According to NetMarketShare, Linux saw a significant bump in usage during April.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catastrophe for so many. Businesses have shuddered, unsure if they’d survive the months-long closure. And although it’s hard to find a silver lining in such a tragedy, they do eventually appear. One such positive outcome is that the Linux operating system has witnessed a large surge in usage.
Before you get too excited, it’s not as though Linux all of a sudden surged past either Windows or macOS. In fact, Linux desktop usage is still in the single digits. However, in comparison, Linux actually bested both Windows and macOS for growth in April.
However, suddenly the software/hardware set-up in each person’s home has become a critical factor in getting work done.
At Kazi Farms Group, we found that a significant number of people had to be given computers to allow them to work from home remotely once lockdown began. This was enabled at minimum cost by giving them low-cost RaspberryPi computers which are available at various online outlets in Bangladesh for Tk9000 or less.
It does require an additional computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, and cables to connect.
But since RaspberryPi runs on the free/open-source Linux operating system which includes the LibreOffice word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email software, it is easily used by most office workers.
Marketing and graphic design people who normally use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator can accomplish much the same on a RaspberryPi with free software like Gimp and Inkscape.
RaspberryPi’s low-cost hardware and the free Linux operating system enable this sort of solution to be installed in homes at several times lower cost than would be possible with conventional hardware and software.
The savings from using RaspberryPi/Linux over conventional PC hardware with proprietary software is even more urgent for students.
Ubuntu MATE 20.04 is an impressive update on its predecessor. One of the most popular Ubuntu variants just got better in the latest LTS release.
Good news for Linux phones and Raspberry Pi users, an embarrassing security incident, Keybase bought by Zoom, KDE Korner, some feedback, and more.
This week we’ve been making a New Show and playing Ring Fit Adventure. We discuss Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu popularity and Canonical profitability, Ubuntu Core security audit, Groovy Gorilla is coming, Ubuntu Studio switches to KDE, Folder Colors adds Yaru support and Ubuntu Server has a self-updating installer. Plus we round up some of our favourite tech stories.
Wraith Master 1.0 has been released as the "feature complete" version of this Linux GUI application for providing RGB lighting controls for the AMD Wraith Prism heatsink under Linux.
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More details on Wraith Prism 1.0 via the release announcement. The code for this AMD independent RGB lighting solution is available via GitLab.
Wraith Master is an open-source Linux-only RGB control application for the Wraith Prism, written in Kotlin and compiled down to a native binary. It has feature parity with the official Windows application by Cooler Master, and has two interfaces: a CLI and a GUI. Both are native Linux binaries, and the command-line interface only requires libusb to function, while the graphical interface additionally requires GTK3 (and glib2 on some distributions). 1.0.0 is the first stable release!
The Zink Gallium3D driver project that is layering OpenGL over Vulkan is one step closer to exposing OpenGL 3.0 capabilities.
The Zink project has just been at OpenGL 2.1 era functionality for this generic OpenGL-over-Vulkan layer. But now conditional rendering support was merged. NV_conditional_render is one of the requirements for OpenGL 3.0 and that is now scratched off the list with this merge request pulled in today for Mesa 20.2.
Longtime AMD open-source driver developer Christian König is proposing the removal of AGP graphics card support from their Radeon kernel driver as well as the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver and in turn removing the AGP related code from the TTM memory management code.
"Well let's face it AGP is a total headache to maintain and dead for at least 10+ years," began Christian's proposal sent out today.
The Google-backed SESES pass for LLVM to help fend off speculative execution vulnerabilities has been merged for LLVM 11, but in opting to enable this patch you lose much of your system's performance.
SESES was shown back in March by Google engineer Zola Bridges following the public disclosure of the Load Value Injection attack affecting Intel CPUs. SESES is an optional pass for LLVM on x86-based platforms for "Speculative Execution Side Effect Suppression" and is intended as a last resort for mitigating against the likes of LVI and other possible speculative execution side channel vulnerabilities.
  Stuck indoors like most of the rest of the world, a group of Opensource.com editors and correspondents—Seth Kenlon, Matt Broberg, Alan Formy-Duval, Jessica Cherry, and Chris Hermansen—decided to use their far-flung locations and variable-quality internet connections to try out several open source video-conferencing solutions.
Regardless of which solution you choose, we're clearly past the tipping point of open source communication. There are several great options, so try one on your next call, and get off those proprietary and centralized (and probably insecure) chat applications! Next time someone invites you to a call, make a counter offer with an easy-to-remember Jitsi or p2p.chat URL or just your phone number for a Signal chat.
Less than a month after the free New Game+/Couch Co-op update for Indivisible comes a paid DLC: Razmi’s Challenges. I rarely buy DLC, unless I’m buying the game-of-the-year edition, but being the Indivisible fanboy that I am, I wanted to get some further gameplay out of it. I’ll be going over a quick rundown of what the DLC is about, and let you determine whether it’s worth your time (and definitely, your wallet) by sharing my thoughts on it.
Razmi — one of the characters that Ajna encounters early on in her journey — has set up a tent in Ajna’s inner realm (i.e. inside her head). This tent evidently allows Razmi to create challenges for Ajna to complete — a total of forty, using a mixture of platforming and battle elements. A clock will be ticking, and the faster the challenge is cleared, the better ranking you’ll get. And that’s pretty much all there is to it.
Something that I found quite interesting is DRAG. According to the description on Steam, the off-road racing title “introduces next generation 4CPT vehicle physics (4-way contact point traction technology) and a damage model that allows for competitive multiplayer wheel-to-wheel racing in a rallycross fashion.” The Early Access trailer description mentions that there will be both Windows and Linux support, which is also confirmed by the store page listing the system requirements for Linux.
[...]
The system requirements are pretty modest. The Steam store page recommends 8 GB of RAM, a Ryzen 5 or a Core i5, and an RX 580/GTX 760. They’re the same with the Windows version. Support for racing wheels will be added throughout the Early Access period; keyboards and gamepads will need to be used in the meantime. I’d really like to know what made these guys decide to support Linux, how similar or how different the codebase is between them, and what graphics API they’re using.
Today Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio have released the huge 2.7 'Wells' update for Stellaris, as it recently turned 4. Not only are the having a bit of an anniversary blow-out with it being 75% off, they're also allowing you to play it for free from now until May 17.
"We have always put the community first when developing and supporting content for Stellaris," said Daniel MoregÃÂ¥rd, Game Director for Stellaris. "It is so rewarding to see this strategy help us earn the continued interest of a large and growing player base after all these years. Being able to reach a new all-time high right now makes the anniversary festivities feel even more momentous."
Linux-centered companies often find themselves at the center of a dilemma. On the one hand, they depend on open source software. On the other hand, they are selling their version of open source software. As a result, they generally seek a way to differentiate themselves from the open source software they are based upon. As a result, they often embed in their product a particular set of assumptions about how users can or should work. A case in point is Pop!_OS, the Ubuntu-based operating system developed by System76, the manufacturer of American-made computers. What users think of Pop!_OS is likely to have less to do with versatility or features than with how Pop!_OS’s aesthetics and work-flow fit with their own.
To start with, Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and the Gnome desktop environment. Either because System76 has tweaked the system extensively, or to simplify technical support (perhaps both), those are a user’s only choice. Those who prefer, for instance, LXDE or KDE’s Plasma for an interface are out of luck. Pop!_OS is simply not for them.
As for aesthetics, one immediate problem is that Pop!_OS delivers a decidedly mixed message. Although Pop!_OS was originally advertised as being “an OS for the software developer, maker, and computer science professional who uses their computer as a tool to discover and create,” its name seems aimed at a different target. Most of its current artwork seems aimed at gamers and can best be described as inspired by science fiction cartoons from the 1950s (Figure 1). To complicate matters, its default wallpaper is in another style altogether, seemingly rooted in motivational speeches, featuring the slogan “Unleash Your Potential” in monolithic characters (Figure 2), while the overview screen is simply a reversal of the desktop (Figure 3). None of the artwork fits well together, or with the flat, minimalist design of the icons and widgets (Figure 4). Moreover, for gamers, features like disk encryption and tiled windows are apt to be a nuisance rather than a feature.
  We haven’t covered any major thing on the Raspberry Pi since our article on the 8 New Raspbian Features to Start Using on Your Raspberry Pi close to a year ago. No one needs to state how successful the Raspberry Pi has been since its inception till date, thus, the factor behind this article.
Today, we bring you a list of the best Linux distributions you can run on the Raspberry Pi perfectly. But before we delve into that list, let me brief you on NOOBS
Long back gaming on Linux was next to impossible, but in recent years it quite stable. Nowadays, there are hundreds of Linux distro, made with different ideas and purpose supports to gaming.
There are some of the best option available in Linux distro for gamers. Here, we are going to list the top Linux gaming distribution.
These distros are precompiled and installed with various drivers, application and softwares, and emulators for the excellent gaming experience.
Ubuntu 20.04 was released this past Friday, and Linux fans around the world were understandably excited. However, "when it rains, it pours," as they say, because not only is Fedora 32 right around the corner, but today, yet another top-tier distribution gets a new release. This time, it is the Arch Linux-based Manjaro 20, which is code-named "Lysia."
The newest version of the wildly popular operating system can be had with your choice of three desktop environments -- Xfce, GNOME, and KDE Plasma. All three are great, but Xfce is the default for Manjaro. In version 20 of the OS, Xfce gets bumped up to 4.14. Manjaro 20 "Lysis" also gets Linux kernel 5.6 and a new ZFS installation option in Architect. Pamac 9.4 package manager gets support for both flatpaks and snaps by default -- very cool.
To stop this from happening, we use pool-wide quotas. No matter how much space people have purchased in a pool or even if this is a system pool that we operate, we insist that it always have a minimum safety margin, enforced through a 'quota=' setting on the root of the pool. When people haven't purchased enough to use all of the pool's current allocated capacity, this safety margin is implicitly the space they haven't bought. Otherwise, we have two minimum margins. The explicit minimum margin is that our scripts that manage pool quotas always insist on a 10 MByte safety margin. The implicit minimum margin is that we normally only set pool quotas in full GB, so a pool can be left with several hundred MB of space between its real maximum capacity and the nearest full GB.
I’m using FreeBSD again on a laptop for some reasons so expect to read more about FreeBSD here. This tutorial explain how to get a graphical desktop using FreeBSD 12.1.
If your organization has adopted a DevOps culture, you're probably practicing some form of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to manage and provision servers, storage, applications, and networking. IaC uses human-readable, and machine-consumable, definitions and automation tools such as Ansible. It's also likely that Git is an essential part of your DevOps toolchain, not only for the development of applications and services but also for managing your infrastructure definitions.
With the release of Red Hat Ansible Tower v3.6, part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we introduced Automation Webhooks to natively enable easier and more intuitive Git-centric workflows. Such workflows might be found with GitOps-oriented environments.
GitOps is a prescriptive style of Infrastructure as Code based on the experience and wisdom of what works in deploying and managing large, sophisticated, distributed, and cloud-native systems. While you can implement Git-centric workflows, where you treat infrastructure like it is code, that doesn't mean it's GitOps.
In the first half of this post, we'll explore how you can make use of Automation Webhooks. In the second half, we'll cover how to apply these features to creating GitOps pipelines using the unique benefits Ansible provides.
First, let's look at IaC for some context as to how this feature benefits your organization.
Apache Camel K is a lightweight cloud-integration platform that runs natively on Kubernetes and, in particular, lets you automate your cloud configurations. Based on the famous Apache Camel, Camel K is designed and optimized for serverless and microservices architectures. In this article, I discuss six ways that Camel K transforms how developers work with Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and Knative on cloud platforms.
The BUS1 API did see some activity back in March but with that in-kernel IPC mechanism not yet on approach for landing in the mainline Linux kernel, the Dbus-Broker project for a high-performance D-Bus implementation remains the best solution for the time being.
In part one of this article, I discussed some of the common pitfalls for sysadmins who are suddenly pulled into projects way too late in the game. Recognizing these warning signs can help you anticipate whether a project is in trouble. Here in part two, I'll continue with the remaining six signs and have provided you with a checklist that you can use to make your life as a sysadmin better.
It is free software! Built on Debian, I am sure that users are not spied upon, and that it can run on low end hardware. This last point is very important, because we really need to improve "green IT". I do not know enough about Skolelinux / Debian Edu to tell how it is better than another free software solution, but what I like is the "all in one" solution: everything has been thought of and prepared to ease installation and usage.
I like Free Software because I hate using something that I can not understand. I do not say that I can understand everything nor that I want to understand everything, but knowing that someone / some company intentionally prevents me from understanding how things work is really unacceptable to me.
Secondly, and more importantly, free software is a requirement to prevent abuses regarding human rights and environmental care. Humanity can not rely on tools that are in the hands of small group of people.
Ubuntu 20.04 was officially announced a few weeks ago with major improvements, but at the same time, it looks like it also introduces a series of inconsistencies that ruin the whole experience for some.
More specifically, users are now complaining that the store isn’t working exactly like they expected it to work in the first place, with a growing thread of reddit grouping messages from users who encountered various problems when trying to install snaps.
One of the common annoyances, and which I also encountered on my Ubuntu 20.04 laptop, concerns the behavior of the store when a new snap is being installed. There’s no indication regarding the progress of the installation after clicking the install button, and trying to click the same button again returns an error that the process is still under way.
So in short, using Linux as your desktop environment if you’re a web developer is pretty great. You probably won’t miss much, as soon as you rewire your brain to get the keyboard shortcuts right.
I find that the main things I miss these days are some of Apple’s best built-in apps, such as Preview or Garage Band. I love Preview for taking a quick screenshot and drawing arrows and boxes on it (something I do surprisingly often), and I haven’t found any good substitutes on Linux. (I use Pinta, which is okay.) Other apps like ImageOptim also have no Linux version.
So if you depend on some Mac-only apps, or if you need best-in-class Safari and iOS debugging, then I wouldn’t recommend Linux over Mac. If your main focus is accessibility, it also might not be sufficient for you (although something like Assistiv Labs may change this calculus). But for everything else, it’s a great desktop OS for web development.
Linux was at a 2.78% market share around December of 2018, but has been steadily dropping ever since…until just recently. Around March of 2020 the Linux Desktop/Laptop market share was at 1.36% and Ubuntu was just .27% of that. Ubuntu has jumped to 1.89% of the total Desktop OS market share, and that leaves the other Linux Distros with a market share of .98% (that includes the Ubuntu Flavors, BTW).
Take out Ubuntu, Ubuntu Flavors, Ubuntu-based and Mint & it looks like the rest of the Linux Distros don’t have much of a Desktop/Laptop OS market share at all. Looks like all those articles and blog posts were just a hullabaloo over nothing…
That’s the best pic I could find, and newer ones look a lot better, but no decent pics of them. Knowing how to use your Boot Menu is going to be key to doing all of this fairly safely on your Windows computer. However, ‘n just in case, go ahead and do a full image backup … if you’re using WIN10 then “Create a system image” using the free Backup and Restore (Windows 7) program located in your Control Panel … if you’re using Vista just delete it (-wink-)… if you’re using WIN7 go ahead and upgrade to WIN10, then “Create a system image.” If you’re still using DOS, then stop here and go try one of the ‘Archies’ or even Arch Linux … slower versions of DOS, but you might like them.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 630 for the week of May 3 – 9, 2020.
  Nearly 10 years ago, Canonical introduced Unity to the world. When Ubuntu 18.04 LTS released in early 2018, the company abandoned Unity in favor of the GNOME 3 desktop. Some people in the Linux community viewed this as a huge mistake. If you’re yearning for the good ole’ Unity and Compiz days, I bring awesome tidings: someone’s shining a new spotlight on them, and the stage underneath is a brand new Linux distribution called Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.04.
  Linux Mint 20 was announced at the end of January 2020, along with the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 4 rolling release based on Debian GNU/Linux, which was released on March 20th.
Soon after the release of LMDE 4, the Linux Mint 20 operating system was dubbed as “Ulyana” and the team announced the obvious, that it would be based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).
The board apparently runs the older OpenWRT 14.07 Barrier Breaker firmware, and Qualcomm SDK is provided with QCA binary drivers
Continuing in my series of developments with the Mech Warfare turret, I’ve now managed to replicate the primitive target tracking functionality I had in the v2 version of the turret. This works using a pretty simple principle: [...]
What comes after Teensy 4.0? Teensy 4.1. The new version of the Arduino compatible board is powered by the same NXP i.MX RT1062 Cortex-M7 crossover processor clocked at 600 MHz, but about doubling in length in order to add a 10/100 Mbit Ethernet PHY, a MicroSD card slot, and offer more I/Os.
Teensy 4.1 also increases flash memory to 8 MB (vs 2 MB for Teensy 4.0), and the USB hot-plugging power management circuitry needed to plug a USB device via a USB host cable.
I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again: the world of Linux phones is evolving so fast that it’s probably just a matter of years until it finally becomes an alternative to Android and iOS.
And while that’s hard to imagine right now, Linux on mobile phones is gaining more and more traction, with fresh projects enabling new capabilities that aren’t otherwise possible on the other mobile platforms.
More recently, the PinePhone has received a new bootloader that allows multiple Linux operating systems to boot on the device. In other words, the so-called Pineloader is a multi bootloader that essentially allows users to choose what operating system they want to run when starting the PinePhone.
If you have a problem with your computer, you may have to go through log files, or as a software engineer, you may be looking for clues about a bug in a debug or error log. It can be done in any text editor, but there may be a better way thanks to lnav Log Files Navigator that allows checking those files more easily and efficiently in a Mac OS or Linux terminal.
lnav is open-source software released under a BSD-2 clause in Github. It’s not new at all as some commits were made in January 2010, but it’s new to me, and hopefully to some of you as well.
“We have established a relationship with Guggenheim as an adviser with the primary purpose to bring in additional capital to fund acquisitions and enable us to fuel growth,” Chef’s Chief Marketing Officer Brian Goldfarb said in a statement.
An external spokesperson for Chef said it hasn’t raised cash since 2015. The company has raised about $105 million to date, according to Pitchbook.
The public cloud and open source software are pretty much coupled these days. No matter if you’re running Kubernetes-as-a-service, MySQL, Linux, or that open source text editor you’ve used since college, it’s all there for the taking, as-a-service.
However, it’s really not free. Cloud providers charge for usage, either by time or other resource-units consumed. Indeed, it’s half or more of the cloud computing bills I’ve seen recently.
Some enterprises have not yet used open source on premises, not to mention cloud. Now that they are moving to the public cloud, both developers and infrastructure engineers are finding some very compelling reasons to “go open” in the cloud.
[...]
In many instances I’ve seen enterprises pick open source software around religious beliefs more than from a feature and function comparison. Although you’ll certainly get the open source cred, in some instances you won’t be able to get the value out of that specific cloud service versus other alternatives. It’s really not that hard. Enterprises fall down when they’re myopic about picking the right solution for the business without understanding the true value. Keep the business value in sight, and you’ll be fine. Short of that, you’re likely to make expensive mistakes.
We have released Qt 5.15.0 RC2 today. As usual you can get it by using online installer (for new installations) or by using maintenance tool (existing online installation). Delta to rc1 as an attachment.
Target is still to release Qt 5.15.0 19th May.
Qt 5.15 is aiming to release next week while today marks the availability of the toolkit's second release candidate.
Qt 5.15 RC2 is out as a last-minute test release. Since the prior Qt 5.15 release candidate are just some install fixes, updating of Chromium, updating MapBox-GL, and some other last minute fixes.
In today's RC2 announcement, The Qt Company's Jani Heikkinen confirmed they are still planning to release next Tuesday, 19 May.
I’m very much looking forward to GitOps Days 2020 on 20th/21st May (next week). It will be a great opportunity to learn more about GitOps concepts and tools, see demos, ask questions, have a great time and meet other people who are in the space as well.
Last night, Lars, Mark, and I discussed Jeremy Kun's The communicative value of using Git well post. While a lot of our discussion was spawned by the article, we did go off-piste a little, and I hope that my notes below will enlighten you all as to a bit of how we see revision control these days. It was remarkably pleasant to read an article where the comments section wasn't a cesspool of horror, so if this posting encourages you to go and read the article, don't stop when you reach the bottom -- the comments are good and useful too.
This was a fairly non-contentious article for us though each of us had points we wished to bring up and chat about it turned into a very convivial chat. We saw the main thrust of the article as being about using the metadata of revision control to communicate intent, process, and decision making. We agreed that it must be possible to do so effectively with Mercurial (thus deciding that the mention of it was simply a bit of clickbait / red herring) and indeed Mark figured that he was doing at least some of this kind of thing way back with CVS.
We all discussed how knowing the fundamentals of Git's data model improved our ability to work wih the tool. Lars and I mentioned how jarring it has originally been to come to Git from revision control systems such as Bazaar (bzr) but how over time we came to appreciate Git for what it is. For Mark this was less painful because he came to Git early enough that there was little more than the fundamental data model, without much of the porcelain which now exists.
“Low code development” is increasingly being used in the marketing of a wide range of software products. The term refers to the use of a graphical user interface to build something that a developer would usually have to custom code.
“Low code development” is somewhat deceiving. One might think it is going to solve all our development problems, but in reality, each low code platform has a very specific set of capabilities. They are domain-specific and target areas like web or mobile applications, BPM or CRM, and give us large pieces of predefined functionality to build with. This makes us more efficient at delivering functionality as long as we stay within the platform domain.
A couple of video interviews conducted in 2013. Now collected on one page!
Some weeks see one release. And then some do two! In any case, it is good to see the 2020.05 Rakudo Compiler Release, thanks to the hard work of Alexander Kiryuhin. Which was immediately followed by updated Docker Containers (by Suman Khanal and JJ Merelo) and installable Linux packages (by Claudio Ramirez). And since it has been a time since there was a Rakudo Star release, Patrick Spek immediately created a Rakudo Star Release Candidate. Rakudo Star users: please test this Release Candidate!
Python’s eval() allows you to evaluate arbitrary Python expressions from a string-based or compiled-code-based input. This function can be handy when you’re trying to dynamically evaluate Python expressions from any input that comes as a string or a compiled code object.
Although Python’s eval() is an incredibly useful tool, the function has some important security implications that you should consider before using it. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how eval() works and how to use it safely and effectively in your Python programs.
I haven't played python in a long time. It can be seen after the last article. Today I installed Python 3.8.3 and my favorite PyQt5 and started to see how much I forgot from what I knew. Installing PyQt5 python mode was simple.
A bigger issue is that defining a static fork of HTML is easy, but persuading Web developers to use it is where the real problem lies, and that is immensely difficult and no-one has any good ideas for how to do it. Of course, if you do find a way to persuade Web developers to avoid features you don't like, there isn't much value in defining a specific "static subset" of HTML.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been discussing for some time that esports is having itself a moment. The reason for that is obvious: there is an enormous vacuum that has been left by IRL leagues shutting down throughout the world. That vacuum is easily filled by esports that don't rely on sweaty people rubbing up against each other in order to pull off the same style of competition. It's all gotten big enough that the gamblers are now involved, along with most of the major sports leagues.
More and more people are being exposed to working remotely. One of the key factors for success in a remote workplace is a culture of written communication. It’s not always obvious how to create such a culture, and it takes at least some level of discipline from the people involved to make it a habit.
I’ve worked with mostly remote teams over the past three years. Here are a few of my observations on what helped cultivate such a culture.
Last week, I wrote about Plandemic, a viral video featuring disgraced scientist turned antivaxxer turned COVID-19 “Fire Fauci” conspiracy theorist and grifter Dr. Judy Mikovits. You’d think that, after a 6,000-word takedown of that 26 minutes of disinformation-filled conspiracyfest of a video there wouldn’t be anything left for me to say, but, hey, it’s Orac. There’s always something left to say! In this case, the reason is that, as bonkers as Plandemic was, it turns out that the director of the video, Mikki Willis, apparently restrained the ever excitable Dr. Mikovits to make her appear far more reasonable than she actually is during the video in which she promoted her book Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science and kept referring to the COVID-19 pandemic as a “plandemic.”
Teaching across an abyss of silence.
Both security tokens are quite similar except U2F support (YubiKey 4C) and their firmware model (closed source vs. open source). Therefore, our recommendation depends on your use case:
If you only need a secure storage for your OpenPGP key, buy either a YubiKey or Nitrokey.
If you hate closed-source software or if you need a hardware-based password storage (with the above-mentioned limitations), buy a Nitrokey.
If you need U2F support or if you need to store lots of OATH-TOTP secrets, buy a YubiKey.
At least 376 people, including several minors, were diagnosed with COVID-19 after rehearsing outside Moscow for the capital’s May 9 Victory Day parade, according to a new investigative study by the website Proekt.€
Krasnoyarsk Krai, Stavropol Krai, Primorsky Krai, and Dagestan are Russia’s leading regions for violations of quarantine restrictions, Yuri Valyaev, the head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s department for ensuring public order told RIA Novosti.€
"It is not doing a good job. Never has. Never will."
On Friday evening, Katie Miller, the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence (and spouse of Trump adviser Stephen Miller), tested positive for coronavirus.
On Mother’s Day, President Donald Trump launched a “tweetstorm” against his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, in part for criticisms the latter made over the weekend about the current commander in chief.
A new study by an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York linked the 1918 flu pandemic to the rise in Nazi support in Germany, a finding that could have significant relevance as the United States and the world grapples with the health and economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus.
The CDC, Dr. Fauci, and other pandemic experts are sidelined in the midst of the plague. So are many scientists in the E.P.A. and other agencies charged with protecting the health and safety of the people. Government regulations designed for those purposes are cancelled, allowing free enterprise the profitable freedom to freely pollute the air and waters at the cost of whom it might concern. Appointed as cabinet Secretaries are lobbyists and politicianswho have spent their professional careers undermining the mission of the agency they now head. When they prove corrupt they are replaced by cronies of the President as acting heads–who need not be approved by Congress. Inspector generals of these and other federal agencies are removed when they rule honestly, but in ways unfavorable to the President.
As COVID-19 has spread around the world and online platforms have scrambled to adjust their operations and workforces to a new reality, company commitments to the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation have fallen by the wayside. The Principles—drafted in 2018 by a group of organizations, advocates, and academic experts who support the right to free expression online—outline minimum levels of transparency and accountability that tech platforms should provide around their moderation of user-generated content.
"Deporting people to Haiti in the midst of a global pandemic is both inhumane and unsafe."
On the morning of May 11, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 11,656 new coronavirus infections in the past day (up 5.5 percent from the day before) bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 221,344 patients. Russia has now overtaken Italy and Germany to become the country with the third-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, after the United States and Spain.
It was a historic occasion for the South Texas town of Pearsall when officials broke ground in 2004 on what would become one of the country’s largest immigration detention centers.
Not only would it help improve border security, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn said then, it would also bring employment to the small rural community, about 60 miles from San Antonio. Hundreds of good jobs for a region that desperately needed them.
The NY Times had a report over the weekend about how the US government was gearing up to accuse China of using cyberattacks to get at COVID-19 vaccine data:
Although most Americans currently face hard times, with unemployment surging to the levels of the Great Depression and enormous numbers of people sick or dying from the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s super-rich remain a notable exception.
Two Sioux nations in South Dakota have said that Governor Kristi Noem is undermining both their sovereignty and their health. Indigenous populations have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic.
On the International Day of the Nurse, NZNO is paying tribute to the 301 nurses from 32 countries who have died from their frontline work fighting COVID-19. This is the latest tally from Global Nurses United (GNU), but GNU Co-ordinator Ken Zinn says there are likely to be many more.
Contacted by SecurityWeek, the Swiss manufacturer refrained from providing additional details on the incident, given the ongoing investigation.
If an attacker can get his hands on a Thunderbolt-equipped device for five minutes, he can launch a new data-stealing attack called “Thunderspy.”
AMD’s commitment to openness is the foundation upon which the GPUOpen initiative was built. We stand behind the belief that the freedom of open standards and being open about our hardware drives innovation forward faster and further than any proprietary technology can.
Since 2016, GPUOpen has been a vehicle for this vision, sharing our game development and content creation software tools and technologies, with a focus on solving developer problems.
AMD is marking the relaunch with "releasing new GPUOpen tools and technologies every day this week." Announced for Monday is an expansion of FidelityFX as their open-source toolkit for high quality post-process game effects. There is now support for screen space reflections, ambient occlusion, HDR mapper, and a downsampler as part of FidelityFX.
The Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee of the California Assembly is supposed to have an obvious, eponymous purpose – but doesn’t seem to. There’s a new “online privacy” bill in the California legislature that is seeking to grossly normalize facial recognition technology and it just received an 8-3 vote to continue from the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. The bill, AB2261, was put forth by Democratic Assemblymember Ed Chau of California’s San Gabriel Valley – who also conveniently sits as the chair of the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. Said committee, whose name might suggest is looking out to protect consumer privacy, has proven to be anything but.
This is the first good news we've heard from Clearview since its exposure by Kashmir Hill for the New York Times back in January. In response to a lawsuit filed against it in Illinois accusing it of breaking that state's privacy laws with its scraping of images and personal info from a multitude of social media platforms, Clearview has announced it's cutting off some of its revenue stream.
Taken together, privacy advocates consider McConnell’s moves an alarming expansion of Attorney General Bill Barr’s powers under FISA, a four-decade-old process that already places the attorney general at the center of national-security surveillance. It also doesn’t escape their notice that McConnell is increasing Barr’s oversight of surveillance on political candidates while expanding surveillance authorities on every other American. One privacy activist called McConnell’s efforts “two of the most cynical attempts to undermine surveillance reform I've ever seen.”
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McConnell’s amendment blocks the FBI from seeking the “content” of web browsing and searching conducted by Americans. But it explicitly permits the warrantless collection of “Internet website browsing records or internet search history records.” Barr and other attorneys general approve guidelines for conducting such surveillance.
This coalition is currently focused on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, commonly known as the business records provision. Under this authority, the government holds that any information we give to a business (an online search through Google, video from a Ring doorbell camera, and even DNA test results from 23andMe) can be accessed by the government without the Fourth Amendment requirement for a probable cause warrant. All the FBI has to do is assert such information is somehow relevant to national security.
Congress now has a unique chance to bring these practices in line with the Fourth Amendment. The House passed a bill that was never subjected to markup or amendments. Predictably, this bill has only a few weak reforms, a sop to those with deep concerns over the potential for surveillance abuse. A rebellion against similar tactics in the Senate forced Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to allow for debate and amendments as soon as this week.
The following is not meant as a comprehensive list. Rather, these are a few themes that came up in our panel discussion as my colleagues and I were thinking of how our experiences from the 9/11 era might be relevant to the use of digital surveillance to combat the pandemic—particularly if we were to consider a role for the federal government. (I also recommend this piece by Peter Swire, in which he thoughtfully lays out his own list of lessons learned, some of which overlap with the themes below.)
On March 10, trustees of the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home in Massachusetts heard a glowing review of the facility’s operations. For the third year in a row, the home’s superintendent reported to the board, the 247-bed nursing home met or provisionally met the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care standards.
We “are happy to report a ‘three peat,’” Superintendent Bennett Walsh told the board, according to minutes of the meeting.
Not only did we waste $6.4 trillion, we continue to wast trillions more on war industries that don’t actually do us any good or make us perceptibly safer.
As the death toll from COVID-19 in the United States surpasses 80,000, an unusual new billboard called the Trump Death Clock in New York City’s Times Square keeps tally of lives lost to government inaction. “What we found was that there was an amazing and very dark truth underlying the numbers that spoke to reckless mishandling of a pandemic by the president and his team, and we felt that ought to be quantified,” says Eugene Jarecki, the award-winning documentary filmmaker, author and activist behind the project.
Unless Democrats begin to take advantage of the liability Guaidó represents and push back against Trump’s regime change efforts, there seems to be little hope of improving U.S.–Venezuela relations, regardless of who wins the presidency in November.
"The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can only ever be solved by finding a solution that guarantees peace, security, rights, and dignity to both peoples. Unilaterally seizing territory and ignoring international law achieves precisely the opposite."
It was nearly twenty years ago at a Muslim conference in Washington D.C. that I heard the distressing argument that Palestine should not be made a central topic in the American Muslim political agenda.
The Biden campaign and the DNC must consider the voters they lose by not broadening their platforms on racial justice as conceived by progressives—voters who no longer make Palestine the exception to their progressive values.
A joint letter urges the presidential candidate to oppose regime-change interventions and broad-based sanctions, engage with Iran and North Korea, and support a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In recent months, Russian aircrafts, as well as Syrian government planes, have carried out regular airstrikes against schools and hospitals in the provinces of€ Idlib, Hama, and Aleppo in northwestern Syria. This was revealed in the latest report from the human rights organization Amnesty International, which was made available to Meduza.
When an attempted invasion of Venezuela launched from the shores of Colombia was foiled on May 3, after armed commandos were intercepted at Venezuela’s coastline of La Guira, it seemed undeniable that the heavily armed men, possessing satellite phones and uniforms with the US flag emblazoned on them, had been paid to take part in a coup attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government (People’s Dispatch, 5/6/20).
While his base continues to be mesmerized by the "emperor’s new clothes," the world stands aghast at the naked truth that America is not only incapable of leading the world, but also failing to protect its own people.
“I’ll never tire of repeating: We need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking.”
In a major step toward establishing a Trump dictatorship, the Justice Department moved Thursday to drop the criminal case against confessed felon Michael Flynn, the retired Army general and secret foreign agent who was Trump’s first national security adviser.
Instead of seeking equal justice under law, an extraordinary court filing demonstrated that Trump has one standard of justice for his enemies and an entirely different one for his allies. The court action shows how fully Trump has turned our Justice Department into his personal protection agency.
The 108-page court filing is rife with falsehoods and tortured interpretations of established facts, a mendacious necessity since Flynn twice confessed to multiple crimes under oath in open court. It argues that the lies Flynn told FBI agents were not “material” to the case against him. The trial court judge has already dismissed that as nonsense.
Nine members of the high profile terrorist group, Jama’atu Ansarul Muslimeena fii Bilaa dis Sudan, responsible for the kidnap of expatriates and influential personalities in northern Nigeria, have revealed how they were recruited from mosques and trained in Libya.
According to the findings, climate tipping points could happen in a matter of years or decades, not on the ecological timescale of hundreds, or even, thousands of years.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Western Watersheds Project objected to the continued appointments of the acting leaders of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and National Park Service (NPS).
The groups argue that the repeated tenure extensions of William Perry Pendley and David Vela are unconstitutional and claim that neither is qualified to lead their respective agency.
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“These serial, ‘temporary’ appointments for Pendley to head the nation’s largest public lands agency are not only irresponsible but illegal, as well,” said a statement from Erik Molvar, the executive director of Western Watersheds Project. “These serial, ‘temporary’ appointments for Pendley to head the nation’s largest public lands agency are not only irresponsible but illegal, as well,” said a statement from Erik Molvar, the executive director of Western Watersheds Project.
Most of the frequency increases were in the Persian gulf, India, Pakistan and south-west North America. But at Jacobabad and Ras al Khaimah, 35€°C TW appears to have been passed, the first time the breach has been reported in scientific literature.
“The crossings of all of these thresholds imply greater risk to human health – we can say we are universally creeping close to this magic threshold of 35€°C. The tantalising conclusion is it looks like, in some cases for a brief period of the day, we have exceeded this value,” says Tom Matthews at Loughborough University in the UK.
Lethal heatwaves carrying air turned too hot and wet to survive are a threat which has arrived, thanks to climate change.
The earth is dying and capitalism is to blame. Facing this, one can opt for hope, as Marxist ecosocialists do, or one can succumb to pessimism fed by dark thoughts on human nature and the intractable, deadly persistence of our economic system of exploitation. Human nature has a destructive and murderous side, while capitalism, expressing that side with its endless growth, endless greed, blights the planet like cancer. Yet Marxist ecosocialists do not let this drag them down to despair. They talk about fixing what humanity has wrought, about drastically cutting carbon emissions, about mitigating the sixth mass extinction, about decreasing plastics and other environmental toxins and doing so while providing for the necessities of life, including, as John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark write in their newly published “The Robbery of Nature,” “love, family, community, meaningful work, education, cultural life, access to the natural environment and the free and equal development of every person.”
"Not Today. Not Tomorrow. Not Ever. No KXL. Mni Wiconi," read the banner displayed on social media as the ongoing coronavirus pandemic kept activists and campaigners from gathering to demonstrate.
"We do not consent to their dirty tar sands KXL pipeline," the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) said on Twitter.
The pipeline’s construction is taking place less than a month after federal Judge Brian Morris ruled that the United States (U.S.) Army Corps of Engineers had improperly issued a permit to TC Energy when it authorized it to construct the pipeline without conducting a thorough review of its environmental impact, IEN explained in an email sent Friday to supporters.
There are tens of millions of cows in the U.S. but only about 700 grizzly bears in the remote and wild public lands known as the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that include and surround America’s first national park.€ € Grizzlies are listed as “Threatened” under the Endangered Species Act and the federal government is legally mandated to stave off extinction by restoring a sustainable population of these national icons.
On an unseasonably warm November morning in 2016, Youngstown’s business and political leaders crowded onto a small, scraggly plot of land on the Ohio city’s long-suffering East Side. Reeling from decades of decline, the area was a patchwork of potholed streets, weeded lots, moldering homes and drive-thru liquor marts.
But on this day, the city, once a national center of steel manufacturing and now a poster child for industrial decay, was celebrating the groundbreaking of a new venture: Chill-Can, the world’s first self-chilling beverage can. Joseph Co. International, a California-based beverage company, had pledged to build a $20 million research and manufacturing campus and create hundreds of new jobs. Its motto: “The Ice Age Is Over!”
You know my position, it is unchanged. The main thing for us is the life, health, and safety of people. The “non-working” days have gone on for over six weeks. We received the resource of time. We did not allow the healthcare system to be overloaded, and such an overload, as global experience shows, is the cause of high mortality. A reserve of ventilators and other equipment has been formed. A testing system has been established — it is possible to detect the disease at an early stage, avoid serious consequences, and prevent the infection of friends and relatives. By mid-May, the number of tests will double. All the measures taken allow us to move on to the next stage of the fight against the epidemic — the exit from restrictions.€
"We cannot afford to allow the interests of private corporations to supersede the needs of the American people and the long-term stability of our economy."
I would like to nominate the “Public” Broadcasting System’s (“P”BS) “NewsHour” and its economics reporter Paul Solomon for the 2020 Piss Down Our Backs and Tell Us Its Raining Prize in broadcast journalism. € Last Thursday, “P”BS “NewsHour” viewers got to see the show’s longtime economics correspondent (Paul Solomon) give a chilling account of how newly unemployed people are disastrously losing their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic.
The difficulties caused to workers by record unemployment during the pandemic are a product of capitalism. Most of the time, employers decide to hire or fire workers depending on which choice maximizes employers’ profits. Profit, not the full employment of workers nor of means of production, is “the bottom line” of capitalism and thus of capitalists. That is how the system works. Capitalists are rewarded when their profits are high and punished when they are not. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business.
"Congress must act now to save jobs and ensure crucial economic and health information reaches the people harmed most by this pandemic."
The coronavirus-related plunge in mail revenue is threatening to bankrupt USPS—Trump doesn't want to help.
Over the last decade, Congress’s approval ratings have hovered around the mid-teens or low 20s, reflecting the reality that our representatives in Washington, D.C., serve the needs of big donors while throwing an occasional rhetorical bone to the “essential” workers who actually make the country function. Congress’s handling of the current crisis of the pandemic is unlikely to improve its ratings.
"They took care of their billionaire buddies and Wall Street bankers. Now they're trying to say there's 'not enough' left to help you and your family. It's a lie."
"Donald Trump and his administration will stop at nothing to cut Social Security."
Suddenly concerned about the growing national debt now that corporations have secured access to trillions of dollars in Covid-19 bailout funds with little oversight, Trump administration officials are reportedly considering several proposals purportedly aimed at reducing government spending — including a pair of plans that would provide Americans with cash payments in exchange for delays or cuts to their Social Security benefits.
President Vladimir Putin has announced that the ‘non-working’ days introduced to prevent the spread of COVID-19 will come to an end on May 12.€
"We want to ensure eligible voters and election integrity are protected."
Last summer, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was forced to resign because of his assessments of Russia and North Korea that opposed the personal and political views of Donald Trump.€ The removal of Coats meant there was no longer a member of the national security team willing to contradict the views of the president.€ For the past year, moreover, as a result of the purge of intelligence personnel, the top two positions in the Office of the DNI and the Department of Homeland Security were occupied by “acting” officials who had not received congressional confirmation.
Republicans are conserving little beyond their own wealth, racism, sexism, and homophobia, while eroding American democracy, health, and the environment.
Lyubov Sobol, a lawyer for the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), led by opposition politician Alexey Navalny, debated television host Ksenia Sobchak during a May 10 broadcast on the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy. The debate centered around the question of whether or not money should be paid to people directly during the coronavirus pandemic.€
Conspiracy theorists never let a crisis go to waste.
As we noted in April, President Donald Trump has appointed a staggering number of judges to the federal bench, including more circuit court judges than any president by this point in their tenure.
"Unbelievably ugly ending to Trump press conference."
The website Open Media compiled a “ranking of Putin’s medal bearers” — Russians who have received at least half of their state honors, medals, and awards by order of presidents Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev.€
Black and Brown communities are being disproportionately targeted and policed in New York City’s response to the spread of COVID-19. We speak with author and activist Jill Nelson, who was herself arrested by NYPD in April for writing “Trump = Plague” in chalk on an abandoned building in her Washington Heights neighborhood. The 67-year-old scholar was handcuffed, taken to the police station and held for five hours. Now she is speaking out. The president is “telling us that as people of color, and older people, we should just die,” says Nelson. “It’s ridiculous.”
It is one of the most familiar horror movie tropes on file: On a dark and stormy night, the phone rings and an evil voice whispers terrifying threats. The phone keeps ringing, the mystery grows, the tension builds, until the big reveal: THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!
We know how to frame from picture framing, and we also know the frame in which a picture is placed can influence how we see a picture. Well, virtually the same thing applies to politics. The way in which politics is framed can influence how we perceive politics. Social scientists have known about this for a long time. A simple example shows how framing works. Group 1 is told that crime is like a lurking predator which is increasing in number in neighborhoods. Group 2 is told that crime is like a virus infection which is increasing in number in neighborhoods. If crime is a predator, the natural response is to hunt it down. The first group accordingly opts for stronger law enforcement. On the other hand, if crime is a virus, the natural response is to attack it at the source.
With 4.25 percent of the world population, America has the tragic distinction of accounting for about 30 percent of pandemic deaths so far.
In a report aired on May 10, the Czech public TV program 168 Hours quoted unnamed security sources as saying Andrei Konchakov flew to Prague's Vaclav Havel Airport two months ago with the toxin and was driven to the Russian Embassy compound in the Czech capital, long considered a nerve center of Russian espionage activities.
Events in the United States have unfolded more favorably than any operative in Moscow could have ever dreamed: Not only did Russia’s preferred candidate win, but he has spent his first term fulfilling the potential it saw in him, discrediting American institutions, rending the seams of American culture, and isolating a nation that had styled itself as indispensable to the free world. But instead of complacently enjoying its triumph, Russia almost immediately set about replicating it. Boosting the Trump campaign was a tactic; #DemocracyRIP remains the larger objective.
Many of those same Republicans are now acclaiming the decision to drop charges against Flynn as vindication. But vindication is precisely what this is not. Flynn’s release by Barr does not prove that Flynn was innocent of wrongdoing. Being released by Barr does not convert Flynn’s lies into truth. Flynn’s release by Barr only strengthens the suspicion that back in December 2016, Flynn acted with Trump’s approval. Flynn’s release by Barr only strengthens the suspicion that Flynn and Kislyak were furthering a corrupt arrangement between Trump and Putin. Flynn’s release by Barr only strengthens the suspicion that the corrupt arrangement continues to this day.
In keeping with Animal Crossing’s founding principles, New Horizons is capable of quiet, welcomingly pointless moments—like when I left my avatar to sleep while rain gently tapped its window—but for the most part, it’s been subsumed within a modern mentality of optimization. Games ask us to role-play—that’s part of their fun—whether it’s as an enterprising villager, machine, or lonely creature spending 400 days below ground. But in this moment of downtime, at least for those asked to stay home, we might do well to look beyond New Horizons’ gamified conception of the everyday. Its stultifying islands are not the inspiration we need.
"Right-wing idiots didn't realize the joke is on them not the students."
Only a quarter of the Oversight Board originates from the United States. That means three quarters of the censorship court comes from countries with no First Amendment. While people from outside the United States may believe in certain kinds of free speech, political speech in this country will be determined by a majority Third World board of left-leaning political activists.
And even there the balance is curiously tilted.
3 members of the 20 member board are Muslim or come from Muslim countries. Only one board member is Hindu. Considering that there are approximately 1.1 billion Hindus and 1.8 billion Muslims, the Facebook Oversight Board favors Muslim countries at the expense of Hindus.
Considering the pressure by Islamists and their allies to censor India’s Hindu political movements and civil rights organizations combating Islamic violence, this is troubling.
The Oversight Board also has only one Asian member for around 1.8 billion people.
A draft of Turkey’s economic aid package in response to the pandemic was made public early this month and eight articles buried deep in the bill outline a framework that free speech advocates like Human Rights Watch describe as an attempt to censor and control social media.
Among other restrictions, the bill stipulates that all social media platforms with more than a million daily users - this would include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and others - must appoint a legal representative in Turkey to whom courts can turn to make requests to remove content or block users.
The social media regulations were removed from the aid package before it was passed by Turkish parliament last week, but Yaman Akdeniz, faculty of law at Istanbul Bilgi University, feels confident they will soon be revived.
"Nothing less than the future of the planet is at stake."
Leaders from the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes in South Dakota sent firm rebuttals to Gov. Kristi Noem over the weekend, following her call for the two sovereign jurisdictions to shut down highway checkpoints that are being used to minimize the spread of coronavirus.
For as long as people have been driving, cops have been imagining reasons to pull them over and coerce them into "voluntary" searches. The Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision (sort of) put an end to extended stops -- the ones that start with a perceived violation that's dragged out until a drug dog arrives. Unfortunately, that decision only removed part of the equation. The Supreme Court's Heien decision made it possible for cops to rely entirely on pretext to engage in fishing expeditions by saying cops only had to think they witnessed a traffic violation, rather than actually be accurate about the laws they're tasked with enforcing.
Officers from the Russian Interior Ministry have launched an online flashmob in response to the imprisonment of€ Vladimir Vorontsov — the administrator of an online community known as “Police Ombudsman,” which publishes reports of abuse within the ministry.€
You can take the stop-and-frisk out of the NYPD, but you can't remove the biased policing, as the old saying goes. The NYPD may have been forced to stop pushing every minority up against the nearest wall/fence/cop car after a federal court determined this to be a violation of their rights, but they're apparently continuing to enforce laws very selectively.
Polls have found that a majority of Americans support allowing everyone to vote by mail permanently — not just as a precaution amid the coronavirus pandemic. Polls have also found that a large number of Republicans disagree, particularly those who watch Fox News.
The RNC's legal efforts are largely defensive in nature, but have dramatically ramped up in response to an increase in lawsuits by Democrats seeking to expand mail-in voting rules across the country in light of the coronavirus crisis. Republicans are involved in legal battles in 13 states across the country.
Experts say there is no evidence that mail-in voting benefits one party over the other. And while Trump has claimed that mail-in voting will result in massive fraud, experts say voter fraud involving mail-in voting is still rare. A majority of Americans favor changing election laws to allow everyone to vote by mail, according to an April NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, but Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to agree.
If you are following the tech news, you might have seen the announcement that ICANN withheld consent for the change of control of the Public Interest Registry and that this had some implications for .org. However, unless you follow a lot of DNS inside baseball, it might not be that clear what all this means. This post is intended to give a high level overview of the background here and what happened with .org. In addition, Mozilla has been actively engaged in the public discussion on this topic; see here for a good starting point.
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During this period the actual name registrations were handled by a series of government contractors (first SRI and then Network Solutions) but the creation and assignment of the top-level domains was under the control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which in practice, mostly meant the decisions of its Director, Jon Postel. However, as the Internet became bigger, this became increasingly untenable especially as IANA was run under a contract to the US government. Through a long and somewhat complicated series of events, in 1998 this responsibility was handed off to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which administers the overall system, including setting the overall rules and determining which gTLDs will exist (which ccTLDs exist is determined by ISO 3166-1 country codes, as described in RFC 1591). ICANN has created a pile of new gTLDs, such as .dev, .biz, and .wtf (you may be wondering whether the world really needed .wtf, but there it is). As an aside, many of the newer names you see registered are not actually under gTLDs, but rather ccTLDs that happen to correspond to countries lucky enough to have cool sounding country codes. For instance, .io is actually the British Indian Ocean’s TLD and .tv belongs to Tuvalu.
One of the other things that ICANN does is determine who gets to run each TLD. The way this all works is that ICANN determines who gets to be the registry, i.e., who keeps the records of who has which name as well as some of the technical data needed to actually route name lookups. The actual work of registering domain names is done by a registrar, who engages with the customer. Importantly, while registrars compete for business at some level (i.e., multiple people can sell you a domain in .com), there is only one registry for a given TLD and so they don’t have any price competition within that TLD; if you want a .com domain, VeriSign gets to set the price floor. Moreover, ICANN doesn’t really try to keep prices down; in fact, they recently removed the cap on the price of .org domains (bringing it in line with most other TLDs). One interesting fact about these contracts is that they are effectively perpetual: the contracts themselves are for quite long terms and registry agreements typically provide for automatic renewal except under cases of significant misbehavior by the registry. In other words, this is a more or less permanent claim on the revenues for a given TLD.
NetNewsWire 5.0.1 for iOS is delayed due to an apparently new, or newly-enforced, issue: if an RSS reader includes default feeds, Apple will ask for documentation that says you have permission to include those default feeds.
We've noted for a while that the "race to 5G" is largely just the byproduct of telecom marketing departments and lobbyists hoping to spur lagging smartphone sales and scare lawmakers into obedience. Yes, fifth-generation wireless (5G) is important in that it will provide faster, more resilient networks when it's finally deployed at scale years from now. But the society-altering impacts of the technology are extremely over-hyped, availability has been dramatically overstated, and even if it was a "race," our broadband maps are so terrible (by industry design) it would be impossible to actually determine who won.
Facebook seems to really dislike it when people refer to its Oversight Board as the Facebook Supreme Court, but it's just too good a name not to use. The company announced plans a while back to create this Oversight Board to review a narrow slice of its moderation decisions. As I discussed two years ago when such an idea was floated, people all over the place freaked out mainly because they hate Facebook so anything associated with Facebook must automatically be deemed bad and evil.
A six- year long legal dispute between Sisvel and Haier, concerning the question of injunctive relief for infringement of cellular Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) EP 0 852 885 (“885”), owned by Sisvel, has been brought to an end by the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH), in a decision, rendered on May 5, 2020.
The BGH ruled that Haier had acted as an unwilling licensee in FRAND negotiations, thus not fulfilling the requirements for a compulsory license.
Previously, on March 10, 2020, the BGH had confirmed that patent EP 885 was valid. On April 28, 2020, the same court confirmed the validity of yet another Sisvel patent, namely EP 1 264 504.
COVID tracing apps are now under the threat of a software patent in the United States, granted to Blyncsy, a company from Utah. This is the posterchild of an American patent office willfully ignoring the Alice jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, which bans patents on software.
Blyncsy was granted a patent on February 2019 titled “Tracking proximity releationships and uses thereof” (US10198779B2), which claims “receiving data about a first person and a second person, the first person having a contagion.”
Torrent release groups ETTV and ETHD generally upload a steady stream of movies and TV-shows to torrent sites, but that abruptly stopped little over a week ago. The outage is linked to troubles at their home base from where the main operator has disappeared. New servers were ordered and the bots are likely to resume later this week but there are other problems too.
A popular YouTuber who specializes in unboxing videos, reviews and tips, has been fined by a court in Brazil for instructing people how to access TV content using pirate IPTV services. Bruno Gustavo, whose YouTube channel has more than 15.5 million views, must also hand over 10% of the revenue generated by his social media accounts to the Brazilian Pay TV Association.
Over the next three months, these interns will work with members of the Creative Commons’ team on projects that support our mission and community. We can’t wait to get started!€
