicon vendors, ODMs, SIs, OEMs, and end users across all verticals and enable the transition to disaggregated networks.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (davical, intel-microcode, libpgf, php-horde, spamassassin, spip, and thunderbird), Mageia (clementine, dnsmasq, git, jasper, kdelibs4, kernel, libcroco, libgit2, libvirt, ncurses, openafs, proftpd, qbittorrent, signing-party, squid, and wireshark), openSUSE (java-1_8_0-openjdk and postgresql), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (chromium-browser and openslp), and SUSE (kernel, libssh, and xen).
For several years, the Reproducible Builds Summit has become this pleasant and fruitful retreat where we Guix hackers like to go and share, brainstorm, and hack with people from free software projects and companies who share this interest in reproducible builds and related issues. This year, several of us had the chance to be in Marrakesh for the fifth Reproducible Builds Summit, which was attended by about thirty people.
The funky vulnerability of the month – what we call a BWAIN, short for Bug With an Impressive Name – is Plundervolt, also known as CVE-2019-11157.
[...]
In very greatly simplified terms, the vulnerability relies on the fact that if you run your processor on a voltage that’s a little bit lower than it usually expects, e.g. 0.9V instead of 1.0V, it may carry on working almost as normal, but get some – just some – calculations very slightly wrong.
We didn’t even know that was possible.
We assumed that computer CPUs would be like modern, computer-controlled LED bicycle lights that no longer fade out slowly like the old incandescent days – they just cut out abruptly when the voltage dips below a critical point. (Don’t ask how we know that.)
But the Plundervolt researchers found out that ‘undervolting’ CPUs by just the right amount could indeed put the CPU into a sort of digital twilight zone where it would keep on running yet start to make subtle mistakes.
The undervoltages required varied by CPU type, model number and operating frequency, so they were found by trial and error.
One of the most visible manifestations of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the "cookie banner" that pops up when you visit many sites for the first time. These are designed to give visitors the opportunity to decide whether they want to be tracked, and if so by whom. Any business operating Internet sites in the EU should theoretically use them or something similar, or risk a GDPR fine of up to 4% of global turnover. Cookie banners may be tiresome, but at least they give users some measure of control over how much they are tracked online. But do they? Few of us have the skills or the time to check that our wishes are obeyed by every site. Fortunately, three researchers in France -- Célestin Matte, Nataliia Bielova, Cristiana Santos -- possess both, and have conducted the first rigorous study of this area. They've written a good summary of their full academic paper.
The US government is considering forcing app developers to disclose any foreign involvement after a string of concerns about how users' data is being collected.
Even if your every move isn’t being watched, it’s still best to assume your work computer is monitored and act accordingly. Here are some less obvious tasks you should be mindful of.
The twentieth century turned Western civilization upside down. Wars and upheavals resurrected the dark ages. It was extremely violent, perhaps the most violent era in history.
A bipartisan deal on a government spending bill would for the first time in two decades provide money for federal research on gun safety. A law adopted in the 1990’s has effectively blocked such research and prohibits federal agencies from engaging in advocacy on gun-related issues.
The nuclear energy ‘industry’ in Australia should be dead, but somehow it keeps getting revived. Dr Darrin Durant weighs in in New Matilda’s ongoing series on ‘the nuclear option’.
Coups have been one of the greatest threats to democracy. The people elect a daring leader willing to take on the status quo. And then, as in Iran in 1953 or Chile in 1973, the military pushes the leader aside to take control. Sometimes the generals remain in power; sometimes they restore a royal to the throne. Often some external force – a foreign intelligence agency, a cabal of corporate interests – plays a key role in denying the people their democratic choice.
Since the 1990s, the U.S. government has launched manipulative ideological campaigns with respect to human rights in order to justify interventions in the affairs of nations that resist subordination to U.S. imperialist intentions. The U.S. ideologically manipulated human rights campaign has ignored the evolution of the meaning of democratic rights during the last two and one-half centuries.
“U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign,” the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reports, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.”
I’ve been writing critiques of the Pentagon, the national security state, and America’s never-ending military overreach since at least 1979 — in other words, virtually my entire working life. In those decades, there were moments when positive changes did occur. They ranged from ending the€ apartheid€ regime in South Africa in 1994 and€ halting€ U.S. military support for the murderous regimes, death squads, and outlaws who ruled Central America in the 1970s and 1980s to sharp€ reductions€ in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals as the Cold War wound down. Each of those victories, however complex, seemed like a signal that sustained resistance and global solidarity mattered and could make a difference when it came to peace and security.
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An ambulance arrives in Tahrir square in Baghdad after an attack on protesters in al-Khilani Square late on December 6, 2019.€
MIT, a U.N.-designated terrorist group, is mostly active in Indonesia's Java and Sulawesi province, with some presence in eastern provinces.
While it is unclear how many fighters are in MIT, the group reportedly has ties with other terrorist groups in the country and abroad.
MIT has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, and some of its members have traveled to Syria to join the extremist group.
Since 2012, MIT has targeted Indonesian government officials and security forces, while also killing civilians in multiple attacks. It has become increasingly bold in its attacks on security forces, which include beheadings and the use of explosives and shootings, according to the United Nations.
Turkey has deployed armed drones to northern Cyprus as tensions escalate in the gas-rich eastern Mediterranean over energy resources and control of their distribution. Greek- and Turkish Cypriots remain at loggerheads over the issue with the dispute now drawing in other nations.
The drones arrived after the Turkish Cypriot government, which is recognized only by Ankara, granted permission for their deployment. The drones are intended to protect Turkish research ships searching for hydrocarbons in contested waters of the Mediterranean Island.
As humans fill the atmosphere with more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide, not only is it heating up the planet — with devastating effects on the world’s oceans — the gas is also being absorbed by seawater in huge quantities. Roughly 27 percent of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1959 has gone into the oceans.
As all that carbon dioxide mixes with seawater, it makes the entire ocean more acidic, an effect commonly referred to as ocean acidification. The oceans are now around 30 percent more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution.
A more acidic environment is damaging for many marine species but it’s especially bad for the ones that form shells. The acidic waters make the chemical building blocks that sea creatures use to form shells in the first place less plentiful and corrode those that do manage to coalesce.
Emily Osborne, a scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ocean acidification program, with her colleagues studied the fossil record of planktonic foraminifera — tiny simple organisms which, like shellfish, build their shells from calcium carbonate. They have been around for millions of years, but each individual organism only lives for roughly a month.
“They are creating this super tight snapshot of what the ocean looks like for a month period of time,” said Dr. Osborne, a lead researcher on the study, published in Nature Geosciences.
The COP25 United Nations climate summit ended in failure Sunday, after negotiators failed to agree to a deal that would limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — a key goal of the Paris Agreement. Scores of civil society groups condemned governments in the European Union, Australia, Canada and the U.S. for a deal that requires far less action than needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Indigenous leaders and environmentalists blasted the United Nations for marginalizing civil society groups over two weeks of negotiations at the climate summit, while welcoming polluters. For more on the outcome of the U.N. climate summit, we speak with Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want, and Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network International.
The speed of glacial melt in parts of Latin America is threatening water supplies – and life and limb in cities downstream.
"It's a catastrophe of our own creation—but it doesn't have to end this way," says Andrew Romanoff, a Democratic hopeful for U.S. Senate running in Colorado.
Please watch the 23 minute video, linked below, to completion. It shows an interview of Dr. Peter Carter (Director Climate Emergency Institute, IPCC expert reviewer, Co-author in 2018 of Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival). This interview was conducted at COPS25 (“this is set up to fail”) currently underway in Madrid, Spain, on 10 December 2019.
Priority for abused communities must pervade every aspect of a Green New Deal.
"The smart money on Wall Street is drawing red lines on oil and gas, and exiting coal."
BlackRock, Vanguard, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase are among the top global financers of new coal development, according to new research presented during the United Nations climate summit in Madrid.
Two years after spilling 407,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota, the Keystone Pipeline erupted again. In November, a North Dakota portion of the pipeline leaked another 380,000 gallons – adding to the millions of gallons of crude oil that have spilled from pipelines over the last decade, as Undark has reported.
Notes: The article can be found at the Bohemian. Will Carruthers is a staff reporter at the North Bay Bohemian; Peter Byrne is a widely-published, award-winning freelance journalist and science writer. The authors give thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press.
A DeSmog analysis found that a majority of the hundreds of comments received were supportive of the initiative, which€ aims to€ reduce€ the state’s transportation-sector€ emissions.
Using data from satellites, the researchers found that a well explosion in Belmont county on Feb. 15 of that year discharged the potent greenhouse gas at a rate of about 80 tons an hour and lasted for nearly 20 days. The end result was more methane in the air than the oil and gas industries of France, Norway and the Netherlands emit over a 12-month period, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mutilated orangutan bodies discovered near palm oil plantations captivated public attention throughout 2018 in Indonesian Borneo. One hundred and thirty bullets shot from close range riddled one orangutan carcass. Seventeen bullets were found in another decapitated orangutan. Conservation workers observed signs of torture in a third body discovered near a newly opened palm oil plantation.
Unless radical changes are made, warns the lead author of a new WHO report, "the growth and development of individuals and societies for decades to come" are at risk.
Without mass grassroots awareness and collective action, without a political revolution—the billionaires and corporations will destroy us all.
"The 2017 tax law was a clear giveaway to corporations and their shareholders."
Economic tyranny lies at the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The financial institutions would get significant tax breaks for their investments, thanks to the 2017 Republican tax law.
Boeing has displayed an egregious pattern of mismanagement.
Installment loans seem like a kinder, gentler version of their “predatory” cousin, the payday loan. But for consumers, they may be even more harmful.
"It's time to stand up for border communities."
"Donald Trump and his advisers know that this will kill people, and they do not care. Every current and future Social Security beneficiary must band together to defeat this horrific proposal, or else all of our earned benefits will be next."
Activists are working to raise public awareness and outrage over a little-noticed Trump administration proposal that could strip life-saving disability benefits from hundreds of thousands of people by further complicating the way the Social Security Administration determines who is eligible for payments.
House leaders on Monday unveiled a $1.4 trillion government-wide spending bill that’s also carrying lots of unrelated provisions backed by denizens of Washington’s swamp of lobbyists and interest groups. A House vote is slated for Tuesday.
"My record is so good on the Economy and all else, including debating," declared the president as he derided the non-partisan, non-profit Commission on Presidential Debates.
Looking forward to bringing home a bar of souvenir chocolate bearing Joseph Stalin’s face from your next visit to St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum? Alas, the facility has pulled the confections from its cafe, following a public backlash, according to the radio station Govorit Moskva. “The cafe tenants bought the chocolate from the ‘Faces of Russia’ series, without the museum’s prior approval, and so it was decided to suspend all sales now,” said a spokesperson for the museum.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has introduced a new bill for consideration in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. The bill, which was published on the Rada’s website on December 16, includes a new scheme for territorial designations in the country.
A deeply funded lobbying group is out to kill Medicare for All. Its ideological roots run back to the Truman era.
We might expect that corporate billionaires and Koch-funded Republican right-wingers would be howl-at-the-moon opponents of a wealth tax, Medicare-for-All, and other big progressive ideas to help improve the circumstances of America’s workaday majority.
I suspected from the moment the general election was called that the result would be a large Conservative majority, a calamitous defeat for Labour, and a decisive victory for Brexit. To prevent myself getting too depressed by this grim prospect, I picked out and read two books on crises that were far more dire: one on the Wars of the Roses in 15th century England and the other on Verdun in 1916, perhaps the most horrific battle in the First World War.
Last week, the British parliamentary election gave conservative Boris Johnson a big victory, and leveled an historic defeat on the British Labour Party not witnessed since 1935.€ Johnson now has an absolute majority in Parliament and his quick march to a hard Brexit is now very likely.
The threat posed by Jeremy Corbyn to the powerful and privileged in Britain at the 2019 general election was far more severe than the one from Clement Attlee in 1945. While his Labour Party manifesto may have just laid out plans for a return to post-war norms of a “civilized” European social democratic state, Corbyn’s ambitions have long lain deep in English history, with movements like the Diggers in the 17th Century and the wider workers’ movements of the 1920s General Strike years.
After polling averages showed him as a frontrunner in the€ Iowa€ and€ New Hampshire€ Democratic nomination contests, journalists predicted South Bend, Indiana, mayor, presidential candidate and “media darling” Pete Buttigieg would be in the hot seat at last month’s€ MSNBC/Washington Post€ debate in Atlanta.
The new survey shows the Vermont senator trailing the former vice president by just two points.
Bernie Sanders refuses to be counted out of the Democratic primary field, and, based on two recent polls, it appears that voters are backing him up.
"Why would many, many billionaires be contributing to candidates if they didn't think they were getting something out of it?"
We’re now seven weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, the first voting in the Democratic presidential race. After that, frontloaded primaries might decide the nominee by late spring. For progressives torn between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — or fervently committed to one of them — choices on how to approach the next few months could change the course of history.
President Warren Sanders can then start clearing the wreckage left by Trump, and make America decent again.
United States President Donald Trump is a racist, a nativist, a narcissist, a bully, a classist, an authoritarian, an eco-exterminist, and a neofascist. Given all that and the front-page impeachment drama sparked by Trump’s arms-for-dirt shenanigans, it can be all too easy to forget that he is also – consistent with all the rest – a malignant woman-and girl-hating sexist. This alone should disqualify from holding the most powerful position in a world that is slightly more than half-female.
In the past, despite their differences, our political leaders were in agreement that to at least preserve the ideals behind our democratic system it was important to pay lip service to the spirit of the law. For instance, during the Iraq war, the Bush administration committed war crimes. But officials didn’t come right out and say, “Yes, we torture people. What are you going to do about it?” There were consequences to openly defying the law, which they knew could get quite serious down the road. They understood that to openly endorse war crimes was to let an ugly, dangerous genie out of the bottle. So they claimed it wasn’t actually torture and pretended that they believed torture was wrong, insisting they would never do such a thing.
"We know the facts. We know the Constitution. We know what needs to be done."
Some people on the left have been neutral or even opposed to the Democrats’ drive to impeach Donald Trump over his effort to coerce Ukraine’s government into taking steps to harm a 2020 competitor. Some argue that there are better reasons to impeach the president, or that Democrats’ efforts are woefully inadequate. But part of this disdain for impeachment stems from objections to the New Cold War policies that the career State Department staff wanted to pursue. Many also are not fans of Joe Biden and don’t mind seeing him slimed by the Trump administration.
Emmanuel Macron was born nearly a decade after the 1968 protests and strikes that shook France more than a half-century ago, threatening the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and bringing the country to a halt, but the 41-year-old president’s first few years in office have been highly reminiscent of that turbulent period in French history.
Like other big players in the industry, Accenture’s Austin site is based on the model of a call center. (Unlike Facebook, Google declined to let me visit any of its sites.) Employees work in a dedicated space known as the production floor where they work in shifts to process reports. The work is critical to enabling YouTube’s existence: many countries have passed laws that legally require the company to remove videos containing terrorist material, some of them in as little as 24 hours after a report is received.
Daisy found the terrorist material disturbing, but she was even more unsettled by what Google calls child sexual abuse imagery (CSAI). The job listing had promised she would only be reviewing content related to child abuse for an hour or two a week. But in practice, it was a much bigger part of the job.
It’s illegal to view CSAI in most cases, so Google set up what the moderators called a “war room” where they could review requests related to child exploitation without the risk that other co-workers would inadvertently see the material. Initially, the company set up a rotation. Daisy might work CSAI for three weeks, then have six weeks of her regular job. But chronic understaffing, combined with high turnover among moderators, meant that she had to review child exploitation cases most weeks, she says.
“We started to realize that essentially, we were not a priority for the company,” Daisy says of Google. “We would ask for things and they would say, ‘Look, we just don’t have the budget.’ They would say the word ‘budget’ a lot.”
As you'll recall, earlier this month we wrote about this bizarre situation in North Carolina, in which the University of North Carolina agreed to give a bunch of racists $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit before the lawsuit had even been filed. The details of the story came out due to some inquisitive digging by North Carolina lawyer Greg Doucette. And, in response to him publishing the details, including a "victory" letter sent by the head of the North Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans (in which it is admitted that they obviously had no legal standing to sue), Doucette's Dropbox account was blocked thanks to a bogus DMCA letter from the group. Doucette retained lawyer Marc Randazza, who sent the Sons a letter demanding they use the $2.5 million to fund scholarships for African American UNC students or face a lawsuit for the bogus takedown. That letter argued that the bogus DMCA notice violated Section 512(f) of the DMCA, which (in theory) is supposed to stop abusive takedowns by punishing "misrepresentations" in takedown notices.
"That we, as doctors, feel ethically compelled to hold governments to account on medical grounds speaks volumes about the gravity of the medical, ethical, and human rights travesties that are taking place."
More than 100 of some of the world’s most respected medical doctors from countries all around the world have joined forces to issue an urgent appeal to the Australian government to protect the life of imprisoned WikiLeaks journalist and publisher Julian Assange.
Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that implicitly defines Jewishness as a racial or national category and not as just a religious category. This is ominous.
[...]
The key sentence in the order is this: “Discrimination against Jews may give rise to a [Civil Rights Act] violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color, or national origin.”
In fact, Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity, race, or nationality. There is no Jewish gene, and the very suggestion echoes eerily from the 1930s.
Tennessee sheriff's deputy Daniel Wilkey has racked up some amazing stats during his short law enforcement career. At the age of 26, Deputy Daniel Wilkey is at his second law enforcement agency, having left the Rhea County Sheriff's Office for the Hamilton County in 2018.
The Senegalese government has not gone far enough to combat the chronic and widespread abuse, exploitation, and neglect of thousands of talibé children living in traditional Quranic schools, Human Rights Watch and the Platform for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights (PPDH), a Senegalese coalition of rights groups, said in a report released today.€
The 84-page report, “‘These Children Don’t Belong in the Streets’: A Roadmap for Ending Abuse, Exploitation of Talibés in Senegal,” analyzes the Senegalese government’s policy, programming, and judicial efforts from 2017 to 2019 to address the abuses.
It’s a paradox of impeachment politics.
"Is this democracy? Where are we living?"
The€ Indian€ authorities should immediately order all police to€ abide by international standards on policing assemblies, Human Rights Watch said today. The police may have used excessive force against demonstrators across the€ country who have been protesting against the enactment of the discriminatory€ Citizenship Amendment Act€ on December 12, 2019.€
The government should establish a credible independent investigation into allegations of excessive force, brutality, and vandalism by law enforcement officials against demonstrators.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has accepted a case on the parental rights of a transgender individual for the very first time, the Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. The case follows from a complaint submitted by a Russian citizen who was completely barred from seeing or contacting her children following her surgical transition. The ECHR’s decision in the case will set a precedent for all Council of Europe member states.
I would have never thought that I would be using the pages of€ Counterpunch€ to defend an article that appeared (of all places) in€ The€ New York Times. Yet, the contents of M.G. Piety’s “A Lesson From the Danes on Immigration” required some sort of reply.
The South Korean government should stop disengaging from ongoing human rights abuses by North Korea, a coalition of human rights and other groups said on December 16, 2019 in a joint open letter to South Korean president Moon Jae-in.
The International Coalition to Stop Crimes Against Humanity in North Korea (ICNK) and 76 nongovernmental groups, coalitions, and individuals from 22 countries, representing over 300 groups and individuals, said South Korea’s recent decisions betray past efforts to push for human rights improvements for the North Korean people.
I learned many powerful lessons from my father. He was a dedicated pediatrician and he spent his last years doing medical evaluations for suspected child abuse. He was responsible for forensic analysis and, in some cases, evidence collection. Over lengthy conversations I learned of a number of his frustrations in this area, often due to cases of arrogance. He said he only approached each distinct case with one primary question: what does the evidence show?
Faulty drug tests deployed by law enforcement continue to ruin lives. Usually, it's cheap field tests used by officers during traffic stops that turn legal substances into illegal substances, resulting in hefty criminal charges for people who've never used drugs, much less carried them around in their cars.
This month, we wrote an article revealing how the consulting giant McKinsey & Company helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement implement the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The article reported that, after President Donald Trump launched a crackdown on illegal immigration in early 2017, McKinsey, which was already working for ICE on a project dating to the previous administration, was redirected to focus on advising the agency on two elements of Trump’s crackdown: hiring 10,000 new immigration officers and reducing the cost of handling an expected influx of migrant detainees.
The article described how McKinsey “proposed cuts in spending on food for migrants, as well as on medical care and supervision of detainees,” noting that some of McKinsey’s recommendations made ICE staffers uncomfortable. The story explained that it was based on “interviews with people who worked on the project for both ICE and McKinsey and 1,500 pages of documents obtained from the agency after ProPublica filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.” It incorporated several statements and responses from McKinsey and ICE.
Bloomberg is reporting that YouTube in India has gotten over 800,000 paid subscribers for its music service less than a year since launching.
For more than a week, hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets of France in a general strike protesting the potential degradation of the country’s pension system. One of France’s largest public-sector strikes in recent history, the action has united a wide array of workers, including air-traffic controllers, teachers and hospital staffers.
Uber Technologies Inc. beat back an aggressive bid to force it to treat California drivers as employees, but a judge’s ruling may allow a long-running fight over pay and benefits to gain traction in 2020.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen declined Monday to order Uber to instantly convert drivers in its home state from contractors to employees based on an argument that it’s cheating not just workers but also the public at large.
But the San Francisco judge also refused to throw out the case, an early test of a California law aimed at gig economy companies that’s set to take effect Jan. 1. In what may turn out to be a significant threat to Uber’s business model, Chen concluded the case presents “a plausible claim that any misclassification by Uber is willful.” Uber declined to comment on the ruling.
The Federal Circuit on Monday affirmed Amgen's $70 million victory over its anemia treatment Epogen, ruling the jury correctly found that Hospira was not shielded by a safe harbor meant for companies seeking federal approval for biosimilar products.
The Federal Circuit backed a $70 million patent infringement verdict that Amgen won against Hospira in what was one of the first trials to test the rules for developing biosimilars. (Getty)
In a published opinion, the three-judge panel affirmed a Delaware federal court's decision to uphold a jury verdict that Pfizer Inc. unit Hospira Inc.
If you visit the BayStream site directly, there's no way of searching for videos like on YouTube or Netflix. Instead, it's just a portal for people to upload files of up to 20GB in size for which they definitely own the copyright.
On that note, one of just two links on the page is to \report abuse'. "If you believe some of our users has violated our Terms of Service or your intellectual property [sic] rights [sic], please file a report in the form below," the page sternly reads.
"You must provide genuine information regarding who you are, who you represent and which file(s) this report concerns," meaning that armchair fans of IP [sic] rights [sic] are discouraged from dobbing files in.
It's not clear whether this is run by The Pirate Bay itself, or is the effort of outsiders. The only clue is the big old Kopimi logo at the bottom of the page, but that doesn't really answer the question.
Last month, founder of 'pirate' IPTV service Gears Reloaded 'OMI IN A HELLCAT' revealed that the FBI had seized all of this cars and the contents of several bank accounts. Under pressure to show that the whole thing wasn't a giant publicity stunt, OMI has released new video evidence and a bank statement that appears to show $5.2m disappearing from an account on the day of the raid.
Readers here will be familiar with the practice of copyright trolling and the toll this extortion by threatened litigation has had on the public and the court system. You will also be aware that a huge chunk of copyright trolling efforts in America have been undertaken by two companies: Malibu Media and Strike 3 Holdings. Both companies have had setbacks as of late, between ownership and investor issues, and a series of both losses in court and judges who are finally starting to catch on to the shady way these trolls attempt to extort money from people with scant evidence.
The first pirated screener of the season has just made its way onto various pirate sites. This year the honor goes to Uncut Gems, which has yet to be released widely in US movie theaters. Interestingly, there are leaks available with a DVD Screener as well as a Web Screener tag, suggesting the source includes an online screener.
WIPO has launched a public consultation about artificial intelligence and intellectual property. With technology moving forward at a rapid pace, the UN organization wants to know whether copyrights should be limited to human creativity or if AI-generated content can enjoy the same privilege. Similarly, can AI infringe copyrights of others?
Fringe at the Edge of the World – an artist run festival in Hobart which directs 100 per cent of ticket sales to the artists themselves – will be back in January 2020, with an expansion of venues and acts that claims “every genre of performance”, including the “undefinable”.
John Frusciante, who has been the on-and-off guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is€ rejoining€ the band, according to a post on the group’s official Instagram account. The post also announced that Josh Klinghoffer was leaving.
In 2016, CC released an assessment of the community in the Faces of the Commons research. The CC ecosystem has changed since then and many of those changes have been essential for the commons to reach its full potential and to grow the CC Network. In fact, the CC Network has indeed grown to over 500 members across 42 chapters.€
Rambler Group has filed a copyright lawsuit in the Moscow City Court against the streaming service Twitch, demanding a “halt to the distribution of pirated broadcasts” of English Premier League (EPL) soccer games on the network, according to the newspaper Kommersant. As an injunctive measure, the Russian court subsequently ordered the blocking of EPL games broadcast on Twitch.
Top executives at Rambler say they will ask Russian law enforcement to close their criminal case against the web-server Nginx, based on a decision by Rambler’s board of directors, according to a press release issued to Meduza.
It is being reported that the U.S. Justice Department will soon take legal action against Live Nation because they believe that the company has been trying to coerce concert venues into using its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
For the past few years, there's been a really bizarre "fight" going on in the copyright world. I had considered writing about it nearly two years ago when it first seemed to flare up, but I had hoped that facts and cooler heads might prevail. Silly me.
