  In a terrible year, it was a great moment. On May 30, SpaceX's Crew Dragon, the first private-manned spacecraft ever and the first US-manned spaceflight in nine years, successfully delivered NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley into orbit. Taking them was SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, powered by rocket fuel and Linux.
Like supercomputers, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and many mission-critical devices, the Falcon 9 flies with Linux. SpaceX's software engineers explained several years ago how the Falcon 9 programming works.
Windows 10 is back on the up-and-up in terms of how many users it has, according to the latest figures from one big analytics firm – although it’s Linux which has been making the most headway among desktop operating systems over the last couple of months.
In fact, according to the figures from NetMarketShare for May 2020, Linux has hit an all-time high of a 3.17% share, a big leap from two months ago in March when the OS was hovering at 1.36%.
Lenovo is announcing Linux Certification to their ThinkPad and ThinkStation Workstation Portfolio. In the past, Lenovo has only certified specific workstations with specific configurations for use with Linux in an enterprise environment. With this announcement, Lenovo is certifying all of their ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations for use with Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise. This will allow users who use Linux an out-of-the box solution without needing to worry about compatibility or stability issues.
Lenovo, the world’s top PC seller, is giving Linux a big boost by certifying all its workstation computers for Red Hat and Ubuntu, two of the most popular open source software solutions.
“We’re not talking about just hardware certification, either. Lenovo will offer both RHEL and Ubuntu LTS distributions pre-installed,” Forbes notes.
“Once thought of as a niche IT crowd, this user base of data scientists, developers, application engineers, scientists and more is growing – stepping into sought-after roles across multiple industries and becoming essential within their companies,” wrote Rob Herman, General Manager, Executive Director Workstation & Client AI Group at Lenovo.
Lenovo is looking to make Linux a more visible part of its product line-up after announcing full certification for its entire ThinkStation and ThinkPad P workstation series. Starting this month, Linux fans will be able purchase Lenovo workstations pre-installed with their choice of Red Hat or Ubuntu operating system, fully configured to their liking.
Historically, Lenovo has only certified a select range of Linux distributions for a limited set of devices. But with the once-niche operating system now seeing an increase in demand, the device manufacturer is looking to expand its product portfolio to cater for those who prefer open-source software over the more locked-down platforms offered by Microsoft and Apple.
There was a time when ThinkPad was the preferred system for Linux users.
But that was when ThinkPad was an IBM product. When Beijing-based Lenovo acquired New York-based IBM’s personal computer business in 2005, (I feel that) things started to change.
ThinkPad was/is an amazing series of laptops, reliable, trustworthy and rock solid. Just ask a person who used it before 2010s.
But around 2010, Lenovo ThinkPad started to lose its charm. It was filled with issues after issues and consumer complaints of poor performance.
Right out of the gate I’ll confess: it’s impossible for me to contain my excitement about this unparalleled announcement from Lenovo. The popular OEM is going beyond its pilot program with Fedora 32 and offering full certification and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu LTS across its entire lineup of workstation PCs.
Lenovo announced that they will certify their entire portfolio of ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations for Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In April, Lenovo surprised the Linux community by partnering with the Fedora Project to offer the Fedora Linux distribution on some of its laptops, including the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8.
Now, the well known hardware manufacturer took another step in getting its hardware ready for Linux users by announcing that it will bring Linux certification to its full workstation portfolio for top GNU/Linux distributions from Canonical and Red Hat.
According to the company, every model and configuration of its ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations will be certified for Ubuntu LTS versions, such as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux family of distributions.
Lenovo announced that it is certifying its entire ThinkPad and ThinkStation series laptops with the Linux Operating system.
  This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
Before kicking off this week’s blog, there’s a few recent interesting developments that caught my eye. The first one is merely a cosmetic change. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided to rename Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS. Forgive me if I accidentally forget the name change.
The real news is that a new model of the RPI4 has been launched. The major improvement offered by the new model. 8GB of RAM, wow! That’s an impressive chunk of memory on a tiny computer. This development doesn’t render the 32-bit operating system obsolete. After all, the 32-bit system allows multiple processes to share all 8GB of memory, subject to the restriction that no single process can use more than 3GB. But advanced users who need to map all 8GB into the address space of a single process need a 64-bit userland. Step forward the second exciting development — a new 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS. Unsurprisingly, it’s currently in beta.
Earlier this year in January, Dell unveiled the 2020 refresh for its XPS series of laptops. As part of the lineup, Dell released the XPS 13 2020 with 10th Gen Intel Ice Lake chips. Along with the regular Windows-based variants of the notebook, Dell also released a Ubuntu-based Developer Edition of the XPS 13 2020 featuring Ubuntu 18.04LTS. Up until now, Dell was one of the only major PC OEMs to officially offer Linux distribution options for its notebooks. However, Lenovo will soon be joining Dell by offering Linux-based versions of its P-series ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkStation PCs.
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In the Red Hat ecosystem, Lenovo has also partnered with the Fedora project to offer a pilot program with a preloaded Fedora image on the ThinkPad P53 and P1 Gen 2 systems. By certifying its entire workstation portfolio, Lenovo aims to prioritize the needs of specialized end-users and provide the best possible out-of-the-box Linux experience. The certified portfolio of workstations will also be fully customizable and configured-to-order, based on the needs of the end-user. Additionally, Lenovo will be providing complete web support, dedicated Linux forums, configuration guidance, and more to prospective buyers. The new Linux-based workstation lineup will roll out over the summer, starting with the ThinkPad P-series notebooks this month.
While many users prefer to customize their own machines – either on hardware without an OS or by wiping an existing client OS, then configuring and installing Linux – this can raise uncertainty with system stability, restricted performance, compatibility, end-user productivity and even IT support for devices. Now that these users are making their way out of the proverbial shadows and onto the enterprise floor, the demand is high for an out-of-the-box solution that removes the barrier for deployment of enterprise-grade hardware within a Linux software ecosystem.
In this episode, we’re joined by two representatives working at Canonical, the financial entity and umbrella company behind Ubuntu. Galem Kayo and Loic Minier work at that organization’s Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu Mobile Embedded projects. With IoT and its much older cousin, IIoT, ever-present as buzzphrases at the moment alongside 5G, self-driving cars and AI, we get the lowdown on what IoT really means in a practical sense.
From early days of hobbyists putting together mobile devices and needing an OS to run on them, the Ubuntu flavor of Linux now runs on IoT devices found in installations of every type, all over the world. Modular construction of the software in a series of discrete “snaps” means that the days of having to flash updates via hardware is now a thing of history (one that your host, sadly, can remember).
Lenovo doubles down on Linux support, Firefox 77 arrives with better extension permission handling, the Tor Browser’s latest release focuses on exposing features to users, Nextcloud Hub 19 includes security and collaboration improvements, and the Linux Professional Institute launches a new webzine.
With the new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM, new possibilities are opened and using a Pi as your desktop is now more possible than ever. In this video, I show off the new 8GB Pi with some first impressions of the new 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS.
From the low-end to the high-end we try out both ends of the Linux hardware spectrum. Wes reviews the latest XPS 13, and Chris shares his thoughts on the Pinebook Pro.
Plus a really cool new feature in Linux 5.7, and we get some answers to the recent GNOME patent settlement from the source.
First up, in our Wanderings, Erik gardens, Tony Hughes bakes cars, Moss throws everything up in the air, Tony Watts goes live, Joe fills his brain, Bo fights a snake, and Leo fixes an oven
Then, in the news, Gnome wins, Microsoft loses, Linux moves on
In security, GitLab goes fishing
I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.16 kernel.
All users of the 5.6 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.6.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 5.7 after seven weeks of development. The release announcement comes as a piece of exciting news as it brings a host of new features for the hardware manufacturers as well as the developers.
Let’s take a deep dive and look at what’s new in the Linux kernel 5.7 so that you can decide if you need to upgrade your Linux kernel on your PC. Typically, most of the end-users don’t always have to update their kernels manually unless they know what they are doing. Upgrading Kernel is not still a smooth process, and one must exercise caution before doing so.
Linux kernel head Linus Torvalds has trashed a patch from Amazon Web Services (AWS) engineers that was aimed at mitigating the Snoop attack on Intel CPUs discovered by an AWS engineer earlier this year.
The so-called 'Snoop-assisted L1 Data Sampling', or Snoop (CVE-2020-0550) attacks affecting a range of Intel Xeon and Core CPUs were disclosed in March.
AWS engineer Pawel Wieczorkiewicz discovered a way to leak data from an Intel CPU's memory via its L1D cache, which sits in CPU cores, through 'bus snooping' – the cache updating operation that happens when data is modified in L1D.
The improved DAX code led by Intel has landed in the Linux 5.8 kernel with EXT4 and XFS being the initial file-systems to make use of this improved direct access mode.
DAX is the direct access of files backed by persistent memory (such as Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory) without needing to be copied via the page cache. In avoiding the page cache with the DAX mode, it means avoiding an extra copy for reads/writes to the storage device and allows mapping the storage device directly (and efficiently) into user-space.
This improved DAX code led by Intel allows for the direct access mode to be enabled on a per-file/directory (inode) basis rather than just being flipped on/off for the entire file-system. EXT4 and XFS with Linux 5.8 are making use of the new DAX code with this kernel cycle. Via statx() user-space can query to find out the direct access state of a particular file.
The 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes have already landed into the progressing Linux 5.8 codebase.
When it comes to modern Arm architectural changes for Linux 5.8, this cycle it primarily revolves around two security features now being supported: Branch Target Identification and Shadow Call Stack.
The usual assortment of cryptography updates have landed within Linux 5.8.
The crypto updates for this summer 2020 kernel update include:
- The Jitter RNG has beem updated for SP800-90B compliance. This comes after a half-year of testing the SP800-90B support in user-space. SP800-90B is the NIST specification over entropy sources for random bit generation.
TPAUSE is the new Intel instruction for supporting lightweight power/performance optimized and improved power/performance states for sleeping until the timestamp counter (TSC) has reached a desired value. This new instruction with Intel's Tremont architecture will now be used by Linux 5.8+ on supported CPUs for an optimized power state while waiting on a delay event.
This Timed Pause (TPAUSE) instruction was outlined in more detail last month for making use of it where supported for more power efficient delays. That code outlined there has now been sent in for Linux 5.8 as part of the x86/timers update.
Intel low-power Tremont-based systems with the TPAUSE instruction initially include Lakefield mobile processors and Snow Ridge server/network processors.
About 207 patches for a new AMD GPU codenamed Sienna CiChlid have been committed to the AMD Radeon Linux Driver. Evidence from these patches suggests that Sienna CiChlid could, in fact, be Navi 21 aka Big Navi. The Sienna CiChlid Linux driver patches confirm support for VCN 3.0 and DCN 3.0 while a leaked slide indicates GDDR6 support and advanced clock and voltage control.
Mesa's Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver is now enabling the "zero vRAM" option for all VKD3D games -- Direct3D 12 titles running on Steam Play / Wine with this D3D12 to Vulkan layer -- in order to workaround various rendering bugs.
Doom Eternal (native Vulkan, but still requires this workaround), Metro Exodus, and various other DirectX 12 games that rely on VKD3D when running under Steam Play / Wine have been hitting "colorful graphical aberrations" with the RADV driver but the issues go away when setting RADV_DEBUG=zerovram. As such, that option is now being enabled by default when VKD3D is present.
Radeon Open Compute 3.5 (ROCm 3.5) is now available with a number of improvements but surprisingly still no GFX10/Navi support.
ROCm 3.5 was released today as the successor to ROCm 3.3 with no v3.4 milestone having been made public. Highlights of ROCm 3.5 include:
- The Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) has been deprecated in favor of the HIP-Clang compiler for compiling HIP programs. The HIP-Clang code has been seeing a lot of work upstreamed into LLVM/Clang os overall this should be good in the long-run.
  Besides disabling CPU security mitigations (not recommended if security is of importance), for those wanting to squeeze extra performance out of Intel CPUs like Comet Lake with the Core i9 10900K, loading Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux is one such way. Here is a look at the current performance that can be gained out of using the latest rolling-release Clear Linux on the i9-10900K in comparison to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
While Intel's Clear Linux team is investing less in the desktop to focus on cloud and server workloads, the distribution does continue maintaining its desktop ISO and more or less will still work fine on desktop systems like with the new Comet Lake S-Series. Just expect a more vanilla GNOME Shell experience with less customizations and focus on desktop packages/bundles.
I’m a big fan of desktop e-mail client Geary — it’s in our list of the best Ubuntu apps after all — so I’m particularly thrilled to hear that a “mobile version” is in the works.
Okay, okay: I say “mobile version” but what I more accurately mean is a mobile “face” for the app.
Y’know: a responsive interface designed to work well on a range of mobile devices, be it Linux phones like the Librem 5 or upcoming Linux tablets like the PineTab.
Alex, aka BabyWogue, uncovered work on an adaptive UI for Geary in code on the Geary repo on the Purism Gitlab instance. He built it and, as you’d expect, demoes the current state of progress in a video on his YouTube channel (which you can see embedded below).
  Our friends at Ardour have released Version 6.0, and we would like to offer them a huge congratulations! While the source code and their own builds were available on release day, many of you have been waiting for Ardour 6.0 to come to Ubuntu’s repositories.
Today, that day came. Ardour 6.0 has landed in Ubuntu Groovy Gorilla (future 20.10) and will be on Ubuntu Studio’s daily spins of Groovy Gorilla within 24 hours of this writing.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to backport Ardour 6.0 into Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, nor would we want to. This is because if we do, we might disrupt the workflow of people who are currently working with projects in 5.12 that are relying on its functionality and sound. Ardour 6.0 has an all-new Digital Sound Processor (DSP), and as such it may sound somewhat different.
Blender releases its latest major version 2.83 as a first-ever long term support release. That means you get the stability and consistency in your graphics project for a long two years.
Blender 2.83 is out today as the project's first long-term support release (LTS) while still introducing many new features and improvements for existing functionality.
Blender 2.83 LTS has more than 1,250 bug fixes, initial VR support via OpenXR, OpenVDB import capabilities, OptiX viewport denoising, and a new physics-based cloth brush.
OpenVDB is the file format developed by DreamWorks Animation for volumetric applications and also used by Maxwell Render, RenderMan, Houdini, Cinema4D, and many other applications. The new OpenVDB import works with the new volume object support.
Audacious music player 4.0.4 was released 2 days ago with further improvements to the new Qt5 UI. Ubuntu PPA updated for all current Ubuntu releases.
Yesterday the Tor Browser 9.5 was released. I am excited about this release for some user-focused updates.
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This is the first proof of concept built along with Freedom of the Press Foundation (yes, my team) and HTTPS Everywhere to help people to use simple names for onion addresses. For example, below, you can see that I typed theintercept.securedrop.tor.onion on the browser, and that took us to The Intercept’s SecureDrop address.
Tor Browser 10.0a1 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
10tons, developer of hits like Crimsonland and JYDGE have announced another new title currently in development. It's called Skeletal Avenger and you quite literally need to use your head. While they're also still working on DYSMANTLE, it seems they've been very busy.
One of the features that they're using to set Skeletal Avenger apart from other hack and slashes are the special moves, which involve taking off your head at throwing it around. It looks and sounds pretty hilarious. It's also what they're calling a reverse rogue-lite dungeon crawler, since you're coming from the depths to get revenge.
Developer The Shady Gentlemen and Top Hat Studios have launched a Kickstarter for the seriously intense looking SteamDolls - Order Of Chaos, and it's almost funded already.
The Kickstarter campaign only launched on June 2 and of their €30K goal, they already have over €20K. As we wrote about before, they full plan to support Linux with it and there's a great big "tux" icon on their Kickstarter page to show it off. Gameplay will mix together action and exploration, with a touch of stealth depending on how you choose to play through and a fair amount of blood. You play as The Whisper, voice by David Hayter (Solid Snake - Metal Gear).
You've played puzzle games that get you to do basic programming like move left, move right, stop at a wall and such but what about adding magic to a sword and watching it spin around a level? Enter Sword Slinger.
It's not much to look at being mostly black and white but it's a weirdly attention grabbing game. The idea is not only dumb but also totally hilarious. The levels have goblins spread out across them and you need to slay them all. To do so, you're given a sword and you have to program it with magical behaviours. What results from this can be very comical.
Making it Home, a game about building a great big vehicle full of crazy contraptions to get home sounds like a lot of fun. Oh, you're also a tiny ladybug.
Admittedly, I've been following this for quite some time but haven't posted about it until now. I really wasn't sure what to make of it. Early footage looked odd but I loved the idea. Nearly a year later after discovering it I took a look back with the latest trailer and wow does it look hilarious. Bounce around your vehicle, hoisting sails, squeezing bellows, spinning propellers and deal with a Rabbit and some flying carrots. I think you will like this.
The Cork, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter is a pixel-art 2D action-RPG where you play as a seriously tiny hero and you can now try out an early demo.
With a sprinkle of features from metroidvanias, platformers and seriously challenging combat, The Cork follows your return to a village after several months away to find it devastated by a mysterious plague. The Kickstarter campaign is currently looking like it will fail but the developer is determined to create the full experience anyway. In the latest update they mentioned it will just take longer.
If you already picked up the Humble Cities: Skylines Bundle or were on the fence about it, Humble recently announced more additions for you.
You can still grab the base game Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines - Deep Focus Radio for €£1, making it one of the best deal bundles we've seen for a while for such a great game.
The second tier of the bundle, where you need to pay more than the average is where it's expanded.
Inspired by Factorio, we have another base-building factory sim with shapez.io and the beauty of it is that it's open source under the GPL.
Tor Browser is fully installed (9.5) System upgrade from Debian Buster repos as of June 2, 2020 Update Linux Kernel to 5.4.19 Update Thunderbird to 68.8.0-1 Update VLC to 3.0.10 Update Youtube-dl to 2020.05.29 New add-ons: Ublock (Tor Browser), Enigmail (Thunderbird)
To the surprise—and likely consternation—of BSD fans everywhere, FreeNAS vendor iXsystems is building a new version of its core product, TrueNAS, on top of Debian Linux.
This week's TrueNAS Scale announcement builds on the company's March announcement that its commercial project TrueNAS and its community project FreeNAS would be merging into a common base. Effectively, all the NAS projects from iXsystems will be TrueNAS variants moving forward, with the free-to-use version being TrueNAS Core, the new Debian-based project becoming TrueNAS Scale, and the commercial project remaining simply TrueNAS.
The company is still being coy about the overall goals of the new project, with the major clue being that "SCALE" is used as an acronym. Morgan Littlewood, iXsystems' senior vice president of project management and business development, expanded on this to Ars a little further in an email exchange today...
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Lite 5.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Tekton is a powerful, yet flexible, Kubernetes-native open source framework for creating continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) systems. With Tekton, developers can build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers or on-premise systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.
As a hiking enthusiast, I had always dreamed of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Every time I drove up into the mountain for a day or weekend trip, I'd think of all the Appalachian Trail hikers and the kinds of people who embark on such a journey—the mental and physical exertion, the months away from family, friends, and work, the lack of those "real-life" creature comforts like hot showers and dry socks.
I finally got the opportunity to hike the Appalachian Trail in April of 2017, and over the course of four and a half months, I completed the entire 2200-mile trip. And though the experience was a very personal journey, I still found myself learning lessons that I felt applied to other areas of life and that I thought might be of use to others on their own personal and professional journeys. In particular, I thought about goals, and how there are ways to go about setting and pursuing them that set you up for success.
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I suppose it's easier to grasp in retrospect, but finally realizing a years-long goal of mine made me wonder what other goals I might have put off in my life because they seemed too big or I thought I wasn't enough. It's easy for us all to get discouraged by those kinds of thoughts, but it's also possible to shift your mindset and start thinking of any goal as achievable if you just start working toward it. After all, you can't hike 2200 miles if you don't take the first step.
The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is making progress as it looks to improve industries and society. But, while the technology continues advancing, the idea of “build for performance” will no longer suffice as an AI design paradigm. We are now in an era where AI must be built, evaluated, and monitored for trust.
IBM€® continues to serve as an industry leader in advancing what we call Trusted AI, focused on developing diverse approaches that implement elements of fairness, explainability, and accountability across the entire lifecycle of an AI application.
DXC Technology used Red Hat software to build a new data platform for BMW Group.
Devuan Developers are delighted to announce the release of Devuan Beowulf 3.0.0 as the project's new stable release. This is the result of many months of painstaking work by the Team and detailed testing by the wider Devuan community.
[...]
The next Devuan release, 4.0.0, is codenamed Chimaera. Repositories are already available for the adventurous to test.
Devuan GNU+Linux operating system is a result of a denial to accept the decision of choosing Systemd as the default init system in Debian GNU/Linux.
So, if you’re looking for a Debian GNU/Linux but without Systemd Init system, you must check out the latest release of GNU+Linux Devuan Beowulf 3.0.0. The new release is based on the Debian Buster 10.4 featuring Linux kernel 4.19.
Devuan GNU/Linux 3.0 has been released and it’s a major release for fans of software freedom, those who want to use the latest Debian GNU/Linux release without the systemd init system.
Dubbed “Beowulf,” Devuan GNU/Linux 3.0 is a stable release based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10.4 “Buster” operating system release and powered by the Linux 4.19 LTS kernel, but without using the systemd init system.
New features include support for the ppc64el (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian) architecture, new themes for the boot screen, display manager and desktop, as well as the implementation of eudev and elogind standalone daemons to replace aspects of monolithic systemd.
Debian 10 Buster is undoubtedly an impressive series of releases while Debian 10.4 being the latest.
And, with Devuan Beowulf 3.0, you’ll be happy to know that the release is based on the latest Debian 10.4 Buster update.
In case you aren’t aware of it, you may check out the official announcement post for Debian 10.4 Buster release to know more about it.
The developers of Linux Mint have expressed concern with Canonical's Snap Store and the way it is forced on Ubuntu users who try to install popular packages like the Chromium web browser.
Linux Mint has editions based on either Ubuntu or Debian, so Canonical's decisions have a direct impact on the open-source operating system. Linux Mint 20, expected this month, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The Snap store is an alternative to traditional deb packages for installing applications, and one which Canonical promotes as superior. The approach is different, using container technology, and you can find a full technical explanation here.
The Linux Mint distribution team put out another of their monthly updates, and this month was quite interesting.
In the past the Linux Mint team had been quite vocal about Snaps, the next-generation Linux packaging system backed by Ubuntu maker Canonical. Like Flatpak, they're trying to redefine how Linux users install packages. The main issue here it seems, is that Snaps are more locked-down and it pushes Ubuntu directly.
Mint's founder Clément Lefèbvre has said that with Linux Mint 20, they will push back firmly against Snaps. Currently in Ubuntu, which Mint builds off, Chromium is an empty package which installs a Snap (info) so the Mint team will ensure it tells you why and how to go and get Chromium yourself. Additionally, by default APT on Mint will not let snapd get installed but you will be able to do so manually.
NVIDIA users rejoice! NVIDIA Optimus is to get better Mint support, with their included applet being able to show your GPU and select what card to use from the menu.
When working with customers on snaps and Ubuntu Core one of the most asked questions I get in calls and at events in booth discussions is about building your code in-house.
Many companies simply do not allow their sources to leave the house …yet many of these customers have also used https://build.snapcraft.io before for their test projects …
Typically I point such customers to use lxd and snapcraft manually, or to just go with multipass … but then the question comes up “how do I build for my ARM IoT device” ?
There is no easy way to cross-build snaps so it usually boils down to some complex setup that has some ARM device in the back end doing the actual building and requires some more or less complex work to get it up and running.
As part of their work on ZFS support improvements for the in-development Ubuntu 20.10, Zsys 0.5 has been tagged and landing in the "Groovy Gorilla" repository for this ZFS daemon spearheaded by Canonical developers.
With Zsys 0.5, TRIM (autotrim) is now being enabled for users upgrading their system in order to enhance the solid-state drive performance. Zsys 0.5 also fixes a possible infinite loop garbage collection bug, snapshots will stop being taken when there is less than 20% free disk space, APT integration improvements for the automated snapshots, and various other changes.
The Station P1 Geek Mini PC is a compact computer with a 6-core, 64-bit ARM processor, 4GB of RAM, support for 4K video playback, a fanless design, and an aluminum alloy case. The system is designed to support Ubuntu or Android operating systems, as well as the Android-based Phoenix OS.
It’s made by Firefly, a company that crowdfunded a single-board computer with the same processor back in 2016. But this version has more memory and storage. It comes with a case (the original board did not). And it has a lower starting price.
Firefly’s $399 and up “Face X2” is a facial recognition device that runs Ubuntu or Android on an RK3399. The X2 has an 8-inch screen, binocular vision, IR thermometry, and card readers. Its Face-RK3399 mainboard sells for $129 on its own.
T-Chip Technology’s Firefly unit has launched a smartphone-like facial recognition device called the Face X2 that also offers a variety of card readers and sensors. Like Firefly’s recent Station P1 Geek Mini PC, it runs Ubuntu Linux or Android on Rockchip’s hexa-core Cortex-A72 and -A53 RK3399 SoC.
Metriful is launching a $39 “Sense” indoor air quality sensor module that works with the Raspberry Pi and other I2C-enabled systems. Other sensors include temperature, humidity, air pressure, light, and sound.
In recent months, much of the world’s population has spent a lot of time indoors, often crowded into small apartments. If the air quality has improved outside due to the pandemic, the same cannot always be said for the indoor realm.
Metriful has gone to Kickstarter launch a remarkably low-cost sensor board called Sense to help you find how much pollution has come inside and how much is being generated from within from HVAC, cooking, and manufactured goods. It also checks temperature, humidity, air pressure, light, sound, and even gives you a rough estimation of CO2. Metriful has posted example code and setup instructions for Raspberry Pi and Arduino on GitHub and offers additional documentation.
Effective today, Kulina, is the new executive director of the OpenPower Foundation, and his appointment follows the trend of gradually moving from a systems-centric view from the people at the top to one where people are more familiar with the open source software movement and how to build ecosystems. We had a chat about the OpenPower effort and what plans Kulina has to shape what the foundation does and to make Power more broadly implemented than it is currently today.
Star Trek is one of the most popular entertainment franchises of all time. It has been 54 since the Star Trek series was aired for the first time. But its popularity has never gone down. That’s why gaming companies take it as a great subject.
The recent announcement that the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) was authorized to conduct covert surveillance on protestors got me thinking about how one could protect oneself against that kind of mass surveillance both in general and specifically in the context of attending or documenting (or just being near) a protest. It made me particularly thankful that we designed the Librem 5 to have a cellular hardware kill switch and in this post I’m going to give a quick overview of Stingray technology, the implications of its use at a protest, how the use of aerial stingrays (aka “dirtboxes”) extends its mass-surveillance capabilities, and how the Librem 5’s hardware kill switches give you control over where, when and how you are surveilled.
Our customers are from all walks of life and as such face a wide range of threats ranging from every-day risks from using the Internet all the way to customers concerned about nation state actors. We develop our security measures with all this in mind and try to strike the right balance between strong security (like our anti-interdiction services and PureBoot) and convenience (hardware kill switches). We also believe strongly that the customer, not us nor anyone else, should be in control of their computers and in control of their privacy, and this along with our commitment to Free Software guides all of our design decisions.
  Open source BI tools provide a great value to the Linux users for managing their business. Business intelligence tools are popularly known as BI tools. It doesn’t matter whether it is a brick and mortar business organization or online business; they have to work with a lot of data for business intelligence. Business intelligence consists of some strategies for the data analysis of any business. Though it is not possible to process these huge piles of accumulated data manually. The open source software developers have created some computer programs for business intelligence.
  Open source tools are constantly changing the landscape of testing, and the community around these tools is bigger and more vocal than ever.
The first-ever State of Open Source Testing Survey examines the latest trends and developments across the software development industry. This survey received over 2,000 responses from practitioners across the behavior-driven development, functional testing, and load testing domains.
The survey reveals a great deal about software testing and how it uses open source, and based on the results, it's reasonable to expect an increased rate of adoption and deployment of open source tools.
  In general computing, an operating system is software that provides a computer's basic functions. It ensures that a computer detects and responds to peripherals (like keyboards, screens, mobile devices, printers, and so on), and it manages memory and drive space.
Even though modern operating systems make it seem that multiple programs are running at the same time, a CPU core can run only a single thread at a time. Each task is executed so quickly and in such rapid succession that the result appears to be massive multi-tasking. This is managed by a subroutine called a scheduler.
Today we release a big step in improving Collabora Online installability for home users. Collabora has typically focused on supporting our enterprise users who pay the bills: most of whom are familiar with getting certificates, configuring web server proxies, port numbers, and so on (with our help). The problem is that this has left home-users, eager to take advantage of our privacy and ease of use, with a large barrier to entry. We set about adding easy-to-setup Demo Servers for users - but of course, people want to use their own hardware and not let their documents out of their site. So - today we've released a new way to do that - using a new PHP proxying protocol and app-image bundled into a single-click installable Nextcloud app (we will be bringing this to other PHP solutions soon too). This is a quick write-up of how this works.
Mail; admin, wrote up the Nextcloud proxy pieces.
Nextcloud has launched a major new release of Nextcloud Hub tuned for remote collaboration of teams already employed in thousands of large and small enterprises across the globe. Dubbed “home office”, the release brings document collaboration to video chats, massively simplifies authentication and improves performance.
The 19th release of Nextcloud Hub features: Optional automatic logout, Password reuse limitations, Automatic account locking in response to failed login attempts and Password expiration features.
With this release, Nextcloud introduces password-less, secure login, where users can simply plug in a hardware key and get to work. Together with many other new security measures, being productive at home becomes a standard solution in organizations that have deployed Nextcloud Hub, the company said.
Collabora Online has been available as integrated solution for many productivity use cases for more than three years. However, feedback from home users and the community showed an increasing need for a much easier way to setup LibreOffice online. Users found configuring separate certificates, ports, docker images, and so on too complex, so Collabora created a totally new way to deploy Collabora Online using an innovative PHP proxy and a new custom protocol. With the release of NC 19, this work is ready to use: the new app “Collabora Online: built-in CODE server” can be installed and activated with a single click.
The new app is the same fully functional productivity solution that people already know, with the same feature richness, easy collaboration and excellent interoperability as a normal CODE – Collabora Online Development Edition – installation. Naturally it has its limitations in performance and scalability that are provided by a normal server installation. This makes it much easier for people to make the right choice, with an open standards based, solution built on fully open source code that respects their privacy. It has never been easier for users to work and collaborate on office documents online, on their own hardware.
Nextcloud GmbH announced today the general availability of Nextcloud Hub 19, a major release of their popular and open-source self-hosted on-premises collaboration platform.
With Nextcloud Hub 19, the file sharing and collaboration platform introduces much-needed features for people who are forced to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis, including passwordless authentication with support for security keys. This implementation not only makes Nextcloud logins painless, but also strengthens them through the use of hardware keys, and the first to be supported is Nitrokey.
New security measures are also in place to make it easier for administrators to secure the accounts of remote workers. These include password expiration features, password reuse limitations, automatic locking of account after multiple failed login attempts, as well as optional automatic logout.
We don’t know whether lockdown has anything to do with it, but how time flies!
We couldn’t believe it either – it’s four weeks since Firefox’s last regular security update.
If you want to check your version numbers, Firefox 76.0 is now replaced by 77.0; Firefox 68.8.0ESR is now 68.9.0ESR, and the Tor Browser, based on Firefox ESR, is now at version 9.5 and based on 68.9.0ESR.
As we’ve explained before but we’ll mention again because it’s useful to know, the first two numbers in the ESR version should add up to the leftmost number in the regular release.
So the current ESR is based on the feature set of Firefox 68, but with 9 updates’ worth of regular security fixes in there, so it is at 68+9=77 in security terms.
For organisational users of Firefox who are conservative about new software features but aggressive about installing security patches, the ESR version is an excellent compromise.
  When you run Gnome Wayland session on Fedora you get Firefox with Wayland backend by default. Make sure you have the latest Firefox 77.0 for Fedora 32 / Fedora 31.
You also need working VA-API acceleration and ffmpeg (valib) packages. They are provided by RPM Fusion repository. Enable it and install ffmpeg, libva and libva-utils.
The libqmi and libmbim libraries are every day getting more popular to control your QMI or MBIM based devices. One of the things I’ve noticed, though, is that lots of users are writing applications in e.g. Python but then running qmicli or mbimcli commands, and parsing the outputs. This approach may work, but there is absolutely no guarantee that the format of the output printed by the command line programs will be kept stable across new releases. And also, the way these operations are performed may be suboptimal (e.g. allocating QMI clients for each operation, instead of reusing them).
Since the new stable libqmi 1.26 and libmbim 1.24 releases, these libraries integrate GObject Introspection support for all their types, and that provides a much better integration within Python applications (or really, any other language supported by GObject Introspection).
The only drawback of using the libraries in this way, if you’re already using and parsing command line interface commands, is that you would need to go deep into how the protocol works in order to use them.
 We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.12.2!
This release of Qt Creator supports Qt for MCUs 1.2 and fixes various smaller issues.
The opensource version is available on the Qt download page under "Qt Creator", and you find commercially licensed packages on the Qt Account Portal. Qt Creator 4.12.2 is also available as an update in the online installer. Please post issues in our bug tracker. You can also find us on IRC on #qt-creator on chat.freenode.net, and on the Qt Creator mailing list.
Qt Quick Ultralite is designed to be a subset of the complete Qt Quick framework, its QML APIs aim to be directly compatible with its larger sibling even though the implementation is entirely different. Some key differences did however exist in Qt for MCUs 1.0 and 1.1. This release addresses the main ones, making it much easier to reuse QML code across all the platforms that Qt supports, from microcontrollers to mobile devices, to Desktop. If you are an experienced QML developer, that also means being able to jump into a Qt for MCUs project with minimal adaptation.
With the 1.5 release Qt Design Studio you can now try the flow mode feature. In this first part of a multi part blog post I want to cover the basic usage of the flow mode and how to get started, at the end we will look at the planned advanced features coming up in the next version of Qt Design Studio.
In the previous article, I discussed the benefits of C and C++ language restrictions in optimized code. In this second half, I present a variety of programming language exemptions and compiler extensions that developers can use to get around aliasing restrictions more or less safely. I will also discuss the common pitfalls of aliasing, both resulting from the extensions as well as from misuses of standard language constructs, and illustrate common problems these pitfalls might cause.
Besides e-mail, IRC chat, and Telegram, my mentor (Siqueira) and I are meeting every Wednesday on Jitsi, where we also use tmate for terminal sharing. We also use, together with Trevor, a spreadsheet to schedule tasks, report my daily activity, and write any suggestions.
[...]
My first project task is to find out why it is not possible to access debugfs files when running kms_cursor_crc (and fix it). Two things could help me solve it: learning about debugfs and dissecting kms_cursor_crc. To guide my studies, my mentor suggested taking a look at a patchset for the IGT write-back test implementation that CI reported a crash on debugfs_test for i915. For this investigation, I installed on another machine (an old netbook) a Debian without a graphical environment, and, accessing via ssh, I applied the patches and ran the test. Well, everything seemed to work (and the subtests passed). Perhaps something has been fixed or changed in IGT since the patchset was sent. Nothing more to do here.
The eleventh release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the fourteen-ish year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.
Perhaps this quote carries particular weight for me as I, too, was a first-year student in 1973-1974, though at a different institution—the University of British Columbia. Moreover, "back in those days," the introductory computer science course at UBC was taught in the second year using Waterloo FORTRAN with a bit of IBM 360 Assembler thrown in; nothing so exotic as Algol 68. In my case, I didn't encounter Algol 68 until my third year. Maybe this wait, along with experiences in other programming languages, contributed to my lifelong fascination with this underrated and wonderful programming language. And thanks to Marcel van der Veer, who has created a very fine implementation of Algol 68 called Algol 68 Genie, that is now in my distro's repositories, at long last, I've been able to explore Algol 68 at my leisure. I should also mention that Marcel's book, Learning Algol 68 Genie, is of great utility both for newcomers and as a refresher course in Algol 68.
I recently wrote about this topic having concluded that the best route for now was to use the malloc-free, but imprecise, conversion routines in the tinystdio alternative.
Here's a practical example of applying Template Haskell to reduce the amount of boilerplate code that is otherwise required. I wrote the below after following this excellent blog post by Matt Parsons. This post will be much higher-level, read Matt's blog for the gorier details.
To demonstrate how to utilize curl in a real-world scenario, here's a quick example of interacting with a social network platform. Mastodon is an open-source, federated social network and microblogging platform, and features a rich API to read, write, and manage your account. Other social networks may have similar features, and while the exact API commands differ from site to site, Mastodon provides a reasonable example of the process, and in just three simple steps.
If you want to try this process yourself, you must sign up for a Mastodon account (and if you do, be sure to follow the opensource.com bot to see a shell and curl-based bot in action).
In the previous tutorial in this series, you covered a lot of ground. You saw how to use re.search() to perform pattern matching with regexes in Python and learned about the many regex metacharacters and parsing flags that you can use to fine-tune your pattern-matching capabilities.
Want to be a badass at Python coding with PyCharm? Keep reading!
Over the last few years we have been collecting productivity tips, tutorials, and a lot more into a central, video-oriented resource, and now we are ready to introduce you to our brand new PyCharm Guide!
PyCharm 2020.1.2 is out now with fixes that will improve your software development experience. Update from within PyCharm (Help | Check for Updates), using the JetBrains Toolbox, or by downloading the new version from our website.
In this article, we'll be diving into the idea behind and Python implementation of Binary Search.
Binary Search is an efficient search algorithm that works on sorted arrays. It's often used as one of the first examples of algorithms that run in logarithmic time (O(logn)) because of its intuitive behavior, and is a fundamental algorithm in Computer Science.
In accordance with our security release policy, the Django team is issuing Django 3.0.7 and Django 2.2.13. These releases address the security issue detailed below. We encourage all users of Django to upgrade as soon as possible.
As the first edition, it’s aimed to people that already know a bit of Python (not necessarily developers). It describes how to automate common tasks. Things like work with different kind of documents, generating graphs, sending emails, text messages… You can check the whole table of contents for more details.
Along with my coauthor Bob, we are proud to release "Architecture Patterns with Python", which you can find out more about at cosmicpython.com.
The cosmic soubriquet is a little joke, Cosmos being the opposite of Chaos in ancient Greek, so we want to propose patterns to minimise chaos in your applications.
But the subtitle of the book is Enabling TDD, DDD, and Event-Driven Microservices, and the TDD part is relevant to this blog, and fans of the Testing Goat. In my two years at MADE and working with Bob, I've refined some of my thinking and some of the ways I approach testing, and I think if I were writing TTDwP again today, I might change the way I present some things.
Now there is a lot of technology conferences going online. Which is boon for anyone unable to attend it? Especially I wish to have a chance to go to PyCon US someday. To have a chat with a bunch of Python developers in the US and across the world.
Recently while I was listening on one of the podcast episodes on Talk Python to Me - Why Python is Slow?. That PyCon 2020 has happened with video recordings will be posted online on their Youtube Channel. I started to look for videos that are interesting to me. Which I believe will be useful for you. So here it goes!!!
Starting with version 3.2, Zato will use a new, dark theme for its auto-generated API documentation and specifications. Here is its preview.
Every time we read something about web development, the subject of NodeJS always comes up. But this is not bad, because it is quite an important technology that is the basis of many current applications. So if you want to develop web applications you probably need to install NodeJS on Ubuntu or another system.
NodeJS is a server-side implementation of javascript. It is event-driven and asynchronous so it is often used as a partial replacement for PHP.
NodeJS is cross-platform so installing it on Ubuntu is not difficult. However, it is always useful to know.
Programming language Rust has entered the top 20 of the Tiobe popularity index for the first time, but it's still five spots behind systems programming rival Go.
[...]
Paul Jansen, CEO of Tiobe software, said Rust's rise is because it's a systems programming language that is "done right".
"All the verbose programming and sharp edges of other languages are solved by Rust while being statically strongly typed. Its type system prevents run-time null pointer exceptions and memory management is calculated compile-time," said Jansen.
"So no garbage collection that suddenly kicks in. We have D, Lua and Julia trying to beat C and C++, but Rust seems to be the first one to come really close."
[...]
The rankings roughly line up with Stack Overflow's list of most commonly used languages, which were JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, Java, Bash/Shell/PowerShell, C#, PHP, TypeScript, C++, C, and Go.
Every month, we take a look back at our top ten most clicked topics. Last month was packed full of exciting news such as more info on Java 16 with its upcoming migration to Git and GitHub. Other top news include interviews on the programming language Julia, the visualization platform Grafana and the Node alternative Deno. In May, we also learned how to analyze big data using Java and saw C pass Java in the monthly TIOBE Index.
But many of the scientists quoted say the newspaper used their public comments but never spoke to them and have distanced themselves from Bild’s articles.
The row, which has roiled the German media for days, “makes open discourse harder”, said Christoph Rothe, a professor of economics at the University of Mannheim, who said the newspaper had quoted one of his tweets discussing the preprint without speaking to him.
The risk is that routine discussion about preprints among scientists is weaponised by tabloid newspapers as an “attack on the general integrity” of scientists such as Professor Drosten, he said.
Class of 2020, wherever you are, I had planned to address you on this graduation day. But how can I?
The school district cannot "claim to fight institutional racism" while aligned with the police€ department, said a board member.
A new report details how racial inequities in American society contributed to higher rates of unemployment within Black communities as compared to rates among whites during the economic downturn brought on by coronavirus.
The New York Times’ obituary of Larry Kramer (5/27/20) announces in its lead that Kramer “helped shift national health policy in the 1980s and ’90s,” but the rest of the obituary doesn’t explain this absolutely justified introduction.
On the morning of June 2, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 8,863 new coronavirus infections in the past day (172 fewer new cases than the day before) bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 423,741 patients.
When Shaquinda Burks came down with flu-like symptoms in mid-May, she braced for the worst. A 29-year-old single mother of two, she works in a nursing home in Oak Grove, La., a 20-minute drive from her home in rural Lake Providence. After several days of fever, aches, and chills, she tested positive for Covid-19; several days later, her 7-year-old daughter tested positive, too.
Companies receiving taxpayer dollars as part of President Donald Trump’s signature food aid program hired a longtime lobbyist to push back on criticism that the government is relying on unqualified contractors, such as an event planner.
“We’re working to take the stories of the impact this is having on farmers, processors, distributors and end users and making sure some positive aspects of the program, from both the economic and social standpoints, are out there too,” said the lobbyist and industry consultant, Dale Apley, who reached out to ProPublica on behalf of the contractors. “It’s not all just certain stories about certain companies that maybe shouldn’t have been awarded contracts.”
People already feel less willing to engage with contact tracers in the Twin Cities, according to someone with knowledge of the Minnesota COVID-19 response, who asked not to be named because they didn’t have permission to speak with the media. It’s hard to say yet if data would back up that assessment, they told The Verge, but anecdotally, people making calls feel like they’re meeting more resistance. Contact tracers identify people with a disease like COVID-19 and figure out who they recently interacted with to stop the virus from spreading. The Minneapolis health department did not respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft is crediting a developer after he accused the company of copying the core mechanics of its new Windows Package Manager. AppGet developer Keivan Beigi provided a detailed account of Microsoft reaching out with interest about his package manager, inviting him for interviews, and then ghosting him for months before unveiling its own package manager that he felt was inspired by his work.
Beigi claimed the “core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure” of Microsoft’s Windows Package Manager (winget) are all heavily inspired by AppGet. Microsoft only briefly mentioned AppGet once in its announcement, in a throwaway line that lists other Windows package managers. A variety of Windows package managers exist, and are used to automate the process of installing and updating apps.
Even though this review was exhaustive, don't get me wrong, most annoyances are minor except for the one deal-breaker: the typing experience. I have written this review with the laptop keyboard and it's been a continuous annoyance. Look, another irony. Apple suffered so much to fix their keyboard, yet it's still ruined by a comically large trackpad. The forest for the trees.
Point #4: For the first time since using Macs, I do not love this machine.
I searched through the terms and conditions and Samsung doesn’t address what happens if you finish paying for your phone but still want to keep Access. Speaking from experience, however, three years is a lot to expect from a Galaxy phone, so you’ll definitely want to upgrade before then. And if you do, Access really isn’t a bad deal. You’ll get the latest Galaxy hardware, an Office subscription that can be installed on five devices, and 1TB in OneDrive Cloud storage for a flat discounted monthly fee. And presumably, you’ll be able to lower your Access subscription to a lower tier at the time of upgrade.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the availability of its first ever bootcamp program, designed to take individuals from newbie to certified cloud engineer in six months.
The Linux Foundation Cloud Engineer Bootcamp bundles self-paced eLearning courses with certification exams and dedicated instructor support for a comprehensive and well-rounded educational program. The training begins with Linux at the operating system layer, and moves up the stack, covering DevOps, cloud, containers and more, providing all the knowledge needed to work as a cloud engineer. The specific courses and exams included, all of which are taken online, are...
Back when I was going to tech shows every few weeks, no matter what the show was about -- Linux, networking, open-source software development -- I could always count on one thing: Every, and I mean every, company was looking for cloud-savvy people to hire. Indeed.com found that between October 2015 and October 2019, cloud computing jobs increased by 55%. By 2022, Gartner predicts the public cloud services market alone will be three times bigger than overall IT services. But there isn't anything like enough cloud experts to meet the demand. That's where the Linux Foundation's new Cloud Engineer Bootcamp comes in.
The Linux Foundation has announced its first ever bootcamp program, designed to take individuals from newbie to certified cloud engineer in six months. The training begins with Linux at the operating system layer, and moves up the stack, covering DevOps, cloud, containers and more, providing all the knowledge needed to work as a cloud engineer.
The Linux Foundation Cloud Engineer Bootcamp bundles self-paced eLearning courses with certification exams and dedicated instructor support for a well-rounded educational program.
“A price point significantly below most bootcamps, coupled with industry-leading certifications and vendor-neutral training, makes this offering a tremendous value and provides an accessible option for individuals looking to break into the IT and cloud industries. At the same time, it will help close the talent gap and ensure adequate staffing for companies seeking cloud talent,” quipped Clyde Seepersad, SVP and general manager of training & certification at The Linux Foundation.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (java-11-openjdk, perl-Email-MIME, perl-Email-MIME-ContentType, and slurm), openSUSE (imapfilter, mailman, and python-rpyc), Red Hat (bind and firefox), SUSE (evolution-data-server, python, qemu, and w3m), and Ubuntu (python-django).
EFF has joined a broad coalition of civil liberties, civil rights, and labor advocates to oppose A.B. 2261, which threatens to normalize the increased use of face surveillance of Californians where they live and work. Our allies include the ACLU of California, Oakland Privacy, the California Employment Lawyers Association, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, and California Teamsters.
A.B. 2261 is currently before the Assembly Appropriations Committee. It purports to regulate face surveillance in the name of privacy concerns during this pandemic. In fact, as written, this bill will give a legislative imprimatur to the dangerous and invasive use of face surveillance, by setting weak minimum standards that allow governments and corporation to pay lip service to privacy without actually preventing the harms of face surveillance. The risk is greater now than ever. Government officials already are pushing to use pandemic management tools to surveil and control protests across the country against racism and police brutality.
Keep your mitts off cellphones if you don't have a warrant. That's the message at least one court is sending to law enforcement. A 2014 decision by the US Supreme Court introduced a warrant requirement for cellphone searches. Since then, cops mostly seem to be complying with the mandate. Of course, this half-assed analysis of mine rests solely on federal cases I've managed to catch drifting downstream in the internet flotsam, so it's far from conclusive. But -- unlike the SCOTUS decision erecting a warrant requirement for historic cell site location info -- there doesn't seem to be much gray area in the Riley decision for law enforcement to explore.
Testing VPN speeds has just gotten a whole lot easier with Top10VPN’s Speed Test Tool. Anyone can use the Top10VPN.com Speed Test Tool to view historical fastest VPN performance data across 12 of the most popular VPN companies. The speed test industry has historically had two major leaders: Fast.com and Speedtest.net and these are widely regarded as the industry standard for finding out your internet speed from home at any given moment. However, to use these speed tests to test your own internet speed when connected via VPN requires multiple steps and lots of time. That’s why the team at Top10VPN has created an automated tool that runs speed tests both with and without a VPN and stores the historical data to be displayed in a handy chart for users to view.
Despite these proposals, past crises have shown us that mass surveillance will not only fail to save us, but is practically guaranteed to have negative consequences for Black communities and communities of color. In order to safeguard the privacy and rights of the communities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19, it must be asked: Why is mass surveillance being proposed as one of the most viable solutions to the ongoing pandemic, and why aren't resources being channeled into our broken public health infrastructure instead? This is a particularly urgent question as police forces around the country mobilize against Americans standing up against police brutality, and President Trump urges governors to “track” and lock up protesters.
Google surreptitiously amasses billions of bits of information --every day -- about internet users even if they opt out of sharing their information, three consumers alleged in a proposed class action lawsuit.
“Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy,” according to the complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in San Jose, California.
The deal announced Wednesday marks Facebook’s first investment in an Indonesian company and is a major boost for the country’s largest startup, a ride-hailing giant that’s morphed into a provider of services like payments and meal delivery. Gojek is now backed by some of the world’s largest internet companies from Alphabet Inc.’s Google to China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd., helping it compete against Singapore’s Grab Holdings Inc.
The ruling found that the imagery and footage captured by drones flying at a low altitude was personal data to the extent that individuals filmed were identifiable. Consequently, the operation of drones by the police amounted to data processing, and the activity fell within the remit of the French data protection law.
On Thursday (May 28), China's rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), passed a new heavy-handed security law to crush dissent in Hong Kong. The next day, Chan joined 2,616 "people in the cultural and performing arts" and 110 cultural groups in signing a statement which read, "We fully understand the importance of safeguarding national security for Hong Kong and support the decision of the National People's Congress on Hong Kong's national security law."
A number of Hong Kong entertainers immediately expressed their opposition to the law, including singer-songwriter Anthony Wong Yiu-ming (é»Æèâ¬â¬Ã¦ËŽ), singer Denise Ho (ä½â¢Ã©Å¸Â»Ã¨Â©Â©), and musical artist Adrian Chow (Ã¥â¨åš賢), among others. In response, Chan led a group of other Hong Kong celebrities in expressing support for the law, including singer-actress Liza Wang (汪æËŽèÂÆ), actor Eric Tsang (æâºÂ¾Ã¥Â¿âÃ¥Ââ°), director Clifton Ko (é«Ëå¿â森), singer-actor Jordan Chan (éâ¢Â³Ã¥Â°ÂæËÂ¥), singer Alan Tam (èš詠麟), and entertainer Wong Cho-lam (çŽâ¹Ã§Â¥âèâÂ), along with others.
Zuckerberg’s decision to platform Trump’s inflammatory posts faced heavy internal opposition from employees last week. On Friday, Zuckerberg authored a blog post addressing the employees’ concerns, even though Facebook ultimately “decided to leave it up because the National Guard references meant we read it as a warning about state action, and we think people need to know if the government is planning to deploy force,” Zuckerberg wrote.
The protest group — conducting a virtual “walkout” of sorts since most Facebook employees are working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic — was one of a number of clusters of employees pressing Facebook executives to take a tougher stand on Mr. Trump’s posts.
Inside the company, staff members have circulated petitions and threatened to resign, and a number of employees wrote publicly about their unhappiness on Twitter and elsewhere. More than a dozen current and former employees have described the unrest as the most serious challenge to the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, since the company was founded 15 years ago.
The employees reportedly added a message to their emails saying they were out of the office in a show of protest of Facebook's decision not to intervene over Trump's post.
The public pushback from employees comes after growing scrutiny of Facebook's inaction. Last week, Twitter for the first time affixed a fact-check label to multiple Trump tweets about mail-in ballots and days later put a warning label on a tweet from Trump about the protest, in which he warned: "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." While identical posts appeared on Facebook, the company chose to do nothing.
"I've been struggling with how to respond to the President's tweets and posts all day. Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. "But I'm responsible for reacting not just in my personal capacity but as the leader of an institution committed to free expression."
Trump and Zuckerberg spoke on the phone Friday, a source familiar with the call previously told CNN.
But notable as that letter was, it still adopted the form that dissent has almost always taken at Facebook: vigorous internal debate. (One source told me the internal furor over Joel Kaplan’s public support of controversial Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination hearings had been markedly more intense.) What’s different about Monday’s walkout is that the protests were public first — and posted about on a rival social network, to boot. For Facebook workers, the choice to discuss their concerns on Twitter was remarkably effective, for two reasons. One, Twitter is where journalists live, and so the posts were guaranteed to generate coverage. Two, sentiment about Facebook on Twitter is generally hostile, so current employees’ criticisms of the company got massive distribution through retweets.
The walkout was one of several recently that occurred at major tech companies due to worker conflict with management. Amazon employees called for a walkout in April over unsafe working conditions. Just a few weeks ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk fomented employee discontent when he violated county orders to reopen his luxury car factories in the Bay Area.
Are you a Google Chrome user? Have you heard that a proposed class action lawsuit filed against Google is accusing the company of violating federal wiretap laws by tracking users’ online activities even when they’re in Incognito mode?
The complaint says the tech giant uses tools like Google Analytics, Google Ad Manager, smartphone and PC applications, as well as website plug-ins, to monitor users even if they don’t click on Google-supported ads. It also says that “millions” of users who went online in Chrome’s Incognito mode since June 1st, 2016 have likely been affected.
“Google tracks and collects consumer browsing history and other web activity data no matter what safeguards consumers undertake to protect their data privacy,” the lawsuit reads. The plaintiffs argue that by tracking users’ info when they’re in Incognito, Google has been intentionally deceiving customers into believing that they have control over the information they share with the company. According to Reuters, the lawsuit is seeking $5 billion in damages or at least $5,000 per affected user for violations of federal wiretapping and California privacy laws.
When she and daughter Keana first set foot on Canadian soil last year, Vanessa Rodel couldn’t stop smiling, despite just getting off a 15-hour flight.
Rodel had left behind an increasingly precarious life in Hong Kong, where she helped hide U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, then faced years of alleged harassment for her role in one of the biggest news stories of the decade.
Accepted as a refugee by Canada, she looked forward to a new existence in Montreal.
“We are safe and free,” she declared then.
Rodel is still hopeful for her and Keana’s future, but a year later has come to realize that life in her new haven can be a challenge, too.
She has toiled to learn a new language — French — dealt with some of urban Canada’s chilliest winter weather and then had to single-parent in the midst of a pandemic that ground the economy to a halt.
COVID-19 hit as her sponsor’s financial obligations ended, though the cash-strapped not-for-profit managed to extend her allowance for an extra two months.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
Mobs are unruly, headless things. The message is the action. The platform is often violence. But what is happening across the United States cannot simply be labelled as a looting-leads-to-shooting episode. It ranks as another chapter of enraged despair and untidy opportunism.
"It is asinine for a rich man hiding in a bunker to ask these troops, most of whom probably signed up to pay for access to college and healthcare, to take actions that will inevitably lead to more violence and haunt them for the rest of their lives."
The signs say Black Lives Matter.€ Yet the very people who are supposed to protect us too often, in too many places, don’t seem to agree.
A 53-year-old Black business owner in Louisville, Kentucky, was killed by police gunfire early on Monday morning during protests in that city, as law enforcement attempted crowd control in the neighborhood near his barbecue business.
Unhinged right-wing Venezuelan opposition leaders point to Max Blumenthal’s t-shirt as evidence of a devious plot by the government of President Nicolas Maduro to spawn chaos across the US.
The sight of burned police stations and looted corporate shopping centers sent right-wing media into a tailspin as protests escalated the weekend of May 29. Those media and right-wing politicians quickly concocted a narrative that deemed anti-fascists (or “antifa”) the enemy of choice. The aggressive protest tactics were said to be the work of “outside agitators,” a common theme used to delegitimize protests. Instead of understanding that the vast majority of protesters were taking up aggressive protests in their own communities out of a legitimate anger over police killings of Black people, the method for explaining away the civil unrest was to blame it on anti-fascist activists.
As thousands in Los Angeles continue to protest against police brutality and face mass arrests, Mayor Eric Garcetti is facing criticism for increasing the budget for the Los Angeles Police Department. Organizers have called on the City Council to enact a People’s Budget that slashes money for police and invests in services for the community instead. “We have created a system that overrelies on law enforcement and prioritizes their money, their budget, their needs over everything else,” says Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Reform L.A. Jails. “Now is the time that we redirect resources back into our communities.”
As President Donald Trump threatens to invoke the Insurrection Act to use aspects of the U.S. military against Americans involved in the demonstrations in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, polling so far shows that most people are not happy with how he has handled the situation.
Australia wasn’t always a lapdog of the United States, writes John Pilger.
In the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, another unarmed Black man crying out “I can’t breathe!” as he was strangled in public, the ethical question of re-posting the videos and pictures of the murder have arisen in social media. This also occurred in April during the initial revelations surrounding the vigilante murder of Ahmaud Marquez Arbery in Georgia, a 25 year old jogger who was chased by several civilians in a pickup truck and gunned down in cold blood.
Minneapolis could not have happened at a worse time for the US elites. While violence perpetrated against African Americans by White police officers has happened a number of times before, its occurrence right in the midst of a huge health emergency that has already claimed more than a 100,000 lives and a related massive economic disaster that has robbed 30 million people of their jobs, is truly unprecedented. The mayhem and chaos accompanying the violence have spread to a number of other cities right across the United States of America.
As a historic week-long uprising against police violence continues and curfews are in place across the United States, President Trump has declared himself “the president of law and order” and threatened to send thousands of heavily armed soldiers into the streets. “President Trump’s speech almost amounted to a declaration of war against Americans,” says Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. We also speak with William Arkin, longtime reporter on the military, who notes Trump is getting “no pushback” from Defense Department officials.
Two autopsies have agreed George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police was a homicide. “I don’t think that most of us are surprised that the county medical examiner tried to find a reason related to why George Floyd died that distanced it from law enforcement’s role,” says Nekima Levy Armstrong, civil rights attorney, activist, founder of the Racial Justice Network and former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. She also discusses the local history of police accountability: “What this does is illustrates the corruption that exists within Hennepin County, where you have law enforcement working collaboratively with the County Medical Examiner’s Office, working collaboratively with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, and ultimately resulting in people not being able to get justice when they are killed by police. This happens time and time again.”
Malians began fleeing to Burkina Faso in 2012 after Tuareg rebels and Islamist militants capitalised on a military coup in the capital, Bamako, to capture vast swathes of land in the desert north.
A French-led offensive dislodged the jihadists from several towns, but they soon regrouped in Mali’s hinterlands, before pushing south and spilling across the border into Burkina Faso – now the epicentre of a regional crisis.
But concerns remain as to how China will react to an inability by African countries to repay loans. Djibouti, for example, owes foreign lenders an amount equal to about 80 percent of its gross domestic product. In Kenya, that figure is 61 percent. Both countries have major ports financed by China. Observers worry that as debt mounts, projects will go unfinished, or Chinese lenders will take control of African infrastructure in lieu of repayment.
A Twitter account that tweeted a call to violence and claimed to be representing the position of "Antifa" was in fact created by a known white supremacist group, Twitter said Monday. The company removed the account.
Before it emerged the account was run by white supremacists, Donald Trump Jr., President Donald Trump's son, pointed his 2.8 million Instagram followers to the account as an example how dangerous Antifa is.
The fake account was created as President Donald Trump tweeted that he would label Antifa a domestic terror group, though experts say such a move would be unconstitutional. It would also be impossible, since there is no centralized Antifa organization, though some local chapters affiliated with the movement are well-organized.
Here is a look at the extremist movements suspected of involvement in the protests: [...]
On Friday, the CIB announced the following six persons are being investigated for "malicious distribution of untruthful information on Facebook": Chi Ying Leung, Nancy Leung, Siu Ted Ted, Ken Lee, Zhi San Gao, and Ming So. The bureau alleges that these individuals posted the fake news on Facebook groups, such as "é¦â¢Ã¦Â¸Â¯Ã¦Â¼Â¢Ã¥Â¥Â¸Ã¦Â´Â»Ã¥â¹â¢Ã¨Â§â¬Ã¥Â¯Å¸Ã¥Â°Âçµâ 2.0" and "é¦â¢Ã¦Â¸Â¯Ã§ÂªÂçâ¢Â¼Ã¤Âºâ¹Ã¤Â»Â¶Ã§Ëâ æââ¢Ã¥Ââ¬."
The false story included a photo taken on Sept. 25, 2018, of a drill held by Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) police rehearsing the subduing of a violent passenger. The suspects then wrote fictitious captions, such as "Taiwan black police taking away Hong Kong refugee from Taipei Main Station."
The #dcblackout hashtag, which trended in the U.S. on Monday, was first tweeted by an account that had three followers. But others tweeted it roughly 500,000 times within nine hours of the initial post, according to the Washington Post. The hashtag was associated with false claims that authorities had blocked communications to hinder protesters, the Post reported.
The Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit priest and author, said in a statement, "Using the Bible as a prop while talking about sending in the military, bragging about how your country is the greatest in the world, and publicly mocking people on a daily basis, is pretty much the opposite of all Jesus stood for."
Other misinformation and misleading claims spread across Twitter on Sunday night and into Monday related to the protests.
Some of the posts feature a screenshot of a tweet by a fake antifa Twitter account that Twitter said was created by the white nationalist group Identity Evropa, attempting to drum up fear of looting in residential and suburban areas. The false antifa tweet was boosted in part by Donald Trump Jr., who posted a screenshot of the tweet to his Instagram account. Other rumors falsely warn of antifa members' being "bused in" to towns in Idaho.
In 2019, an area of primary forest the size of a football pitch was lost every six seconds, the University of Maryland study of trees more than 5 metres says.
Brazil accounted for a third of it, its worst loss in 13 years apart from huge spikes in 2016 and 2017 from fires.
However, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo both managed to reduce tree loss.
Meanwhile, Australia saw a sixfold rise in total tree loss, following dramatic wildfires late in 2019, .
As well as storing massive amounts of carbon, primary, tropical rainforests, where trees can be hundreds or even thousands of years old, are home to species such as orangutans and tigers.
Munoz says he takes such pictures to raise awareness of light pollution and hopes people can work together to illuminate cities in a more efficient way. “The night sky is a natural heritage that all citizens deserve to enjoy regardless of where they live, and therefore it must be protected from pollution, just like oceans or the atmosphere,” he says.
Africa has the greatest diversity of mammals in the world, and its climate is warming up faster than in the rest of the world. 'With rising temperatures, the window of time in which herbivores can avoid both the heat and the animals that prey on them is increasingly small,' Veldhuis explains. It is cool enough to graze at night, but if herbivores live in an area with lions – which are also mainly active during the cool nights – they are forced to forage for food at hotter times of the day. This discovery means that climate change affects not only individual species but also the relationships between species.
[...]
In the short term, it is easier for mammals to adapt their behavior to the changing climate than their bodies. These mammals would normally migrate to cooler areas, but they often face human barriers such as fences. 'The problem is that we do not yet understand the consequences of the shrinking window of time,' says fellow researcher Joris Cromsigt. Not all herbivores are equally affected, for instance: 'Some species, gemsbok for instance, should be able to cope with the heat and thus avoid lions, but the higher temperature could have a significant effect on other species such as zebra.'
A fearsome cyclone, other climate extremes, Covid-19 and now locust swarms – Indians may think life could hardly get worse.
"This president and this administration are at war with justice and well-being—particularly for the communities that lack these fundamentals the most."
It’s become a trite but true saying the definition of insanity is doing the same acts over and over yet expecting different results. This is definitely the case with timber industry lobbyists stridently arguing for increased logging and firefighting on public lands.
Striking a match: Top: Members of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and of Local 1199 of the Retail Drug Employees Union picket Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City in 1959. Bottom: Striking Chicago public school teachers and their supporters march in Chicago in 2019. (top: Bettmann ; bottom: Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have become the public faces of the $3 trillion federal coronavirus bailout. Behind the scenes, however, the Treasury’s responsibilities have fallen largely to the 42-year-old deputy secretary, Justin Muzinich.
A major beneficiary of that bailout so far: Muzinich & Co., the asset manager founded by his father where Justin served as president before joining the administration. He reported owning a stake worth at least $60 million when he entered government in 2017.
Someone needed to check on Leonard Graves. The 57-year-old lived alone in a senior building on Chicago’s North Side, and no one had seen him in at least two days.
Volunteers called community ambassadors usually checked on fellow residents in the Edith Spurlock Sampson Apartments, a 394-unit Chicago Housing Authority complex. But after the coronavirus began spreading in Chicago, leaders say the CHA suspended the program.
As the George Floyd Uprising intensified in Minneapolis on Friday and Saturday, President Trump asked Acting Defense Secretary Mark Esper for options to deploy federal troops to the city. He signaled to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, “We have our military ready, willing and able if they ever want to call our military, and we can have troops on the ground every quickly.” Military Police soldiers from Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Fort Drum (New York), Fort Carson (Colorado), and Fort Riley (Kansas) were ordered to be ready to deploy for crowd and traffic control duties, if the state National Guards could not quell the unrest.
Protests quickly broke out nationwide following the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, which was caught on video and quickly went viral.
In his infinite ignorance, Donald Trump has invited world leaders to the White House for a face-to-face meeting at the end of June.
Russia’s new prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, is fanatically obsessed with his own reputation and image in the media, multiple people who know him have told Meduza. Special correspondent Farida Rustamova explains how Mishustin spent a decade working meticulously and tirelessly to craft his public profile as an effective manager, culminating in his appointment as prime minister.€
Following the killing of a man in Yekaterinburg by National Guard officers, Russian libertarian activists have mobilized a new campaign against police brutality using the English-language slogan “Russian Lives Matter” — a phrase deliberately modeled on “Black Lives Matter,” the movement against violence and systemic racism towards black people that began in the United States. Meduza looks at the incident that sparked this idea and how it’s reverbated so far in Russia.
The IG had Pompeo in his sights. An IG’s independence is required— Or was. Pompeo needed just a word With Trump to get that pesky fellow fired.
"What Trump did tonight is going to be remembered as a significant and grave moment in this horror of an era we are living through."
God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.
"This was the same response in Nazi Germany."
"AG Bill Barr's behavior has been deeply problematic since he was sworn in, but now it has become truly dangerous. He needs to resign."
By having no constructive response to any of the monumental crises now convulsing America, Trump has abdicated his office.
The corporate media and corporate politicians are paralyzed with indecision.€ Which fake myth do we adhere to?€ “Black people burning down their own neighborhoods” or “outside agitators”?€ What if it’s both, and more…?
Last Friday, on the PBS News Hour’s weekly review with Mark Shields and David Brooks, Judy Woodruff posed a question about Joe Biden’s response to what was happening in Minneapolis. David Brooks, the New York Times’ conservative columnist, visibly shaken by the events of the week declared: “I want to see more outrage. I want to see outrage at a president who’s grown more contemptible by the day, including his tweets about what happened in Minneapolis. I want to see somebody addressing the underlying issues that lead to the inequalities in places like Minneapolis and all around the country. I just want to see a more aggressive Democratic challenger, who’s really got broad arguments for collective change, structural change. I want to see a candidate who is as angry as he ought to be, to be honest.”
Late yesterday afternoon, a president who couldn’t spell “Constitution” if you spotted him the “onsti” and the “ution” appears to have gestured toward inciting a second civil war. I believe it is safe to say that Donald Trump has grown into his office at long last, much the way a tumor will grow in the lung after years of breathing factory smoke. The authoritarian is fully revealed, although he continued to dance along the line rather than cross it entirely.
President Donald Trump’s pledge Monday evening to deploy the full force of the U.S. military against demonstrators protesting the killing of George Floyd — and the president’s authorization of police violence against peaceful protesters to clear the way for a photo-op — amounted in the eyes of lawmakers, rights groups, and commentators to “declaration of war” against the U.S. public that must result in Trump’s removal from office.
"Frankly," said a representative for Engel's progressive challenger Jamaal Bowman, "we couldn't have made the case more clearly ourselves that after 31 years, it's time for change."
They have destroyed our capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state.
Latest gaslighting efforts comes less than one day after order to have nonviolent civil rights protesters swept off the streets of Washington, DC in a volley of rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash grenades.
The president of the United States declared war on America on Monday night.
"This appears to be grossly unjustified use of a dangerous chemical weapon on protesters and raises serious human rights concerns under international law," the civil liberties group said.
"Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence," the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde said of the president.
Enough. It is time to remove the president from the private platforms he uses to undermine the public institutions he is sworn to protect, starting with Twitter and Facebook. And it is time to remove anyone else in power who facilitates the president’s vile and deadly agenda.
We are now far beyond the petty fight over “conservative bias.” Who cares? Right-wing complainants have already declared social media platforms irreparably biased, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Fox News and other right-wing media organizations thrive on Facebook and Twitter and routinely see their messages flourish there. The charge of bias has always been a hoax perpetrated by demagogues who find profit in partisanship. Besides, the president and his allies have already accused the platforms of censoring them. They will not preserve any good faith by continuing to broadcast his hateful messages.
Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., was not happy. In fact, she was outraged. “I’m outraged,” she told the Washington Post. “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.”
Here’s what she’s talking about: [...]
There is only one truth left to wrestle with: It does not matter if what Trump is doing is legal. It does not matter if what he’s doing is constitutional. It doesn’t matter, because nobody is going to stop him.
We had our chance to prosecute him, but Robert Mueller decided that the Office of Legal Counsel’s suggestion that the president could not be prosecuted while in office was an ironclad principle. Remember that? Remember when Mueller testified that he’d found 10 instances of obstruction of justice, and nobody did anything because Mueller looked really old on television?
It was essentially a three-part violation. In being generally unsupportive of the protests against the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, Trump is in tension with a core democratic value — America taking additional steps to ensure people are treated equally, no matter their race. Trump’s decision to break up the protest then subverted one of America’s core democratic values, the right to peacefully protest. Finally, by involving the National Guard and senior military officials in the action against the protesters, Trump also disregarded the democratic value that the military and police not be used for political purposes.
On May 28, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship.” From the title and the document respectively we can draw to two lessons.
When we last talked about the Geo Group, a company making hundreds of millions of dollars running private prisons, one of its executives was attempting to improve the company's reputation by constantly removing all the dirty from the Wikipedia page about the company. In trying to do this, of course, the company actually amplified the controversies listed on Wikipedia and, having been caught trying to scrub the internet of its own sins, found itself in headlines as a result. At present, the Wikipedia page still lists those controversies, but more on that in a moment.
Google has removed an app called "Remove China Apps" from its Android Play Store.
The app, published by Indian developer OneTouch AppLabs, advised Android users of the nation of origin for all apps installed on their smartphone and offered to delete them. The company says the app was downloaded a million times in ten days, a fact supported by its cached Google Play page. But OneTouch AppLabs said Google took issue with the app and it's no longer available.
After removing Chinese apps, the program delivered this cheery notification.
We can't have nice things. We can't even have mediocre things. And, in the midst of a global pandemic, we can't even have basic things. The Bangladesh government hasn't exactly discovered the power of censorship. The government and this power are already acquainted. But with a novel virus in the air, the government has discovered it can silence speech more effectively.
The targeting, harassment, shooting and arrest of working journalists by police over the last several days is having a significant — maybe even profound — effect on the coverage of the mass demonstrations over the death of George Floyd.
It's a shift from watching the protests through the eyes of the police to watching the police through the eyes of the protesters.
It's a shift from seeing the police primarily as sources and protectors to seeing them as subjects and aggressors.
In these examples journalists have been shot with rubber bullets, targeted with stun grenades, tear gassed, physically attacked, pepper sprayed and arrested.
Although in some incidents it is possible the journalists were hit or affected accidentally, in the majority of the cases we have recorded the journalists are clearly identifiable as press, and it is clear that they are being deliberately targeted. This pattern of violence against journalists is replicated in several cities, but appears most intense in Minneapolis.
A selection of these incidents can be found below.
“Although in some incidents it is possible the journalists were hit or affected accidentally, in the majority of the cases we have recorded the journalists are clearly identifiable as press, and it is clear that they are being deliberately targeted.”
Over the weekend, President Trump used his bully pulpit to openly fantasize about the Secret Service siccing “vicious dogs” on demonstrators outside the White House who were protesting police brutality following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota last week. Trump’s calls for violence against protesters reflect the anti-Blackness of economic policies he and the GOP have relentlessly pursued since 2016, including recent attempts to destroy public sector jobs and to make discrimination in lending nearly impossible to catch.
Actor Alexander Filimonenko recently starred in a homophobic propaganda video titled “Why amendments to the Constitution are important.” He then opposed voting in favor of those very same amendments.
As protests in the United States show little sign of slowing, Steven Oliver wonders how many people actually know what is happening, and more important why it is happening.
June 2nd is recognized around the world as the chosen date of countless direct actions and protests in support of the sex workers' rights movement. Since its inception nearly 45 years ago, International Whores Day reclaims a sometimes derogatory word to set the tone for a day of unrest and political action. June also marks International LGBTQ+ Pride month, and this is the first in a series of blog posts that aims to highlight different facets within the broader LGBTQ+ community.
In 2018, the backdrop for many€ International Whores Day€ actions were to raise awareness around SESTA/FOSTA, a bad bill that turned into a worse bill and then was rushed through votes in both houses of Congress. Sex work advocacy organizations warned how dangerous that bill would be in undermining 47 U.S.C. €§ 230, originally enacted as part of the Communications Decency Act, and thus silencing online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users. It ultimately passed, and unfortunately the grim predictions those advocacy organizations laid out were proven right.
Beyond Prisons hosts Brian Sonenstein and Kim Wilson sit down with Anthony Williams to talk about co-founding the hashtag “#MasculinitySoFragile,” leveraging social capital online, how their political consciousness evolved over time, and overcoming isolation through reading.
We recorded this episode in early March just as the pandemic was gaining steam. The subsequent weeks have forced us all to contend with a new reality that intensifies our vulnerability and underscores the need for organizing and collective liberation.
In a brutal and devastating way, the Covid-19 pandemic is revealing the many stark and deep inequalities at the heart of our corporate capitalist political economic system. In the United States, for instance, every passing day brings new evidence of how structural and institutional racism has left people of color disproportionately vulnerable both to the disease itself and the economic effects of the efforts to contain it.
As thousands in Los Angeles continue to protest against police brutality and face mass arrests, Mayor Eric Garcetti is facing criticism for increasing the budget for the Los Angeles Police Department. Organizers have called on the City Council to enact a People’s Budget that slashes money for police and invests in services for the community instead. “We have created a system that overrelies on law enforcement and prioritizes their money, their budget, their needs over everything else,” says Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and Reform L.A. Jails. “Now is the time that we redirect resources back into our communities.”
The assault on protesters came late Monday as President Trump declared himself "your law and order president" in an address to the nation. Moments later, Trump crossed the park for a photo shoot at St. John's Episcopal Church, which had been damaged during earlier protests.
"I didn't see any provocation that would warrant munitions, especially for the purpose of moving the president across the street," Bowser told reporters Tuesday.
Watching people slam the protesters on Twitter for breaking curfew and bringing their kids to an event, I felt like I’d been at a different gathering. The scenes of arrests and tear gas had happened — and I’m glad it was all documented and shared — but they were a small part of the four-hour demonstration. Online, they dominated the news. People were still posting about the peaceful protest. Their videos just weren’t getting as many views.
And there is a long track record that shows how rarely police officers are arrested, much less convicted, when they kill somebody in the line of duty. In 2014, amid the furor over the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, I reported for Talking Points Memo on new research that analyzed homicides committed by law enforcement. The authors found that from 2006 to 2011, 41 police officers were arrested for murder or negligent homicide in the line of duty — while, over the same period, more than 2,700 “justifiable” homicides were committed by police officers.
So either US law enforcement are almost always justified in the most extreme use of force, or there are systemic obstacles to holding police officers accountable when they kill one of their constituents.
"Let's stop thinking that our voice don't matter and vote — not just the president, vote for the preliminaries," Floyd asserted as mourners applauded. "Vote for everybody. Educate yourself, educate yourself. Don't wait for somebody else to tell you who's who; educate yourself and know who you're voting for. And that's how we're going to hit them, because it's a lot of us. It's a lot of us. And we're still going to do this peacefully."
But just because there’s no data about protests that can be easily compared in a chart doesn’t mean we’re bereft of information, said Pat Gillham, a professor of sociology at Western Washington University. There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate “abrasive policing tactics” and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police.
Experts say the following decades of research have turned up similar findings. Escalating force by police leads to more violence, not less. It tends to create feedback loops, where protesters escalate against police, police escalate even further, and both sides become increasingly angry and afraid.
In addition to the proceeds from June 19th, Bandcamp will be allocating an additional $30,000 per year “to partner with organizations that fight for racial justice and create opportunities for people of color,” Diamond added.
And what is class solidarity? Simply put, it is the tendency for people of a certain economic or social class to feel affinity for and share interests and political goals with members of their own class. Class solidarity is the glue that holds segments of society together, and can be a powerful tool for organizing and defending our communities. Broadly speaking, there is the working class — the workers who sell their labor in order to survive, known in Marxist theory as the proletariat — and the ruling class, or bourgeoisie, the bosses and managers who profit off of workers’ labor.
So we've noted repeatedly how AT&T's entry into the video space hasn't gone according to plan. First, the company spent so much money on mergers ($150 billion for Time Warner and DirecTV) in recent years, it effectively crippled itself with debt. Second, the company passed that merger debt on to most of its customers in the form of price hikes, which defeated the whole point of "cutting the TV cord." Third, AT&T launched so damn many confusing streaming brands simultaneously, it even confused the company's own employees.
Google seems to want to make really clear that Fuchsia is diametrically the opposite of Android when it comes to updates. They don’t mince words here, and it might as well read “everything Android is not”:
Fuchsia works by combining components delivered in packages. Fuchsia packages are designed to be updated independently or even delivered ephemerally, which means packages are designed to come and go from the device as needed and the software is always up-to-date, like a Web page.
Fuchsia aims to provide drivers with a binary-stable interface. In the future, drivers compiled for one version of Fuchsia will continue to work in future versions of Fuchsia without needing to be modified or even recompiled. This approach means that Fuchsia devices will be able to update to newer versions of Fuchsia seamlessly while keeping their existing drivers.
Over the last few months, it's been weird to watch how any time we point out that there's no actual evidence of anti-conservative bias in the content moderation practices of social media, some in our comments absolutely lose their shit. One commenter, has been on a rampage in just the last week to declare me an evil liar for refusing to admit the "obvious" fact that there's anti-conservative bias in moderation. However when I and others ask these people for that evidence, it never seems to show up.
The newspaper added, however, that some employees had claimed he was acting out of fear of what Republicans might do if Facebook acted otherwise.
In a joint statement, the heads of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Color of Change said they were "disappointed and stunned by Mark's incomprehensible explanations for allowing the Trump posts to remain up."
As Facebook employees stage a digital walk-out and make their thoughts known about the social media giant’s choice to not intervene in any way on “political posts”, especially those of President Donald Trump, some have called for the newly-created Oversight Board to step up and force a change in Facebook. While the official answer is that they can’t start (because supposedly they haven’t given out laptops yet), the real and very simple reason why the Facebook Oversight Board won’t get involved is because it can’t. It’s not created to function that way, it’s not staffed for something like this, and ultimately, due to its relationship with Facebook, anything it would say on this matter right now would be taken in an advisory capacity at best. Facebook, understandably not wanting to actually give any of its power away, played confidence games with the idea of external, independent oversight, and it’s clear that they fooled a lot of people. Let me explain.€
Some employees on the call were more ambivalent. “Why are the smartest people in the world focused on contorting or twisting our policies to avoid antagonizing Trump instead of driving social issue progress?” asked one attendee. Another pointed out some confusion over whether Facebook’s head of integrity Guy Rosen was consulted. “I don’t think it’s probably great that we’re not super clear on whether the VP of integrity was included on an integrity decision involving civic matters of voter suppression and societal violence, right?” she asked.
Twitter’s corporate governance came under scrutiny earlier this year when activist investor Elliott Management Corp. took a stake in the company with plans to challenge Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, and potentially replace him. Having an independent chairman was one of the first things Elliott raised with Twitter in their initial meetings as one of the ways the company could improve its governance, according to people familiar with the matter. Pichette will be the first independent chairman for the social-media company.
The hedge fund has also pushed Twitter to de-stagger its board, which would allow all directors to stand for re-election every year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. At Twitter’s annual meeting last week, just three of the company’s 11 directors were up for re-election, including Kordestani.
We previously published an alert that the European Patent Office (EPO), had issued a Notice that extended the times to file papers that could not be filed due to disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The EPO extended most deadlines accruing after March 15, 2020 until April 17, 2020, including deadlines for international applications under the PCT.
We published an updated alert regarding these EPO extensions, which previously expired on April 17, 2020. The EPO issued a second Notice on April 16, 2020, extending the times to file papers to May 4, 2020. The EPO issued a third Notice on May 1 extending the deadline to June 2, 2020.
Article 53(b) of the European Patent Convention (EPC) provides that patents cannot be granted in respect of plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals. The above debate arose in 2015 when two Enlarged Board of Appeal decisions concluded that under Article 53(b) of the EPC, European patents could not be granted for essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals, but that this did not extend to products that are exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process.
In July 2017 the EPO Administrative Council sought to clarify the situation by introducing Rule 28(2) to the EPC, which provides that under Article 53(b), European patents will not be granted in respect of plants or animals which are exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process.
Unfortunately, the waters were muddied in 2018 when a technical board of appeal held that Rule 28(2) of the EPC had no impact on the interpretation of Article 53(b) and instead followed the enlarged board's 2015 decisions.
In 2019 the president of the EPO referred the matter to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, requesting the interpretation of Article 53(b) of the EPC in view of legal and other developments which occurred after its 2015 decisions, particularly in view of Rule 28(2) of the EPC.
On 14 May 2020 the Enlarged Board of Appeal returned its finding on this point of law, ruling that the non-patentability of essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals also extends to plant or animal products that are exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process.
BREIN has published the results of its 2019 anti-piracy campaign. In addition to shuttering 564 downloading and streaming platforms, the group had The Pirate Bay and 258 of its mirrors and proxies blocked by ISPs. More than 330 similar platforms shut themselves down.
A former police officer, currently serving a six-year sentence for running a cannabis farm, was handed an additional 12 months inside yesterday for running a pirate streaming operation. Daniel Aimson, who sold piracy-configured devices and ran an online streaming portal, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud.
Dutch ISPs Ziggo and XS4ALL must block access to The Pirate Bay, the Amsterdam Court ruled today. The verdict is the latest in a long-running legal battle that started over a decade ago. The verdict, which was issued despite a long list of defenses, opens the door to more pirate site blockades in the Netherlands.
The recent Copyright Office report on Section 512 of the DMCA (the notice and takedown provisions) has been frustrating on many levels, including the fact that it simply ignores that the public is a stakeholder (actually the main stakeholder) in copyright policy. But one of the most frustrating parts of the report is that it ignored a ton of testimony (including some provided by me) about how frequently the 512 notice-and-takedown process is abused (either on purpose or accidentally) to take down non-infringing content. The Copyright Office acts as if this is a fringe issue, when the data suggests it's a massive problem impacting millions.
