In today's backyard boomer rant, I talk about "the Linux community" which some people think is not even a real thing. I think the Linux community is a real thing, or at least can be a real thing...
Tuxedo Computers sent their Pulse 15 Linux notebook to the studio, and it gets a full review in this video. I'll talk about the build quality, battery life, performance, and more!
Today we are looking at Ubuntu Unity Remix 21.04 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, Unity, and uses about 1.5GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Ubnity Remix 21.04 Beta.
Today we're taking a quick look into the changes that have landed in GNOME 40 - why those changes exist and whether they make a real difference.
I bought a new desktop! It comes from Slimbook, which is a spanish company that sells laptops and desktops with Linux preinstalled, and it's a pretty big upgrade over the previous one I used, so it's time we take a look at it, at the experience of buying it, and using it after that!
Signal disappoints with crypto nonsense, Google finally triumphs over Oracle, Nvidia helps out Mozilla’s voice project, the EFF helps you find out if you’re part of Chrome’s latest experiment, KDE Korner, and more.
The new Linux kernel security update comes just three weeks after the previous one, which patched 11 flaws, to address three vulnerabilities affecting the Linux 3.10 kernel used in all supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and CentOS Linux 7 operating system series.
Two of these vulnerabilities are marked by the Red Hat Product Security team as “important.” These include CVE-2021-27365, a heap buffer overflow discovered in Linux kernel’s iSCSI subsystem that could allow a local, unprivileged user to cause a denial of service (system crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code, and CVE-2021-27364, an out-of-bounds read flaw discovered in the libiscsi module that could lead to reading kernel memory or a crash.
I’ve just setup the Yama LSM module on some of my Linux systems. Yama controls ptrace which is the debugging and tracing API for Unix systems. The aim is to prevent a compromised process from using ptrace to compromise other processes and cause more damage. In most cases a process which can ptrace another process which usually means having capability SYS_PTRACE (IE being root) or having the same UID as the target process can interfere with that process in other ways such as modifying it’s configuration and data files. But even so I think it has the potential for making things more difficult for attackers without making the system more difficult to use.
If you put “kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 1” in sysctl.conf (or write “1” to /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope) then a user process can only trace it’s child processes. This means that “strace -p” and “gdb -p” will fail when run as non-root but apart from that everything else will work. Generally “strace -p” (tracing the system calls of another process) is of most use to the sysadmin who can do it as root. The command “gdb -p” and variants of it are commonly used by developers so yama wouldn’t be a good thing on a system that is primarily used for software development.
Another option is “kernel.yama.ptrace_scope = 3” which means no-one can trace and it can’t be disabled without a reboot. This could be a good option for production servers that have no need for software development. It wouldn’t work well for a small server where the sysadmin needs to debug everything, but when dozens or hundreds of servers have their configuration rolled out via a provisioning tool this would be a good setting to include.
In development for more than one year has been the ability to create secret memory areas on Linux that would be visible only to the owning process and is not mapped for other processes or the kernel page tables. That "memfd_secret" system call has finally materialized in Linux-Next and looking like it could be ready for mainline.
The memfd_secret system call is the new interface for creating secret memory areas on Linux for use-cases like OpenSSL in user-space for storing private keys and reducing the chances they are potentially exposed while in system memory and not backed by any other hardware encryption methods.
Last month Google engineers proposed multi-generational LRU for Linux to enhance the kernel performance and today the work has advanced to a second version.
Google's Yu Zhao announced the "v2" of the multigenerational LRU framework today for the Linux kernel. The key takeaway from this work remains: "The current page reclaim is too expensive in terms of CPU usage and often making poor choices about what to evict. We would like to offer an alternative framework that is performant, versatile and straightforward."
As noted in the original article on the matter, the multi-generational LRU code in its preliminary form was found to yield ~18% fewer low-memory kills on Android, reducing cold starts by 16%, on Chrome OS there were ~96% fewwer low-memory tab discards and 59% fewer out-of-memory kills on fully-utilized devices. Google's testing found a "significant reduction" in CPU usage with this proposed multi-generational LRU (Least Recently Used) framework.
Apple revealed its first desktop-class System-on-a-Chip design last year, the Apple M1, based on the same ARM architecture as most smartphones and tablets. While Linux has worked well on ARM devices (like the Raspberry Pi) for years, Apple’s hardware is heavily customized and requires specific software support. Thankfully, we’re now one step closer to running Linux on Apple Silicon.
Asahi Linux has been working to bring “a polished Linux experience” to Apple Silicon Macs and has been submitting its code to the Linux project for inclusion in the official Linux kernel. The group’s initial work has been merged into the Linux SoC codebase, and will likely arrive as part of the upcoming Linux 5.13 update.
For years we have been eager to learn more about the long mentioned Vulkan Video API, which was supposed to come in H1-2020, but now has finally arrived with today's v1.2.175 update in provisional form. The new Vulkan Video extensions allow for GPU-accelerated video encode/decode. The initial public work is treated as a provisional specification and with limited codec coverage but will be expanded upon in time.
Vulkan Video allows for GPU-accelerated encode/decode and integration with the Vulkan API over scheduling, synchronization, and other Vulkan capabilities. The main new extensions for Vulkan Video are VK_KHR_video_queue, VK_KHR_video_decode_queue, and VK_KHR_video_encode_queue. Vulkan Video is designed to be extensible in terms of codec coverage while initially the new extensions there are VK_EXT_video_encode_h264, VK_EXT_video_decode_h264, and VK_EXT_video_decode_h265).
Vulkan 1.2.175 is now public as the latest Vulkan API specification and it's bringing with it many new extensions.
Vulkan, the graphics and compute API that provides high-efficiency, cross-platform access to modern GPUs expands further with Vulkan Video and some provisional extensions. What is it? A new expansion years in the making to add in seamless hardware accelerated video compression and decompression into the Vulkan API.
[...]
The Khronos Group say they plan to "add support in the Vulkan SDK with layers for validation and higher-level abstractions that will speed the development of video applications where simple frame-in-frame-out and black-box decoding and encoding is sufficient" along with open source Vulkan Video samples for Windows and Linux. All of this closely integrates "hardware accelerated video processing with Vulkan’s existing graphics, compute and display functionality".
As expected, NVIDIA continue to be at the forefront of new and improved Vulkan support as they've today rolled out the 455.50.12 Vulkan Beta Driver. This is to go along with the announcement of Vulkan Video and Vulkan 1.2.175 that were put out today too.
Arcan, the long running open-source display server built atop a game engine that has embraced technologies like XR/VR and Wayland and claims feature parity with X.Org this week announced their new Pipeworld project.
Most of us access our emails from the web browser. While web browsers may be a common way of accessing emails but not quick and efficient. Email clients for Linux easily sync email accounts with the system and notify users of any new email.
Email clients can add multiple email accounts and keep users informed about each and every new email. If needed, email clients also support plugin-ins for adding any missing feature. Email clients can also read feeds from your favorite blogs.
In this article, I will review some of the best email clients for Linux. Even though this list contains 8 email clients, many of them still be out of the list. Let me know if you use any email client that you think should be in this list.
The tool is written in Go programming language, and it works in Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
It works as a system tray indicator with only a few menu options. The first option shows the current tool status (ACTIVE or PAUSED) along with the volume level in number.
When it’s in ACTIVE mode, it slowly decreases your system volume bit by bit with time interval set in “Speed” option. Higher intervals mean a longer, more subtle decrease.
Eventually you’ll notice the sound is a tad too low and you’ll increase the volume, which will disable Quiet AF and leave your volume at the perfect level – not too loud, not too quiet!
Recently, I demonstrated how to implement full-drive encryption on Linux with LUKS and the cryptsetup command. While encrypting a whole drive is useful in many cases, there are reasons you might not want to encode an entire drive. For instance, you might require a drive to work across several platforms, some of which may not have Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) integration. Furthermore, it's the 21st century, the cloud exists, and you may not be using a physical drive for all your data.
Dmidecode is a Linux command line tool which is commonly used to retrieve the useful information of your system’s hardware components in human readable format.
The world of Ubuntu welcomes you and it is ready to grant you all the power over your system. However, being a newbie, you might find its Command Line Interface (CLI) a little intimidating. A lot of people find Linux more challenging as an operating system especially when they are coming from the comfort of using Windows or macOS.
Here we present the basic but very important Ubuntu commands to give you an in-depth knowledge of how to use your Linux terminal.
In this article, we will show you a few commands that every Linux administrator should know and use to make their lives easier.
Many people think that the graphical environment is the easiest way to use Linux, but this is not the case. The easiest way is to work with the terminal and now we will show you some of the most pleasant commands that you can use every day.
Just because Linux appeals to the nerdiest of nerds doesn't mean that it can't be extremely helpful for those who don't want to spend a lot of time delving into the technical details of how to use various commands. In fact, Linux provides a series of tools that can help anyone master the command line or just get the task at hand done more quickly and efficiently. This post covers 10 of the best options.
Due to what I suspect is disk corruption error due to a faulty RAM module or network interface on my GnuBee, my restic backup failed with the following error...
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' Kade Engine 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.
System navigation is one of the most basic tasks that a user can perform on an operating system. While many file managers are available that allow you to switch directories and navigate your disk drives in a graphical way, doing the same using the command line can provide you better control over your system.
Luckily, Linux provides you with a command known as cd, which allows you to easily change the current working directory on your terminal.
Here's how you can use the cd command on Linux, the only utility that you'll ever need to traverse through directories on your system storage.
The tcpdump utility is used to capture and analyze network traffic. Sysadmins can use it to view real-time traffic or save the output to a file and analyze it later. In this three-part article, I demonstrate several common options you might want to use in your day-to-day operations with tcpdump.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Deluge BitTorrent Client on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Deluge using a front and back end architecture where libtorrent, a software library written in C++ which provides the application’s networking logic, is connected to one of various front ends including a text console, the Web interface, and a graphical desktop interface using GTK+ through the project’s own Python bindings.
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 Deluge BitTorrent on a CentOS 8.
exFAT presents a proprietary filesystem that Microsoft created in 2006, which was first originally used in Windows operating systems and on various SD cards and USB drives. The main purpose of the existence of the exFAT filesystem is optimization for a USB flash drive.
These days exFAT presents a standard for utilized default filesystem for numerous high-capacity SD cards or USB steak drives.
On Linux, exFAT has been supported with a special implementation called fuse-exfat. In order to mount an exFAT drive on Linux, you need to install fuse-exfat.
Setting up hostname is an important task when you are installing the operating system. Hostnames are invented to make human life easy. When you have 100’s of machines in your network it is not easy to remember each machine with its IP address but with hostname it becomes easy. Let’s dive in and see how simple it is to configure hostname in Fedora Linux.
Are you a perfect user in Linux or need one more user for your Linux system/server.
Today I am going to cover how to create user in Linux or add a user in Ubuntu by command. Having multiple users with different privileges is good for linux system security propose.
This article is not to cover types of users in Linux.
‘useradd’ and adduser are the two most popular commands in Linux to create a new user. You are a system administrator and asked to create a new user account in Linux with some specific properties, limitations, and comments, etc.
Angular is a popular open-source application development framework. It is highly extensible and used for developing mobile and web applications using TypeScript/JavaScript. It is designed for building small to large-scale applications from scratch. It provides an Angular CLI utility to create, manage, build and test Angular applications..
In this post, we will show you how to install Angular (CLI) on CentOS 8.
PrestaShop is an open-source shopping cart written in the PHP used to create and manage your online business. It provides a simple and easy-to-use interface that helps you to launch your online store in a minimal time. It provides a lot of features including, a user-friendly interface, multiple payment gateways (PayPal, Google Checkout), mobile-responsive design, free support, multi-lingual, analytic, reporting and more. In this post, we will show you how to install PrestaShop with Apache and a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate on CentOS 8.
bmon is a monitoring and debugging tool to capture networking related statistics and prepare them visually in a human friendly way. It features various output methods including an interactive curses user interface and a programmable text output for scripting.
In this video, I am going to show how to install MX Linux 19.4.
htop is an interactive system-monitor process-viewer and process-manager. It is designed as an alternative to the Unix program top. It shows a frequently updated list of the processes running on a computer, normally ordered by the amount of CPU usage. Unlike top, htop provides a full list of processes running, instead of the top resource-consuming processes. htop uses color and gives visual information about processor, swap and memory status. htop can also display the processes as a tree.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SpiderFoot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Spiderfoot is a free source testing tool to analyze any vulnerabilities/malicious functions on the server to reduce the attacks. It is written in Python and uses SQLite as a database backend. It provides a web-based interface to perform penetration testing for more than one target simultaneously through a web browser.
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 SpiderFoot on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
There are multitude of applications available to view as well as visualize disk usage in Linux. We already have looked at du, Ncdu, Agedu, Filelight, Duc and a few good alternatives to du command. Today we will discuss about yet another tool named Vizex to visualize disk space usage in Linux.
MySQL is well known and an open-source database management system. It uses a relational database and SQL to manage data. It is easy to use, fast, and integrated with popular stacks Lamp, Xampp, Lemp, etc.
In this tutorial, I will cover how to install MySQL in Ubuntu 20.04, Secure MySQL, Check MySQL service, Connect and use MySQL server, Uninstall MySQL in Ubuntu and more.
In this quick guide, you will go through the complete process on how to install SQLite and its companion graphical manager SQLiteBrowser on Ubuntu, Debian, and any of their derivatives.
SQLite as the name itself suggests, a lightweight relational database management system contained in a C library. It does not follow the traditional client-server model like any other RDBMS (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL). Rather, it is just a small self-contained file having everything in it. This file can be embedded into any end program.
Being so small but still SQLite has ACID compliance and implements most of the SQL standards while following SQL syntax. Let’s see how you can get the SQLite in your Ubuntu or Debian distribution.
Nioh 2 is the sequel to Nioh, a 2015 Action RPG. It takes place in Japan and was released on PS4, PS5, as well as Microsoft Windows. With a few tweaks, the game can run on Linux. Here’s how.
The N64 is one of the greatest games consoles of all time, leading the way in the late 90s with pioneering 3D graphics and bringing franchises like Mario and Zelda into gorgeous open worlds. If you own the original games, you can relive these glory days through emulation on PC, which lets you do things like increase resolutions and framerates and add shaders over the game to recreate that retro feel.
The emulation frontend Retroarch is arguably the best N64 emulator out there, letting you run several different N64 emulators as “cores” (as well as letting you play PS1, SNES, Sega Genesis, and various other retro console games on your PC). Here, we’ll show you the best way to get Retroarch to run your N64 collection.
Emulation is all the rage in PC gaming. Not only does it allow you to relive the glory days of retro titles on your PC, it also often allows you to enhance your experiences with those games. Going back to play an old game – especially from the PS1 era – can often shock those who are surprised at how much better these titles look through nostalgia glasses.
Using RetroArch PS1 emulation, you can upscale and tweak these games to something that looks a lot closer to what you remember – and better.
Raylight Games / Yippee! Entertainment and Kalypso Media have today announced the release of Commandos 2 - HD Remaster for Linux after waiting over a year since the original release.
"Take control of an elite group of Allied commandos who must venture deep into enemy territory and utilize their combined expertise to complete a series of progressively demanding missions. In this World War II genre-defining classic, explore interactive environments and use unique skill sets to complete missions against seemingly impossible odds."
Yes this is a real game and yes it sounds hilarious. Developer Max Clark has now formally announced Flock of Dogs, a 1 - 8 player online / local co-op experience and I'm a little bit in love with the premise and style.
Describing it as simply as possible Clark says it's a "top-down, twin-stick, crew game. Most of the time, one player pilots the whale and everyone else rides flying dogs to battle and quest. Players can land on the whale and relaunch when ready. The journey leads to the Flying Festival through procedurally-generated, floating biomes with a mix of creatures, characters, and quests."
It sounds completely wild, and the visuals and gameplay matches up wonderfully to the idea. Inspired by storybooks like Goodnight Moon, The Cat in the Hat, and Go, Dog!. The idea is that each playthrough had you journey to an annual Flying Festival, with each year seeing the skies you fly through being different.
You've played Slay the Spire, Dicey Dungeons and many other great deck-builder but now it's time for Across the Obelisk to shine and it's rather engrossing. We did some pre-release testing for the developer on the Linux build and it's already great fun even though it's not finished, as this is an Early Access game.
This is a party-based game so you build up a roster of powerful heroes, each with their own set of cards and items they can equip to buff various statistics. What makes it quite different is that you can play it in co-op online with other players controlling different heroes in the party. Quite a refreshing little mix!
You have until Sunday the 2nd of May 2021 23:59 UTC to submit your proposals but you will make our (talks committee) live much easier if you start sending the proposals *now* and not send them all last minute in 2 weeks ;)
Akademy will be held online from 18th to 25th June and the Call for Participation is open! Submit your talk ideas and abstracts by 2nd May.
Shortwave is an impressive Internet radio player for Linux desktops. It offers a modern and minimal user interface.
Shortwave v2.0 has finally landed after its last release in June 2020. Formerly known as Gradio, the new iteration of the app has become more robust and has a slew of nifty features thanks to Felix Häcker and other contributors.
It was already an easy-to-use app that enables users to simply launch the app, select a radio station and hit play. No subscriptions or sign-ups required. A no-frills, no-nonsense minimal internet radio player.
Shortwave Internet radio player has reached version 2.0, adding a new mini player mode, redesigned station information dialog, and more. Also, the user interface has been ported to GTK4.
Shortwave is a GTK Internet radio player written in Rust, created as the successor of Gradio. It uses radio-browser.info as its radio stations database, which features more than 25,000 radio stations, but this also means that if you want to add a radio station that's not already in the database, you'll need to add it to radio-browser.info, with no option to add it directly in Shortware. The radio player features include the ability o easily discover new radio stations, add your favorite radio stations to your library, automatically record songs (with automatic detection based on the stream metadata), adaptive layout, play audio on Chromecast devices, MPRISv2 support, and more.
After a sub-par 20.04 version, Lubuntu returns updated, upgraded, and all-around improved. What should you expect from it compared to other distributions or the other members of the Ubuntu family? Read on to find out.
Like many modern Linux distributions, Lubuntu boots into a live environmen, where you can both test it and start its actual installation on your computer.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/13 branch.
FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is now officially available as the debut of the big FreeBSD 13 feature update.
FreeBSD 13.0 delivers on performance improvements (particularly for Intel CPUs we've seen in benchmarks thanks to hardware P-States), upgrading to LLVM Clang 11 as the default compiler toolchain, POWER 64-bit support improvements, a wide variety of networking improvements, 64-bit ARM (AArch64) now being a tier-one architecture alongside x86_64, EFI boot improvements, AES-NI is now included by default for generic kernel builds, the default CPU support for i386 is bumped to i686 from i486, and a variety of other hardware support improvements.
The release notes for FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE contain a summary of the changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 13-STABLE development line. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
This document lists errata items for FreeBSD "13.0-RELEASE", containing significant information discovered after the release or too late in the release cycle to be otherwise included in the release documentation. This information includes security advisories, as well as news relating to the software or documentation that could affect its operation or usability. An up-to-date version of this document should always be consulted before installing this version of FreeBSD.
While they continue to work hard on the next major OpenMandriva Lx release, version 5.0, the development team saw an opportunity to release a new update for the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series, which arrived in mid-June 2019, due to the multitude of package updates and recent GNU/Linux technologies published lately.
As such, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 is now taking shape as the third installment in the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series, shipping with the latest Linux 5.11 kernel and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, as well as the systemd 248 init system, FFmpeg 4.4 multimedia framework, Mesa 21.0 graphics stack, and LLVM/Clang 12 system compiler.
It's not what we were originally planning, but we are planning a OM Lx 4.3 release very soon — an extra release made possible by the load of progress made in the Cooker development branch before getting to some of the major core changes planned for 5.0 — changes we don't want to withhold from people not ready to install a 5.0 development snapshot.
Continuing the downloads, now here's our traditional What To Do article for OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 (made easy for Ubuntu users). This includes how to install more software, setup several stuff on the desktop, and getting started to the Control Center. I wish you really enjoy this!
Back in February Slackware 15.0 went into alpha, nine years since Slackware 14.0 made its debut or even five years since Slackware 14.2. Now Slackware 15.0 is up to its beta phase.
In the two months since the alpha start, Slackware 15.0 has seen many package updates and is ready enough to be called beta. Slackware 15.0 Beta is using the GCC 10.3 compiler, a newer revision of the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, and many other package updates like the newest KDE desktop components are available.
Is Slackware dead? The answer is no! Patrick Volkerding has announced that Slackware 15 moved to stage of beta testing.
Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. For many early Linux users, Slackware was their introduction. After more than a quarter century and 30-plus versions later, Slackware is the oldest actively maintained Linux distribution, but now it is not nearly as popular as it was a decade or more ago. The features of the distribution are the lack of complications and a simple system of initialization in the style of classical BSD systems.
We haven’t had any Slackware news since the release of Slackware Linux 14.2 in July 2016. Till now.
Slackware is one of the earliest distributions before any mainstream option was popular. You will be surprised to know that this year marks its 28th year. It is mostly suitable for experienced Linux users who want the stability and ease of use.
Slackware hasn’t seen a new release in years, the last release being in 2016. That left people guessing if the oldest maintained Linux distribution was on the verge of being discontinued.
Recently the Arch team decided to add a guided installer into the ISO, and it seems like everyone else is ignoring the fact that this script is completely broken, not only is it buggy it doesn't even setup a decent Arch system.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published a statement in defence of its decision to reappoint Richard Stallman (RMS) to its board.
“We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom," the FSF said. "His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights.
We are delighted to welcome Jennifer "Jen" Dudeck as senior vice president and chief people officer. In her new role, Jen will be responsible for leading Red Hat’s People team, which is focused on attracting, developing and rewarding associates around the world.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Jen served as vice president of the Transformation Office at Cisco Systems, Inc. and held several business-aligned HR roles at the Honeywell Corporation, within the Aerospace and Performance Materials business units.
Jen brings more than 25 years of experience to Red Hat, and we caught up with her to find out more about the insights and perspectives she will be bringing to her role as chief people officer.
What’s all the hype about 5G? Check out the latest episode of our Technically Speaking series to learn all about the 5G revolution.
Technically Speaking features conversations between Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Chris Wright and a rotating cast of industry leaders around what's on the horizon for technology.
Wright is joined by Srini Kalapala, Vice President, Global Technology Strategy and Network Cloud, Verizon, for this episode to talk about 5G as it relates to the mobile edge. Kalapala shares some challenges his team has faced in building networks in a cloud native world, how they’re leveraging open source, and the value he sees in collaboration across ecosystems.
It was Sunday at the Masters, and Xander Schauffele had momentum, trimming Hideki Matsuyama’s lead from seven strokes to just two on the back nine. But, in this game, there is no margin for error. And by misjudging the wind, his 8-iron on 16 landed a yard short, found the drink, and led to a triple bogey, dashing his hopes of donning the coveted green jacket.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies development use cases by providing a consistent way to host applications along their life cycle. Explore how easily using RHEL in development translates to a predictable and repeatable security certification and accreditation environment with no surprises when moving to production.
Robin.io has announced the availability of the pay-as-you-go pricing model for Robin Cloud Native Storage (CNS) on Red Hat Marketplace.
Robin.io customers can now pay for hourly usage of Robin CNS when purchased on Red Hat Marketplace, giving them the flexibility to tie their project budgeting to consumption, rather than commit to fixed pricing up front.
Red Hat has joined hands with NEC Corporation to deliver 5G solutions built on Red Hat OpenShift. With NEC’s 5G core network solutions running on Red Hat OpenShift, organizations will be able to capitalize on 5G across a broad set of use cases including 5G core, 5G radio access networks (RANs), edge computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more, helping them create new revenue opportunities.
Here's a list of all Debian wallpapers from official releases with download links.
Pop!_OS from Linux hardware vendor System76 is set to get a massive upgrade when Pop!_OS 21.04 releases, as they've announced COSMIC - their very own desktop environment.
"We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization. The new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release, and are currently being further refined in their testing phase."
With April in full swing, it’s time to preview the upcoming version of Pop!_OS! New features are lined up for the release like kids at a candy store. Among them is the tale…the legend…the ultimate customizer…the COSMIC desktop. To ensure the best taste, we’re slow-cooking COSMIC to deliver a *chef’s kiss* quality experience. As a result, Pop!_OS 21.04 will release in June.
System76 has their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and have long been customizing their GNOME-based desktop. However, the Linux PC vendor is now taking things a step further by developing their own desktop environment dubbed COSMIC.
While System76 has long been a supporter of GNOME, with the changes around GNOME 40 they have decided instead they will be moving to their own GNOME-based desktop environment. COSMIC will make its debut in Pop!_OS 21.04 due out this June.
What’s the first thing you do after installing a fresh copy of Linux distro Pop OS? I’d wager the majority of you install Gnome Tweaks, Dash to Dock, or Dash to Panel. Jeremy Soller, Principal Engineer at System76 (the hardware company also responsible for developing Pop OS), is well aware of this.
“90% of the screenshots on the Pop OS subreddit have a dock,” he says in my upcoming Linux For Everyone interview. “It’s something we want to provide out of the box.”
Following that, Soller drops all kinds of info bombs regarding Pop OS 21.04 (yep, there will be a public beta). Specifically, System76 will be integrating Gnome-Tweaks and building upon it.
System76 are well known for their Linux-powered laptops and desktops, but they’re also famous for Pop!_OS Linux, the company’s in-house built Ubuntu-based distribution that ships pre-installed on all of their computers.
Until now, Pop!_OS Linux featured the GNOME desktop environment, with various customizations and improvements from System76. But this is about to change with the next major release of their distribution, Pop!_OS Linux 21.04, due out in June 2021.
System76 Linux ninja Jeremy Soller has a lot to say. Here's the most exciting 45 seconds you'll hear about Pop OS 21.04. It's finally happening guys!!! Hear the rest of the 2+ hour interview beginning May 5th.
In a March 31 blog post, the Linux Mint development team detailed how Mint's Update Manager application will soon start showing desktop notifications when a user has gone for a significant amount of time without applying any updates to the operating system. A small dialog will appear prompting the user to either view the updates, set up automatic updates, or snooze till later.
Previously, the only indication of available updates has been a tiny red dot in the taskbar. The developers of the beloved Linux distribution claim they're adding the feature in response to research showing that a significant number of Mint users ignore any and all updates for extended periods, missing critical security updates in the meantime.
The team found in interviews with Mint users that many "were sensitive to the importance of applying updates but didn’t do so simply because they were never really told to."
This week Edge Impulse has announced its move into embedded Linux rolling out official support for the Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC. Now, users of Edge Impulse can select the right processor class for their embedded machine learning applications. Leverage our existing best-in-class support for low-power MCUs or venture into processor classes that run embedded Linux if highest performance is the objective, explains Edge Impulse. SDKs for Python, Node.js, Go, and C++ are provided so you can easily build your own custom apps for inferencing.
INTENDED AUDIENCE: Raspberry Pi hobbyists. Software developers with no embedded systems experience.
READ TIME: About 10 minutes, excluding exercises.
GOAL: The instructions below will explain how to build a Linux environment for a Raspberry Pi 3B from scratch, focusing on extreme minimalism. I will build most components from source code and use BusyBox as the only user application on the target. The focus is on minimalism for the sake of learning. Optimizations like network boot, secondary bootloaders, compressed filesystems, etc.. will not be covered.
A potential new Raspberry Pi competitor will soon be announced, according to a post on embedded systems blog CNX-Software. Based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, the Allwinner D1 development board is a credit-card-sized single board computer with a single core XuanTie C906 64-bit RISC-V CPU running at 1GHz along with 1GB of DDR3 RAM.
Codasip, the leading supplier of processor design solutions and customizable RISC-V processor IP, is pleased to announce the availability of Codasip Studio 9.0 and Codasip CodeSpace 9.0. Key features include productivity improvements such as a new LLVM-based SDK with a fast C/C++ compiler, the Linker Support Package, and the tutorial 32-bit/64-bit uRISC-V processor.
Our RK3328-SOM prototypes are testing now.
These are with dimensions of only 55 x 41 mm.
This article covers some best practices for writing SQL queries for data analysts and data scientists. Most of our discussion will concern SQL in general, but we’ll include some notes on features specific to Metabase that make writing SQL a breeze.
Correctness, readability, then optimization: in that order
The standard warning against premature optimization applies here. Avoid tuning your SQL query until you know your query returns the data you’re looking for. And even then, only prioritize optimizing your query if it’s run frequently (like powering a popular dashboard), or if the query traverses a large number of rows. In general, prioritize accuracy (does the query produce the intended results), and readability (can others easily understand and modify the code) before worrying about performance.
Our traditional LibreOffice Conference will be a fully virtual event for the second consecutive year, from September 23 (Thursday) to September 25 (Saturday), 2021. Unfortunately, the uncertainty still surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the conference – coupled with the unpredictability of the current vaccination campaign – are reasons for shifting the event to online also in 2021.
You could use Office 2019, or the forthcoming Office 2021. But let me offer up a better, more universal suggestion: LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is an open-source office suite. It's based on OpenOffice, which it superseded years ago. It includes a word processor, Writer; a spreadsheet, Calc; a presentation creator, Impress; a vector graphics and flowchart editor, Draw; a simple database program, Base; and a mathematical formula editor, Math.
If you can use other office programs, you can use LibreOffice. It supports most of today's popular document formats, including Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx); Adobe PDF and the Open Document Format (ODF). Admittedly, its support for Microsoft's formats isn't perfect. But if you ever read Microsoft's Office Open XML File Format "Standard" closely, you'll find even Microsoft doesn't fully support its own standard. Practically speaking, if you're doing very elaborate work in Word or Excel, you would be better off sticking with Office.
On the other hand, LibreOffice won't cost you a single cent. It's also available on all major desktop operating systems. And, when I say all, I mean all. This includes Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and even ChromeOS. The last comes from LibreOffice's commercial partner Collabora via the Google Play Store.
I posted a couple of days ago, that compiled dependencies for LibreOffice in OpenEmbedded, but compile LO itself in a running EasyOS. I am going to do the same with 'modem-manager-gui', as have found it to be cross-compiler-unfriendly.
Actually, it only seems to be the usage of po4a that is unfriendly, so I could probably hack on it. But decided to take the easy path and compile in a running Easy.
ModemManager GUI is a gtk+3 frontend to 'modemmanager'.
The success of open source projects is largely carried by the pillars of the community and group collaborations. Without putting a stake in the ground to achieve strategic initiatives, an open source project can lose focus. Open source strategic initiatives should aim at solving impactful problems through collaboration involving the project's stakeholders.
As one of the leading open source projects, Drupal's success largely thrives on implementing its various proposed strategic initiatives. Drupal's focus on strategic initiatives and continuous innovation since Drupal 7 brought huge architectural changes in Drupal 8, 9, and beyond that offer a platform for continuous innovation on the web and an easy upgrade path for end users.
In this People of WordPress contributor story, we chat to Tyler Lau from the US on his relationship building work in marketing and his WordPress journey.
Read on to discover his story which shows it is often what you have learned from negative experiences in your life that can make you a major asset to a product team.
On 12 May 2021, the 17th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), also known as OSS 2021, will take place. The event provides an international forum where diverse professionals from academia, industry and public administrations can come together and discuss FLOSS initiatives. The event will address the use of FLOSS in large organizations, including private for-profit corporations, major non-profit organizations and large public administrations.
The voting members of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation.
We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing.
RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission.
The people relentlessly screaming orders at Dr Stallman and the FSF board appear to be autocratic and dictatorial in many ways.
Stallman has apologized, blames his lack of social skills. Will people accept his apology?
Sponsors withdrawn, management team resigned but the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is determined to keep its founder Richard Stallman on board.
Soon after Richard Stallman issued an apology, FSF released a statement on the election of Richard Stallman. It’s clear that both the apology and the statement had been prepared well in advance and published almost at the same time.
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The surprise return announcement of Stallman in a LibrePlanet conference talk was blamed on a “planned flow of information that was not executed in a timely manner”. FSF keeps emphasizing Stallman’s vision and thinking throughout the statement.
In response to its newfound resolve, a new smear campaign against Richard was launched, and its agenda furthered by the non-free media. Part of it took the form of a petition calling for his removal from the FSF. In response, we, the libre software community, started a petition of our own, and a subsequent counter-campaign urging the FSF to publicly endorse and exonerate RMS. Read more about this effort on https://stallmansupport.org/
The FSF does well to defend him from the campaign out for his name; to hold their ground and retain Richard at his post, and possibly reinstate him in his rightful place as leader of the FSF. No doubt will he downplay his position and contribute towards the FSF creating the required resilience against attacks on it, regardless of who holds it.
The following defense of Richard Stallman I submitted March 31st, 2021: Defend Richard Stallman!
We won. The FSF issued this news post on the 12 of April 2021: https://www.fsf.org/news/statement-of-fsf-board-on-election-of-richard-stallman
I, Leah Rowe, would like to publicly *thank* the FSF for their courage and backbone in this matter. Richard Stallman in his leadership of our movement is an excellent public speaker showing great character in unfiltered fashion. He should never have had to resign in the first place, but the failed past is a strengthened future.
I, Leah Rowe, would like to thank everyone working tirelessly to defend our guy against the mob. It is my wish we move past the divisive and hateful politics and tactics of those that engage in it.
Now is the time to deal. Let's write more libre software!
Richard Stallman is not a universally loved figure. He has spent his life [[What is Free Software?|educating people about the importance of free software, advocating for a free digital society, warned against the danger of software patents and criticized proprietary software corporations at every turn. Big technology corporations strongly oppose his free software activism. They have been looking for ways to remove Stallman from the public spotlight for decades.
"Strategic Initiatives Manager" Molly de Blanc from the GNOME Foundation, a semi-profitable big tech funded lobbying organization with $876,871 in revenue in fiscal year 2019, published a vicious opinion piece titled "RMS Open Letter" on March 23rd. More than 3000 people signed on to that letter the following week thanks to heavy promotion of it in large corporate-controlled "News outlets".
The Free Software Foundation has doubled down on its support for its founder, Richard Stallman, issuing a statement on Monday backing his reinstatement to the board.
There is a war going on in the world of free software. And the first to pay for it is its inventor, Richard Stallman. It all started again with a letter published on Github calling for his resignation from all positions, including those in the Free Software Foundation, for being “misogynist, abilist and transphobic” and for other behaviors and ideas defined “repugnant”. The letter was signed by about 50 organizations involved in the development and maintenance of both free and open source software. To put it into perspective, that’s what lies behind Linux, the Android operating system, the Libre Office package, and much of the technology that the digital world is sitting on creating thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value through companies like Red Hat and MuleSoft.
The Free Software Foundation's board of directors issued a statement today regarding the controversial return of Richard M. Stallman (RMS) to its ranks, alongside a statement of Stallman's own.
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According to today's statement, the voting members of the Free Software Foundation voted to appoint RMS to a board seat once more, but only "after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation." The board's statement goes on to describe a "planned flow of information" to be "executed in a timely manner" and "delivered in the proper sequence."
Instead, the world discovered that RMS was back on the board of the Free Software Foundation when he self-announced it at the FSF's LibrePlanet conference this March. RMS declared "I'm [back] on the Free Software Foundation board of directors [...] that's how it is. And I'm not planning to resign a second time."
The board goes on to state that "the announcement by RMS at LibrePlanet was a complete surprise to staff, [LibrePlanet organizers], to LibrePlanet speakers and to the exhibitors," and that the board "had hoped for a more inclusive and thoughtful process."
Recently RMS returned to the FSF board with to my mind an indefensible lack of grace & engagement with his critics. This seems to unfortunately intersect with the absence of good, representative governance structures for eg. GPL users to affect license direction. People started on-line petitions in liu of voting to either remove the FSF board or to unconditionally support RMS. Spoiler alert - there is something to annoy everyone here. I don't believe either of these stated positions is helpful and one of them is actively dangerous. I expect RMS to demonstrate hard-core leadership by preparing for his inevitable political or physical death, and building good governance structures that can live on and continue his work. It is not a time to do nothing. KDE's, statement seemed constructive, Debian had a middle ground option, and even RedHat's position was not so extreme. I sincerely hope that the FSF can be improved and continue to reflect RMS' vision of Software Freedom.
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This focus on beliefs is unconscionable. Beliefs struggle to exist outside people's heads so I read this as: People who we can plausibly accuse of having misogynistic, ableist or transphobic beliefs have no place in the free software community. This might sound plural and welcoming, and I understand the desire to stick up for those who are marginalized, but it has a number of acute problems.
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It seems to me there is a substantial convergence of views between RMS and this new orthodoxy - so it should be far easier to find those whose beliefs diverge significantly. Luckily very detailed descriptions exist of what very large groups of people believe around the world. Many have different ideas of how best to love those with whom they disagree. For example Male and Female he created them - towards a path of dialogue on the question of gender theory in education. (published 2019 under Pope Francis). That should be easy to caricature in order to exclude people from the Free Software community. I think it would also be easy to argue that a loyal Catholic faithfully upholding the Churches' teaching has beliefs that are more easy to caricature as mysogynist than RMS'. I really don't want to pick on Catholics (who just happen to be rather good at multi-lingual write-ups of their doctrines), so how about a random update from the Church of England. Of course - in each case adherents would reject such a caricature and these labels; no doubt they would also have powerful convictions on when life begins. But perhaps that's all a bit Euro-centric - so how about Wikipedia on Islam, or we can spend all day cycling through major belief systems each representing hundreds of millions of people, and collectively billions. Almost all of these will have some element that will conflict with or upset the opinions of someone else. Most of these belief systems are mutually contradictory and/or mutually offensive at some level to adherents of others. So there should be no shortage of beliefs for which we can excommunicate others.
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Apparently it is easy to end up championing the gentle treatment of a sexual minority while thinking it is funny to be gratuitously offensive to other minorities. Surely it can be offensive enough to respectfully state ones position. Still - in a world where there is a broad freedom of belief, conscience and speech, possibly some humour can cut through the gloom. A possibly tragic, possibly humorous but probably co-incidental aside here is that some chunk of this is based on an excessive focus on a small divergence in linguistic orthodoxy; when this was a hallmark of the GNU-slash-Linux campaigns of the past.
Perhaps you think it is deeply unfair to examine people's public twitter feeds - which occur outside the context of a project - to determine whether their beliefs are aligned with the standards they demand from others. Actually - I tend to agree. For good reason any sensible code of conduct excludes speech and behaviour outside its immediate project context. Not so this statement - its scope is everyone, everywhere and all of the time - even historic beliefs.
But possibly you think that it is ok to attack the privileged to defend the weak; that it is proportional to agitate to end someone's career in order to avoid the risk of a friendly minority member inadvertently working alongside someone who has some subset of beliefs that differ from theirs.
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Is being offended occasionally by others' (truly objectionable) beliefs the price of collaborating with people with diverse viewpoints, discussing anything and everything without boundaries and learning? Not always a small price to pay, but is it not necessary? Surely it is the case that each member of outlying groups benefits from mutual tolerance. Indeed we often celebrate the amazing contributions to society of those who (at the time) were viewed to have unacceptably fringe beliefs & practices. Becoming a less tolerant society is potentially polarizing and dangerous.
What is love's response to a neighbour in need in this instance? Probably it is to vigorously encourage RMS to setup a representative governance so actual users of the GPL family can determine its post-RMS future. Perhaps it is to loudly re-iterate the obvious: that RMS does not represent you or me - and that we don't share the details of his unusual politics; to make more obvious that personal views are disjoint from organizations' missions, and to ensure we are able to choose our representatives in a secret ballot. But love's response is certainly not to let Free Software get twisted into a new and narrow orthodoxy consumed by gender politics to its own harm and the exclusion of others. We should remain a broad, tolerant and inclusive church even when it hurts. We used to be focused on liberty & freedom - I miss that.
The story dates back to September 2019, when Stallman commented on an MIT email thread about sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically, Stallman defended AI pioneer Marvin Minsky against allegations of sexually assaulting an underage girl who had been one of Epstein’s victims. Stallman wrote, “We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.” The insensitivity of Stallman’s comments, which were focused on his personal definition of the word “assault” and did nothing to acknowledge the complexities of sex trafficking or the disturbing power relationships at the heart of the Epstein story, caused a shock wave through the free software community. Although Stallman described the reaction to his comments as “a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations,” the comments were widely interpreted as implying that the victim was to blame for the incident, an interpretation that seems supported by the fact that Stallman also described statutory rape laws as “morally absurd.”
Free software developer Aurélien Gâteau reports that his free software 2D racing game Pixel Wheels got flagged on the Google Play app-store for the horrible crime of asking for donations. Pixel Wheels is also available for GNU/Linux, Windows, macoS (but not ARM based Macs).
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The updated banner mentioning donations was the only thing he had made when the game stopped being "compliant" with "Google Play Policies". The Pixel Wheels Android version on the Google Play has been there, with no issues, since February 24th, 2021.
We present Logica, a novel open source Logic Programming language. A successor to Yedalog (a language developed at Google earlier) it is a Datalog-like logic programming language. Logica code compiles to SQL and runs on Google BigQuery (with experimental support for PostgreSQL and SQLite), but it is much more concise and supports the clean and reusable abstraction mechanisms that SQL lacks. It supports modules and imports, it can be used from an interactive Python notebook and it even makes testing your queries natural and easy.
Google engineers are responsible for a number of programming languages like Go and Dart while their newest one to be made public is Logica.
Logica is the successor to Yedalog, another language out of Google. Logica compiles to SQL and can run on Google BigQuery with experimental support for PostgreSQL and SQLite databases.
Conway's Game of Life is a popular programming exercise to create a cellular automaton, a system that consists of an infinite grid of cells. You don't play the game in the traditional sense; in fact, it is sometimes referred to as a game for zero players.
Once you start the Game of Life, the game plays itself to multiply and sustain "life." In the game, digital cells representing lifeforms are allowed to change states as defined by a set of rules. When the rules are applied to cells through multiple iterations, they exhibit complex behavior and interesting patterns.
While Frontend Web Development is concerned with the designing of the user interface of the website using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. – Backend Web Development (or you can say Server-Side Development) is responsible for the appropriate functioning of the website.
VS Code)extension users and providers argue that the industry needs a fully open source marketplace for the extensions. That's because Microsoft forbids the use of its marketplace for non-Microsoft-branded products, as noted in the marketplace user agreement, which reads: "Marketplace Offerings are intended for use only with Visual Studio Products and Services and you may only install and use Marketplace Offerings with Visual Studio Products and Services."
Just as some spoken languages have faded into history, programming languages also face the risk of obsolescence and extinction. Though their profound influence on development techniques and coding styles certainly still resonates, languages like ALGOL and LISP don't enjoy nearly as much prominence and acclaim as they once did. It's only natural that some of the languages we use today will follow the same path.
In no way does that mean these languages will disappear entirely. There will be plenty of legacy codebases written in these prophetically dead programming languages, and a need for developers with the know-how to understand and maintain them. Just look at legacy languages like COBOL, which still sits at the heart of countless enterprise software systems (including Fortune 500 companies).
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Perl was conceived in the 1980s as a scripting language designed for Unix system administration tasks, and subsequently gained popularity as a general-purpose programming language. Despite its age, the language hovers in 19th place on the TIOBE index, as it remains important in areas like data science and analytics. However, Perl commands much less mindshare now than it did a decade ago.
The release of Raku in 2019 -- a Perl spinoff designed by the language's creator, Larry Wall -- profoundly undercut community enthusiasm for Perl. Plans for future version releases counter the argument that Perl is already a dead programming language, but it is quickly turning into one that may find itself confined to legacy codebases.
DevOps isn’t just a cultural shift — it requires great tools to come to fruition. Below, we’ve pulled together a list of some of the most well-loved DevOps tools available today. But, throwing loads of money into fancy SaaS solutions can quickly gobble up the cloud budget. These DevOps tools all are open source, and enable everything from container builds and orchestration to microservices networking, configuration management, CI/CD automation, full-stack monitoring and more. Here are some of our favorite open source DevOps tools for 2021.
Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the HTML of any web document, without the use of inline code.
I've released version 1.1.6 of plocate with some minor fixes; changelog follows.
There are very few books written for junior-to-mid level developers that answer the question “How do I run a real-world software project?”. Industry best practices often arise as the result of cross-pollination and institutional/tacit knowledge rather than explicitly prescribed rules that you can read about in a book.
For developers working alone or in small organizations such as startups, these norms may not be obvious. Knowing which tools one needs to deploy a production-scale application is crucial knowledge.
In 2019 I published the article “Software Tools for Hobby-Scale Projects.” It is still one of my most popular blog entries. This post will explore the same idea within a professional context and hopefully help new or solo developers get guidance on tools and practices for new projects at small to mid-scale organizations.
Objective: Provide a list of tools and practices that apply to a majority of real-world software projects.
Intended audience: Developers familiar with software authorship wishing to learn about real-world software deployments and practices.
Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn’t have a way to “Go Back”. This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It’s a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let’s demand perfection.
Why it matters €· Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won’t, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out. It was one of the reasons why the nascent browsers were so much better than the Visual Basic, X11, and character-based interface dinosaurs that then stomped the earth.
Thus I was delighted, at the advent of Android, that the early phones had physical “back” buttons.
Did you know you could run a permissively-licensed MTP implementation with minimal dependencies on an embedded device? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to easily run cmtp-responder on a Rock Pi 4 or any other board equipped with a UDC.
To recap: In part1 of this series I introduced you to the concept of USB gadgets, their configfs composition interface, available opensource tools and basic systemd integration. In part2 I wrote about one particular USB gadget function - FunctionFS - and its integration with systemd. Then I presented cmtp-responder, a permisively-licensed MTP responder implementation and showed how to play with it on your PC with dummy_hcd driver. It is in this latter post that I promised you running cmtp-responder on real hardware. You can also watch me talking about USB gadgets at ELC 2019 and Linux Piter 2019.
Andrew Shitov has announced the very first Raku Conference, to be held online on 7 August 2021. You can sign up if you want to attend, or want to give a presentation. Formats for presentations vary from a 5-minute lightning talk to an 8-hour workshop. The deadline for talk submissions is 15 July 2021. Of course, you can also sponsor this conference in various ways! Exciting to see our first Raku Conference planned like that!
In languages such as Perl and C, it is a fairly common task to take a reference or a pointer to a variable, and a reference or a pointer are essentially the memory addresses of such a variable (for some definition of memory address). In Raku, using the memory address of a variable is almost never necessary (except possibly for low-level debugging purpose). Actually, I originally wasn’t even completely sure I was going to find a way of doing that in Raku. However, the Metaobject Protocol (MOP) offers some metamethods, which are introspective macros that provide information about objects (including variables). One such metamethod is WHERE, which returns an Int representing the memory address of the object.
The x-hack was indeed useful and effective against several real and practical problems in multiple shells.
However, the value was mostly gone by the mid-to-late 1990s, and the few remaining issues were cleaned up before 2010 — shockingly late, but still over a decade ago.
The last one managed to stay until 2015, but only in the very specific case of comparing opening parenthesis to a closed parenthesis in one specific non-system shell.
I think it’s time to retire this idiom, and ShellCheck now offers a style suggestion by default.
This is an exciting week for the vision doc! As of this week, we are starting to draft “shiny future” stories, and we would like your help! (We are also still working on status quo stories, so there is no need to stop working on those.) There will be a blog post coming out on the main Rust blog soon with all the details, but you can go to the “How to vision: Shiny future” page now.
This release enables file system watching by default to make your incremental builds faster, expands support for building projects with Java 16, and adds support for building on Macs using Apple Silicon processors (such as M1).
The latest release of the Gradle build tool is now available. Gradle 7.0 enables file system watching by default to make incremental builds faster and expands support for building projects with Java 16 as well as Apple Silicon support.
When the file system is enabled in the new version, Gradle keeps what it learned from the file system in memory and skips reading from the file system on each build, reducing the amount of disk I/O needed to determine what has changed, the team explained.
The release also introduces a feature preview for centralized dependency versions and it enables build validation errors to make builds more reliable.
This too is what is worthwhile about Fales’ work. She identifies a peculiar politically correct take on sex, namely that anything goes. She accurately identifies this shift as a total turn away from a biological understanding of reality into one of pure automation. Indeed, the pro-sex argument today sounds just the same as the pro-capitalist argument. You are free, you have choice, be who you want to be! How horrifying an argument it is. The reason sex is the most enriching thing in life (from my vantage point as a young horny male) is that it is an overwhelmingly constricting source, almost authoritarian in the way it binds you to the desire of the Other.
What compares to sex, more so than a hungry child on the side of the road? Do we not become overtaken by a form of authoritarianism within ourselves to give everything up for this child? Is this not what freedom is, in its exact form? The freedom to bind ourselves to something greater than ourselves?
You might remember that a retrospective of the paintings of Philip Guston was planned to open last June at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and would then have traveled to Houston, London, and Boston. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the museum to close, a new tour schedule was set: The show would open at the Tate Modern in London in February 2021, with dates in Washington, Boston, and Houston to follow.
If all had gone well, I might have flown to London to see that show and write about it. But the Tate is closed again, and I’m not flying anywhere, thank you. Besides, the National Gallery and its sister institutions chose to put off the Guston show until 2024—and then, after an uproar, until 2022. This is not the time or place to thrash out the rights and wrongs of the museums’ decisions and redecisions, or of the objections many of us raised to those decisions. But I wish I had those paintings to look at now. Their disabused self-interrogation seems more necessary than ever these days.
There along that stretch of highway we see signs for the two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, The Cold War, Desert Storm and so on. After several miles and many wars we finally come to the last sign, ominous there in the brutal, barren and strangely surrealistic beauty of the Nevada desert. This sign reads, Dedicated to the Veterans of the Global War On Terror. There it stands glaring out at the passing motorist, a frightening reminder in an Orwellian world designating a road that goes on and on seemingly forever, that has no end, just like the global war on terror and so it is.
Out in this part of our world a person can find lots of loneliness and solitude, along with a stark natural truth in the ragged mountains, the bright-white salt flats and that ever more and more elusive but so necessary treasure, peace and quiet. This part of the country with all its vast space and natural beauty is also home to the Fallon Naval Air Station, the Fallon Naval Range, the Hawthorn Army Depot, the Nellis Air Force Range, The Nellis Air Force base, The Creech Air Force Base, the Nevada National Security Site and the highly classified USAF training range commonly known as Area 51. There’s not much else out in this desert–what’s left of the struggling to survive Piute Indian Tribe, a few very old, old-time prospectors and miners, a few ranchers with their farms and families spread out across the land, a couple “cat-houses” with what few working women that remain during a pandemic and the occasional motorist speeding along from Reno to Las Vegas or Vegas to Reno.
Marshall Sahlins was a titan in his field, not just in anthropology, where his ideas were as revolutionary as those of Levi-Strauss, or in the classroom, where his students included David Graeber, but in academia itself, where he continually punctured institutional prejudices and excoriated the corrupting influence of big money and the political biases and, let’s face it, cowardice that warps so much research and pedagogy. Sahlins taught us radical new ways to think. But more than that he taught us how to think about the way other people from distant cultures think and to value those ways of thinking and learn from them.
Sahlins began writing for CounterPunch on a fairly regular basis a few years ago, unloading his mighty intellectual arsenal on the travesties of Trumpworld. Ultimately, Trump proved too easy of a target, plodding, predictable and cretinous. Sahlins told me Trump was only worth some limericks and doggerel, which he eventually distilled to a succinct couplet, as direct and obscene as Roman graffiti: POTUS FUCTUS, which he wanted us to turn into bumperstickers and t-shirts.
The goal of the meeting, according to the president, was to figure out how to "strengthen our domestic semiconductor industry and secure the American supply chain."
Earlier, White House press secretary Jen Psaki, speaking to reporters, said, "This isn't a meeting where we expect a decision or an announcement to come out of, but part of our ongoing engagement and discussion about how to best address this issue over the long term, but also over the short term."
A shortage of semiconductors, commonly known as chips, has significantly slowed U.S. auto manufacturing, with General Motors, Ford and other carmakers temporarily shuttering some factories or reducing production.
During the meeting, Biden said he had bipartisan support for legislation to fund the semiconductor industry. He previously announced plans to invest $50 billion in semiconductor manufacturing and research as part of his drive to rebuild U.S. manufacturing under a $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
The Saratov regional government spent 8.46 million rubles (about $109,345) on organizing a two-week quarantine for locals who were set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin during his visit to the region on April 12. This was reported by the BBC Russian Service, citing a tender the Saratov regional government posted on the public procurement website on March 27.
So how about we arm our cities with military-grade healthcare instead?
The US Department of Veterans Affairs is part of the most generously funded institution in the government, and guess what? All that investment pays off.
To my view, taking the pandemic seriously means doing everything we can to get the whole world vaccinated as quickly as possible. This is not just an issue of being concerned for the poor people in the developing world, who are being left behind in the vaccination race, it is a recognition of the reality that viruses mutate.
We already know about several mutations that are more contagious than the original coronavirus and are at least somewhat more resistant to some of the vaccines that have been developed. If the pandemic is allowed to spread largely unchecked through the developing world for another year or two, then it is virtually certain that we will see many more mutations. Some of these may be even more contagious and deadly, and most importantly, more vaccine-resistant.
Directed by Rafe Scobey Thal; Animated by by Luca Valente; Produced by #MeWeSyria, and #MeWeMexico, and #MeWeHonduras community leaders Fernando Camacho, Nadine Hraki, Ola Ali, Sandra Hernandez, Sara Killawi, #MeWeIntl, and Rafe Scobey Thal
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
Covid-19 is a mirror that reflects back to us the crises in our society. It renders more visible the pathological symptoms that already existed before the pandemic. One of these symptoms is tiredness. We all somehow feel very tired. This is a fundamental tiredness that accompanies us everywhere and all the time, like our own shadows. During the pandemic we have felt even more tired. The idleness imposed on us during lockdown has made us tired. Some people claim that we might rediscover the beauty of leisure, that life might decelerate. In fact, time during the pandemic is ruled not by leisure and deceleration but by tiredness and depression.
Why do we feel so tired? Today, tiredness seems to be a global phenomenon. Ten years ago, I published a book, The Burnout Society , in which I described tiredness as an illness afflicting the neoliberal achievement society. The tiredness experienced during the pandemic has forced me to think about the subject again. Work, no matter how hard it might be, does not bring about fundamental tiredness. We may be exhausted after work, but this exhaustion is not the same as fundamental tiredness. Work ends at some point. The compulsion to achieve to which we subject ourselves extends beyond that point. It accompanies us during leisure time, torments us even in our sleep, and often leads to sleepless nights. It is not possible to recover from the compulsion to achieve. It is this internal pressure, specifically, that makes us tired. There is thus a difference between tiredness and exhaustion. The right kind of exhaustion could even free us from tiredness.
Big Tobacco has targeted Black communities for generations with multi-billion dollar marketing campaigns and a plethora of deadly products.
Trigger warning: police and anti-Black violence
The head of the World Health Organization estimated in a recent address that of the more than 700 million coronavirus vaccine doses that have been administered across the globe, just 0.2% have gone to people in low-income nations — inequity that experts warn will persist unless rich countries end their obstruction of an international effort to suspend vaccine patents.
"By ensuring equity and social justice in our cannabis legalization, we are saying 'enough' to the devastating 'war on drugs' that over-incarcerated and over-penalized thousands of New Mexicans."
"Seven years later, New Mexicans are finally able to exhale."
"It is the time right now where everyone has to take stock and have a reality check of what we need to be doing."
The World Health Organization's head epidemiologist on Monday warned that humanity has reached a "critical point" in the coronavirus pandemic, which despite increased vaccination is "growing exponentially" around the world.
If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the years combatting science denial, quackery, and antivaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories, it’s that words matter and messaging is important. At no time in my life have I seen this more than now, in the middle of a pandemic, and I’d like to do something a little different from what I normally do here on€ SBM€ and discuss an example. It’s an example in which early messaging used years ago to promote and sell a promising new technology has been weaponized by antivaxxers and COVID-19 minimizers to demonize COVID-19 vaccines. You might recall a€ post of mine from two months ago, when I discussed how mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are not “gene therapy”. Think of this as a follow-up looking at how that claim by antivaxxers came about, plus the idea that such vaccines “hack” your genes.
Shortly after we posted about Moderna, Inc.’s October 2020 pledge not to enforce its COVID-19-related patents during the pandemic, the United States Food & Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency regulatory approval for two COVID-19 vaccines produced by Moderna and BioNTech (with Pfizer), making these groups the first to ever enter the commercial market with mRNA-based therapies. This little-known and never-before-approved mRNA technology has since been widely administered and represents a primary weapon being used to defeat the pandemic.
While this effort carries on, market players are confident that COVID-19 is but one of many indications that the mRNA technology platform might be utilized for, and that approval of the mRNA vaccines could open the door for the approval of other mRNA-based medicines, creating a wide range of new markets.
With the anticipated increase in market activity and competition, we will provide an overview of the mRNA IP and competitive landscape in a series of three posts in the context of certain key players’ patent positions, drug pipelines, strategic relationships, and other attributes. These posts are based on publicly available information, are non-exhaustive, and do not identify all market players or potential market players in this space.
The saddest story is that this time Covid has reached alarming proportions in India and surprise, surprise this time the villain for many is my state of Maharashtra even though it hasn’t received its share of GST proceeds for last two years and this was Kerala’s perspective, different state, different party, different political ideology altogether.
While the core team itself might be fine, we can’t forget that all those developers have hierarchies above them and they lack the ultimate power that Antirez had: copyright ownership and undisputed control over the codebase which allowed him to raise a big, fat middle finger to pressure coming from Redis Labs or any of the clouds.
Another thing that might hint at the sad mess everything is turning into, is what’s at the top of redis.io. It used to be that all commercial content would be relegated to redislabs.com, but now apparently a “Try Free” button has found its way to the top menu of the open source website. So now you have to be careful because if you press the wrong (big, red, well positioned) button you might end up signing up for a Redis Enterprise Cloud account instead of getting a copy of Redis. Disgusting.
The [attackers] infected Buffalo’s schools with malicious code that spidered through their networks, freezing computers and making it impossible for teachers to reach their students who were working remotely because of the pandemic. They demanded a ransom to make it go away.
School officials canceled remote classes for the day while they figured out what to do. They would end up needing more than a week to resume their planned class schedule. A single infection of a school district can affect dozens or hundreds of schools: Buffalo counts 63 individual schools and learning systems.
"Veolia's plan to dominate public water services all across the globe is becoming a terrifying reality."
French-based transnational corporation Veolia agreed in principle to acquire Suez, its main rival, for $15.5 billion on Monday, setting the stage for the creation of a water and waste management juggernaut that critics warn€ would be a "dangerous corporate monopoly" destined to "hurt consumers and enrich shareholders."
The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), the open-source software foundation that seeks to improve the world's capacity to deliver software with security and speed, today announced that Armory has joined the CDF as a premier member. Armory adds enterprise-grade proprietary features and support to the open-source Spinnaker project under the CDF.
The Linux Foundation and the American Association of Insurance Services are co-launching a blockchain-based platform to help the insurance industry.
“The ultimate potential of digital is driving new experiences and business value through interconnected ecosystems, however in order to build complex relationships that span private and public boundaries, we need both open interoperability and tools to ensure that no single entity owns the trust,” Shepherd explains. “For this, we need to focus on the human elements that balance privacy with the value received, collaborate openly and leverage technology to automate data confidence because it simply isn’t feasible to build the necessary trust relationships one by one.”
To this end, Shepherd led the incubation of Project Alvarium within Dell starting in 2018 and the November 2019 public announcement of intent to form as a Linux Foundation project. Project Alvarium aims to build out the concept of data confidence fabrics by layering trust insertion technologies with a system-based approach. Dell, The IOTA Foundation, and Intel continued to incubate the Alvarium code in 2020, and soon open collaboration will begin within the Linux Foundation.
Shepherd has observed the overall industry increasingly step up on enabling trusted systems and data, from developing secure edge operating systems like Zephyr and EVE-OS, establishing trusted software supply chains, and building distributed ledger efforts like IOTA.
Over the weekend, Sonatype spotted a rather unique malware sample published to the npm registry, within a day of its release on npm.
Outside of work, I have contributed to the Fedora Project for almost six years. I am soon ending a year-long term as the Diversity & Inclusion Advisor to the Fedora Council. I am a founding member of the Fedora Community Operations and Diversity & Inclusion teams.
Elastic re-licensed the ElasticSearch search engine to a dual license model where rather restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPL) license as the only copyleft option in January 2021. Amazon has now released a fork of the last Apache licensed ElasticSearch version called OpenSearch and made it available under the much more liberal Apache 2.0 license.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libpano13), Fedora (mosquitto and perl-Net-CIDR-Lite), Mageia (curl, mongodb, pdfbox, python-jinja2, rygel, spamassassin, tor, velocity, webkit2, and wireshark), openSUSE (umoci), Oracle (389-ds:1.4, kernel, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (kernel and kpatch-patch), Slackware (dnsmasq and irssi), and SUSE (cifs-utils, rubygem-actionpack-4_2, and spamassassin).
According to Istio’s support policy, minor releases like 1.8 are supported for three months after the next minor release. Since 1.9 was released on February 9th, support for 1.8 will end on May 12th, 2021.
At that point we will stop back-porting fixes for security issues and critical bugs to 1.8, so we encourage you to upgrade to the latest version of Istio (1.9.2). If you don’t do this you may put yourself in the position of having to do a major upgrade on a short timeframe to pick up a critical fix.
New DNS vulnerabilities have the potential to impact millions of devices
Today, Forescout Research Labs, partnering with JSOF Research, disclose NAME:WRECK, a set of nine vulnerabilities affecting four popular TCP/IP stacks (FreeBSD, Nucleus NET, IPnet and NetX). These vulnerabilities relate to Domain Name System (DNS) implementations, causing either Denial of Service (DoS) or Remote Code Execution (RCE), allowing attackers to take target devices offline or to take control over them.
Back when the whole TikTok hysteria was taking root, we noted how people were generally obsessing over the wrong things. Yes, there are concerns about what a Chinese company does with your data. But there was nothing TikTok was doing that was particularly unique in an adtech sector that's massively complex, sees little meaningful regulatory oversight, isn't big on the whole ethical behavior thing, operates in many countries with no real internet privacy laws, and is comprised of thousands of foreign and domestic app makers, data brokers, telecoms, tech giants, and others -- all dashing toward a hugely profitable trough.
There are several proposals from ad tech providers to preserve “addressable media” (read: individualized surveillance advertising) after cookies die off. We’ll focus on just one: Unified Identifier 2.0 , or UID2 for short, developed by independent ad tech company The Trade Desk. UID2 is a successor to The Trade Desk’s cookie-based “ unified ID .” Much like FLoC, UID2 is not a drop-in replacement for cookies, but aims to replace some of their functionality. It won’t replicate all of the privacy problems of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones.€
There are key differences between UID2 and Google’s proposals. FLoC will not allow third-party trackers to identify specific people on its own. There are still big problems with FLoC : it continues to enable auxiliary harms of targeted ads, like discrimination, and it bolsters other methods of tracking, like fingerprinting. But FLoC’s designers intend to move towards a world with less individualized third-party tracking. FLoC is a misguided effort with some laudable goals.
In contrast, UID2 is supposed to make it easier for trackers to identify people. It doubles down on the track-profile-target business model. If UID2 succeeds, faceless ad tech companies and data brokers will still track you around the web—and they’ll have an easier time tying your web browsing to your activity on other devices. UID2’s proponents want advertisers to have access to long-term behavioral profiles that capture nearly everything you do on any Internet-connected device, and they want to make it easier for trackers to share your data with each other. Despite its designers’ ill-taken claims around “privacy” and “transparency,” UID2 is a step backward for user privacy.
Right now, the company is recruiting around 300 people who use Android devices in Northern California, Atlanta, and Chicago.
This is Google’s second attempt at creating a way for people to access their medical records. In 2008, it launched Google Health, which aimed to give people a way to see their health information online. It didn’t take off, and Google shut it down in 2012. “We haven’t found a way to translate that limited usage into widespread adoption in the daily health routines of millions of people,” Google wrote in a 2011 blog post.
After 13 years, Google is coming back for patient health records. The tech giant has launched an early user feedback program aimed at exploring how patients might want to see, organize, and share their own medical record data.
The work could inform the creation of a consumer-facing medical records tool along the lines of Apple’s Health Records app. It also follows an early attempt by Google — later panned by medical experts — at creating a new version of the electronic medical record in 2008. This time around, timing may be on the company’s side: Its new effort, which is still in the early stages, came on the heels of the introduction of the federal information blocking rule, which lets patients access their medical records through health apps.
While conflict and war have written much of modern human history, they offer an incomplete narrative. Anthropological evidence suggests war is not innate to humanity, as detailed in a recent Independent Media Institute (IMI) article on the topic. Further, war can be successfully stopped and can be prevented in the future when societies shift their cultures and values and adopt intentional systems of peace, or what are now called peace systems, due in large part to the work of anthropologist Douglas P. Fry. Fry, a professor and chair of the department of peace and conflict studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has studied existing clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with each other, and how they operate, for years. These peace systems exist both in smaller, Indigenous groups like Brazil’s Upper Xingu River Basin tribes and Aboriginal Australians, as well as in larger societies, the most obvious modern example being the European Union (EU)—a peace system which would have been assumed impossible, even ridiculous, just decades prior to its adoption.
Fry says peace systems like the EU demonstrate the ability for peace to eclipse systems of war.
Guillermo Bustos migrated to the United States when he was a child. He spent his formative years in Los Angeles, where he graduated from Huntington Park High School in 2006. Guillermo’s entire family and life is in California. He was raised by his mother, Maria Bustos, a lawful permanent resident, and his older sister and brother-in-law, who are both US citizens and small-business owners. In 2014, Guillermo was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era policy that allowed undocumented people who had been brought to the United States as children to get a work permit and avoid the threat of deportation. He was on a path to having a stable documentation status in this country.
But two years later, Guillermo was convicted of a felony for being a passenger in a car that was carrying drugs. Even after serving his sentence, Guillermo now sits in a precarious position: Because of a double punishment written into American immigration law, his conviction bars him from legal status and citizenship, and he now faces permanent banishment from his entire family and the country that he has called home for 20 years. He has been caught in a punitive part of the US immigration system that advocates call the prison-to-deportation pipeline.
These days the darkness remains. Ignoring Africa while the Middle East burned was a bad move. Conflicts, war crimes, weaponized food supplies, all are on the rise. The effective lack of accountability in a multi-polar world only adds to the caustic mix.
Mozambique is not the only nation in Africa for which the Cold War was an inescapable vortex of violence. Yet it is facing a crisis as militants affiliated to Islamic State intensify a horrific campaign of violence in the Cabo Delgado region, which has a long Indian Ocean coastline and a lot of gas reserves. Those displaced now number upwards of half a million.
Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.
“When people think of famine,€ they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh € “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”
"This should have been a routine traffic stop and the video speaks for itself."
A Virginia police officer who pepper-sprayed and threatened a uniformed Black and Latinx Army officer during a routine traffic stop was fired Sunday after video footage of the incident was published, sparking nationwide outrage.€
As protests surged across the country to condemn George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020, police divestment became a serious and pressing demand that has reaped rewards: Many cities have recently taken steps to divert police department money to fund community resources that, protesters argue, would better serve the people and resolve many of the issues cops have historically turned into opportunities for violence. 1
Students have been making these demands for years now, and not just for local police. Students have to deal with both municipal and campus cops, and so do the people who live around university grounds. And campus have only become more professionalized and militarized in the paste decade. They are frequently armed, equally as violent as regular cops, and—especially at private universities— not burdened with the same expectation of transparency. These are complaints shared by students across the country. To this end, we asked students at universities that have led the way in campus police abolition movements to tell us about what they’ve been doing to hold their universities’ police departments accountable. 2
The police killing of Daunte Wright just outside of Minneapolis is creating reverberations throughout the sports world. First the Minnesota Twins, then the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, and then the National Hockey League’s Minnesota Wild all canceled their games. And they didn’t do it out of fear of riots, as some sportswriters erroneously ( and inexcusably) tweeted.
Here is the statement that the Twins issued regarding the decision to postpone Monday’s contest against the Boston Red Sox.
Last week, the Biden administration published its “skinny budget” proposals — essentially a wish list of the most important discretionary expenditures for the coming year. It’s divided roughly evenly between military and nonmilitary spending.
Following the police-perpetrated killing of a 20-year-old Black man in the Twin Cities suburb of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, hundreds of residents demonstrated outside of the police headquarters and throughout the city Sunday night into Monday morning.
There are white flowers clinging to limestone cliffs, teeming schools of rabbitfish, and busy tree snails—but in The Properties of Perpetual Light , there is no birdsong. Save for an epigraph, the absence of one of nature’s most ubiquitous pleasures in Julian Aguon’s new, effusively nature-loving book is acknowledged only in the final chapter, a transcribed conversation between Aguon and a close friend, in which he reveals to readers that, on his home island of Guam, there have been virtually no songbirds for a generation. They were eradicated when the United States military inadvertently introduced the invasive brown tree snake. It “is one of those gifts from the colonizer that keeps on giving,” Aguon tells his friend sarcastically.
A lawyer by trade, Aguon lives what he calls “the integrated life,” employing his passion for writing, activism, and advocacy in the fight for environmental justice and Indigenous self-determination. Guam is a US territory, full of US citizen residents, including thousands of Indigenous CHamorus like Aguon, who live with truncated civil rights and no voting representation in Congress. Closer to Asia than the US mainland, the Pacific island also hosts a massive US military outpost, which has for decades wrought environmental havoc. And the military is expanding its presence on the island. For a decade and a half it has been upscaling its operations in preparation for the relocation of thousands of Marines from Okinawa to Guam.
"This is sabotage all right," said one outside critic of the attack on Natanz, reportedly carried out by Mossad. "But the target is Biden's diplomacy with Iran."
Iran's Foreign Ministry said Monday that an attack on its Natanz nuclear facility over the weekend, which it accused Israel of carrying out, could have led to a catastrophic "crime against humanity" if the damage had been more extreme than what occurred.
In 2018, the Iowa Supreme Court decided to align the state with one of the worst aspects of federal jurisprudence. Deciding it was too much to demand law enforcement officers perform their duties without violating rights, the state's top court decided to adopt a form of qualified immunity so plaintiffs could be just as screwed in state courts as in federal courts.
Iraqi Kurdish officials announced Monday that their counterterrorism unit arrested five Islamic State (IS) suspects who had penetrated the autonomous Kurdistan Region from war-torn Syria to carry out explosions and assassinations in the region's capital, Irbil.
Most journalists seem to prefer avoiding all discussion of the advance of radical Islam in France. They know that those who do so are immediately called "racists" or "Islamophobes" and are often threatened, prosecuted, sentenced to heavy fines or fired from their place of work.
Even though what the journalist Ãâ°ric Zemmour said was accurate and verifiable, the CSA (Superior Audiovisual Council), said that to state certain facts constitutes an "incitement to racial hatred".
In 2015, a French journalist compared the National Rally Party to the Islamic State. [National Rally President] Marine Le Pen responded by posting on Twitter two photographs of crimes committed by the Islamic State and added, "This is Islamic State".... In court, the judge asked Le Pen, "Do you consider that these photos violate human dignity?". Le Pen replied, "It is the crime that violates human dignity, it is not its photographic reproduction".
Over the weekend the Associated Press (AP) revealed the contents of an internal Pentagon report detailing a series of calls made between lawmakers and the Department of Defense during the attack on Congress on January 6. The report demonstrates that Trump-appointed officials within the Pentagon purposefully forestalled the deployment of military forces for hours even as lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence pleaded for help while fascist-led mobs hunted and called for their deaths inside the Capitol.
The report states that at 4:08 p.m. on January 6, over two hours after windows at the Capitol were breached by members of the fascist Proud Boys, Pence called acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and demanded he “clear the Capitol.”
"It's time that the U.S. government take the reins back from Wall Street so we can assure the rapid, justice-centered decarbonization necessary for a livable planet."
A new poll released Monday shows that large majorities of voters in the United States want the federal government to bolster its regulation of big banks, insurers, and other financial institutions to prevent climate-driven economic crises.
It is not just cherry trees that climate change is confusing, however, but also the poets who write paeans to them. Seasons have long occupied a prominent place in Japanese literature: Kokinwakashu, a poetry anthology published in the 10th century, opens with six chapters of seasonal poems. Basho, who popularised haikus in the 17th century, tended to include in his poems kigo, or seasonal words, to anchor them temporally and thus evoke a certain emotional state.
Over the past century, nearly all of the native forests in the South Gonder province have disappeared, cleared to make way for wheat fields and grazing land—agricultural endeavors that support the region’s rapidly growing population. Many of the church forests, though, remain, protected by their religious stewards and the communities around them. They are tiny fragments of a lost past, and the center of hope for conservation and future restoration.
Because these church forests of Ethiopia house water supplies, biodiversity (including pollinators of local crops), conserve soil, store carbon, as well as the local churches which represent important spiritual centers, these forests are an important legacy to the health of the Ethiopian people. TREE’s Ethiopia project represents a win/win/win in the world of conservation biology: [...]
Each dot of green stands out on the landscape because they are some of the only trees left in a country that’s experienced widespread deforestation. Some forests are more than 1,000 years old, and these precious trees have been spared thanks to shadow conservation – conservation as a by-product of religious stewardship. But they are small and threatened by encroaching roads, buildings and farmers' fields. Paradoxically, humans have both protected them yet pose the biggest threat to their future.
Bali is a radically different place today than it was before it became a tourist mecca. The explosion in interest has brought growth and jobs and a growing economy to one of the world’s poorer nations. But progress has also brought problems, in this case, trash. And a lot of it. Paige Leacey weighs in on the fight to protect the Balinese environment from the tourist hordes. S
Global heating has already set back farming around the world, and wiped out seven years of steady advance.
"Why 'emergency'? Because words matter. To preserve a livable planet, humanity must take action immediately."
Lead partners of a global consortium of news outlets that aims to improve reporting on the climate emergency released a statement on Monday urging journalists everywhere to treat their coverage of the rapidly heating planet with the same same level of urgency and intensity as they have the Covid-19 pandemic.
As the planet warms, it isn’t just humans who are feeling the heat — trees are too. Rising temperatures are disrupting a primary engine of life on Earth: photosynthesis.
In fact, no one will ever know the mountains of wastes that have been buried or dumped into rivers, lakes, seas and oceans in violation of the law or with the consent of local and national authorities.
The EPA is still struggling to lessen the dangers of illegal pollution and burial of toxic wastes in places throughout the country. The EPA baptizes these gangster operations “superfund” sites.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
It’s long past time for journalism to recognize that the climate emergency is here. To be clear, that is a statement of science, not politics—and the science says the hour is very late.
A new report, published on 14 March, 2021 in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ journal Ambio, points out that humanity is hurtling towards destruction unless we have the collective wisdom to change course quickly.
The Ambio article was written as part of the preparation for a meeting of Nobel Prize winners to discuss the state of the planet. The virtual meeting will be held on April 26-28, 2021.
"Kudos to Tom DiNapoli for making it clear that you can't build your retirement on tar sands."
In a development climate campaigners welcomed as a harbinger of more institutions ditching fossil fuel investments, New York state's pension fund will divest $7 million from seven tar sands companies, the state comptroller announced Monday.
For years organizations have been calling on pension funds to divest from fossil fuels due to environmental racism and the climate impact of these investments.
Environmental organizers across the country are converging in Northern Minnesota in support of Indigenous Water Protectors, to stop the construction of the Line 3 pipeline expansion. Across the country, people€ are protesting, sending letters, and making calls to demand that President Biden shut down the construction of Line 3 just as he called for the shut down the Keystone XL pipeline in January. They are also demanding that banks, insurance companies and pensions divest from Enbridge, the pipeline owner.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Standing Rock Sioux tribal historian, has died of cancer at the age of 64, and we look back on her work, through interviews on her land and in the Democracy Now! studio. Allard co-founded the Sacred Stone Camp on Standing Rock Sioux land in April 2016 to resist the Dakota Access pipeline, to which people from around the world traveled, making it one of the largest gatherings of Indigenous peoples in a century. “We say mni wiconi, water of life. Every time we drink water, we say mni wiconi, water of life. We cannot live without water,” LaDonna Brave Bull Allard said in a September 2016 interview with Democracy Now! “I don’t understand why America doesn’t understand how important water is. So we have no choice. We have to stand. No matter what happens, we have to stand to save the water.”
Today, those plans were laid bare as the government unveiled a 20 billion kroner deal with French firm Alstom.
Alstom has initially been tasked with delivering 100 sets of electric trains to national rail operators DSB between 2024 and 2030.
The new electric trains will replace DSB’s ageing fleet of IC3, IC4 and IR4 trains on Denmark’s national and regional grid.
Over the weekend, lawmakers voted in favour of a bill to end routes where the same journey could be made by train in under two-and-a-half hours.
Connecting flights will not be affected, however.
The rural basic income system that Gyeonggi Province is introducing is a significant step: an examination aimed at pre-testing the effects of a particular policy before it is expanded nationwide. No government to date has implemented a full-scale basic income at the state level. The US state of Alaska, which has made cash payments in the form of “Permanent Fund Dividends” (PFDs) since 1982 to people who have resided there for at least one year, represents a special case, with a stable source of finances in the form of profits from the sale of natural resources. Other examples have all been policy experiments designed to pre-test the effects of a basic income. In Finland, a center-right coalition government that came to power in 2015 launched an experiment in 2017 with a basic income for people unemployed for two or more years. The Canadian province of Ontario, the Spanish city of Barcelona, and the countries of India and Namibia have experimented with cash payments to the impoverished class based on minimal eligibility conditions. The Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), a global alliance of basic income proponents, defines a basic income as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.” The aforementioned policy experiments, however, fall short in terms of two of the most important conditions of a basic income, namely unconditionality and universality. This limits our interpretations of the outcomes of those experiments, confining them to examining effects on particular groups or particular circumstances rather than the general effects of a basic income.
The rural basic income system to be introduced by Gyeonggi Province is different from other basic income policy experiments in the past, in that the funds are to be provided to all residents of a given region rather than a particular group such as unemployed persons or members of the impoverished class. Under this system, a basic income is to be provided not only to farmers but also to people employed in other professions, without distinctions of age, income, employment status or other factors. Only one condition applies: residency in a particular region. In effect, the implementation of this policy will permit a comprehensive examination of the effects of a basic income on income stability, life satisfaction, willingness to work, working hours and other areas.
After decades as a loyal customer, I recently dropped my insurance policies with Liberty Mutual. I had not realized that the company I had thought was protecting me was, in fact, one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel insurers and is supporting violations of Indigenous rights worldwide.
Actor Will Smith and film director Antoine Fuqua released a joint statement on Monday announcing they would no longer produce a highly anticipated film in Georgia due to the state’s recently passed restrictive voting law.
The IRS is struggling under a mountain of paperwork and grappling with outdated technology, and in the past year it has been tasked with distributing stimulus checks three separate times.
2020 federal income tax returns for individuals are now due on May 17, 2021. The IRS announced in March that its tax deadline would be pushed back from the usual date, April 15. “Even with the new deadline, we urge taxpayers to consider filing as soon as possible, especially those who are owed refunds. Filing electronically with direct deposit is the quickest way to get refunds,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in the statement.
[...] Specifically, it prohibits companies from burdening consumers with confusing language or unnecessary steps such as forcing them to click through multiple screens or listen to reasons why they shouldn’t opt out. [...]
And then there is the inherent contradiction of trying to be a big, if not dominant, player in a world that by definition is meant to be fragmented (or “decentralised”, in the lingo). If crypto becomes as successful as Coinbase wants it to be, there may be no need for a financial behemoth. In fact, the firm’s most dangerous rivals may be neither its peers, such as Binance and Kraken, nor conventional financial institutions, but those without a big organisation behind them—fully decentralised, like most cryptocurrencies themselves.
Corporations can and should bankroll much of what America needs. But they won't as long as corporations keep bankrolling American politicians.
For four decades, the basic deal between big American corporations and politicians has been simple. Corporations provide campaign funds. Politicians reciprocate by lowering corporate taxes and doing whatever else corporations need to boost profits.
In normal times the propaganda is better masked, wrapped in the illusion of choice and variety.
A few lessons to be learnt from the wall-to-wall coverage of Prince Philip’s death in the British media...
Facing deportation to Russia, Chechen asylum seeker Magomed Gadayev stabbed himself in the stomach at a migrant detention facility in France on Friday, April 9. Nevertheless, the French authorities put him on plane to Moscow. When he arrived, FSB border guards held him in an airport transit zone for 12 hours, before loading him onto a flight to the far-northern town of Novy Urengoy, where his relatives live. By Sunday, Magomed Gadayev had been handed over to the Chechen authorities — despite the fact that he faces reprisals in Chechnya as a witness in a torture case against local police.
President Joe Biden issued an executive order over the weekend that creates a commission to study potential reforms for the Supreme Court, including expanding the size of the court and instituting term limits for sitting justices.
President Biden’s schedule for Monday included a White House meeting with four House members and four senators on the administration’s proposed $2 trillion infrastructure bill. On the GOP side, Representatives Don Young and Garret Graves joined Senators Roger Wicker and Deb Fisher, while Democratic Representatives Donald Payne and David Price joined Senators Maria Cantwell and Alex Padilla.
In January -- shortly after the failed DC insurrection -- Dominion Voting Systems sued former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation over her repeated assertions the company was somehow involved in "stealing" the election for President Joe Biden.
The senator from West Virginia says he sees himself as a defender of the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd. If we review Byrd's legacy, however, it's clear Manchin is not doing that.
Joe Manchin of West Virginia is the€ Democrats' pivotal 50th vote in the Senate—the key to passing bills with a simple majority. (With the€ tiebreaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.) He is also pivotal for€ changing the filibuster rule.
Home to the world’s third largest rainforest, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has a biodiversity as well as a cultural and linguistic diversity that is as great as any region on Earth.
PNG’s biological and cultural diversity is under assault by the global economy. PNG’s economy is dominated by foreign corporations engaged in resource extraction that plunders PNG’s wealth while leaving little for PNG’s ordinary people. This resource colonialism destroys habitat and quickens global warming. It is accelerating the sixth mass extinction of species in Earth’s history.
Global logging companies have deforested over a third of PNG, often replacing rainforest with palm oil plantations. Corrupt logging deals between the PNG government and foreign corporations have left indigenous landowners economically and culturally impoverished by the destruction of their traditional means to life in the rainforest.
[...]
The U.S. and other rich countries now owe PNG and other exploited tropical countries an ecological debt. The rich countries expropriated their resources, destroyed their habitat and biodiversity, and impoverished their people. We must push the U.S. to lead a Global Green New Deal that invests in the habitability of the whole planet by paying these countries for reforestation, habitat restoration, and revenues lost from cutting the international trade that drives biodiversity destruction.
Twitter trails its largest rival, Facebook Inc, which opened its first African office in Johannesburg in 2015 and plans to open a second in Lagos this year. The firm struck a deal with African telecom majors in 2020 to build one of the world's largest subsea cable networks.
Dorsey has said he wants to better understand Africa’s [Internet] users, many of whom are moving online for the first time. He announced plans to live in Africa part-time after visiting the continent in late 2019 to meet entrepreneurs and attend a meditation retreat. He scuttled the idea after the Covid-19 outbreak forced people to stay home and limit travel.
A piece in Current Affairs resonated strongly with me: The Truth is Paywalled; but the Lies are Free. The premise of the piece is simple: access to journalistic institutions and academic journals is restricted by paywalls; but hogwash, regurgitated rubbish, and conspiracy theories are available for free. The institutions of truth seem to be too busy erecting paywalls to notice that they’re loosing the market to those that manage to operate without direct payments.
[...]
Paywalled websites don’t just request payment for the individual articles you want to read. The only options on offer is a reoccurring monthly subscription. The interests of the consumer are completely ignored in the pursuit of a pot of gold and reoccurring revenue stream.
This decision, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Goldsmith, came out only a few weeks ago, yet before the Supreme Court ruled in Google v. Oracle. In light of that latter decision it's not clear that this one is still good law. Then again, it's not clear it ever was.
The tech site Engadget reported Thursday that the far-left legal group Muslim Advocates has filed a consumer protection lawsuit against Facebook for allowing “anti-Muslim hate to spread on the platform, leading to real-world harm.” The organization provided a list of what it claimed were 26 “anti-Muslim hate groups,” including organizations that are dedicated simply to opposing jihad violence and Sharia oppression of women, gays, and others, including my own news site Jihad Watch, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, the Center for Security Policy, and other groups whose main crime is opposing leftist Islamopandering and the left’s tendency to turn a blind eye to the human rights abuses sanctioned by Islamic law.
On April 6, the Russian Civic Chamber removed human rights activist Marina Litvinovich from Moscow’s Public Monitoring Commission (ONK), an organization tasked with overseeing the observance of prisoners’ rights. Allegedly, Litvinovich was suspended for “multiple ethical violations.” Meduza correspondents Maxim Solopov and Ivan Golunov dug into the Moscow ONK’s internal workings to find out who’s really in control, why so many members are from Moscow’s Mitino district, and how a union for security guards factors in.
If it has so far opposed the American request, the British justice refuses to give Julian Assange his freedom, on the pretext that he would take the opportunity not to appear in court during the appeal by the American side. An appeal that the Biden administration recently confirmed to have made.
If the western world valued truth, there wouldn’t be a journalist languishing in Belmarsh Prison for publishing it.
Julian Assange is in prison entirely because of his authentic publications of the 2010 Manning leaks. He remains locked up for no other reason than the Biden administration’s efforts to appeal a British court’s rejection of its extradition request to try him in the United States for those entirely truthful publications.
If the western world valued truth, Julian Assange would be free. He never would have been imprisoned in the first place. He would be a celebrated hero.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is appalled to learn that three imprisoned Iranian journalists who have almost certainly caught Covid-19 – Baktash Abtin, Reza Khandan Mahabadi and Kayvan Samimi Behbahani– are being denied appropriate medical attention. They must be freed at once, RSF says. Abtin, 48, was transferred to the infirmary of Tehran’s Evin prison on 4 April with a serious pulmonary condition that was confirmed by X-ray. He had been given a PCR test for Covid-19 three days before that and got a negative result. Mahabadi, 59, and Behbahani, 72, also have Covid-19 symptoms and their condition is also very worrying.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has ordered an urgent investigation Friday of one of the country’s top crime reporters, Giorgos Karaivaz.
Greek media have long been targeted by far-left organizations and anarchists in a show of violent defiance to what they call links between them and the nation’s political and financial establishment. However, journalist killings are rare in Greece. If it is established that the reporter was gunned down for carrying out his duties, it will be the first such case in Europe in years.
Minneapolis, Minn.—The spark comes just before the boom. Every time the cops throw a flash-bang grenade, protesters sprint and cry out. They take cover and protect one another while retreating in tiny increments across the street.
On Sunday afternoon, police in Brooklyn Center—a suburb 15 minutes north of downtown Minneapolis—killed a 20-year-old Black man named Daunte Wright during a traffic stop. Protesters initially gathered in the neighborhood where he was killed before blocking off the intersection outside the Brooklyn Center police station two miles away.
So I believe we can all admit that there are large groups of racist pricks wandering around our country — usually armed, rarely friendly. Everyone knows it. I bet even the racist parents of a 32-year-old white supremacist know he’s a dick. At Thanksgiving dinner they probably tell him, “Listen, Robbie. We’re very proud of you. We love what you’ve done with hating Black people online. But the thing is — you’re kinda a dick. Can you just be more polite? Just approach people slowly and kindly ask if they would like to be racist with you. You don’t have to make such a scene — with all the guns and the camo.”
Anyways, I bring this up because I don’t think we’re going to solve America’s militant hate group problem until we get the help of € Fruit by the Foot€ and € Gushers. …You heard me.
With the increase, the federal government’s capacity to process and shelter migrant children has been stretched, leading to children being housed in overcrowded and inhumane CBP facilities for extended periods of time.
Federal officials and some media have called what’s happening at the border a “crisis” or a “surge”— harmful rhetoric that has long been used to dehumanize immigrants and people approaching the southern border.
Charles Booker announced on Monday that he is launching an exploratory committee looking into challenging Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. Booker is a former state representative from Louisville and previously ran against fellow Democrat Amy McGrath in the party’s failed 2020 challenge against Sen. Mitch McConnell.
"I know Rand Paul is watching this movement. I know he's scared. He should be. He knows we can transform Kentucky."
In a move swiftly cheered by progressives, Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker announced in a video message on Monday that he was forming an exploratory committee to consider running against Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul in 2022.
"Yet another Black life was taken by those sworn to protect, and we join the community in mourning Wright's loss," said the ACLU of Minnesota.
Update:
He served his country as the 66th Attorney General of the United States from 1967 to 1969 under U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. As Deputy and Assistant Attorney General he was instrumental in drafting some of the leading civil rights and environmental legislation that any generation before or after has produced. His hand contributed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the legislation that later inspired the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA. After leaving public office he ran for U.S. President in 1972 and U.S. Senate in 1974 and 1977.
He was the son of a Supreme Court Justice and former Attorney General, and had his son Tom rose to a senior position in the Department of Justice before his life was ended prematurely by illness. He was married to Georgia (Welch) who he met while they were students at the University of Texas. He was always fond of recalling his travels with Georgia right after they were married when they drove as far South in Central America as they could before turning around and heading all the way back to Chicago. Georgia passed away in 2010. Their daughter Rhonda survives them.
For a while during Ramsey Clark’s 1974 senate race, I was his finance chairman. I’m not sure exactly how this happened. I had never been the finance chairman of anything. Maybe Victor Navasky, who ran the campaign, picked me from a list of volunteers. Or maybe it was a role no one else seemed to be filling at the time. The job required that I file documents with the Federal Election Commission. I learned two lessons. Campaigns cost a lot of money—and ours needed more.
Ramsey rejected contributions above $100. I, among others, urged him to raise this limit. No one, we said, would think that individual contributions of $200 or $300 or even more would corrupt Ramsey Clark. He declined. You could look at his position as imprudent and obstinate. Or you could look at it as principled and resolute. At the time, I was unsure of the answer. Today, in light of Ramsey’s work in the next four decades, I choose principled and resolute.
Former U.S. attorney general and longtime human rights lawyer Ramsey Clark has died at the age of 93, and we look back on his life. Clark was credited as being a key architect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. He served as attorney general from 1967 to 1969, during which time he ordered a moratorium on federal executions and opposed J. Edgar Hoover’s wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., though he was also involved in the prosecution of antiwar activists. After leaving office, Clark became a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy. “The world is the most dangerous place it’s ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back,” Ramsey Clark said while addressing a protest against the inauguration of George W. Bush on January 20, 2005. We also play an excerpt from an interview with Clark about defending the Hancock 38, a group of peace activists arrested at a U.S. drone base near Syracuse, New York.
"The world is the most dangerous place it's ever been now because of what our country has done, and is doing, and we have to take it back."
Former U.S. attorney general and longtime human rights lawyer Ramsey Clark has died at the age of 93, and we look back on his life. Clark was credited as being a key architect of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
The largest union drive in the history of Amazon has ended with the company on top. After a months-long battle, 738 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse voted to unionize, and 1,798 voted no. Ballots from another 505 workers were challenged, mostly by Amazon. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that led the drive says Amazon illegally interfered in the vote, and it plans to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon, which is led by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, spent millions to defeat the closely watched election, and even got a private mailbox installed at the warehouse so it could pressure workers to mail their ballots from work and monitor votes. “It’s important that people don’t misread the results of this election,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon’s working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union.”
In the face of intimidation by one of the largest companies in the world, Alabama workers bravely spoke out about the need for greater labor protections.
The largest union drive in the history of Amazon has ended with the company on top. After a months-long battle, 738 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse voted to unionize, and 1,798 voted no. Ballots from another 505 workers were challenged, mostly by Amazon. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that led the drive says Amazon illegally interfered in the vote, and it plans to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon, which is led by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, spent millions to defeat the closely watched election, and even got a private mailbox installed at the warehouse so it could pressure workers to mail their ballots from work and monitor votes. “It’s important that people don’t misread the results of this election,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon’s working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union.”
Labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey says there were many warning signs that the historic Amazon union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, would fail. Workers at the Amazon warehouse voted overwhelmingly against forming a union after a months-long vote by mail, with Amazon using widespread intimidation and misinformation to undermine the effort. But McAlevey says organizers made a number of missteps in their campaign and didn’t do enough to engage workers in the warehouse. “There’s a strategy and a method for every part of a hard campaign. Do we always win when we follow them? No. Do we stand a better chance of winning them? Yes,” says McAlevey.
Eduard Atayev, the coordinator of Team Navalny’s office in Makhachkala, has gone missing along with his aide Murad Manapov.
For years, the FBI has threatened brown people with a miserable existence unless they're willing to become informants. What should be illegal somehow isn't -- or at least hasn't generated enough courtroom precedent to force the FBI to knock it off.
"The Biden administration should place human rights at the center of its migration discussions and agreements with regional governments."€
Human rights defenders expressed concern Monday after the Biden administration announced it reached agreements with Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala for those countries to boost their deployments of military forces to stop the flow migrants trying to make their way to the United States.
Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny, who is currently on hunger strike in Pokrov’s Penal Colony No. 2, has been transferred out of the prison’s sick ward and returned to the general population.€
A Request For Information (RFI) posted on a website for Federal government contractors gives a glimpse into the degree to which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has embedded itself into the information technology infrastructure of the airline industry.
The RFI for Services to Electronically Transmit Airline Data was posted April 5, 2021, by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Responses from potential vendors are due by April 19, 2021.
CBP says it is “conducting market research to gain a greater understanding of the full range of available options for services for obtaining names and related information of passengers who are arriving and departing the U.S. on commercial airlines.” Although the RFI was put out by CBP, which surveils and controls international air travel and cargo transport to and from the US, it appears to contemplate integration with the parallel systems used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for data-driven surveillance and control of domestic US air travel as well.
A district court in Russia’s Vladimir region has fined Anastasia Vasilieva, the director of the medical workers’ union “Alyans Vrachey” (Doctors’ Alliance), 180,000 rubles (about $2,325) for her involvement in a rally outside the prison where opposition politician Alexey Navalny is being held.
Do you think you have a First Amendment right to use your cell phone to record on-duty police officers, or to use your social media account to criticize politicians? Do you think you have a Fourth Amendment right to privacy in the content of your personal emails? Courts often protect these rights. But some judges invoke qualified immunity to avoid affirmatively recognizing them, or if they do recognize them, to avoid holding government officials accountable for violating them.
Because of these evasions of judicial responsibility to enforce the Constitution, some government officials continue to invade our digital rights. The time is now for legislatures to repeal this doctrine.
In 1871, at the height of Reconstruction following the Civil War, Congress enacted a landmark law empowering people to sue state and local officials who violated their constitutional rights. This was a direct response to state-sanctioned violence against Black people that continued despite the formal end of slavery. The law is codified today at 42 U.S.C. €§Ã¢â¬Â¯1983 .
These cases suggest that banks remain the Achilles heel in the global war on money-laundering, despite the reams of regulations aimed at turning them into front€line soldiers in that conflict. However, closer examination suggests that the global anti-money-laundering (AML) system has serious structural flaws, largely because governments have outsourced to the private sector much of the policing they should have been doing themselves. A study published last year by Ronald Pol, a financial-crime expert, concluded that the global AML system could be “the world’s least effective policy experiment”, and that compliance costs for banks and other businesses could be more than 100 times higher than the amount of laundered loot seized.
The Tibetan diaspora is estimated to include about 150,000 people living in 40 countries, mainly India, Nepal, North America, and in Europe.
Thirteen people who describe themselves as “victims of forced confessions broadcast on Chinese television” are urging European satellite operator Eutelsat to reconsider carrying Chinese channels CGTN and CCTV4.
The letter published by human rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders details a list of violations that the signatories say China is guilty of using to extort confessions from them and "refuse the right to a fair trial".
A Chinese political prisoner jailed after he publicly supported the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong has died at the age of 48, despite warnings from his family that mistreatment and possible torture at the hands of the prison authorities and police could kill him.
Guo Hongwei, who was serving a 13-year jail term in China's northeastern province of Jilin, was rushed to hospital with a brain hemorrhage after his family repeatedly warned that his high blood pressure had been left unmedicated, Hong Kong's Apple Daily newspaper reported on Monday.
A person familiar with the matter told RFA last week that Guo had been tortured.
State security police and religious affairs bureau officials frequently raid unofficial "house churches" that aren't members of the CCP-backed Three-Self Patriotic Association, although member churches have also been targeted at times.
The CCP under Xi Jinping regards Christianity as a dangerous foreign import, with party documents warning against the "infiltration of Western hostile forces" in the form of religion.
Credits: Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology, April 6, 2021
You are probably familiar with Ajit Pai, the former head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) famous for killing net neutrality rules, doing the Harlem Shake in a Daily Caller video, and drinking from an oversized coffee mug to appear funny and relatable.
If you'll recall, the Trump administration rushed the appointment of Nathan Simington to the FCC last year, despite Simington having absolutely no real experience or qualifications for the role. That's because Simington was appointed for two other reasons. One being the idiotic (and utterly hypocritical if you tracked the net neutrality fights) effort by the Trump administration to try and have the FCC target Section 230, which was derailed by Trump's election loss.
The FCC Speed Test App works similarly to existing speed-testing apps like Ookla’s and Fast by Netflix, automatically collecting and displaying data once users press the “start testing” button. According to the FCC, the data collected through the app will inform the agency’s efforts to collect more accurate broadband speed information and aid its broadband deployment efforts.
It's not just about privacy and Apple's plan to deal major damage the in-app advertising business (in order to force app developers to rely on subscriptions, in-app purchasing, and download fees--the types of revenues on which Apple imposes a tax). On the same day that Tim Cook's Canadian interview appeared, Apple posted a Canada-centric defense of its App Store business model to its website: Apple's iOS app economy drives economic growth and opportunity across Canada
The story mentions some smaller Canadian apps and app development companies: Sago Mini, Ground News, TRU LUV, FILM3D. Apple connects those success stories to Canada's economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic: "Canada’s dynamic app economy stands poised to be a competitive and powerful force for job growth as the country recovers from the COVID-19 recession."
What Apple does not say, of course, is that the Canadian app economy would do even better if #OpentheAppStore became a reality. Developers of all sizes would find more and greater opportunities that way. I can't think of anybody who would doubt that the app economy is huge and growing. But I also don't know a single developer who likes to be at Apple's (and Google's) mercy.
I wanted to briefly highlight this important pending Federal Circuit appeal involving parallel litigation in both the US and China. The Swedish company wants to litigate in the US, while the Korean company wants to litigate in China.
[...]
The Chinese court issued an anti-suit injunction order that would force Ericsson to stop litigating the case in the US (and globally anywhere but in Wuhan). The US court then issued an anti-interference order that bars Samsung from attempting to enforce the Chinese order against the US actions. Litigation between the parties is apparently also ongoing in the USITC, Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium.
On Friday, Apple brought a motion for pretrial sanctions against Epic Games. I only tweeted about that motion as it didn't allege any particular wrongdoing on Epic's part (just "procedural gamesmanship" according to Apple) and, all in all, fell short of what would have warranted a blog post...
[...]
What Apple wanted was for the court to preclude three witnesses--Vivek Sharma of Facebook, Lori Wright of Microsoft, and Benjamin Simon of a five-people company named Yoga Buddhi--"from testifying unless they agree to make sufficient productions four business days in advance of their depositions."
The New European Patent Office Site in The Hague houses the EPO's extensive staff and operations within 278,871 square feet of office space. Completed in 2018 by the Paris-based firm Ateliers Jean Nouvel and the Amsterdam-based firm Dam & Partners Architecten, the project isthe largest steel structure in the Netherlands. In his latest column, ARCHITECT contributing editor Aaron Betsky analyzed winning design for the Shenzhen Opera House in China, explaining that the proposed building is "translucent and coherent from a distance, while close-up and interior views reveal vast, shimmering spaces, covered with net-like grids, that seem to have no visible support." Read more of Betsky's "Notes from the Shenzhen Opera House Competition" here, and read more about the New European Patent Office Site in The Hague here.
Repurposing drugs has very clear benefits. It gives companies the opportunity to develop entirely new uses for existing drugs that they don’t have patent protection, and may allow innovator companies to protect a molecule or formulation even after initial patent protection has expired.
Despite these benefits, the road to repurposing drugs can be unclear and costly, with many countries lacking incentives for smaller companies to pursue repurposing for drugs they don’t already have patent protection for.
LSPN Connect invited five repurposing specialists to a panel talking about the barriers to repurposing treatments, how to incentivise the practice, and notable trends in repurposing over the past 10 years.
The online European Qualifying Examinations (eEQEs) are part of the EPO's overall digital strategy. The patent exams were moved online for the first time this year as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However (like ViCo oral proceedings), the EQEs will continue to be held online, even post-pandemic. As part of the change to online exams, it has now become apparent that the EPO is planning a radical overhaul of the exams themselves, to be implemented by 2024. Part of the goal of this change is to make the exams more relevant tests of “fit-to-practise”.
In moving online, the EPO endeavoured to keep the form and content of the exams as close as possible to the paper examinations. In 2022 and 2023, the EPO is expected to make only relatively minor changes to the exams, to better adapt the papers to the online format. Technical changes to the online platform are also expected, which will hopefully prevent a repeat of the issues faced by candidates this year (IPKat here and here).
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As the comments on this and other blogs frequently highlight, there is a strong perception by many in the profession that the patent examinations as currently formatted do not test fit for practice. This Kat can herself testify that the more professional experience she accrues, the more absurd some of the requirements of the examinations appear, either because of subject-matter specialism and/or the artificial nature of the jigsaw puzzle-like style of the EQEs. The epi discussion paper begins with an acknowledgement of the problem to be solved: "There is a strong feeling among the tutors and some qualified European patent attorneys that some Exam Papers are too remote from reality" and is welcome for this acknowledgement alone. This Kat wonders if the highly-anticipated Mercer Review of the UK patent examinations (IPKat) will make a similar acknowledgement [Merpel: Speaking of which, where is the Mercer Review?]. The fact that the EPO appears prepared to go further and address the perceived need for a better examination system should be applauded. Let's hope the PEB is taking note.
President António Campinos addressed Members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) on the latest developments in the European patent system on 12 April.
The EPO President’s participation at the JURI committee meeting, held by videoconference, provided an opportunity to exchange views with MEPs, particularly on the role of patents and innovation and the EPO’s efforts to create a sustainable patent system. It underlined the importance of the European patent system to the success of EU policies on innovation, industry and SMEs and for providing the incentive for ground-breaking research.
The lawyers representing Samsung in the U.S. part of its patent dispute with Ericsson must have had a very busy weekend. On Friday, five amicus curiae briefs were filed in support of Ericsson's responsive brief, one of which was a joint filing by Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), former Federal Circuit Chief Judge Paul Michel, and the Trump Administration's USPTO Director Andrei Iancu. But around mignight Eastern Time on Monday, Samsung already filed its reply brief (this post continues below the document):
[...]
The remaining questions are not that clear-cut. I've recently spoken with two U.S. lawyers whose positions on standard-essential patent (SEP) enforcement I consider to be pretty balanced. They've made some points that I need to think about, and they relate to situations in which antisuit injunctions from other jurisdictions (not necessarily China) could disadvantage net licensees (like Samsung) even though in this case, a net licensor (Ericsson) obtained the anti-antisuit injunction at issue. And it's interesting that only one company has filed an amicus brief: InterDigital supports Ericsson, but InterDigital may have nothing to lose in China and is presently embroiled in litigation with Xiaomi, which obtained an antisuit injunction like the one Samsung got against Ericsson. Other companies and their industry bodies prefer not to alienate any particular jurisdiction, at least for the time being, and/or they're afraid of situations in which the shoe will be on the other foot and whatever they'd say now would be held against them.
Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that Inspur has become a licensee and community member of OIN. As a leading global provider of data center infrastructure, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions – ranking among the world’s top-three server manufacturers – Inspur is reinforcing its commitment to open source software (OSS) as an enabler of advanced infrastructure computing systems.
“Linux is rewriting what is possible in infrastructure computing. OSS-based cloud computing and on-premise data centers are driving down the cost-per-compute while significantly increasing businesses’ ability to provision AI and machine-learning (ML) capabilities,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network. “We appreciate Inspur’s participation in joining OIN and demonstrating its commitment to innovation and patent non-aggression in open source.”
The Open Invention Network (OIN) defends the intellectual property (IP) rights of Linux and open-source software developers from patent trolls and the like. This is a global fight and now the OIN has a new, powerful allied member in China: Inspur.
Grilling weather is coming up soon! You may be in the market for a new grill to set up in your backyard. Well, now you have to make a choice: will you go with the “Backyard Grill” or the “Backyard BBQ?” That’s not a choice that Variety Stores, Inc. (Variety | Plaintiff) wants you to need to make. Variety Stores, Inc. v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 888 F.3d 651 (4th Cir. 2018).
[...]
Tolan arose from a claim of excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 651. Officer Edwards believed that Tolan (Plaintiff) and his cousin had stolen a car, which the two exited at Tolan’s home. Id. at 651-52. Tolan’s parents came out of the house when they noticed the brewing situation. Id. Officer Cotton (Defendant) arrived, responding to a request for backup from Edwards. Id. at 652. From here, the parties had differing stories. Id. at 653. The two parties disputed how Cotton handled Tolan’s mother during the incident, and as to how Tolan responded to Cotton’s interactions with Tolan’s mother. Id. The stories converge around an unfortunate ending, however: Cotton fired three shots towards Tolan, striking him in the lung. Id.
Cotton moved for summary judgment with the district court, who granted it for Cotton, later affirmed by the Fifth Circuit. Id. at 654. In upholding summary judgment, the Fifth Circuit relied on Cotton’s version of Tolan’s response to Cotton’s interactions with Tolan’s mother (that Tolan rose to his feet) and to the lighting conditions of the porch where the shooting occurred (that it was dimly lit). Id. at 655. The Supreme Court noted that this was in error: the lower courts had failed to credit Tolan’s versions of the facts, vacating the Fifth Circuit’s judgment. Id. at 660.
You won't be paying an Oracle tax on your next Android phone. After 10 years of Big Red claiming dibs on Android internals and Google telling them to GTFO, the legals have finally been settled by the US Supreme Court. Google has won.
The case was in many ways a classic troll. Way back when, Google thought Java SE would be a good platform to build its new Android phone around. That didn't work out, thank your favourite deity, so Google wrote its own platform with just enough Java structure to bring caffeinated programmers – of whom there were millions – along for the ride.
Everyone was happy until Oracle turned up. It fancied a new revenue line for the profit centre it called its legal department. Looking around, Oracle discovered and hauled away the dying Sun with – aha – intellectual property that could be weaponised. Most notably, Google's little shards of Java API. There were other things too, like patents, but they soon fell by the wayside. As the court case crept up the American legal system, it became widely understood to be about whether you can copyright APIs. Oracle said yes, and Google had infringed that copyright. Google said no, and anyway even if it had, the "fair use" aspect of copyright applied.
Via the MPA, global anti-piracy coalition Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment is investigating several major streaming platforms. The sites, which offer mainstream movies and TV shows, are good for more than half a billion visits per year. With the help of a US court, the rightsholders are hoping to identify their operators, with disruption or even closure the ultimate aim.
A federal court in Virginia has signed a temporary restraining order that requires PayPal to freeze the assets of VPN provider VPN.ht. The company is being sued by several movie studios and stands accused of facilitating piracy. The court also signed off on a request to lock the domain name of a Popcorn Time fork, which already appears to have thrown the towel.
