Mobile/Desktop convergence is something that Purism had planned and has been developing since the launch of the Librem 5.
It all started with the amazing work that Adrien initiated with the libhandy library, that let the default Librem 5 applications be adapted from the exact same applications running on the laptops.
Now the Librem 5 team is moving a step further by letting the Librem 5 being used as a real desktop computer by simply plugging it into an external monitor, keyboard and mouse through a single USB hub. The feature is still under active development at the time of writing this article, but the different components are starting to come together and it is already pretty functional.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.6.13 and Istio 1.6.14
As previously announced, support for Istio 1.6 has now officially ended.
At this point we will no longer back-port fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.6, so we heartily encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.8) if you haven’t already.
Linus Torvalds has expressed some worries about progress of version 5.10 of the Linux kernel.
"Hmm. The 5.10 release candidates stubbornly keeps staying fairly big, even though by rc5 we really should be seeing things starting to calm down and shrink," he said in his weekly state of the kernel post.
While Torvalds went on to write: "There's nothing in here that makes me particularly nervous," adding: "I'm still hopeful for things to calm down. Otherwise we get into uncomfortable territory for the next release with the holiday season coming up too."
Torvalds prefers releases to have eight release candidates. If he can stick to that plan, a full 5.10 release will emerge in the week before Christmas. His practice is then to open a two-week merge window that would occupy the less-than-busy times between Christmas and New Year. As a resident of the USA, Torvalds may also have this week's Thanksgiving holiday on his mind as that's another time in which productivity is not at its peak. Developers could therefore move slower than usual and see 5.10 remain a little unruly.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.9.11 kernel.
All users of the 5.9 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
I guess I never left, really, since I’ve been vicariously living the life of someone who still writes zink patches through reviewing and discussing some great community efforts that are ongoing.
But now I’m back living that life of someone who writes zink patches.
Valve has generously agreed to sponsor my work on graphics-related projects.
For the time being, that work happens to be zink.
Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has announced that they're now being funded by Valve, so Blumenkrantz's work on the OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan with 'Zink' will continue.
Hold on, what actually is Zink? As described by Collabora dev Erik Faye-Lund it's an "OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. Or to be a bit more specific, Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available".
After working on Zink for a while, Mike Blumenkrantz posted a blog entry back on November 6 saying it was the "last day" due to the end of it being hobby work while being between jobs. In a new blog post titled "Don't Call It A Comeback", Blumenkrantz mentions that "Valve has generously agreed to sponsor my work on graphics-related projects" and that the focus will be on Zink.
Longtime open-source developer Mike Blumenkrantz who has been an Enlightenment developer for many years and was working for Samsung's Open-Source Group prior to its demise jumped into the open-source Linux graphics world this year. While being unemployed he began hacking on the Zink Gallium3D code that allows generic OpenGL acceleration over the Vulkan API. He quickly got the code to the point of OpenGL 4.6 support and quite compelling performance compared to where Zink was at earlier this year. Now it turns out he will continue with his Linux graphics adventures thanks to funding from Valve.
Mike Blumenkrantz shared today that Valve is going to be sponsoring his graphics-related work moving forward. At least for now, that Linux graphics work is still on the matter of Zink.
Given the recent Intel presentation alleging AMD Ryzen laptop performance being worse on battery relative to the AC vs. battery performance seen with Intel EVO notebooks featuring Tiger Lake processors, I ran a mini comparison on my side to see whether there is any merit to Intel's information when testing under Ubuntu Linux.
Here is just some initial data on my side when benchmarking AMD Ryzen "Renoir" versus Intel Core i7 "Tiger Lake" when running Ubuntu 20.10 and comparing the AC power versus battery performance.
A video card is a special circuit board that controls what is displayed on a computer monitor. It is also called a graphics processing unit (GPU), which calculates 3D images and graphics for Linux gaming and other usages. Let us see the top 7 Linux GPU monitoring and diagnostic command-line tools to solve issues.
The following tools work on Linux for GPU monitoring and diagnostic purposes and other operating systems such as FreeBSD. The majority of Linux and FreeBSD users these days use Nvidia, Intel, and AMD GPUs.
We have released LibreSSL 3.3.0, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon.
This is the first development release from the 3.3.x series, which will eventually be part of OpenBSD 6.9.
There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.2-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release by mid-December.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.
XFCE is a well know desktop environment for Linux, Solaris, and BSD systems. It is a fast, lightweight, user-friendly, GTK toolkit based desktop environment. It comes with a wide range of applications and Linux users find it very useful and appealing.
You can download Linux Mint 20, in three editions Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce. Here I will show you how to install Xfce 4.14 (GTK3 based) desktop environment on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana.
When working on a Linux distribution, the user may need to know about hardware and basic system information of the current working system. Regardless of whether you are a software developer or a normal Linux user, it might be necessary to check software and hardware system compatibility. The command-line Linux system provides built-in commands through which a user can get the details about the currently used system and hardware platform.
In this article, you will find a brief description of all commands, which will help you easily get details about your system and hardware.
Amnesty International finally dropped the bomb and released a report about FinSpy spyware made by FinFisher Gmbh.
The most interesting thing was the revelation of Mac and Linux versions, something that was missing from previous reports on this commercial malware (Kaspersky, Wikileaks).
Their report summarizes the most important features but isn’t technically deep. This got me interested in verifying if FinSpy for Mac was any good malicious software or just the same kind of bullshit commercial malware like HackingTeam (they finally went kaput, oh so many crocodile tears!).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zoom on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Zoom is a cross-platform video communication tool that works on Windows, Mac, Android, and Linux systems. With Zoom, you can host webinars, organize online meetings, and create conference rooms.
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 of Zoom client on CentOS 8.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenLiteSpeed on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, OpenLiteSpeed is an open-source HTTP server developed by LiteSpeed Technologies. OpenLiteSpeed is a high performance and lightweight HTTP server which comes with a Web Gui administration interface. As far as Linux web servers are concerned, OpenLiteSpeed has some interesting features that make it a solid choice for many installations. It features Apache compatible rewrite rules, a web administration interface, and customized PHP processing optimized for the server.
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 of the OpenLiteSpeed web server on a CentOS 8.
Gibbon is a free and open-source school management system specially designed for teachers, students, parents and leaders. It helps teachers to find, contact and help their students. It allows teachers to plan, teach, collect, assess and return work in one streamlined process. It is an excellent and one-stop-shop efficient tool that makes all information available in one place. It comes with a simple web-based interface that helps teachers to access all student details on the go.
This beginner's guide explains the steps on how to install Arch Linux - in a most easy and friendly way.
How do I install MySQL server 8.0 on CentOS 8 Linux server running on Linode and AWS cloud? How do I add and set up a new MySQL user and database account on the newly created CentOS server?
Oracle MySQL server version 8.0 is a free and open-source free database server. It is one of the most popular database system used in web apps and websites on the Internet.
Typically MySQL is part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL, Perl/Python/PHP) stack. Popular open-source software such as WordPress, MediaWiki, and others profoundly used by MySQL as a database storage engine. Let us see how to install MySQL server version 8.x on CentOS 8 Linux server.
If you see a lot of banner ads on certain websites, you know that without a Virtual Private Network (VPN), hackers will quickly ravage your computer and burn down your house. Well, that seems to be what they imply. In reality, though, there are two main reasons you might want a VPN connection. You can pay for a service, of course, but if you have ssh access to a computer somewhere on the public Internet, you can set up your own VPN service for no additional cost.
The basic idea is that you connect to a remote computer on another network and it makes it look like all your network traffic is local to that network. The first case for this is to sidestep or enhance security. For example, you might want to print to a network printer without exposing that printer to the public Internet. While you are at the coffee shop you can VPN to your network and print just like you were a meter away from the printer at your desk. Your traffic on the shop’s WiFi will also be encrypted.
By essence, QSoas works with \(y = f(x)\) datasets. However, in practice, when working with experimental data (or data generated from simulations), one has often more than one experimental parameter (\(x\)). For instance, one could record series of spectra (\(A = f(\lambda)\)) for different pH values, so that the absorbance is in fact a function of both the pH and \(\lambda\). QSoas has different ways to deal with such situations, and we'll describe one today, using meta-data.
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QSoas is a powerful open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities. It is released under the GNU General Public License. It is described in Fourmond, Anal. Chem., 2016, 88 (10), pp 5050–5052. Current version is 2.2. You can download its source code there (or clone from the GitHub repository) and compile it yourself, or buy precompiled versions for MacOS and Windows there.
The Linux sort command can arrange command output or file content in a lot more ways than you might realize--alphabetically, numerically, by month and randomly are only some of the more interesting choices. In this post, we take a look at some of the more useful sorting options and explain how they differ.
Luminance HDR is an open-source GUI tool that provides an easy to use toolkit for HDR imaging. It is available on all major Linux operating systems and is excellent for photographers. In this guide, we will go over how to install Luminance HDR on Linux.
Adding an external user sign up page on a website allows users to register for different roles. Once registered, they can perform tasks such as adding new articles, new comments, and even performing other actions such as designing.
Allowing a user to sign up is a common thing for bloggers and companies that accept guest posts. However, this feature can also be used to offer premium content for your members. But, this may require more custom fields and branding. The default WordPress sign up page contains fixed fields and a WordPress logo.
Today we are looking at how to install Lyrebird, a voice changer for Discord on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Brawlhalla is a free-to-play 2D fighting game. It was developed by Blue Mammoth Games, published by Ubisoft, and released on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and PC. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play it on Linux.
Need to take to the skies? We can possibly help with that. Aerofly FS 2 Flight Simulator from IPACS recently quitely released a Linux version. They don't seem to have announced it in a news post but it's up and live on Steam right now. A reader emailed in about this, and the developer has confirmed it on their Steam forum.
Looks like quite a detailed flight sim too with a number of aircraft included like the A320, B737-500, F-15, F-18, Aermacchi MB-339, King Air C90 GTx, Learjet 45, ASG 29 and Swift S1 gliders and more. After being released in Early Access in 2016, then a full release in 2017 it's continued being supported for a long time now. Most recently, it had a big update adding in the EC135 helicopter along with a bunch of optimizations to the game.
After a rough launch, Frictional Games have nicely fixed up Amnesia: Rebirth and overall the experience is one we're not going to forget any time soon.
"In Amnesia: Rebirth, you are Tasi Trianon, waking up deep in the desert of Algeria. Days have passed. Where have you been? What did you do? Where are the others? Retrace your journey, pull together the fragments of your shattered past; it is your only chance to survive the pitiless horror that threatens to devour you."
While our livestreamer did a full playthrough live on our Twitch Channel cheered on by viewers which you can watch through on-demand on our YouTube Channel, I was spending it entirely alone in a dark room with no one but myself to count on. Not the best idea, because I am a complete wimp. I'm at least honest about that though and Amnesia: Rebirth was, in a word, terrifying. Okay, not all the way through, but plenty of it was.
Amnesia: Rebirth might be Frictional's weirdest yet too. All of their games are strange in their own way but it feels like they really went hard on the darkness in Amnesia: Rebirth. It worked well though, not many games have made me terrified to look at a tiny window on a door before while I search a room for anything useful to keep me going that little bit longer.
Vintage Story has a huge new version almost ready to release, with a couple of Release Candidates going up for the 1.14 release and it's looking awesome.
This is the survival game for those of you who love the blocky style of Minecraft but want something deeper, something much more complex and exciting. With full Linux support, Vintage Story is a good choice and the developer is definitely dedicated to their idea.
With the 1.14 update pulling in lots of often requested features including character customization, the "Steel Age" along with assorted items to build like a metal door and a mechanical powered Pulverizer building that can grind down things for you which looks awesome. Your body temperature now matters more too with clothing giving warmth, frost damage during harsh winters, lots of new blocks, new graphics with shader effects and lots more.
With the awesome RetroArch application for running emulators and all sorts coming to Steam, they now have a Playtest available you can opt into to try it out.
Using the new dedicated Steam Playtest feature announced by Valve in early November, developers can have a banner on their Steam store page letting users request access. So the Libretro team have put this up, and as of today it also has Linux builds available for testing.
While in 2021 we might begin to see PipeWire replacing PulseAudio by default at least on bleeding-edge distributions like Fedora, for now PulseAudio still is the dominant sound server used by desktop Linux distributions. Rolling out today is PulseAudio 14.0.
PulseAudio 14.0 comes with many changes compared to PulseAudio 13.0 that shipped all the way back in September of 2019.
I've argued that the video-game "Doom" is a sort of cultural version of Turing Completeness. Given that we're jamming computers and screens into just about any device these days, inevitably (and delightfully) someone gets it to run Doom: Watches, digital cameras, ATMs, pregnancy sticks.
But you know what's even cooler? Creating your own new, original game in the exactly style of Doom, and making it so wildly resource-efficient that it fits in under 256K and will run on just about any computational device around.
That's what the programmer Miloslav ÃÅíà ¾ has done, with his new game "Anarch". You can play it in your browser here or download it here; I just blasted away in it for a while, and it's a hoot — he neatly channels the mechanics and twitchy low-rez aesthetics of the original. Gameplay trailer is here; he put it in the public domain, and the code is all here on Gitlab.
Unless you’re new to Linux, you know that there are several popular desktop environment choices for users. And if you’re that newbie, I recommend you to learn what a desktop environment is along with this tutorial.
Here, I shall be focusing on tweaking the task switching experience on GNOME. I know that the majority of users just tend to use it as is and stock settings are good enough for the most part.
I mean there is nothing wrong with the application switcher that you use with Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut in Ubunt
In this video, we are looking at KaOS 2020.11.
So I've been having an adventurous week here at HA Towers: I decided, after something more than a decade, I'm going to get out of the self-hosting game, as far as I can. It makes me a bit sad, because it's been kinda cool to do and I think it's worked pretty well, but I'm getting to a point where it seems silly that a small part of me has to constantly be concerned with making sure my web and mail servers and all the rest of it keep working, when the services exist to do it much more efficiently. It's cool that it's still possible to do it, but I don't think I need to actually do it any more.
So, if you're reading this...and I didn't do something really weird...it's not being served to you by a Fedora system three feet from my desk any more. It's being served to you by a server owned by a commodity web hoster...somewhere in North America...running Lightspeed (boo) on who knows what OS. I pre-paid for four years of hosting before realizing they were running proprietary software, and I figured what the hell, it's just a web serving serving static files. If it starts to really bug me I'll move it, and hopefully you'll never notice.
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I also set up a Kolab Now account and switched my contacts and calendar to it, which was nice and easy to do (download the ICS files from Radicale, upload them to Kolab, switch my accounts on my laptops and phone, shut down the Radicale server, done). I also plan to have it serve my mail, but that migration is going to be the longest and most complicated as I'll have to move several gigs of mail and re-do all my filters. Fun!
If you’ve used Chrome OS, you know there’s a beauty in the simplicity. Over the years, there have been a few attempts at recreating that same simplicity for Linux, but many of those distributions have vanished. From the creator of Ubuntu Unity, comes yet another attempt to create that user-friendly magic. The new distribution, called Ubuntu Web, is based on Ubuntu 20.04, and offers an open source take on Chrome OS.
The developer, Rudy Saraswat, has employed the GNOME desktop (version 3.36) to pull this off and includes plenty of pre-installed apps to make Ubuntu Web a distribution anyone can use. Included in the app listing you'll find web apps for Mastodon, Twitter, SoundCloud, and a number of others from the /e/ Foundation.
The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical. “LTS Images are built on trusted infrastructure, in a secure environment, with guarantees of stable security updates,” said Mark Lewis, VP Application Services at Canonical. “They offer a new level of container provenance and assurance to organisations making the shift to container based operations.”
Canonical and Docker will collaborate on Docker Official Images and LTS Docker Image Portfolio to bring the best of the two to the community and ecosystem. The entire LTS Docker Image Portfolio will be exempted from per-user rate limits.
A good deal of software development now relies on open source images, but it can be hard for businesses to know if they're introducing security flaws by using them.
Canonical -- the company behind Ubuntu Linux -- is addressing this by publishing the LTS (Long Term Support) Docker Image Portfolio, a curated set of secure container application images, on Docker Hub.
LTS Images are built on trusted infrastructure, in a secure environment, with guarantees of stable security updates. Canonical and Docker will collaborate on Docker Official Images and the LTS Docker Image Portfolio to bring the best of the two to the community and ecosystem. The entire LTS Docker Image Portfolio will also be exempted from per-user rate limits.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 658 for the week of November 15 – 21, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.
Edgedevices.io’s second-gen “Pi-oT 2” Raspberry Pi automation add-on offers 8x ADCs, 6x digital outputs, and Ethernet plus options including a 2-hour UPS, RS485, 4x 24V digital inputs, and a 12-24VDC input.
Last year, Cleveland-based Pi-oT, now called Edgedevices.io, launched a Kickstarter campaign for a Pi-oT industrial controller add-on for the Raspberry Pi that is housed within a DIN-rail mountable chassis. Edgedevices.io has now returned to Kickstarter with a Pi-oT 2 model loaded with plenty of new features including DIDO and an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) while losing the 5x relays of the original.
With Raspberry Pi 4, however, the tiny computer became a viable desktop computer -- particularly the model with 8GB of RAM. You can install Ubuntu, for instance, and have a full desktop experience. Best of all, the 8GB variant can be had for just $75.
Great news for the Vulkan API and for fans of the Raspberry Pi 4, as the upcoming V3DV that will be part of the next Mesa release is now an official conforming driver.
Sharing the news on the official RPi blog, guest poster Iago Toral from Igalia announced that nearly a year after being first announced, the V3DV Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 now passes The Khronos Group's Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests and is now officially listed.
We tested 11 different doorbells found on eBay and Amazon, many of which had scores of 5-star reviews, were recommended as ‘Amazon’s Choice’, or on the bestseller list. One was labelled as the number one bestseller in ‘door viewers’. We found vulnerabilities with every single one.
While that plastic cup, bag, dish, or other item may have served its purpose, more than likely it could be formed into something new. With this in mind, the SOTOP-Recycling team of Manuel Maeder, Benjamin Krause, and Nadina Maeder developed an automated injection molding machine that can be built at home and is small enough to allow you to run your own recycling operation!
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Everything is controlled by an Arduino Mega.
The included leaflet is sufficient to get started. Plugging the device into mains has it create a WiFi access point I connect to, and I can then configure it to connect to my home network. The Tasmota firmware spoke German to me all the time, and the only reason I can think of, as my browsers are all set to English, is that it was built that way for delivery here. Ronald confirms that and explains I can flash the device with an en firmware from here (I pasted the link to tasmota.bin into the firmware update page).
The latest beta of Manjaro ARM for the PinePhone brings a series of software updates and bug fixes.
The kernel and default web browser, camera app, keyboard, and chat applications have all received updates. Phone call audio quality has been improved. And you you can now close applications by swiping upward on the thumbnail image in the task switcher.
Manjaro ARM Beta3 with Phosh for the PinePhone is available for download from OSDN, and you can flash it to a microSD card using balenaEtcher or a similar tool.
Think Windows on one side, vs Linux (and the BSDs) on the other (with macOS initially being in the middle and increasingly swaying to becoming even more constraining than Windows). Think proprietary gaming consoles and mobile IAP-chasing games, vs game platforms that encourage participation like TIC-80 and LÃâVE. Think US-centric proprietary social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and services (Dropbox, Google Suite) vs distributed social networks (Mastodon, Pleroma, Diaspora etc.) and self-hosted services (Nextcloud, Cryptpad etc.).
What are most people sacrificing to the altar of promised convenience? Literally both time and money: our attention, higher costs; also our autonomy (you’re locked in) and our privacy (… so platform owners can mine your attention and monetize what they observe of your behavior).
If you believe in capitalism, this is bad news. If you don’t it’s even worse.
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But in other jurisdictions like the US, regulation might be a long time coming, except maybe in California (plus the companies we’re trying to unshackle users from are mostly US-based). So a lot of the solution has to be bottom up.
We simply need to lower barriers to entry, both actual and perceived, to using the platforms we’re championing. Some involve compromises (e.g. Flatpak is a great way to abstract away the differences between Linux distributions, to the point that it’s easier to install proprietary apps, including Steam – which improves the availability of games on Linux despite, yes, being proprietary). Some involve corporate backing (e.g. Fedora on Lenovo laptops). A lot would involve being more welcoming to newcomers, and bridging the actual usability gaps there are.
It’s hard enough to overcome incumbency and the network effect. Let’s not make it harder for ourselves.
LibreOffice 7.1 was branched this weekend that also marked the hard feature freeze for this next half-year update to this open-source office suite. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta has now shipped ahead of next month's release candidate and the additional test releases in January before going gold in early February.
LibreOffice 7.1 brings presentation improvements, an outline folding mode as an experimental feature, faster find/replace performance, faster spell checking performance within the Calc spreadsheets, new physics-based animations within Impress, LibreOffice Math now has full support for HTML colors, native support for Windows ARM64, and a wealth of low-level improvements.
I was born on February 25, 1998 in Istanbul, Turkey. Currently I’m a third-year Computer Engineering student at Hacettepe University in Turkey. I really like coding. Nowadays, I am working on computer graphics. Also, I have academic projects about GPGPU programming. I am contributing to LibreOffice in my free time because of my enthusiasm for open source culture.
The FSF is well-known for spearheading the advocacy and support of free software, not just by recommending it in the face of pervasive proprietary options, but also by condemning nonfree software altogether. Following this recommendation is hard, even for us, because of the ever-increasing dependency on software and computer networks that we are all subject to. To follow through with our commitment, our tech team maintains a large list of services that many other offices our size would have long ago been wrongly pressured into transferring to one of the handful of gigantic corporations that monopolize those services.
Your work email account is most likely implemented through Gmail or Outlook; your office's software is likely to be served by Amazon Web Services, along with all the data backups; your company's customer service is likely to be managed through Salesforce or SAP, and so on. Make no mistake, this is true for your local government and school networks, too!
In contrast, at the FSF, we never jumped on the outsourcing wagon, and we don't use any Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS) in our operations. We run our own email servers, telephony and fax service, print shop, full server stack, backups, networking, systems monitoring, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and a long list of other tasks and software development projects, with a team of just four extremely dedicated technicians. And we implement this on hardware that has been carefully evaluated to meet very high ethical standards, criteria that we push for vendors to achieve through our "Respects Your Freedom" certification program.
GNU Guix 1.2 is out today as both an update to the cross-platform package manager as well as the Guix System Linux distribution.
This release comes after being in development the past half-year and also on the 8th anniversary of this GNU project. GNU Guix 1.2 comes with new features, performance improvements, and many fixes to the package manager as well as the GNU/Linux system distribution.
Celebrating the eighth anniversary of the GNU Guix project, Ludovic Courtès has announced the release of a new GNU Guix version 1.2.0.
The latest v1.2.0 includes several new features, user interface, security update, performance improvements, and bug fixes. But before we see it in more detail, let me brief you about GNU Guix.
Alexander Kiryuhin again did all the hard work to create a new Rakudo Compiler release: the Rakudo Compiler 2020.11 Release! With a bunch of new features, such as new coercion semantics, support for the [|| ] and {|| } postcircumfix operators, a new is test-assertion trait for better error reporting during testing. Plus some efficiency improvements and quite a number of bug fixes and improvements.
Sadly, shortly after the release it became clear that some typical workloads seem to be affected by a noticeable performance regression. This appears to be caused by the new coercion semantics inadvertently disabling some runtime optimizations. Fixing this has now become a blocker for the next release. It just goes to show that in Raku, it’s important to first make it work, and then make it work fast. And that a lot of users are already relying on those runtime optimizations.
One of the types of software that’s important for a web developer is the web framework. A framework “is a code library that makes a developer’s life easier when building reliable, scalable, and maintainable web applications” by providing reusable code or extensions for common operations. By saving development time, developers can concentrate on application logic rather than mundane elements.
A web framework offers the developer a choice about how to solve a specific problem. By using a framework, a developer lets the framework control portions of their application. While it’s perfectly possible to code a web application without using a framework, it’s more practical to use one.
Java Development Kit (JDK) 16 has added two more proposed new features including strong encapsulation of JDK internals and a foreign linker API. Previously proposed features include a foreign-memory access API, pattern matching, a production-ready package tool, concurrent thread-stack processing for garbage collection, support for C++ 14 language features, and an “elastic metaspace” capability to more quickly return unused class metadata memory to the OS.
JDK 16 will be the reference implementation of the version of standard Java set to follow JDK 15, which arrived September 15. A proposed release schedule has JDK 16 reaching rampdown phases on December 10 and January 14, 2021, followed by release candidates arriving February 4 and February 18, 2021. The production release is slated to be published March 16, 2021.
Like many of you, I have certain fond memories of playing various Flash games many years ago. There's obviously many better ways to do web games now and Adobe are killing Flash in December.
On December 31, Adobe will be cutting off Flash from any further updates, it will effectively be End Of Life. There's a few projects around trying to keep it alive, like the open source Ruffle emulator written in Rust. Ruffle is still in development but even so the results are impressive, and it can already play thousands of Flash items. All you need is an up to date browser and it does it all for you with no plugins needed. If you have any Flash stuff, you can even test it online.
Seems people have taken notice of this effort, like The Internet Archive who are known rather well for their Wayback Machine that stores websites at various dates. Announced in a blog post on November 19, the archive's Jason Scott announced that they're now storing and emulating various Flash animations, games and toys in their growing collection.
The letting go is not out of hate, but out of an even deeper love, where truth and balance and harmony exist. Knowing that a more perfect love is not only possible, but something that must be and we are moved. Love, true love, the kind we imagine in our best moments, eventually always requires a full commitment to that which is real and honest.
In real love, the masks come off, which of course is a grand part what makes love so enticing, exciting, and fun! Love of the other, in such a case requires, if it is to be of its fullest nature, requires that it needs to be coupled with that ever so important other ingredient in any mutual affection, self-respect and the kind of love “of self” that a respect of self generates.
Although Buy Nothing Day can be celebrated as a holiday, most people consider it an anti-holiday. It is a day that is celebrated all over North America and Europe on the Friday after the United States’ Thanksgiving – on the same day as Black Friday. In a sense, this makes this holiday the anti-Black Friday, at least in the U.S. In some parts of Europe, however, it is celebrated on the last Saturday in November.
It was a bizarre attempt at normality in highly abnormal times. Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, visited Tokyo last week for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic throttled Japan. In a highly scripted set of photo-ops throughout Tokyo, Bach projected a brand of buoyant optimism untroubled by the precariousness of our collective historical moment.
When it comes to science rather than mathematics, it isn’t so simple. Proudly proclaiming scientific illiteracy is not de rigueur. Instead another refrain has recently become popular among politicians and public figures: “I am not a scientist, but…” Equally prominent, is the statement “I believe in science” (as if there is a choice) which is then followed by some scientific gibberish.
Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which continues to exist even when you stop believing in it.” The line between being scientifically or empirically controversial vs being politically controversial has been blurred to the point of erasure. In Washington, and many other seats of government throughout the world, belief trumps reality.
Before Covid-19 hit Lexington, Mass., Amy Morin loved her job helping special needs students at an elementary school. She still does, but now she also feels a creeping sense of dread.
Russian student Alexei Dudoladov has been forced to go to great lengths - or rather great heights - to attend classes online, having to climb a birch tree in his remote Siberian village every time he needs an internet connection.
The 21-year-old, a popular blogger and a student at the Omsk Institute of Water Transport, located 2,225 kilometres (1,383 miles) east of Moscow, has got the authorities’ attention by pleading for better internet coverage from the top of a snow-covered birch tree.
In his plea - viewed 1.9 million times on TikTok and more than 56,000 times on Instagram since last week - Dudoladov tells regional governor Alexander Burkov that his home internet is not strong enough to connect to his online classes and that he has been forced to come up with a creative solution.
Leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, beset by a Trump White House that was harshly critical of the agency's coronavirus response, are anticipating the Biden transition team and the change a new administration will bring, senior health officials tell CNN.
Russia’s Investigative Committee branch in the Sverdlovsk region has opened an investigation into reports of the forced sterilization of women at the Uktussky Assisted Living Facility in Yekaterinburg. This was reported by the news outlet Lampa Yekaterinburg on its Telegram channel.€
"The costs of doing nothing about high drug prices are too high."
On a balmy August morning in Emanuel County in eastern Georgia, hundreds of children bounded off freshly cleaned school buses and out of their parents’ cars. They were greeted by the principal, teachers and staff at Swainsboro Middle School who hadn’t seen them in four months. Before allowing the children to enter, a longtime receptionist beamed a temperature gun at their foreheads and checked for violations of the public school’s strict dress code: mostly neutral colors, nothing tight and no shoulders exposed.
Masks were optional, and about half of the children wore them. So did the receptionist, but only sporadically, according to several teachers.
Now we find ourselves in a race of much greater import: the dash to develop an effective vaccine for Covid-19. The world now watches with that fabled bated breath. Pfizer, a Big Pharma behemoth, is running neck-in-neck with Moderna, a lavishly funded corporate upstart.
Pfizer, first to announce trial results, reports 90 percent effectiveness rates for its pandemic-stopper. Moderna, not to be outdone, reports 95 percent success rates. We actually hit that brass ring, too, retorts Pfizer. And ours even works with older people!
With the world pinning its hopes on a successful coronavirus vaccine to curb the pandemic, corporate watchdogs say much of the research and development of the medicines rely on publicly funded research. “The investment in these vaccines, as for most drugs, has really been underwritten by the taxpayer, by the government,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US nine months ago, a number of bizarre things that I never thought I’d see have happened. For example, I never thought I’d see a President of the United States promote unproven treatments for a deadly viral illness, as President Trump did with hydroxychloroquine. (Dr. Mehmet Oz and other medical grifters promoting unproven treatments, sure, but the President of the United States? Well, I guess I did forget momentarily who our President was.) Nor did I ever think I’d see a President say such incredibly stupid things about potential treatments for such a disease, including using light and disinfectants internally to fight the coronavirus. Don’t get me wrong, though. Given my background, certainly, I did expect there to be COVID-19 conspiracy theories and wasn’t particularly surprised to see the antivaccine movement team up so quickly with COVID-19 conspiracy theorists and cranks given their shared world view viewing the same groups as villains hiding “The Truth” from you—yes, you!—but even I was a bit taken aback at how vociferously antimask ideology became a thing even though masks do work (COVID-19 denier misinterpretations of studies notwithstanding) to slow the spread of COVID-19. Perhaps the strangest thing, though, that happened during the pandemic is the rise of the most unexpected source of reason, science, and information to fight disinformation. I’m referring to the Twitter feed of a frozen meat company called Steak-umm.
The official mortality statistics from Russia’s operational headquarters for the fight against the coronavirus contradict the country’s excess mortality rate for 2020, says a new report from “Mediazona.” Based on data from Russia’s federal statistics agency and regional registry offices, “Mediazona” calculated that in the last seven months, Russia has seen 120,000 more people die than on average for this same period over the last five years. The country’s coronavirus headquarters, on the other hand, has only counted 28,200 deaths from COVID-19 during this period.€
"Every time I hear someone say these are unprecedented times, I say no, no, they're not," said Brittany Hutchinson, assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum. "They did this in 1918."
On Thanksgiving more than a century ago, many Americans, like today, lived under various phases of quarantines and face mask orders. Millions mourned loved ones. And health officials in many cities issued the same holiday warning: Stay home and stay safe.
International Academy President & CEO Bruce L. Paisner said Cuomo is being honored with the academy’s Founders Award for using his briefings to inform and calm the public. Previous recipients include former Vice President Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and director Steven Spielberg.
“The governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” he said. “People around the world tuned in to find out what was going on, and New York tough became a symbol of the determination to fight back.”
The men's spin on the trend, in which social media users filmed themselves being doused in a bucket of ice-water and then nominating friends to do the same, encouraged participants to donate to ALS research after completing the challenge.
Manchester United said in a statement Nov. 20 that it had extensive protocols and procedures in place for such an event and had rehearsed for this risk. It added that “our cyber defenses identified the attack and shut down affected systems to contain the damage and protect data.”
Media channels including the club’s website, mobile app and streaming service were unaffected by the attack and no personal data is believed to have been stolen.
The head of global security at Apple and two top officials from the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office and a local business owner have been accused in a grand jury indictment of exchanging bribes for concealed gun permits, the Morgan Hll Times, a newspaper in California, has reported.
A California district attorney accused Apple Inc. Chief Security Officer Thomas Moyer of offering a bribe to state officials for gun licenses, according to indictments issued on Monday.
Moyer was named along with Santa Clara County Undersherrif Rick Sung and Captain James Jensen in a case that involved offering bribes in return for concealed firearms licenses, according to a court document and a statement from the Santa Clara district attorney’s office.
A California grand jury has indicted Apple’s head of global security on charges that he tried to bribe Santa Clara County officials to procure firearms (CCW) licenses, according to a news release. Santa Clara district attorney Jeff Rosen alleges that Thomas Moyer offered 200 iPads — worth about $70,000 — to Capt. James Jensen and Undersheriff Rick Sung in the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office, in exchange for four concealed firearms licenses for Apple employees.
The charges came after a two-year investigation. “In the case of four CCW licenses withheld from Apple employees, Undersheriff Sung and Cpt. Jensen managed to extract from Thomas Moyer a promise that Apple would donate iPads to the Sheriff’s Office,” Rosen said in the news release. The iPads were never delivered, according to Rosen’s office, because Sung and Moyer became aware in 2019 that the district attorney was executing a search warrant for the sheriff department’s CCW records.
A warning has been issued by the Israel National Cyber Directorate€ about a critical remote code execution flaw in the Drupal content management system.
Australian end-to-end document and digital solutions provider to the legal industry Law In Order says it has suffered a "cyber security incident" and has had to limit access to most of its website as a precaution.
VMware explained it has no patch for a critical escalation-of-privileges bug that impacts both Windows and Linux operating systems and its Workspace One.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is warning of a zero-day bug affecting six VMware products including its Workspace One, Identity Manager and vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.
The critical unpatched bug is a command injection vulnerability.
In a separate VMware advisory, the company did not indicate whether the vulnerability was under active attack. Tracked as CVE-2020-4006, the bug has a CVSS severity rating of 9.1 out of 10. The company said patches are “forthcoming” and that workarounds “for a temporary solution to prevent exploitation of CVE-2020-4006” are available.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a government decree obliging electronics manufacturers to install Russian-made software on new devices — including smartphones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers, and smart TVs — as of January 1, 2021.
Predictive policing is coming for your children. That's what's happening in Florida, where the Pasco County Sheriff's Office has taken an inappropriate interest in minors. It all begins with some questionable access to sensitive records and ends with the Sheriff deciding some students are destined for a life of crime. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)
Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, recently released analysis he did into 493 COVID-19 related iOS apps across dozens of countries. The results are...not great, and highlight how such apps routinely hoover up far more data than they need to, including unneeded access to cameras and microphones, your photo gallery, your contacts, and far more location data than is needed. Much of this data then winds up in the adtech ecosystem for profit, where it winds up in the hands of third parties.
We must act swiftly to prevent war and further conflict, end the occupation, and allow Sahrawis to make their decision on union with Morocco or independence.€
A Russian peacekeeper has been injured in a mine explosion in Nagorno-Karabakh, reports Interfax on Monday, November 23, citing Russia’s Defense Ministry.
Another FBI counterterrorism "investigation" has turned someone with mental health issues into a potential long term tenant of the federal prison system. The arrest happened in August, but the documents related to the arrest weren't unsealed until earlier this month.
Biden and Harris must eschew anyone complicit in torture or who frustrated oversight.
Foreign policy, sacred cows, and the U.S. Military.
CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies recently noted that Avril Haines "provided legal cover" for CIA torture and "worked closely" on the Obama administration's expanded drone policy.€
The pernicious and lucrative aspects of military madness are personified in the favorite to be Biden’s Defense Secretary.
"It is extremely alarming that the warmongers most reliant on Trump's blank checks are secretly meeting in the middle of the night as the clock nearly runs out on the Trump administration."
They do, and will continue to do so, despite the cholera outbreak, coronavirus, poorly functioning hospitals, and 10 million hungry mouths. The latest illustration of this is the Trump administration’s hurried $23 billon sale of 50 F-35 fighter aircraft, 18 MQ-9B Reaper drones, air-to-air missiles and various other munitions to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE used to be a more enthusiastic member of the Saudi Arabian-led coalition that has been pounding Yemen since 2015. Despite completing a phased military withdrawal from the conflict in February 2020 to much fanfare, Abu Dhabi remains involved in the coalition and an influential agent. Amnesty International has issued a grim warning that such weapons might well be used in “attacks that violate international humanitarian law and kill, as well as injure, thousands of Yemeni civilians.”
With the imminent change of administration in the United States, there is a moral flutter in Congressional ranks, though much of it remains meek and slanted. Democratic Senators Bob Menendez (NJ) and Chris Murphy (Conn.), along with Republican Senator Rand Paul (Ky) intend introducing separate resolutions disapproving of President Donald Trump’s sale. Menendez felt morally mighty in warning the Trump administration that “circumventing deliberative processes for considering a massive infusion of weapons to a country in a volatile region with multiple ongoing conflicts is downright irresponsible.”
On Monday, November 23, Russian state investigators charged Dagestani Police Colonel Gazi Isayev with complicity in a 2010 terrorist attack on the Moscow subway system. Isayev has headed a district police department in Dagestan for a decade. State investigators maintain that he is also responsible for leaking information on special operations to local militant groups, and sources told the media that he is potentially under suspicion for organizing murders, as well.€
The CFCM has agreed to create a National Council of Imams, which will reportedly issue imams with official accreditation which could be withdrawn.
It follows three suspected Islamist attacks in little more than a month.
The charter will state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, while also prohibiting "foreign interference" in Muslim groups.
But it’s time now for all the laughter to die in outrage. Because we need to state in the clearest and most unambiguous terms what is happening in America in November 2020: The president of the United States is using the power of his office to try to overturn, by any means necessary, the fair and democratic election that will remove him from office. In a nation that stakes its claim to “exceptionalism” on 44 peaceful transfers of power (despite one that wasn’t) over 231 years, its current leader is attempting a coup.
It’s not a joke. It’s a crime. And there ought to be consequences — for Trump and his enablers, and to ensure this never happens again.
Meanwhile, most Republican voters don’t think Joe Biden won fairly, despite election officials — including Republicans, who are now getting death threats from other Republicans — saying it might have been among the fairest elections on record. Trump and his enablers in Congress and right-wing media are treating their own supporters with sneering contempt, writes Jonathan Bernstein, but the damage is done: Many of these people may never accept a loss as legitimate again.
As part of the unprecedented attempt to keep President Trump in office despite his election loss, Republicans have focused on Michigan, where the party is seeking a delay in the certification of the vote results and to throw out votes from Detroit, which is overwhelmingly Black. A group of Michigan Republicans met with President Trump at the White House last week in what was widely viewed as an attempt by Trump to personally pressure the lawmakers to block Biden from being awarded the state’s 16 electoral votes. “This is an attempt to disenfranchise the African American vote and to give the election to Trump,” says Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. “If we were in a different country, this would be called a coup, a political coup.”
They are probably right. Then again, we in the media don’t have a great record for recognizing coups when they are staring us in the face. One of the best critiques of American journalism, still taught today because it remains relevant a hundred years after its publication, is an essay by Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz, “A Test of the News,” which analyzed the Times’ failure to cover the Russian Revolution. But Russian journalists missed it, too. On October 25, 1917, my great-grandfather, Arnold Gessen, wrote a long article for Petrograd’s Birzheviye Vedomosti (Stock Market News)—the Wall Street Journal of its time and place. He had been serving as the paper’s parliamentary correspondent since the Russian parliament had been formed, twelve years earlier. Great-grandpa Arnold explained that the Bolsheviks ought not to be taken seriously, because they were a bunch of grifters with no political plan. His article was printed the following day—November 8, 1917, on the Western calendar—in what turned out to be the last issue of Birzheviye Vedomosti: it was promptly shuttered by the Bolsheviks, who had seized power.
“Con versus coup” might be a false dichotomy. A coup is a power claim made illegitimately, often but not always with the use of force, sometimes illegally but sometimes within the bounds of a constitution. A con is a mushy term: it can be a criminal act or simply an unethical one, perhaps just wily and manipulative. A con, in other words, is an illegitimate act of persuasion. A coup always begins as a con. If the con is successful—if the power claim is persuasive—then a coup has occurred.
As a straightforward putsch, it’s too little, too late. Trump failed to come up with a theory for disqualifying crucial states in time, settled on one so silly many Republicans can’t convince themselves of its validity, and failed to lay the groundwork to overrule the election. And while his maneuvers won’t prevent Biden from taking office on January 20, they will serve several other purposes. First, the coup attempt provides Trump with a narrative to sustain his next venture. In the decades-old Trumpian mythos, he never loses; every event must be categorized either as Trump winning or Trump being treated very unfairly. Having now established the latter to the satisfaction of a large segment of the party base, Trump can fulfill plans he has been reportedly discussing to monetize his loyalty as a media brand, run again in 2024, or perhaps both. The Trump cult will stay in place, and any Republican with national ambitions will feel compelled to draw upon its energy and defer to his twisted alt-history. A Reuters interview of 50 Trump supporters found every one of them calling the election rigged or illegitimate and only 20 even open to the possibility of accepting a Biden win.
Second, the stolen-election narrative helpfully motivates the right to despise Biden. Biden’s personality has been the weakest point in the Trump campaign all along. Republicans could not get their voters to hate and fear the Democratic nominee as they did Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Whipping them up against his “stolen election,” and priming them to view the Biden presidency itself as illegitimate, does the base-mobilization work for them.
Third, and most dangerously, it gives Trump a pretext for withholding cooperation from the incoming Biden administration. Trump’s order forbidding all federal officials from cooperating with the normal transition planning has been felt most keenly in the pandemic response. Staffers at the Department of Health and Human Services “have been informed that if anyone from Biden’s team contacts them, they are not to communicate with them and should instead alert the deputy surgeon general of the communication,” CNN reported. Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed public alarm at the failure to loop in the next president.
My three days and nights on the streets of Moscow were the most exhilarating and the most frightening of my career.
No one knew who was in control of the military and law-enforcement agencies. That question was crucial in determining the fate of the plot.
Finally, with most of the armed forces supporting Yeltsin, the conspirators were arrested and imprisoned. Gorbachev returned to Moscow, where he ruled for four more months, until the Soviet Union officially dissolved that Christmas Eve.
Twenty-nine years later, Donald Trump has flipped the script.
Once again, there is a coup attempt from the highest government levels of a superpower.
Only this time, the president isn't being held hostage.
This time, it's democracy itself.
This time, the coup comes from inside the Oval Office.
There isn’t much chance that all the effort will pay off in a second Trump term. Biden’s victory margin is just too large, even if barely so. But even if it doesn’t work, Trump’s half-baked coup attempt is setting a precedent that elections are just an opening bid. From that point, the loser can simply negotiate—a few ballots thrown away here, some questionable affidavits there—and either overturn the results, or at the very least invalidate them in the eyes of half the electorate.
We are heading down a dark path, and laughing all the way about the shoddy paving.
Many political analysts and commentators are sounding alarm over what they see as a coup. "The legal 'challenges to the election are toast. Realizing the courts are a lost cause, Trump is now trying to convince elected officials to overturn the will of the voters. This is a political coup that is the definition of anti-democracy," Daniel Goldman, a former Congressional counsel warned.
Full-fledged editorials are now appearing in US newspapers and international dailies referring to an unfolding coup. There is also alarm over some of the more ardent Trump aides urging his followers to "retake the country" -- words seen as a call to arms to militant groups.
This is also a major difference between France and the American mainstream outlets, of which some apparently would even like to change the date of foundation of the United States. The New York Times's "1619 Project" could serve as Exhibit A for this new "manipulation of history".
Macron plans to fight "Islamist separatism". We do not know if the French president's project will be successful; it is legitimate to have doubts about its real effectiveness in stopping the disintegration of French society operated by the extremist communitarianism that feeds terrorism. We are not, all the same, allowed to accuse France of racism and "Islamophobia", as the Anglophone media is obsessively doing. It seems that the entire American media has decided to blame the victim of terrorism.
Pointing to its “pioneering legislation and policies”, on Thursday the UN chief hailed the 27-member European Union (EU) as a “a leader on climate action”, that had shown that it was possible to cut emissions while achieving economic growth.
Secretary-General Antónioââ¬Â¯Guterres applauded the bloc’s climate action in a virtual address toââ¬Â¯the European Council on Foreign Relations, while emphasizing that “we are still nowhere near the finish line… and still running behind in the race against time”.
France is set to make serious intentional damage to the environment punishable by up to 10 years in prison, as part of a planned "ecocide" law, government ministers said in remarks published on Sunday.
The law was proposed following a recommendation made by the Citizens' Convention for the Climate, an environmental committee of 150 people, created by the government a year ago.
The European Union's environment watchdog says air quality has improved significantly across Europe over the past decade but pollution remains a leading cause of premature deaths on the continent.
An estimated 417,000 premature deaths in 2018 were linked to fine-particle matter in 41 countries surveyed, according to the annual assessment by the European Environment Agency (EEA) released on November 23.
The Copenhagen-based agency also said that about 60,000 fewer people's lives were shortened due to such exposure in 2018, compared with the previous year, because EU, national, and local policies and emission cuts in key sectors have improved air quality.
"This is an encouraging commitment, but it is not enough."
The World Meteorological Organization called for "more sustained and ambitious climate action to reduce emissions to net zero through a compete transformation of our industrial, energy, and transport systems."
It sounds like the conservationist’s dream. But a return to traditional mixed farming ways could pay off for farmers too.
In fact, the three most powerful greenhouse gases continued to rapidly build up in the Earth’s atmosphere in 2020 despite daily emissions falling up to 17 percent during the most severe pandemic stay-at-home€ orders.
The pandemic continues to set new records in the U.S. almost daily — more than 250,000 people in the United States have died from COVID-19 since February. This mounting crisis is leading to a second round of shutdowns and measures that will limit economic activity and slow the consumption of fuel. Amid this, the refining€ industry is expected to face a prolonged€ downturn.
"By artificially delaying the industry's inevitable decline at taxpayers' expense, the government has made it that much harder to make the necessary transition to clean energy sources."
General Motors Co. will no longer back the Trump administration in its legal battle to strip California’s authority to set its own fuel-efficiency regulations, saying GM’s goals for green cars are aligned with the state and the incoming Biden administration.
He argues that this will lead to a spending boom, as consumers have accumulated savings through the slump and will now be in a position to spend lots of money. As a model he points to the boom in 1983 and 1984 after the Fed lowered interest rates.
While I have not been one of the doomsayers predicting economic collapse, I can’t be as optimistic as Paul on this one. First, just to be clear, Krugman does not at all question the need for immediate and substantial stimulus. In the next few months, with the pandemic spreading largely unchecked until vaccines become widely available, millions of people will be thrown out of work as restaurants, bars and other businesses in the service sector are either forced to close or see demand collapse even if they remain open.
I felt really good to finally have gotten out of the prison day-camp Catholic boys high school I’d been in for 4 years, and out of the nice suburban North Shore Long Island town my family lived in during my adolescence (before that being in New York City); and I had a brand spanking new draft deferment that I thought would insulate me from the carnage of the Vietnam War, which was at its peak at that time with the Tet Offensive.
In fact, Lyndon Johnson’s televised speech with the surprise announcement that he would not seek reelection in November 1968 happened two days after my 18th birthday, after which I had to troop down to the post office and register for the draft. That didn’t feel too good believe me, because I’d watched the news and read the papers daily all through high school. Those were my “Greta Thunberg” years, 1964-1968: from the Bay of Tonkin con-job and 1965’s Marine invasion of South Vietnam — “escalatio” as Tom Lehrer called it — to Tet, erupting on January 31, 1968, and pulsing through three bloody phases that year; when I was dreading the fucked-up situation the adults were shoving my way (you know: die for us, it’s good for “the country”).
It sucked. The interview that is. I can’t and won’t read the memoir. Myself also (like Obama) the author of three books on Obama, I have read enough of the 44th president’s dreary, pedantic, fake-progressive, and fake-poetic prose to last a lifetime. No more, please.
The interview warmed the Obama fan Goldberg’s heart by “remind[ing him] of what a thoughtful president sounds like.”
Another facial recognition ban has been passed, bringing a bit more enforceable privacy to the eastern side of the nation. Most of the ban action to date has been on the West Coast, with small pockets of resistance popping up elsewhere. Well, mainly just Massachusetts. The latest ban passed during the most recent election, gives Portland, Maine residents the freedom to live their lives with a little less panopticon.
Many in Russia are inclined to dismiss the bluster of state conservatism as a largely meaningless sideshow. After all, the nation’s laws protecting women’s rights remain relatively liberal, and even the loudest speeches by right-wing politicians have virtually no effect on the everyday lives of the denizens inhabiting Russia’s big cities, where women are part of the workforce, where they get proper healthcare, and where the state apparently doesn’t interfere in their lives. In an article for Meduza, European University at St. Petersburg Sociology Professor of Public Health and Gender Anna Temkina explains how Russia’s “conservative turn” is in fact quite real for many women.€
"The next administration must consider all possibilities, including unconventional but legal removals, to get the federal government working for the public interest as quickly as possible."
Jews have long held important positions at all levels of government, but have never been closer to the highest office since the vice-presidential bid of Senator Joseph Lieberman. An argument can be made that Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 was far away from being even close to liberal, but of major party candidates in this duopoly, he got as close as has been recorded.
In a post-election discussion of her multiethnic background, Kamala Harris noted that besides being of Black and South Asian heritage, she is married to a Jew (“Doug Emhoff prepares to brake new ground as America’s second gentleman,”€ Guardian, November 11, 2020). Her status as a woman also broke through another glass ceiling. Marriage doesn’t count as an attribute, however, since partners in the US can’t ascend to political office.
How might we explain to youths, who have witnessed a world turned upside down by Covid-19 and the rise of strongmen around the world, the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s and 2000s? How might they, for instance, respond to Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement at the end of the Cold War that “what we may be witnessing [is] the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”?
American political leaders display a widening disconnect from reality intended to mask their complicity in the seizure of power by global corporations and billionaires.
Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler is the richest member of the United States Senate, but that hasn’t stopped the appointed senator from making an illegal pitch for money to fund her embattled bid for a full term in the chamber.
On Monday, November 23, two Moscow courts handed down fines to Pussy Riot activists Maria Alyokhina and Veronika Nikulshina for a protest action they conducted on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s birthday, reports MBX Media.€
A Democratic county clerk warned that a vote against certifying the results of the state's November election would "signal that democracy is dying in Michigan."
The demotion of a country that has constantly prided itself, not only on being democratic but also on championing democracy throughout the world, took many by surprise. Some US pundits challenged the findings altogether.
However, judging by events that have transpired since, the accuracy of the EIU Index continues to demonstrate itself in the everyday reality of American politics: the extreme political and cultural polarization; growing influence of armed militias, police violence; mistreatment of undocumented immigrants, including children; marginalization of the country’s minorities in mainstream politics and so on.
The veil of Democracy in America is being ripped away from the body politic right before our eyes. Not only can the Electoral College thwart the popular vote for president; but there are even more nefarious ways for political elites to circumvent the Electoral College if they don’t like it.
The electoral college is, of course, the means by which the popular vote for the president is prevented. Instead of Democracy’s principle of ‘one person, one vote’, we have electors who are selected by their state legislatures who then cast their vote for president. That’s the appearance. But it’s even worse than that.
In 2008, Barack Obama was widely described as having built a game-changing political coalition: young people, racial and ethnic minorities, educated professionals, urban and suburban voters. He was held to have built an innovative campaign infrastructure, leveraging big data and social media in an unprecedented way, increasing turnout and Democratic vote share with constituencies that are typically underrepresented at the ballot box.
"It's OK to laugh at this hilarious clown car and yet appreciate that what's going here is deadly serious. These tactics will go nowhere but still infect our democracy with doubt."
Most elected Republicans in Washington are failing the test by refusing to stand up to Trump. Their cowardice is one of the worst betrayals of public trust in the history of our republic.
"In the U.S., there is no accountability for supporting the worst foreign policy disaster in modern history. Only rewards."
Refusing to concede, however, so as to prolong his crazed fantasies, Trump is distracting the mass media from his looting of the Executive Branch departments to the advantage of big business bosses and his€ failing family enterprises. Expect this to continue until January 20, 2021. (See my op-ed titled: “If Trump loses, expect him to exact revenge on his way out”€ Boston Globe, August 10, 2020).
Trump and his cronies will get away with their crime sprees unless Joe Biden has a Justice Department team that will follow the law and prosecute any government official who broke the law. In 2009, Barack Obama€ let law-breaking Wall Streeters and the Bush/Cheney war criminals become successful fugitives from justice.
It is unlikely that Joe Biden will continue Trump’s trade war with China. That would simply be too destabilizing for everyone. Not only is the U.S. greatly dependent on China for so many of its industrial imports, but so many countries are dependent on China as a market for their exports.
This is not only for raw materials and agricultural goods, as in the case of Africa and Latin America, respectively, but also industrial goods, as in the case of Southeast Asia, which manufactures components that are shipped to China, assembled there, then sent to the U.S., Europe, and everywhere else.
Next month€ will mark a year€ since€ US newspapers€ published€ the Afghan€ Papers, a mass trove of€ secret€ US government documents that€ irrefutably detailed€ a coordinated€ effort€ by the US government, through€ three presidential administrations, to lie to the American people and€ their elected leaders,€ about the war in Afghanistan.€ Of course, these lies of the Afghan War followed the lies that made possible the US invasion and destruction of Iraq.€ The 2011 war in Libya was another war built on lies,€ as€ documented€ by€ the British€ Parliament.€ Slips of the tongue and€ leaks€ by senior US officials,€ including€ the incoming US President,€ have shown the US and its allies’ role in the Syrian war to be€ in€ support€ of€ al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.€ Lies, perjury and propaganda characterize what the US people have been told with regards to€ torture; intelligence€ surveillance€ of€ their€ phones and computers; the incredibly high rate of civilians killed by US€ drones, including€ American citizens;€ and the presence of US forces in Africa, including€ hiding€ knowledge US soldiers€ have been€ killed and wounded€ in countries€ that€ senior members of Congress€ had no idea€ US troops were in.
The lies to elected officials and the American people continue.€ This€ month,€ Ambassador€ James Jeffrey,€ explained€ to journalists€ how he€ intentionally lied€ to the President of the United States about the number of troops in Syria.€ In case you think this is fine because the President was Donald Trump, remember it was the computers of Democratic Senators who were€ hacked and monitored€ by the CIA in retaliation for the Senate’s investigation of the CIA’s torture program.
As if finding a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict weren’t difficult enough, the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government seem hell-bent on making this already bad situation even worse. Sensing that the Trump era will soon be over, members of his team and the Israelis are racing against the clock to implement new “facts on the ground” that will, they hope, permanently alter the political landscape in Israel’s favor.
Refusing to concede his loss in the presidential election, Donald Trump continues to spin absurd conspiracy theories, file vexatious lawsuits, pressure state lawmakers to overturn vote counts, and in general stonewall the transition to the next presidency. On Sunday night, Trump sent out one of his typically nonsensical tweets, writing, “In certain swing states, there were more votes than people who voted, and in big numbers. Does that not really matter? Stopping Poll Watchers, voting for unsuspecting people, fake ballots and so much more. Such egregious conduct. We will win!”
As President Trump’s unprecedented campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election drags on, over two dozen lawsuits filed by his legal team have been dismissed or withdrawn. The Trump team is now focusing on delaying or blocking the certification of the election in several states while trying to toss out votes in cities with large Black populations, including Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. New York Times Magazine staff writer Emily Bazelon says the Trump legal team’s efforts have so far lacked real substance, with the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani “treating court as if it’s cable news.” She also says more Republican lawmakers need to stand up against Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy.
Never underestimate the capacity of Republicans to put aside differences and “come home” just before an election, but right now I’d say Donald Trump’s insults and demands that Georgia Republicans somehow overturn Joe Biden’s stunning if narrow win there—after they certified it on Friday—is inflicting genuine damage to the campaigns of GOP Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.
Moscow’s Presnensky District Court has dismissed opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s defamation lawsuit against Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov.€
A significant number of Americans currently believe the 2020 election was stolen, even though it wasn’t. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week showed 52 percent of Republicans believe President Trump “rightfully won” the election. But the only “evidence” of election fraud has been widely debunked.
An optimist might think the public will gradually drop this election fraud myth as the Trump campaign’s lawsuits are thrown out, recounts and audits are conducted, and, eventually, Joe Biden is sworn in as president. But we’ve seen Trump try to falsely claim a president is illegitimate before, as he spent years claiming without evidence that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States, and thus ineligible to be president. If this recent saga is anything like the birtherism movement, it’s not going anywhere.
Hong Kong pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong, Ivan Lam and Agnes Chow have been remanded in custody on unauthorised assembly charges linked to the siege of the police headquarters in Wan Chai last June. The trio will face sentencing next Wednesday.
Parler, whose backers include the conservative donor Rebekah Mercer and the prominent pro-Trump activist Dan Bongino, was founded in 2018 and began marketing itself to a right-wing audience that felt victimized by supposed censorship on mainstream social platforms. The conspiratorial right-wing media outlet Epoch Times was an early adopter, but most prominent conservative media figures did not join until June 2020, when Twitter took the bold step of fact-checking the president’s tweets. That supposed injustice prompted a recruitment drive for Parler, where posts are neither fact-checked nor labeled, even when demonstrably false. Influential figures such as Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Representative Devin Nunes tweeted about the app. Senator Ted Cruz made a two-minute video declaring that he was joining Parler, and exhorting his followers to join him on the platform: “Let’s speak freely.” For some of American conservatism’s highest-profile figures to insinuate that they were being censored was patently absurd, but the publicity push still won Parler a few hundred thousand new users over a three-day span. By early July, the service claimed 2.8 million users. Parler attracted approximately 1 million downloads in the five days following November 3, and COO Jeffrey Wernick recently put the app’s user count at nearly 9 million. (By comparison, Twitter has 330 million active users globally; Facebook has 2.7 billion, and 255 million in the United States alone.)
Dr. Gary Slutkin is an epidemiologist who spent years working with the World Health Organization to respond to the AIDS crisis and epidemics in Africa and Latin America. After returning to the United States in the 1990s, he "saw the problem that the U.S. was having with violence." He soon launched a project that eventually became Cure Violence, a non-governmental organization that "stops the spread of violence in communities by using the methods and strategies associated with disease control."
"You call a gigantic press conference like that, one that lasts an hour," Limbaugh said. "And you announce massive bombshells, then you better have some bombshells."
The surge in virus cases is causing another wave of restrictions and closures that experts say could damage the economic recovery.
First lady Melania Trump welcomed the 2020 White House Christmas tree Monday afternoon, continuing the long-held tradition even as the coronavirus pandemic rages on and as President Donald Trump's longshot election challenges remain unsettled.
Russia’s media regulation and censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, has opened an administrative case against Google for its alleged refusal to delete information banned in Russia from its search results.
Why should this possible takeaway evoke outrage? A recent study8 found that people evaluate scientific studies reporting a male-favoring advantage less favorably, compared to those reporting a female-favoring one. Papers demonstrating a male (versus female) advantage were viewed as less credible, less valuable, more offensive, and more harmful. These findings suggest merely highlighting a disparity disfavoring women is likely to evoke public outcry. Science, however, relies on the dispassionate accumulation and scrutiny of data. It is quite improbable that the entirety of findings will cohere perfectly with our cherished worldviews. With larger and larger datasets available for analysis, we will inevitably uncover unpalatable findings, some with important implications. However, only by documenting reality (or our closest approximation to it) can we strive to improve society. Interventions based on faulty data or incorrect assumptions will fail, wasting millions of taxpayer dollars and innumerable hours. When we bury findings that make us uncomfortable, the empirical landscape presents an inaccurate, lopsided view of reality. If policies and interventions hinge on that empirical landscape, we will only set ourselves up for failure. Moreover, by presenting an incomplete picture of phenomena, we undermine trust in science. Millions of taxpayers are counting on scientists to forward the most compelling evidence, to best inform subsequent interventions and policies.
If female scientists benefit by collaborating with both male and female scholars, we deserve to know that. Female scientists deserve to know that. Rather than erasing AlShebli and colleagues’ laborious work from the record, their findings should stimulate future investigations to examine whether the patterns replicate, and if so, examine the underlying causal forces.
Hollywood has increasingly capitulated to the Chinese regime’s pressure to censor its films, threatening freedom of speech, according to a new report by rights group PEN America.
The report, based partly on interviews with industry insiders, said that Beijing has used the allure of China’s massive film market to get Hollywood studios to censor or alter movies—either through direct censorship requests or increasingly through voluntary self-censorship.
This year, the Chinese cinema market is projected to overtake the U.S. box office, which in 2019 stood at $11.4 billion. Beijing allows only 34 international films to be screened in the country each year.
One year after Iran's deadliest crackdown on anti-establishment protests, no one has been held responsible for the killing of hundreds of citizens.
Officials have instead pressured the families of some of those killed to remain silent and warned them not to hold public memorials for their loved ones.
A Kazakh blogger and journalist accused of being involved in the activities of a banned organization has been taken to a psychiatric clinic on a court order.
Police in the Kazakh capital, Nur-Sultan, on November 23 took Aigul Otepova from her apartment after a court decision to forcibly admit her into a clinic was upheld by an appeals court last week.
Before getting into the police car, Otepova told an RFE/RL correspondent that she had no medical conditions, including mental problems.
A Russian citizen charged in Sweden with the attempted murder of a blogger and outspoken critic of the authoritarian leader of Russia's North Caucasus region of Chechnya says he acted on orders he received from Chechen officials.
As the trial started at the Attunda district court in Sweden on November 2, the defendant, Ruslan Mamayev, testified that from the very beginning he secretly planned to fail when carrying out the assault against Tumso Abdurakhmanov to keep the Chechen officials who ordered the attack from turning on him. He added that he has since asked for political asylum in Sweden.
Abdurakhmanov’s lawyer, Jens Sjolund, said at the hearing that Chechen authorities had promised a reward for the assassination of his client.
The French National Assembly is currently examining, with the usual fast track procedure that prevents and marginalises parliamentary debate, a bill called "global security". This law, filed on October 20 by a group of MPs from the presidential party, couched in the best neoliberal rhetoric, aims to provide a new framework for security actions that its drafters promise will be "inventive and innovative".
With these two adjectives, "inventive and innovative", the legislators are probably referring to the three highly controversial articles of the proposal that concern the recording and dissemination of images in the context of police actions. Perfectly in line with the trend of the times – and by consequence, we are sorry to have it observed, with very little inventiveness and innovation – these articles impose a general surveillance for the many and a privileged disclosure for the few, as they provide for ground mass surveillance, air mass surveillance and a ban on documenting police action.
France’s parliament voted to approve a controversial law Friday that will ban the publication of images of on-duty police officers as well as expand the use of surveillance drones and police powers. Journalists’ groups, human rights activists and unions – including Reporters Without Borders and Amnesty International’s French branch – organised protests in Paris and other French cities on Saturday.
From 17 to 20 November, the National Assembly is scheduled to examine the so-called “Global Security” bill, supported by MPs from the governing majority. If such a law were to enter into force as it stands, it would constitute a serious violation of the right to information, respect for privacy, and freedom of peaceful assembly, three conditions that are essential to the right to freedom of expression.
We deplore the fact that this bill is being examined under an accelerated procedure when there is no urgency to do so. This has already been the case in recent years for several laws with a strong impact on human rights (the Intelligence Act, the SILT Act, the so-called “anti-rioters law”). This procedure de facto restricts their in-depth examination and informed communication to society. We regret that this text is no exception to the rule.
On Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron’s government presented its “global security” bill to the National Assembly. Coming after the announcement of plans for a law against “separatism” ostensibly targeting Islamist groups, this bill is part of a campaign to establish a permanent state of emergency, handing draconian powers to the police.
Its provisions are unprecedented. Anyone publishing of images of a public event including police agents in a way that could “harm the agent’s physical or psychological well-being” faces one year in jail and a €45,000 fine. This purely subjective criterion, which allows police to arrest anyone filming them simply by stating that they feel uncomfortable being filmed, undermines freedom of the press and any attempt to hold security forces accountable for police brutality.
Experts say decades of war in the Bangsamoro region have caused an increase in child brides, while long-held cultural practices could prove difficult to shift.
In the workshop, 3 sessions were held on causes of child marriage, methods to reduce child marriage and scientific approach to child marriage.
A presentation was made by Jineoloji Center Board Member Xaliya Neimê on the topic of reasons for child marriage. Xaliya noted that child marriage occurs because when there are no deterrent sanctions against violence against women.
I had been thinking of doing a blog post on RCEP which China signed with 14 countries a week and a day back but this new story has broken and is being viraled a bit on the interwebs, especially twitter and is pretty much in our domain so thought would be better to do a blog post about it. Also there is quite a lot packed so quite a bit of unpacking to do.
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Now that lies in the eyes of the Court whether the single bench choses the literal meaning or use the spirit of the law or the genuine concerns of the people concerned. While in today’s hearing while the company asked for a complete sweeping injunction they were unable to get it. Whatever may happen, we may hope to see some fireworks in the second hearing which is slated to be on 6.01.2021 where all of this plays out. Till later.
When there are only five people in charge of a major federal agency, the personal agenda of even one of them can have a profound impact. That’s why EFF is closely watching the nomination of Nathan Simington to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Simington’s nomination appears to be the culmination of a several-month project to transform the FCC and expand its purview in ways that threaten our civil liberties online. The Senate should not confirm him without asking some crucial questions about whether and how he will help ensure that the FCC does the public interest job Congress gave it, which is to expand broadband access, manage the public’s wireless spectrum to their benefit, and protect consumers when they use telecommunications services.
Next time you hear someone blame Section 230 for a problem with social media platforms, ask yourself two questions: first, was this problem actually caused by Section 230? Second, would weakening Section 230 solve the problem?
If you are on Instagram, you have been probably bombarded by Instagram Stories and notifications about new features like emojis, chat themes, selfie stickers, and “cross-platform messaging” that will allow you to exchange direct messages with, and search for, friends who are on Facebook. But the...
Earlier this month, in Sherwin-Williams Co. v. PPG Industries, Inc., Special Master Henry M. Sneath issued a Report and Recommendation in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania that a motion by Defendant PPG Industries, Inc. to partially exclude the opinions of Plaintiff Sherwin-Williams Co.'s expert witness should be granted. In particular, the Special Master recommended that the opinions set forth in ۦۦ 94-117 of the expert's Rebuttal Report be excluded.
Sherwin-Williams initiated the dispute between the parties by filing suit against PPG for infringement of certain claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,617,663; 8,835,012; 9,242,763; 9,415,900; and 9,862,854. The asserted claims are directed to "[a] coating composition for a food or beverage can" that is substantially free of bisphenol A ("BPA"). PPG retained two experts, including Dr. Leon Perez, to opine on the invalidity of the asserted patents, and Sherwin-Williams retained two experts of its own, including Dr. F. Joseph Schork, to rebut the opinions of PPG's experts.
PPG's experts opined that the asserted patents were invalid in view of U.S. Patent No. 5,714,539 (the '539 patent or Perez Patent). In his Rebuttal Report, Dr. Schork opined that the '539 patent does not disclose a BPA-free coating, explaining that "Perez does not disclose a complete coating formulation," much less one that is BPA-free; that "Perez's lack of reference to BPA is not an affirmative disclosure of a composition that" is substantially free of BPA; that PPG did not to cite the '539 patent as prior art when prosecuting its own BPA-free coating patent; and that when PPG formulated the exemplary latexes disclosed in the '539 patent into coatings, PPG made coatings that contained BPA.
Spain has a well-deserved reputation of being a rather formalistic country when it comes to litigation. For example, according to the Civil Procedure Act, a Spanish translation of documents written in languages other than Spanish must be attached to the initial complaint. Otherwise, the Court may simple ignore them. A judgment of 15 October 2019 from the Valencia Court of Appeal is a good example of the risks entailed when embarking on litigation without bringing onboard the required translations. The facts of the case, for the purpose of the theme discussed in this blog, can be summarised as follows:
A toy manufacturer filed a patent infringement action against another toy manufacturer based in Spain, alleging the infringement of a European patent. The latter filed a revocation counterclaim based on lack of novelty and lack of inventive step. For the purpose of questioning novelty, the defendant filed a video and a catalogue, which allegedly disclosed the invention. The inventive step attack was based on two French patents, a German patent, and a Spanish patent. No translations of the French or German patents were filed.
Valencia Commercial Court Number 2, in a judgment of 5 December 2018, dismissed both the infringement action and the revocation counterclaim. This judgment was entirely upheld by the Valencia Court of Appeal in the aforementioned judgment of 15 October 2019. Some of the highlights, dealing with the patent’s validity, are briefly discussed below:
First, the Court of Appeal dismissed the novelty attack because, in its opinion, neither the video nor the catalogue invoked by the defendant disclosed all the features of the claims of the relevant patent. Therefore, it was not satisfied that the invention, as such, had been made accessible to the public at the priority date.
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All in all, this teaching warns prospective complainants on the risks of getting lost in translation or, to be precise, failing to duly provide the translations required by law.
On November 20, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,363,724 as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The '724 patent is owned by InterDigital VC Holdings, Inc. The patent is claimed to be essential as part of SISVEL's Video Coding pool, as to both the VP9 and AV1 standards. It was also formerly owned by Technicolor, who self-declared the patent as essential to H.265.
We've criticized Senator Thom Tillis for his patent and copyright reform ideas that seemed to take a strong "maximalist" line in its approach. He's also taken the Hollywood line on things like the Internet Archive that was troubling. He's been promising a copyright reform bill for a while, and many thought it wasn't going to matter much, since polls indicated that he was very, very likely to lose his re-election campaign in North Carolina (even after his opponent's bizarrely chaste sex scandal made the news). However, Tillis pulled out a surprise victory, and that means that his plan to reform copyright is something worth watching.
A concerned taxpayer has warned the US Trade Representative that its annual “notorious markets” overview, which lists prominent pirate sites, may do more harm than good. According to former criminal defense practitioner Jim Zhoui, it essentially acts as an "advertising campaign for black marketeers at the taxpayer’s expense."
During the summer, Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor sued YouTube in an attempt to gain access to its Content ID tools. YouTube then fought back, claiming that Pirate Monitor had already proved itself untrustworthy. However, in a motion to dismiss, Pirate Monitor now says that YouTube has provided zero evidence to back up its claims.
The uncertainty of who is caught by the regulation is sure to have an impact on the market. Internet streaming services thinking about the Canadian market may put those plans on hold until they have some visibility over what they face from a regulatory perspective, leading to less competition and less choice for Canadians. Should the CRTC establish an economic threshold, that too could have an unexpected impact. If it sets a high threshold that is limited to a handful of large, U.S.-based streaming services, it invites the possibility of a trade challenge. If a low threshold becomes the standard, foreign services may avoid the Canadian market altogether given the regulatory costs. Either way, Bill C-10 in its current form creates considerable uncertainty that is compounded by inaccurate claims from Minister Guilbeault.
You will likely have been following along with us as we have steadily commented on the ongoing controversy at Twitch. But if you're not read up on the topic, Twitch suddenly nuked zillions of hours of recorded content made by Twitch streamers in response to RIAA and game publisher DMCA notices, all without warning and all without a way to counternotice or get any of that content back. As the community went into revolt, Twitch continued taking down content, at times for sound effects within the games streamers were streaming. All the while, Twitch has issued a steady stream of apologies, while the streamer community has basically just shouted "Well then do something!" in response.
