Pre-installed laptops can be used with great peace of mind as hardware and subsystems are tested properly to work without any issues. Linux laptops are comparatively lighter when compared to Windows and don't use many resources. Linux distro mostly works perfectly in low spec hardware so you can save money. .
If you are a Linux fan and looking forward to owning a laptop with Linux based OS, we have listed some of the best plays to buy.
Google is set to give up most control over the Knative Project by electing a steering committee to oversee the direction of the Kubernetes-based serverless project. The decision comes on the heels of Google taking a more controversial approach with the Istio service mesh project.
Protocol first reported on Google’s plans for the Knative Project late last week.
In a blog post, Paul Morie, writing on behalf of the Knative Steering Committee, explained that it had recently constructed a new steering committee charter that will include an upcoming election for five steering committee members. The plan calls for the five members to serve as individuals and not representing their employer. The plan also states that no vendor will be allowed to have a majority of seats on the steering committee.
The project will also set up a new Knative Trademark Committee to deal with trademark issues. That committee will initially include members from Google, IBM/Red Hat, and VMware.
eBPF enables users to trace application activity down to a very low level for better performance analysis
Let’s say you’re a doctor. You know that the human body is tremendously complex, with multiple systems operating and interacting simultaneously. You also understand that sometimes things can go wrong and a person gets sick. Or there might be symptoms that history suggests are potential signs of trouble. How do you determine what is going on? What metrics can you collect that will reveal medically valuable information? And what tools are available to do that?
The same issue that has challenged physicians for centuries is one that IT professionals now face: When you’re troubleshooting a complex system, what diagnostics do you measure, how do you measure them and what do you do with your findings?
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eBPF programs run inside the kernel; they are attached to a code path and whenever that code path is traversed, the program executes. This decoupling of the kernel and eBPF program increases the development time as the developer doesn’t have to recompile the kernel each time the eBPF program is changed. eBPF is useful for both packet processing as well as performance analysis and monitoring, as eBPF programs can be attached to tracepoints, kprobes and even perf events. As you may have already guessed, attaching user-space programs inside the kernel can cause serious security and stability issues; thus, a series of tests are performed on each eBPF program before it’s loaded.
The 2020 Steering Committee Election is now complete. In 2019, the committee arrived at its final allocation of 7 seats, 3 of which were up for election in 2020. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.
This community body is significant since it oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the steering committee’s role in their charter.
The way that applications are being built and delivered has changed dramatically in recent years with the growing trend toward cloud native software. As part of this movement toward the infrastructure and orchestration that powers your project being defined in software, a new approach to operations is gaining prominence. Commonly called GitOps, the main principle is that all of your automation code lives in version control and is executed automatically as changes are merged. In this episode Victor Farcic shares details on how that workflow brings together developers and operations engineers, the challenges that it poses, and how it influences the architecture of your software. This was an interesting look at an emerging pattern in the development and release cycle of modern applications.
Welcome to the 372nd installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we have a rogue co-host join the crew for stories about Jamboree on the Air/Internet, Supreme Court cases of a deeply important nature, revised band plans, losing frequencies, graphical WSL, GPL enforcement, the pre-release WSJT-X and much more. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.
Why Windows isn’t switching to a Linux kernel, Will tells us how he stopped his kids using TikTok with a Raspberry Pi, possible LNL merch, and the usual goodness in KDE Korner.
CentOS 8 only provides the GNOME Desktop. What if you want XFCE? EPEL has it. What if you want to access it remotely? x2goserver is your friend. What if you are on a Digital Ocean Droplet and don't have any swap? Use zram swap. Enjoy.
Lenovo Releases 27 Thinkpads and Thinkstations with Ubuntu https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-launches-linux-ready-thinkpad-and-thinkstation-pcs-preinstalled-with-ubuntu/ Amnesia the Dark Descent, Without Assets, Now Open Source https://frictionalgames.com/2020-09-amnesia-is-now-open-source/ Linux Journal Is Back https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-back Microsoft Confirms Edge On Linux in October https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/09/22/whats-new-in-web-experiences-ignite-2020-need-to-secure-your-remote-workers-choose-microsoft-edge-as-your-browser-for-business/ Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 Out https://ubports.com/blog/ubport-blogs-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-13-release-3720 Debian 10.6 Out https://www.debian.org/News/2020/20200926
Linux Lite 5.2 RC1 Out https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/release-announcements/linux-lite-5-2-rc1-released/
4MLinux 34 Out https://4mlinux-releases.blogspot.com/2020/09/4mlinux-340-stable-released.html
Linux Kernel 5.9 RC7 Out https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/9/27/449
The Linux kernel's prandom_u32() interface for providing pseudo-random number generation is used heavily by the kernel's networking code but that PRNG output can be figured out rather predictably. Thus lining up for Linux 5.10 is a new prandom_u32 implementation.
The prandom_u32 functionality is used in the networking code by several different drivers and for functionality like random port numbers, but since it can be trivially predicted, that isn't good.
The immediate future of open-source software is here for now after Linux 5.9 was declared stable.
The news came directly from the man behind the platform, as Linus Torvalds wrote in a blog post that the new version was ready.
"I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here," Torvalds wrote in his release notes. "It's just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for."
Linus Torvalds has released Linux kernel 5.9, saying that he had hoped for fewer changes in this most recent cycle, but “at the same time there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here.”
According to Torvalds, the bulk of the changes are the networking fixes that he previously mentioned as pending in the rc8 release notes. In fact, he says “about half the patch (and probably more of the number of commits) is from the networking stuff (both drivers and elsewhere).”
Linux 5.9 has been declared stable, with Linus Torvalds observing "there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here" despite the number of tweaks in the last week.
Although more lines had been changed than he would have preferred, the chief maintainer saw little reason for delay so version 5.9 is upon us.
The bulk of the changes this time around lurked in "networking stuff", according to Torvalds, and there have been eight release candidates needed to get to this point.
As for version 5.9 itself, there is initial support for AMD's Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards and Intel Rocket Lake GPUs.
On the eve of release, the team at Phoronix noted that the AMDGPU graphics driver accounted for more than 10 per cent of the lines of code lurking within the source tree for the 5.9 kernel (although a huge chunk of that was actually auto-generated header files).
For 5.9, the deadline scheduling class is now aware of the capacity of each CPU and FSGSBASE x86 instructions see support, bringing with it the potential for a jump in performance.
Sometimes I'm looking around for a subject to write about, and realise that there's one that I assume that I've covered, but, on searching, discover that I haven't. One of those topics is measured boot and trusted boot—sometimes misleadingly referred to as "secure boot." There are specific procedures that use these terms with capital letters (e.g., Secure Boot), which I'm going to try to avoid discussing in this article. I'm more interested in the generic processes—and a major potential downfall—than in trying to go into the ins and outs of specifics. What follows is a (heavily edited) excerpt from my forthcoming book on trust in computing and the cloud for Wiley.
Most notable with this round of hwmon updates is AMD Zen 3 CPU temperature monitoring is added to the existing k10temp driver. As outlined in that earlier piece when the code first hit hwmon-next, this is significant as it was contributed by an AMD engineer and ahead of launch. In the past it generally wasn't until after the CPU launch that Linux users could have temperature monitoring support and was generally left to tackle by parties outside of AMD, but thankfully for Zen 3 the temperature support is ready to go. But for Linux 5.10 there isn't any AMD Energy driver support yet for Zen 3, but at least some accumulation logic improvements in that amd_energy driver code also thanks to AMD.
New Intel and AMD hardware support headline the performance events work for Linux 5.10 as part of the "perf" subsystem.
Monday as the first full day of the Linux 5.10 merge window saw many Intel/AMD x86 changes and that continued with the performance events pull request sent out by Ingo Molnar later in the day.
With the rising number of speculation vulnerabilities in CPUs, it is time we rethink the design of Xen and restrict the attack surface as much as possible to defend against potential vulnerabilities in the future (defense-in-depth). At this year’s Xen Summit, Hongyan Xia & David Woodhouse from Amazon, took viewers through ways to do this.
Do you have a Guitar Hero Live (PS3) 6-fret guitar or perhaps one from the Wii U that you want to use on Linux? Prepare to dust them off.
The new hid-ghlive-dkms driver from developer Pascal Giard, was created as they "really wanted to play a 6-fret guitar on Clone Hero". For those not aware, Clone Hero is a free rhythm game (a clone of Guitar Hero - get it?), which can be played with any 5 or 6 button guitar controller, game controllers, or just your standard computer keyboard.
EBooks have many advantages compared to paperback and hardcover books. An eBook is more accessible, convenient, affordable, and portable. The eBooks can be delivered to a range of digital devices, such as Computers, Tablet PCs, Smartphones and Kindle e-reader devices. There are plethora of graphical Ebook readers available. However, there are only a few applications exists to read eBooks from commandline. Today we will discuss about one such application. Say hello to epy, a CLI ebook reader developed for the command line inhabitants.
Epy is a free, open source, command line ebook reader written in Python. It supports many ebook formats, such as Epub (.epub, .epub3), FictionBook (.fb2), Mobi (.mobi), and AZW3 (.azw3). Please note that image is not yet supported in mobi format and only some formats of .azw3 ebooks are supported.
Epy displays the progress percentage as you read through the pages. It allows you to bookmark a specific page and integrate external dictionary.
One of the first tasks when setting up a Linux web server is the installation of a LAMP stack.
Dropbox is a popular cloud service that offers its client application for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS to sync files between cloud and local devices. However, if you are on a command-line server that doesn’t have a graphical user interface, still we can have the benefits of Dropbox cloud storage to sync files between server and cloud. Here in this tutorial, we will show how to do that in CentOS 8/7 server without GUI and using only the CLI interface.
Zeit is a Qt GUI for cron and at, allowing you to schedule recurring or one time tasks. The application also allows setting an alarm and a timer.
Other features include the ability to add, edit and delete environment variables for crontab, as well as optional PolKit support for root actions. To add a new cron job using Zeit, click the Add Task button from its taskbar and you'll get to a dialog that allows you to run a command or script at the time interval you specify.
Do you want to reset the MySQL root password? Sometimes we forget the root password and not able to log in on MySQL, and we want to reset the password. It is happening with all of us most of the time.
In this article, we will explain the process to reset the MySQL root password from the command line utility.
Configuring the fonts on Arch Linux can assist you in the better display of your desktop. You can customize your font as per your preference if you are using Arch Linux. Indeed, the default fonts of Arch Linux are not that plain. But, if you want to make it more attractive and colorful, then go for the customize fonts. Programmers using the desktop environment of Arch Linux can comprehend the concept of setting variant fonts in their respective systems. Arch Linux itself is a tricky operating system, so using plan font can dull the mood. If you are looking at the user interface of Arch Linux for the fonts, then you won’t find them vibrant and alluring. That’s why the trend of setting customize fonts is voguish among programmers. This guide covers the configuration of fonts on the desktop environment. It shares the embracive details for the desktop environment of GNOME and KDE plasma.
Changes are a part of nature, and this is also the case with technology. As time progresses, technology keeps on evolving and advancing through new and revolutionary changes. Ubuntu is the perfect example of this, as it has seen remarkable growth in its infrastructure. From what was once a simple server-based architecture, to now being used as the primary Linux distribution for desktops, this clearly shows how far Ubuntu has come.Ubuntu has made quite the name for itself in the industry and has quickly become one of the fastest-growing operating systems in today’s market. Being free and open-source, along with having a smooth and silky interface, has made Ubuntu a worthy challenger for Windows and Mac OS. One fascinating aspect about Ubuntu that has made it so sought-after among users is how easily customizable this distro is.
Ubuntu MATE is a flavor of Ubuntu that uses the MATE desktop environment. MATE desktop environment is a lightweight desktop environment that works seamlessly on low-power devices or old devices. Ubuntu MATE has ARM builds (for Raspberry Pi) available for download on the official website of Ubuntu MATE.
Encoding is the process used to convert data in a format required for effective transmission or storage. In contrast, decoding is opposite to the encoding method which converts the encoded data back to its original format. Base64 is the encoding process where the binary data is converted into ASCII. Base64 encoding is mostly required to avoid the transmission problems that occur when binary data is transmitted to text-based systems which cannot handle the binary data properly. As a result, the information is lost or corrupted during transmission.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory considered as an important part of any computer system. When you open a file for editing or viewing its content, the system creates a temporary instance of this particular file in RAM so that you can do processing on it. Moreover, your system’s operating environment and RAM act as a medium on which you run a program. If you have a fresh Ubuntu operating system or VPS (Virtual Private Server) and you don’t have enough information about RAM, how much it is installed and used, the RAM speed, then this article is written for you.
Having never quite been able to write $\zeta$ or $\xi$ correctly, I cobbled together some code to generate worksheets to help practice my handwriting. Since a few people have expressed interest in them, I thought I’d share the documents and code here!
Written PHP, Drupal is a free and opensource content management system (CMS) that enables you to create powerful and elegant blogs or websites. It ships with preinstalled themes, widgets, and other out-of-the-box features that help you get started with little knowledge in web programming languages. It’s ideal for users who want to publish their content with but have little background in web development.
This article discusses and demonstrates the steps to install and configure an httpd service to serve content over HTTPS. The purpose of using HTTPS rather than basic HTTP is that the content is encrypted while it's in transit. This means that if somebody captures the traffic between your system and the webserver, they won't be able to see what was being sent. If you were accessing a basic HTTP server, they could see the content.
Microsoft's Active Directory (AD) is the go-to directory service for many organizations. If you and your team are responsible for a mixed Windows and Linux environment, then you probably would like to centralize authentication for both platforms. I'll cover how to add Linux computers to an Active Directory domain.
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Microsoft's Active Directory, more popularly known as AD, has held the lion's share of the market for enterprise access management for many years now. It is used by institutions and individuals the world over to centrally control access to resources belonging to the organization. It gives you the ability to manage users, passwords, resources such as computers, and dictate who has access to what. For some of you reading this write-up, especially those who work in large institutions, you have interacted with AD before. Usually, the interaction is using one set of login credentials to log in to any workstation in the organization. That is just the tip of a large iceberg.
Brave has gained a lot of popularity lately, mainly because of its ability to reward users for browsing the web. As of January 1, this chromium-based browser has over 15 million monthly active users and 5 million active monthly users, as reported in the Brave community.
In this article, I’ll tell you how to install Brave browser on Ubuntu Linux and earn rewards.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a web-based client written in PHP for managing MySQL and MariaDB databases. It provides a user-friendly web interface to access and manage your databases. To ease usage to a wide range of people, phpMyAdmin is being translated into 72 languages and supports both LTR and RTL languages.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation phpMyAdmin with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Both MariaDB and MySQL are open source databases that use SQL and share the same original codebase. MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL, so much so that you use the same command (mysql) to interact with MySQL and MariaDB databases. This article, therefore, applies equally to MariaDB and MySQL.
If you are stuck to the Linux terminal, say on a server, how do you download a file from the terminal?
There is no download command in Linux but there are a couple of Linux commands for downloading file.
In this terminal trick, you’ll learn two ways to download file using command line in Linux.
I am using Ubuntu here but apart from the installation, rest of the commands are equally valid for all other Linux distributions.
Built like the arcade action-puzzlers of the mid-90s, Petal Crash is a very welcome addition to the block matching genre and is a joy to play. Released with Linux support on October 12 following a successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2019 the idea is great.
Petal Crash will be real familiar to anyone who has played a block-matching game, anything similar to Match-3 style and you know mostly what you're getting into here. However, it's not as simple as just matching tiles. You're not simply swapping spaces, you're actually throwing these coloured petals around the board to try and match the colours together. If they smash into another single block of the same colour, they explode and push away any other blocks attached.
Video: Alesh Slovak missed Vavle's SteamOS so he created a new GNU/Linux operating system called GamerOS based on Arch Linux and some of the components from SteamOS. The idea is to have a OS that boots directly into Steam's Big Picture mode so you can sit on the couch and use a PC with a game-pad the same way you would use a gaming console. Alesh Slovak presented his new OS at the Arch Conf 2020 last weekend. His video presentation is about 45 minutes with Q&A.
Need to get something done and remove distractions? Virtual Cottage is a real sweet idea for a screen-saver style application that gives you tunes and a timer.
It reminded me instantly of Kind Words, the beautiful little game about writing letters to random people in a tiny little room. Virtual Cottage echos that same style and feeling. You get a visually pleasing little room, some lovely music and you can set a timer with a subject to focus on and let your mind melt away as you do it and listen to the great beats.
Bloody Rally Show from February 2020 was probably one of the best top-down racers I've played in a long time, and it now has a free Bloody Rally Show: Prologue version you can try out.
This is no art of rally, it's less of a zen experience much more grimy - it's all about the more intense and chaotic side of racing against others. It's an action-racer, one that gives you a campaign mode to play through as well as some car-combat modes, car customisation and more. It's a very surprising game and a huge amount of fun.
Today is a big day for fans of the KDE Plasma desktop environment. The KDE Plasma 5.20 release is finally here and it’s packed with a new look and feel an icon-only Task Manager and a slightly thicker default panel.
The biggest new features of KDE Plasma 5.20 include middle-click paste support on Wayland, revamped System Settings Users page, the ability to unplug screens on Wayland, redesigned OSDs for brightness and volume, Klipper support on Wayland, as well as S.M.A.R.T monitoring and disk failing notifications.
Version 5.20 of the Plasma KDE desktop is out. "A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general. Everyday utilities and tools, such as the Panels, Task Manager, Notifications and System Settings, have all been overhauled to make them more usable, efficient, and friendlier." There are also significant improvements in Plasma's Wayland support.
Our beautiful desktop Plasma 5.20 has been released and with it the version bump in KDE neon User Edition to 5.20.
KDE Plasma 5.20 is finally here and there’s a lot of things to be excited about, including the new wallpaper ‘Shell’ by Lucas Andrade.
It is worth noting that is not an LTS release unlike KDE Plasma 5.18 and will be maintained for the next 4 months or so. So, if you want the latest and greatest, you can surely go ahead and give it a try.
KDE's Plasma 5.20 is now available as a seriously great update to this open-source desktop environment.
KDE Plasma 5.20 has a crazy amount of polishing and refinements as well as some larger features. Some of the KDE Plasma 5.20 highlights include:
- Numerous fixes to the KWin window manager / compositor including a number of Wayland fixes. Among the Wayland work in Plasma 5.20 includes Klipper support and middle-click paste, mouse and touchpad support nearly on par to X11, window thumbnails in the task manager, crash fixes, and more.
The wait is over. The KDE team announced the release of the brand new KDE Plasma Desktop 5.20. And it is immediately available to download via KDE Neon Linux distribution.
KDE Plasma 5.20 desktop is one of the big releases in the history of KDE Plasma. A huge set of features landed, hundreds of defects fixed, and finally, a lot changed for Wayland which might about to help thousands of users to get the benefit of Wayland.
Plasma is arguably one of the prettiest Linux desktop environments around, and it's highly configurable too. The KDE team just released a huge upgrade with Plasma 5.20. This is a massive release that upgrades all parts of the Plasma desktop.
Fans of Wayland which is gradually replacing X.Org, compatibility continues being a focus and they've managed to make more steps as of this release. They mentioned that since 2019 they set a priority goal to adapt everything to support Wayland and it's "starting to pay off big time" now. As of this release middle-click paste with the Klipper clipboard app now works, plus the launcher/search tool KRunner now shows up correctly. Mouse and Touchpad support is getting close to being on par with X too, screencasting is now supported and more. Lots of steps taken.
Krita 4.4 is here about four months after Krita 4.3 and it’s packed with some important updates to the fill layers, including multi-threading support to make them faster on multi-core computers, transformations for the pattern fill, including the ability to rotate patterns, as well as a new fill layer option for filling the whole screen with dots, lines, squares, waves, etc.
Furthermore, Krita 4.4 introduces a new fill layer that can generate Penrose tilings and Quasicrystal structures, among other elements, and integrates Disney Animation’s SeExpr expression language, which lets you create your own fill layers.
Krita 4.4 is out today as the latest release for this flagship open-source digital painting program.
Highlights of Krita 4.4 include:
- Multi-threading for fill layers to yield a lot faster performance.
- Support for patterns of fill layers and new screentone options for the fill layer. There is also a multigrid fill layer feature for penrose tilings.
Today, we’re releasing Krita 4.4.0!
Only a little later than we had planned, this is the next feature release of Krita! With a whole slew of new fill layer types, including the really versatile SeExpr based scriptable fill layer type, exciting new options for Krita’s brushes like the gradient map mode for brushes, lightness and gradient modes for brush textures, support for dynamic use of colors in gradients, webm export for animations, new scripting features — and of course, hundreds of bug fixes that make this version of Krita better than ever. Especially exciting are all the fixes we made for Krita on ChromeOS and Android!
Hello again, so I believe I am 90% done with the base style direction and main UI components for O€², and am currently struggling with my not so bright idea of dinamic QML colour pallets.
Still overall I'm happy with the general visual direction of the UI style, it's IMO clearly derivative of Oxygen but today.
Now having done 90% of the design and doing the serious work I know that the solemn work that will take far far more time is upon me and us..
Coming two months after the previous release, which dropped support for 32-bit systems, the new Parted Magic release has been completely rebuilt to offer users a full 64-bit system. With this, every single package included in the distribution has been updated to the latest available version at the moment of the release.
Not only that, but Parted Magic is now using the lightweight and highly customizable Xfce desktop environment, instead of the Openbox window manager. Due to this, users will also now be able to save their sessions.
Yesterday, Tomasz Jokiel announced the release of a new Porteus Kiosk 5.1.0 with Linux kernel 5.4.70, and other system components update to the latest version from Gentoo stable branch.
For those who don’t know, Porteus Kiosk is a free, lightweight, and single-purpose Linux-based operating system. You can use it for several purposes such as displaying information, advertisements, as an Internet kiosk, or at other publicly available web terminals in schools, libraries, cafes, or hotels.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation.
Zoom, the cloud meeting company, unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform.
Red Hat Product Security rates the severity of security issues found in Red Hat products using a four-point scale: Low, Moderate, Important, and Critical, as well as includes a separate Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score.
The CVSS rating is not used to determine the priority with which flaws are fixed or to determine the severity rating of the vulnerability. It is used as a guideline to identify and describe key metrics of a flaw and is meant to help customers prioritize the order in which they remediate flaws. CVSS scoring is used by other agencies, which sometimes tend to score these flaws in a different way.
Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2.4 is now available. For this release, we focused on adding support for IBM Z and improving the IDE editor and configuration elements.
CodeReady Workspaces (CRW) 2.4 is available on Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 and OpenShift 4.4 and higher. CodeReady Workspaces 2.4 is also available on OpenShift Dedicated 4.3 via the add-ons capability.
Getting a new computer, whether physical or virtual, up and running is time-consuming and requires a good deal of work—whether it's your first time or the 50th. For many years, I have used a series of scripts and RPMs that I created to install the packages I need and to perform many bits of configuration for my favorite tools. This approach has worked well and simplified my work, as well as reduced the amount of time I spend typing commands.
I am always looking for better ways of doing things, and, for several years now, I have been hearing and reading about Ansible, which is a powerful tool for automating system configuration and management. Ansible allows a sysadmin to define a specific state for each host in one or more playbooks and then performs whatever tasks are necessary to bring the host to that state. This includes installing or deleting various resources such as RPM or Apt packages, configuration and other files, users, groups, and much more.
In a year of challenges and changing times, the community gets closer and starts gathering in a different way. From face to face meet-ups, we moved everything virtually and CodeMotion is not an exception. Made by developers for developers, it is an event where participants are used to meet and code the future of the world. Well, who said that this has changed?
Canonical will give a series of technical talks to learn more about Kubernetes, AI, and big data pipelines on Ubuntu.
The F(x)tec Pro1-X is certainly not your typical Android smartphone, as it offers the choice of LineageOS or Ubuntu Touch operating systems out of the box.
The LineageOS is essentially a refined Android that has advanced controls and privacy permissions, whereas the Ubuntu Touch offers users capabilities of a fully-fledged Linux PC. The smartphone has a landscape-optimized launcher and supports customizable shortcut, but since far not all Google Android applications are optimized for hardware keyboards, not all programs will be able to take full advantage of the device.
The F(x)tec Pro1-X can be connected to a display using a USB Type-C cable and be used like a regular Linux personal computer. The touchscreen display can act like a trackpad, whereas the keyboard can be used to input text.
Finnish Lapland has the cleanest air in the world and Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park in Lapland is Finland’s most popular national park. The landscape of Pallastunturi Fells has been chosen as one of Finland’s national landscapes. The park’s location north of the Arctic Circle means that it experiences the typical weather and natural phenomena associated with seasonal changes. On clear evenings and nights, planets, stars and the northern lights may be visible in the sky.
The 3.4 Pallas-Yllästunturi release includes several updates that enhance the experience on-device, enable new possibilities for developers, and incorporate new features for our corporate customers. Several improvements in this release were developed in collaboration with Open Mobile Platform for Aurora OS. Jolla appreciates the collaborative efforts of its partners and community in making Sailfish OS even better.
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We’ve included experimental support for the Rust programming language in this release. This addition is related to the upcoming browser upgrades, but we will experiment with using Rust in other areas as well. We welcome and appreciate all comments from the community about the behaviour and use of this addition and encourage you to share your experiences on the forum.
In preparation for future needs we are also releasing experimental support for 64-bit hardware (aarch64). This experiment is aimed at potential upcoming devices and is not currently used by any existing hardware. It should be noted by our development community that we do not consider the aarch64 ABI stable yet. Recompiling applications might be needed later when the 64-bit architecture becomes officially supported.
We invite our partners and community to take this into use where devices support it (e.g. HW ports) and to share your feedback via our forum (https://forum.sailfishos.org/). We’ve also updated our Notification API so that the interface now includes progress information that can be displayed on the Events view.
It's been a while since having any major news to report on the once promising mobile Linux software platform Sailfish OS from Finnish vendor Jolla, but today they issued a big update in the form of "Pallas-Yllästunturi" or more easily known as Sailfish OS 3.4.
Sailfish OS 3.4 has a number of new features like initial Rust support but also long overdue work like finally exploring 64-bit ARM (AArch64) support. But that AArch64 support is sadly just forward-looking and at least for now not intended for current smartphones.
Professional animation is not just possible but ideal with free software, this story shares what is possible running PureOS, Librem laptops, and accessories. I have been using free software for 6 years and each year these freedom respecting professional tools I use seem to improve faster than the commercial proprietary pace.
Krita, as an example, released an animation feature that made it the perfect tool for making rough animations. That same year, the software Toonz, that was used by the legendary Studio Ghibli for clean up and coloring purpose, was released as free software under the name of OpenToonz. Nice, with just these two features and tools released, I had everything I needed to do traditional animations again with my Librem based digital studio. Below I will go through the workflow of making a simple hand made 2D animation.
This particular animation was commissioned to me, during the summer, by a young french film production called Baze Production. The goal of this project was to make a cute production identity intro in the same style as Pixar or Illumination Studios, but with hand made animations instead of 3D computer graphics. For that matter, I used 2 Librem laptops and 2 Wacom tablets.
The original BBC micro:bit educational board was launched in July 2015 with a Nordic nRF51822 Arm Cortex-M0 MCU @ 16 MHz providing Bluetooth LE connectivity, a few I/Os, some buttons, and a LED matrix acting as a small display.
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BBC micro:bit v2 board still targets the education market, and lets students learn to program with C++, MakeCode, Python, or Scratch. The company added some example projects making use of the new hardware for example the bumblebee demo using the motion sensor to adjust the frequency, tempo, and volume of the board’s sound.
Teensy 4.0 and Teensy 4.1 are some of the most powerful microcontroller-class boards you’ll find on the market thanks to NXP i.MX RT1062 Arm Cortex-M7 crossover processor clocked at up to 600 MHz, and there won’t break the bank are PJRC sells those for $20 and up on their own store or Amazon.
If you’re into 3D printers, CNC, or pick-and-place machines, you’ll be glad to learn Teensy 4.1 board is the first Arm Cortex-M7 board to support Marlin 2.0 firmware, and a person nicknamed CrazzyFrenchDud is developing PeeNaPle breakout board for Teensy 4.1 to work with OpenPnP open-source software.
There are plenty of Bluetooth or RF remote controls on the market, but Remodo X is a little different. Mainly designed for the Raspberry Pi board, the compact Bluetooth & IR remote control comes with four buttons that can be programmed from a mobile app to launch program or trigger scripts for home automation, home entertainment, or any other function you may think of.
Today marks 20 years since the source code to OpenOffice was released. And today we say: LibreOffice is the future of OpenOffice. Let’s all get behind it!
It’s great to have a rich and diverse set of free and open source software projects. Hundreds of millions of people around the world have benefited from the choice and customisation that they bring. But sometimes, users can lose out when they’re not aware of newer alternatives, or when one brand overshadows another.
OpenOffice(.org) – the “father project” of LibreOffice – was a great office suite, and changed the world. It has a fascinating history, but since 2014, Apache OpenOffice (its current home) hasn’t had a single major release. That’s right – no significant new features or major updates have arrived in over six years. Very few minor releases have been made, and there have been issues with timely security updates too.
It is a no-brainer that Apache OpenOffice is still a relevant recommendation when we think about open source alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux users. However, for the past several years, the development of OpenOffice is pretty much stale.
Of course, it is not a shocker, considering Abhishek wrote about the possibility of Apache OpenOffice shutting down back in 2016.
Now, in an open letter from The Document Foundation, they appeal Apache OpenOffice to recommend users to start using better alternatives like LibreOffice. In this article, I shall mention some highlights from the blog post by The Document Foundation and what it means to Apache OpenOffice.
On the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the OpenOffice.org suite, the LibreOffice has sent an open letter to the Apache OpenOffice project suggesting that it is time for the latter to recognize that the game is over. "If Apache OpenOffice wants to still maintain its old 4.1 branch from 2014, sure, that’s important for legacy users. But the most responsible thing to do in 2020 is: help new users. Make them aware that there’s a much more modern, up-to-date, professionally supported suite, based on OpenOffice, with many extra features that people need."
A web content management system (WCMS) is software designed to simplify the publication of Web content. In particular, it enables content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. A CMS is most commonly used in creating an intranet or in establishing a presence on the Web.
This type of software that keeps track of every piece of content on a Web site. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage.
Not only do content management systems help website users with content editing, they also take care of a lot of “behind the scenes” work such as automatically generating navigation elements, making content searchable and indexable, keeping track of users, their permissions and security setting, and much more.
We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS is going to partner with the MLH Fellowship open source program which is a 12 week internship alternative for students interested in becoming software engineers.
Major League Hacking (MLH) is a mission-driven B-Corp focused on empowering our next generation of technologists. Every year, more than 100,000 developers, designers, and makers join the MLH community to gain hands-on experience and build their professional networks. They are headquartered in the Greater New York Area, USA but operate world-wide.
Plausible Analytics is a software as a service open source web analytics project. With the increase in popularity of Plausible in recent months, we’ve become aware that there are risks associated with permissive open source licenses that corporations that don’t care about open source are happy to take advantage of.
So we’re making a change to our license. This change doesn’t affect anyone subscribing to the Plausible Analytics Cloud and anyone who’s running Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted on their server. Everything stays the same.
The change will affect corporations that want to take our code and use it to create and sell proprietary tools that directly compete with us. Let’s look at the details.
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These corporations use Google Analytics to track their users, have Facebook pixels to target the same users with advertising across the web and so on. Everything we stand against.
Their motives don’t seem to be to make the web more privacy-friendly and reduce the dominance of Google. It seems purely a business opportunity to make money from open source.
Greetings, internet! Today I have the silliest of demos for you: malloc-as-a-service.
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Emscripten includes a couple of good malloc implementations (dlmalloc and emmalloc) which probably you should use instead. But if you are really looking for a bare-bones malloc, walloc is fine.
You can check out all the details at the walloc project page; a selection of salient bits are below.
The types of programming languages is a very old topic that noobs have been discussing a lot. This topic should actually be discussed. One should know how many programming languages are deployed on a machine that he is working on, especially if he is a student of programming.
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Assembly language was designed to communicate with machine language. This language was designed to take instructions in simple human language, and pass on those instructions to machines by writing the instructions in 1s and 0s. After the invention of assembly languages, the life of programmers was easy. They could write the instructions in simple human words like Mov A1, Jump A2, stop run etcetera.
The life of programmers became easy but the computer scientists did not stop at that point. Making a computer perform some task was still complicated and only computer scientists could do that. The scientists were visionary and their vision was to enable future generations to write programs for computers. That is why a whole new concept of High-level programming language came into the picture.
The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) describes different levels of maturity for the development process of any organization in a measurable way. It offers a set of best practices to improve all processes. It's been regularly updated, and the latest version includes some notions of agility.
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Level 2 is about automation and making sure the software never gets into a broken state. Every change should be staged and automatically build the software and run the tests against it. This is based on the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) principles.
CI means that your software code is continuously updated with changes done by developers, and that the code is always in a working state.
CD means that at any moment, there's a releasable software that can be pushed as the next official release. For cloud-hosted apps, the process of deploying the new version in a staging environment is also automated.
In July this year, I wrote a very initial Python module in Rust for OpenPGP, Johnnycanencrypt aka jce. It had very basic encryption, decryption, signing, verification, creation of new keys available. It uses https://sequoia-pgp.org library for the actual implementation.
I wanted to see if I can use such a Python module (which does not call out to the gpg2 executable) in the SecureDrop codebase.
The amount of textual data on the Internet has significantly increased in the past decades. There's no doubt that the processing of this amount of information must be automated, and the TextBlob package is one of the fairly simple ways to perform NLP - Natural Language Processing.
It provides a simple API for diving into common natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, noun phrase extraction, tokenization, sentiment analysis, classification, translation, and more.
No special technical prerequisites for employing this library are needed. For instance, TextBlob is applicable for both Python 2 and 3. In case you don't have any textual information for the project you want to work on, TextBlob provides necessary corpora from the NLTK database.
Most of the CRUD apps, require some level of role based access control.
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This means only the users with specific role can access certain API endpoints or operations e.g. Allow everyone the GET operation, but only admin can DELETE. Some levels in-between can create/update etc.
Python provides a module to generate random numbers. The name of this module is random. In the random module, there is a set of various functions that are used to create random numbers. Sometimes, there may be a need to generate random numbers; for example, while performing simulated experiments, in games, and many other applications. This article explains random number generation in Python using the various functions of the random module.
Bash scripts can be created in a variety of different ways and most of us are familiar with executing the simple commands within a Bash script. However, these commands can also be encapsulated within the variables in Bash. This process is known as command substitution and it is generally used to store the output of a command in a variable so that you do not have to run that command explicitly again and again rather you can simply access that variable to get the output of that command whenever you want. In this article, we will show you how this can be done.
When you are working on bash scripts, sometimes you may need to read a file line by line. Let’s explain with an example. You have some data in a text file that should be executed or processed by using a script. So, running a bash script to process a text file is much different. You need to follow a specified syntax to read a file line by line. This article will help you to read a line from a file using the while loop in Bash.
The Laravel horizon package is used to manage Laravel queues. It provides a good-looking dashboard for the queues. This package allows users to configure jobs, generate analytics, and monitor the different types of queue-related tasks, including job run-time, failure, throughput, etc. The configuration information of all team members of the project is stored in a single file that can be controlled centrally. This package is free to use in the Laravel project, but it is not included with the core code. So, you must first install this package before using it. This article shows you some of the different features of Laravel horizon and how to install and run Laravel horizon for managing Laravel queues using a nice dashboard.
The Laravel query builder provides a simple and convenient way for creating and running database queries and is supported by all of the Laravel database systems. It is used to protect the Laravel application from the SQL injection attack using PDO parameter binding. This package can perform several different types of database operations, such as CRUD (Insert, Select, Update and Delete) and aggregate functions, such as UNION, SUM, COUNT, etc. This tutorial shows you how to apply a query builder to perform various CRUD operations in the database.
The Laravel queue is one of the more useful features of the Laravel framework. This feature is used to wait for time-consuming tasks and perform tasks at a later time to improve the performance and efficiency of the Laravel application. This feature provides different types of queues in back-ends, such as Amazon SQS, Redis, Beanstalk, synchronous driver, or relational database. A null queue driver is used to discard queued jobs. The configuration file of the queue is stored in the location config/queue.php. A common example of using the Laravel queue is to send emails. When it is required to deal with a large number of emails in the Laraval application, then it is better to use Laravel queues to speed up the processing. This tutorial shows how to use Laravel queues to send a large number of emails.
Ever since the impassioned music critic and combative cultural gadfly Stanley Crouch booked passage with the ancestors on September 16 after 74 years on this earth, there has been a steady rolling wave of deep sadness, much of it coming from people with whom he pointedly, sometimes violently, disagreed. There are a few disgruntled holdouts to the mourning. But their grievances needn’t be catalogued here, largely because the disputes were often about the same thing: his stringent, fiercely patrolled standards for African American music, deportment, and collective action, in perpetual conflict with whatever was fashionably edgy or doctrinaire at a given moment.
"Federal holidays should celebrate our heritage and culture, but also honor the struggles that led to society as we know it."
Unless you have been living under a rock, you may notice a blatant parallel to the real world. The above paragraph could—verbatim—be a racist description of real-world black people.
Given that my Monday post for my not-so-secret other blog ended up being a lot longer than expected and the previous Monday’s post is now basically out of date, making my tradition of reposting it a week later not particularly viable, I was left without a good topic for this Monday, something that I could handle quickly. Of course, COVID-19 quackery is always a relevant topic, unfortunately. So it was late last night that I saw an article with what might be the wackiest quackery for COVID-19 that I’ve seen since President Trump suggested that taking disinfectants internally or using UV light to kill coronavirus could be viable treatments for COVID-19. I’m referring to rectal ozone to treat COVID-19, as described by Brazilian microbiologist Natália Pasternak and journalist Carlos Orsi:
Two of the whistleblowers, Duncan Farrow and Graeme Hocking, have disputed Murdoch’s claim that the university resolved these problems internally. “The question arises as to why it took a Teqsa investigation to cause an internal investigation to ‘self-identify’ these issues, when the university management had received multiple warnings from both internal and external sources well before the Teqsa investigation,” the pair said in a joint statement.
"In Gaza, people are going through the garbage," said Philippe Lazzarini. "More people are fighting to provide one or two meals a day to their families."
On Sept. 30, we published an article examining how Prospect Medical Holdings, a hospital chain, and Leonard Green & Partners, its private equity owner, had extracted hundreds of millions of dollars in profits for investors while patients served by their hospitals suffered from a litany of problems. The article reported that on 14 occasions over a decade, government health inspectors had concluded that Prospect hospitals posed an “immediate jeopardy” to patients, defined by the federal government as problems that have caused, or are likely to cause, “serious injury, harm, impairment or death.” Other pervasive problems included everything from bedbugs and ceiling leaks in hospital buildings, to unpaid gas bills for company ambulances to shortages of medical supplies.
The story was based on five months of reporting, including interviews with 70 sources — current and former employees of Prospect and its hospitals, people who worked with the company, experts and others — and a review of several thousand pages of records from regulatory filings, lawsuits, company documents, financial statements and hospital inspection reports.
Instead of being grouped with other forms of shopping or entertainment, theaters have found themselves lumped in with larger performance venues, like Broadway theaters and arenas, that depend on larger crowds to break even. New York officials have considered the movie business to be both “high risk” and “non-essential.”
Some have argued that coronavirus should be allowed to spread naturally in the absence of a vaccine.
But WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said such an approach was "scientifically and ethically problematic".
A company collects more than 100 patents on a drug. It then aggressively asserts this “patent thicket” and enters into settlements with each of the competitors that could enter the market, paying them to delay their entry for years. The company admits that its strategy is to “make it more difficult” for rivals forced to “contend with [its] extensive patent estate.”
Does this violate antitrust law? That presents a nuanced issue. But at least it deserves consideration, which could ultimately involve the weighing of the thicket’s benefits against the anticompetitive harms of abusing this collection.
In this litigation, involving the biologic Humira, the district court never allowed this critical debate to play out. In particular, it short-circuited the analysis by making fundamental errors on how to (1) analyze settlements, (2) assess sham conduct, and (3) determine causation. Because of these errors, the brief requests that the Seventh Circuit reverse.
The response to COVID-19 is indissolubly tied to intellectual property. In an increasingly globalized world in which infectious disease pathogens travel faster and wider than before, the development of vaccines, treatments and other forms of medical technology has become an integral part of public health preparedness and response frameworks. The development of these technologies, and to a certain extent the allocation and distribution of resulting outputs, is informed by intellectual property regimes. These regimes influence the commitment of R&D resources, shape scientific collaborations and, in some cases, may condition the widespread availability of emerging technologies. As seen throughout this chapter, COVID-19 has exposed the shortcomings of ingrained reliance on intellectual property as a channel for the production and dissemination of medical technologies needed to address the problems posed by pandemics and epidemics. At the same time, COVID-19 has brought new life to countervailing efforts to explore legal and policy mechanisms to potentially offset some of the problems posed by the pervasiveness of, and shortcomings associated with, intellectual property dynamics.
In tracing the dual ways in which intellectual property has affected preparedness for, and the response to, COVID-19, this chapter highlights three features of contemporary intellectual property regimes and examines their impact on innovation(s) needed to address public health crises. First, it explores the incentives function of patent law and policy, which places considerable emphasis on market-driven investment in R&D on medical technologies. In so doing, intellectual property becomes one of the driving forces of the commodification of goods—vaccines, drugs or ventilator parts, for example—which are best understood as public health goods.
At the end of 2019 the lead developer of CUPS left Apple after he joined Apple and the company purchased the source code a decade prior for this long-standing open-source printing system used by not only macOS but also Linux and other Unix-like platforms. This unfortunately has not bode well for CUPS in 2020.
As was recently pointed out by a Phoronix reader, the open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020 and that was a push by an Apple engineer with minor updates (including security fixes) for a point release.
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It's possible Apple engineers are still working on CUPS internally and relying upon a private Git repository for development and will only be pushing public when there are enough accumulated changes for a new release, but that still doesn't bode well for open-source -- at least these days driver-less printing is common.
The standard FOVE0 software is also getting an update (this one is free). FOVE is adding official support for Ubuntu Linux. This includes all VR features, such as the FOVE Compositor and eye-tracking.
As of today, Ubuntu Linux is officially supported for all current and future users. This includes all VR features, such as the FOVE Compositor, and the full eye tracker.
This measure is part of a much broader act aimed at reducing the power of big technology companies, especially when it comes to the use of advertising data and platform owners’ power over companies doing business on said platforms. I hope this gets passed, since using ADB to remove bloatware can get a little tedious.
Microsoft's Windows operating system is the target of a massive majority of the malicious software that abounds these days. And it has adopted the same strategy for avoiding blame as it did with the problem of viruses and worms: presenting itself as part of the solution, not the problem.
Global security firm Sophos has questioned the connection drawn between ransomware attacks facilitated by the Trickbot botnet and threats to election security, with a senior researcher saying gangs did not generally target local governments specifically for political effect.
“We disrupted Trickbot through a court order we obtained as well as technical action we executed in partnership with telecommunications providers around the world,” wrote Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security and trust at Microsoft, in a blog post this morning about the legal maneuver. “We have now cut off key infrastructure so those operating Trickbot will no longer be able to initiate new infections or activate ransomware already dropped into computer systems.”
The number of malicious domains which are similar to that of retail giant Amazon has risen by 28% in the run-up to the firm's Prime Day on 13 October, the Israeli security firm Check Point has warned.
The future of work is here, ushered in by a global pandemic. But is it turning employment into a Workers’ Paradise of working at home? Or more of a Big Brother panopticon?
According to court records from an arson case in Florida, Google regularly provides information to law enforcement about people that search a particular term or physical location using a Google service like Google Search or Google Maps. Information such as the the IP address. Typically, if police have an interest in requesting the search history of one particular suspect, they have to get a warrant. What they do now instead is request a list of information on all those that searched a particular keyword in a particular timeframe and use that to build a list of suspects by corresponding IP addresses to real identities. The barrier that faces the latter type of warrant is much more than the former. Here, Google was asked for:
People are engaging more on Facebook today with news outlets that routinely publish misinformation than they did before the 2016 election, according to new research from the German Marshall Fund Digital, the digital arm of the public policy think tank. The organization, which has a data partnership with the start-up NewsGuard and the social media analytics firm NewsWhip, published its findings on Monday.
In total, Facebook likes, comments and shares of articles from news outlets that regularly publish falsehoods and misleading content roughly tripled from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of 2020, the group found.
Formerly a strategic partner manager for emerging talent at Facebook, Gayoso has joined Range as a partner, where he will lead representation of digital management and also work with clients across the firm to develop individualized digital strategies.
This just cannot be said enough: every device that connects to the Internet in some way has the ability to be compromised. Where it’s particularly concerning is with devices that kids use. Anyone who has a child with an Xplora X4 Smartwatch should be concerned with this news that there is an undocumented backdoor included that, among everything else, takes snapshots.
This latest not-so-shocking surprise is actually incredibly dangerous and reckless for the future as well as incredibly cruel, heartless, indeed sadistic right now.
With Joe Biden leading in the polls and President Trump’s attempts to avoid addressing the Covid danger now undermined by his own encounter with the virus, the White House is scrambling for a new line of attack on his opponent. Trump’s attempt to use “law and order” as a wedge in suburban areas has clearly failed, and his drive to shoehorn the Supreme Court appointment of Amy Coney Barrett is at risk because of Covid infections among key Senate Republicans. What remains, then, as a last-minute game-changer? Knowing Trump’s impulsive nature, we cannot rule out war as a possible option.
Most ordinary Afghans hold out little hope for peace.
It has taken decades to reach this moment when 141 cities, 15 states, numerous universities, and the nation of Trinidad and Tobago officially recognize Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
In an article published Sunday, Taiwan-based journalist Chris Horton said Beijing's pressure on governments worldwide has resulted in more countries recognizing Taiwan, including many who see China as their enemy. He said such a shift can be observed in the recent display of Taiwan's National Day posters with Taiwanese flags outside the Chinese embassy in New Dehli, after media in India were threatened to honor the "one China" principle.
Horton noted that more Taiwanese have rejected closer relations with China due to its constant threats and belittlement of their government. He also quoted political scientist Jonathan Sullivan of the University of Nottingham as saying that Taiwan has learned to find space without crossing Beijing's "red lines."
In the days since Michigan authorities and federal prosecutors announced the arrest of 13 people in a plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, President Donald Trump and his inner circle are intensifying their appeals to the fascist right.
While the plot was centered in Michigan, new information has surfaced making clear the plotters were involved in a far broader and ongoing national conspiracy. The criminal complaint filed last Thursday explained that the Michigan conspirators engaged in a plan to “take violent action against multiple state governments.”
The conspirators clearly felt they were acting with the support of the White House. Even after the plot was revealed, Trump denounced Whitmer yesterday for “complaining” and “crying” about the threat to kidnap and kill her. On Saturday, Trump impersonated Mussolini by giving a speech from the White House balcony in which he ranted to a small audience about the imminent danger that the country will be taken over by “socialists” and “communists.”
If mainstream parties continue to fade, Pakistani politics may well see a three-way tug-of-war between a middle-class populist, an aggressive military establishment and radical Islamists. That’s in nobody’s interest — not even the Pakistan army’s.
India on Monday accused neighbouring China and Pakistan of escalating tension in the border areas apparently “like a mission”, even as the senior commanders of its army and the communist country’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) held yet another round of talks to resolve the five-month-long stand-off in eastern Ladakh.
“It appears as if tension is being escalated as part of a mission, first by Pakistan and now even by China,” Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said, after remotely inaugurating 44 bridges closer to the western, northern and north-eastern borders of the country.
A New York Times analysis of tax records showed that more than 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments have funneled millions of dollars to President Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from the president and his administration.
Nearly a nearly a quarter of the entities have not been previously reported.
Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades. Federal tax-return data for Mr. Trump and his business empire, which was disclosed by The New York Times last month, showed that even as he leveraged his image as a successful businessman to win the presidency, large swaths of his real estate holdings were under financial stress, racking up losses over the preceding decades. But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
But once Mr. Trump was in the White House, his family business discovered a lucrative new revenue stream: people who wanted something from the president. An investigation by The Times found over 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments that patronized Mr. Trump’s properties while reaping benefits from him and his administration. Nearly a quarter of those patrons have not been previously reported.
The tax records — along with membership rosters for Mar-a-Lago and the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., as well as other sources — reveal how much money this new line of business was worth.
In Vienna this week a United Nations working group, under its Commission on International Trade Law, or UNCITRAL, is to resume discussions on the reform of ISDS, which is already a feature of more than 2,600 international agreements, and is a contentious issue whenever a new bilateral or plurilateral one is under negotiation. The meeting comes as the European Union and some of its members are trying to renegotiate the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a pact signed in 1994 by the EU and 52 national governments on cross-border trade and investment in energy, with the original aim of integrating the energy industry of the former Soviet bloc with western Europe. The EU is concerned that, because of its ISDS provisions, the ECT is “threatening the climate ambition of the EU domestically and internationally”, in the words of a letter signed by nearly 150 members of the European and national parliaments. The worry is that, if governments force very polluting industries—notably fossil-fuel power stations—to close down, they will face lengthy arbitration procedures and, potentially, crippling compensation bills. Japan, however, is resisting reform, leading to EU threats of withdrawal from the ECT.
A new report from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think-tank, called “Raising the cost of climate action: ISDS and compensation for stranded fossil-fuel assets”, highlights the scale of the problem. It notes that burning fossil fuels is the biggest source of carbon emissions. To have a chance of meeting the goal set out in the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015 of limiting global warming to 1.5–2€°C above pre-industrial temperatures by the end of the century, one-third of known oil reserves, half of known gas reserves and over 80% of coal reserves must remain unused. That means a lot of investment already made in extracting, processing and burning these fossil fuels will not be needed. The assets created will be “stranded”.
"Especially in the midst of a health and economic emergency, public money must be used to boost existing solutions that will create new jobs and support the people most impacted."
A task force for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission put it succinctly in a recent report: “Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy.”
That’s why the world’s biggest banks should do what our great-grandfather began to do in 1920 to spread the risks to his investments (though climate change was not yet on the horizon): move their businesses away from fossil fuels. Just as his father, John D. Rockefeller Sr., the oil tycoon and founder of Standard Oil, was a pivotal figure in the shaping of the oil industry and the modern corporation, so too must the financial leaders of today embrace innovation and move beyond the profits of fossil fuels to develop banking models that will excel in a zero-carbon world.
Bloomberg’s report yesterday on Exxon’s emissions forecasts also drew attention from American politicians. “Outrageous,” U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Twitter. Former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer faulted the company for putting “our lives, our children, and our futures at risk.”
For investors, these details are an important way to gauge if oil reserves are in danger of becoming stranded assets, an industry term for uneconomic resources. “The companies that face the highest risk should be the ones thinking about how they change their business,” said Rooze of BNEF.
He and his team are exploring suitable metal alloys and an optimized preparation process that allows fast storage and release of hydrogen within easily reachable temperatures.
"Our metal hydride system reaches the maximum hydrogen storage capacity of 7.0 weight percent (92.1%) and can release the entire hydrogen in less than 5 minutes," he explained.
Has your unpaid tuition bill been sent to a collection agency or courthouse? Please share your story with VPM and ProPublica. Our newsrooms are investigating collection practices at colleges and universities in Virginia. In some cases, students are charged 30% in collection fees on top of the initial balance they owe. Some students end up dropping out because of the debt. Others have been sued.
Hearing from students will help make our reporting more complete. If you’ve had a tuition bill sent to collections, or know someone who has, please share your story with reporter Megan Pauly by filling out this form. You can help us do even more reporting by sharing this post on your Instagram Story or in a direct message to people in your networks.
"Rejecting any chance at a deal now means asking these struggling families to hold on for another couple of months before they get any help."
Biden must call on federal workers to ignore illegal orders and faithfully serve the Constitution.
"Apparently they're trying to prove voter fraud is real by committing actual election fraud."
The best thing a snake oil salesman can have going for him is a personal story, especially one he himself believes. If you can tell with conviction a tale about how you were stricken by a near-fatal disease—and then miraculously cured—a whole world of possibilities opens up for winning over the gullible.
No one has described the current crossroads more astutely than Naomi Klein, who tweeted last month: "Vote for a more favorable terrain."
The most egregious test of Trump’s 5th Avenue principle is still to come, when he tries to kill off American democracy.
The B-52 Stratofortress is no ordinary warplane. First flown in 1952, it was designed with a single purpose in mind: to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean and drop dozens of nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. Some models were later modified to deliver tons of conventional bombs on targets in North Vietnam and other hostile states, but the remaining B-52s are still largely configured for intercontinental nuclear strikes. With only 44 of them now thought to be in active service at any time, those six dispatched to the edge of Russian territory represented a significant commitment of American nuclear war-making capability.
While it’s still too early to predict the likely outcome of the November 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump continues to fall behind in national polls while pulling dirty electoral tricks in the hope of defeating Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Much of Trump’s hope for victory rests with his “law and order” campaign, which promotes lies about mail-in-voting fraud in order to preemptively discredit the election results if they are in Biden’s favor. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Noam Chomsky discusses the national and international significance of Trump’s refusal to commit to a “peaceful transition to power” and his reliance on conspiracy theories.
"The list of what is at stake if Republicans get their way is truly staggering."
Amy Coney Barrett comes up for confirmation at a time when trust in our highly inegalitarian capitalism is low, especially among the young.
Bickert specifically cited a recent survey of U.S. adults 18-39 that found almost one-fourth said they believed the Holocaust either was a myth, that it had been exaggerated or they weren’t sure it actually happened. About 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi regime, and 36% thought the number of those murdered was “2 million or fewer” per the survey, commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Starting later n 2020, Facebook will direct users who search for terms associated with the Holocaust or its denial to “credible information” from third-party sources, according to Bickert.
In a Facebook post today, Zuckerberg said his thinking on the matter had “evolved,” in part in response to a climate of “rising anti-Semitism.”
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for president, is demanding equal time on the The Rush Limbaugh Show after Limbaugh hosted a 2-hour “radio rally” for Trump on Friday.
In a letter to Limbaugh, Hawkins invoked the equal time rule of the Communications Act of 1934 to ask Limbaugh to contact him to arrange a date and programming format for equal time for Hawkins.
“Limbaugh’s audience deserves to understand that it is me, not Biden, who is the democratic socialist in this race. It is me, not Biden, who supports Medicare for All and a Green New Deal,” Hawkins said. Hawkins was the first US candidate in 2010 to campaign for a Green New Deal, which became the signature policy of the Green Party.
Today would be the 84th birthday of my mother, Kathleen Kearney Naureckas, who died at her apartment in Oak Park, Illinois, on September 30, 2020. In accordance with the journalistic maxim she taught me, “News is something that happens to or near an editor,” allow me to tell you a little bit about her.
"By repeatedly failing to disclose relevant information to the Senate, she has forfeited the benefit of the doubt."
Nelson Cruz’s family was so sure Judge ShawnDya Simpson would free him, they brought a change of clothes to his hearing. Then everything took an unexpected turn. Can justice ever be sorted out?
Halfway through the public lecture that Dr. Daniel Wutti had spent weeks organizing at Klagenfurt University in rural Austria in 2017, 15 male protesters burst through the doors. Some were dressed as stereotypical Muslim women in black niqabs. One man was wearing traditional Austrian lederhosen, and as the “women” unfurled large banners reading “Stop immigration” and “Integration is a lie,” they began throwing stones at him.
The NBA has made a bold statement this summer and fall with its support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The phrase is emblazoned on the courts and on the backs of many players’ uniforms. But how much of this is is sincere and how much is just woke marketing? The NBA franchise owners (or “governors,” in NBA parlance) have been talking the talk, but do they walk the walk?
"Rio Tinto must acknowledge, and seek to correct, the unequal bargaining positions that have always resulted in a disadvantage for Traditional Owners."
Jordan Tygh, a regional field director for the California Republican Party, promoted an "official ballot drop off box" on Twitter and urged followers to message him for "convenient locations" to drop their ballots last week, The Orange County Register first reported. One voter reported an "Official Ballot Drop Box" that was "approved and bought by the GOP" outside of a Los Angeles area church before it was removed after county officials warned on social media that it was "not an official vote by mail drop box and does not comply with [state] regulations for drop boxes," according to KCAL.
Other posts on the church’s website show it hosting a forum for Republican local candidates and criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement. With that in mind, some locals said they are suspicious of what the church’s intentions were with the box.
“If you believe in your candidate, there’s no reason to try to fudge with the election at all,” Kaehny said. “It’s an attack on democracy, it’s not ok, and it pissed me off.”
The discrepancy between what Foxconn is doing and what it said it would do in its contract has only grown since then, and it has brought Wisconsin and the company to an impasse. Documents obtained by The Verge show that attempts to renegotiate that contract have so far failed, and today, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), which oversees the deal, rejected Foxconn’s application for tax subsidies on the grounds that Foxconn had not carried out the Gen 10.5 LCD factory project described in its original contract.
Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest voting equipment manufacturers in the country, was awarded a $107 million contract by the state last year to implement a “verified paper ballot system.”
A spokesperson for the company referred The Hill to Fulton County, noting that Dominion “has no involvement in the matter.”
"We're becoming desensitized to unacceptable burdens on the franchise," one political scientist said. "People died for this right. [It] shouldn't take hours to participate in our democracy."
At least two counties briefly had problems with the electronic pollbooks used to check in voters. The issue halted voting for a while at State Farm Arena, where the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks play. Technicians resolved the problem and the lines soon cleared at the arena, which is Georgia’s largest early voting site, with 300 voting machines.
“We’re disappointed that it happened,” Hawks CEO Steve Koonin told reporters, but he noted that there are still plenty of days left. Early in-person voting runs through Oct. 30 in Georgia.
The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted schooling across the globe. But in southern Bangladesh, local communities hosting nearly one million Rohingya refugees say they’ve been struggling for the past three years. Local teachers, students, and aid workers say schooling in host communities has grown more precarious since a military purge in Myanmar’s Rakhine State drove more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh’s camps starting in August 2017. Educators warn of a lost generation of students as communities grapple with rising poverty, school dropouts, and teacher shortages – side effects, they say, of life amid a massive aid response. Gul Bahar, 13, stopped school last year because her fisherman father couldn’t afford to pay sky-high transport fees, which have doubled since 2017. Government bans on fishing in the nearby Naf River, imposed partly to cut off a transportation route used by Rohingya to enter Bangladesh, have put thousands out of work. “My younger sister and I don’t attend school now,” she said. “My father can no longer fish in the river after the arrival of Rohingya.
What these app companies are doing is both more invasive and a regular tactic rather than a rarity. Uber has done versions of lobbying through its app over and over and over again in many parts of the United States.
The in-app messaging will probably win Uber and its friends some votes. They can get the word out to millions of potential voters in ways that seasoned politicians would envy. But the corporate propaganda risks turning people off, too. We should be able to take a ride across town or eat a bowl of cereal without becoming a target for self-serving corporate propaganda.
Reward drives innovation. For this reason, Congress has enacted a system of Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights to incentivize innovation. Such publicly ordered intellectual property regulation supports public and private interests – mandating disclosure of the innovation while legislating protection of that disclosure. Increasingly, though, the legislated incentives are proving insufficient incentive for innovation, and innovators are relying on private incentives, undermining the fundamental balance of our legal framework and maximizing the reward to innovators at the cost of the public’s interest. Enforcement of contracts that supplant legislation rather than supplement it contravenes public policy and vitiates the public’s interest. It is time to reform public ordering to protect the public’s interest while providing the reward demanded for innovation.
The Federal Trade Commission carried out an (in)famous crusade against reverse payment (more provocatively, "pay for delay") settlements in ANDA litigation for almost a decade before eventually having the Supreme Court see things their way (to some extent) in FTC v Actavis. The Commission has not lost its enthusiasm for such interventions in drug patenting matters but without (so far) overwhelming success. This pattern is illustrated in the Third Circuit's recent decision in Federal Trade Commission v. AbbVie Inc.
The Commission's interest arose over Androgel, which the opinion characterizes as a "blockbuster testosterone replacement therapy that generated billions of dollars in sales," the latter characteristic no doubt playing a large part in attracting the FTC's investigation. The Commission brought suit against AbbVie and related companies under 15 U.S.C. ۤ 53(b) (Section 13(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act), which provides FTC jurisdiction over false advertisements with provisions for injunctions and restraining orders...
[...]
The basis of the allegations were that defendants filed "sham" patent infringement suits (which seems to be the allegation the FTC makes against any patent infringement or ANDA lawsuit brought by a drug company) against generic drug companies, followed by entering into an "anticompetitive reverse-payment agreement" with one such company (Teva Pharmaceuticals). (Indeed, Perrigo Co., one of the generic competitors, made that allegation before the District Court.)
The various parties settled, concomitant with payments from Abbott/AbbVie for "avoided litigation expenses" (a category sanctioned by the Supreme Court's Actavis opinion) and an agreement of a date certain, prior to patent expiration, when the generic competitor could market its Androgel generic drug. In Teva's case, the Androgel settlement was paired with settlement over another generic drug (brand name TriCor) which permitted Teva to take advantage of a 180-day exclusivity period as first filer, with Abbott being the supplier and being entitled to "the costs of production, an additional percentage of that cost, and a royalty." (This agreement formed the basis for FTC's allegation of an illegal reverse payment.)
The newest Supreme Court patent eligibility case was recently filed by Rudy Telscher in Consumer 2.0, Inc., D/B/A Rently v. Tenant Turner, Inc. (Supreme Court 2020). Rather than directly challenging Alice Corp., Rently argues that the Federal Circuit has done a poor job of implementing the Supreme Court’s guidance. The Supreme Court decisions on eligibility are focused on avoiding improper preemption. While mouthing the word preemption as a goal, the Federal Circuit has repeatedly ruled that preemption forms no part of its eligibility test.
In a judgment handed down this week, the Full Court of the Federal Court dismissed Meat and Livestock Australia's (MLA) appeal against two previous decisions, handed down in 2018 and 2019.
At the core of the dispute is a patent, lodged in 2010 by US company Branhaven LLC, that MLA claimed would have a chilling effect on cattle genomic research in Australia.
The patent described using a common scientific technique for identifying valuable genetic traits in cattle, such as fat marbling or milk production.
And MLA was concerned that in its original form, the patent was so broad it could encompass nearly two-thirds of the cattle genome.
Blockchain payments technology firm Ripple has won a patent for a design that can execute smart contracts based on data collected from the outside world.
Apple is working on how to secure digital identity credentials like mobile drivers’ licenses and digital travel credentials, held on its mobile devices and shared through biometrics.
A published patent application details the use of secure enclaves to store digital identity credentials, much as they are used to store biometric data, and controlled methods of providing those credentials.
The Open Invention Network, which offers patent protection for a wide range of open-source software, has expanded its Linux System Definition — the set of software covered by the OIN patent non-aggression agreement. In particular, the new definition includes the exFAT filesystem (once the subject of a lot of patent worries), the KDE Frameworks, the Robot Operating System, and version 10 of the Android Open Source Project.
The Supreme Court has granted Certiorari Arthrex on the questions of whether Administrative Patent Judges were properly appointed under the U.S. Constitution and, if not, what is the proper remedy.
Under the new structure, the studios will continue to develop and produce originals for Disney’s streaming services — which include Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus — and legacy platforms. Distribution and commercialization will now be centralized under the Media and Entertainment Distribution group.
Under the new structure, Disney will create a new Media and Entertainment Distribution group responsible for both the dissemination and ad sales for all of its content, including across streaming services including Disney+. Chapek has tapped Kareem Daniel, formerly president of consumer products, games and publishing, to run the newly formed division.
ISP Charter Communications doesn't have to share all information it has on how subscribers use VPNs to conceal pirating activities. This information was requested by several record labels that sued the ISP for failing to take action against repeat infringers. Charter will, however, share all VPN-related information it has on accused subscribers.
A Premier League plan to charge fans a €£14.95 pay-per-view fee for every game not shown as part of Sky Sports or BT Sports packages has enraged fans, with experts warning it will lead to more piracy. Visitors to SoccerStreams.net, which has just become the most-visited pirate site in the UK, are likely to agree.
