𝕿𝖊𝖈𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖘 Bulletin for Saturday, December 05, 2020 ┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅┅ Generated Sun 6 Dec 00:15:06 GMT 2020 Created by Dr. Roy Schestowitz (𝚛𝚘𝚢 (at) 𝚜𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚣 (dot) 𝚌𝚘𝚖) Full hyperlinks for navigation omitted but are fully available in the originals The corresponding HTML versions are at 𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈 Latest in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒕𝒙𝒕 and older bulletins can be found at 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒕𝒙𝒕-𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒉𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒔 Full IPFS index in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒊𝒑𝒇𝒔 and as plain text in 𝒉𝒕𝒕𝒑://𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒓𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔.𝒐𝒓𝒈/𝒊𝒑𝒇𝒔/𝒕𝒙𝒕 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐑𝐄𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐁𝐔𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐒 ════════════════════════════════════╕ Previous bulletins in IPFS (past 21 days, in chronological order): QmZEByDfGomEW1TeQSQaoupWsxmo5EjLY3CFvKeUXyJoCF QmNrgTi6r2u49k1iWSiANjzATUMw9HkhQgXca2rMfMhcxQ QmUHG95G7Xyn2j8EiUB7jL2HKDjCAj7yo7FbmrTqs6hgn3 QmZ5Fkb4CfotE4Z3E4kaupN5HurudVED9A1JMquN4cmWqX QmRPa3Fa8wFE1JwGtPrdbDGq5VMJ5CinSSSVt2eyZHbt7c QmQ4qcYbFg6RCtajMJBcgoESAn4Cj6wafngVaCsGFVmMTj QmY8CNiuBXEWgEde7biLS6voUiyGg6AsEAjFXJkFEqGUED QmTpnBsAUeyBLJL2NGgLi6vhAmf6Kr6gWhTZYGrmt9U7hv QmZ2hDQGLcFiBexEJSLeXytE1arKzw2acB1Tjz9a89V4Fa Qmd6CkrB6BxvbpYc2A4inaPdP66KBtq72z4VXkuwzSMgkP QmYfrMVyySrZF2SrDo83bXq8ZvCS5nvmuBRbTwmmUMwfmG QmX8sx4qHQqTcXiwTPUfF5FJgwB17cRE94Vdq7o8aajWoB QmNgrJVRJJYg75CzFXHMzwK5Qzc4TSeqDifwZp45So4rE4 QmVRL6WMmGiPV37uPBGTUEvLUEsKm7Yrd3bfHwpJyyzhPU QmS9bP8yhTuXvtdnGKjZQcTYCgofc2LYKW3KEeK8Vq8hti QmZQcuYLNJ1irDo1sgAAN46wJgKbFzZkWPXhqzsJr4wmpV QmfVy1Cefdnogv1y46TCGUYXffiMvPoaUrebDtBmzQouNd QmY1YfMUmDPhBaybxneMM72CHSdttnzK6m6Az1quYcU13Y Qmb1nmr8opPQQQchMsxCxxgtpnpvC6ntG5egMNCvSy6goB QmedadEVa8qx38m3nCc1XAsSv1Ysax8t5GDMfnDFFQ9uuD Qmbeyyus6WJKney9DHZmnSFuEe3qvF2Sobtjn7Meuxzeax ╒═══════════════════ 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐗 ═══════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ ⦿ [Meme] ’Nice’ and ‘Cool’ António Campinos, Now With Extra Sneakers | Techrights ⦿ A Closer Look at Richard Stallman’s Ousters From Inside the Free Software Foundation (Board) | Techrights ⦿ Bringing DRM to GNU/Linux to Attract the Stereotypical ’Gamers’ | Techrights ⦿ IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 04, 2020 | Techrights ⦿ A Mister António Campinos ’Joins’ IAM ‘Media’ and IAM ‘Magazine’ (Symptom of Dying Media) | Techrights ⦿ EPO Management is Lying About the Position of EPO Stakeholders While Compelling Those Stakeholders to Become Accomplices | Techrights ⦿ EPO Call for Strike in 2019 | Techrights ⦿ [Meme] When a European Patent Office President Was There for Only 2 Years (and Some Staff for Over 40 Years) | Techrights ⦿ Twitter Will Abandon Older Systems/Geeks on December 15th and Fediverse Rots Away (Pleroma.site and Pleroma.fr Shut Down Without Notice) | Techrights ䷼ Bulletin articles (as HTML) to comment on (requires login): http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/antonio-sneakers/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/dmca-sfc/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/gnu-linux-and-gamers/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/irc-log-041220/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/journalist-campinos/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/lies-about-epo-stakeholders/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/older-epo-strike/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/only-connections-count/#comments http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/social-control-media-sucks/#comments ䷞ Followed by Daily Links (assorted news picks curated and categorised): http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/sparky-2020-12/#comments ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 70 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/antonio-sneakers/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ [Meme]_‘Nice’_and_‘Cool’_António_Campinos,_Now_With_Extra_Sneakers⠀✐ Posted in Europe, Humour, Patents at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇Bully EPO staff. Like a boss.⦈ 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇So cool he put his sneakers on; How about a goddamn mask?⦈ Summary: António 'Fanta' Campinos sporting new 'EPO_Sneakers' in these ‘Pandemic Times’; at least he’s being ‘cool’ while staff is confined/sentenced to live in a shoebox, working 24/7 without holidays under constant surveillance in the bedroom ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 98 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/dmca-sfc/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ A_Closer_Look_at_Richard_Stallman’s_Ousters_From_Inside_the_Free_Software Foundation_(Board)⠀✐ Posted in Deception, Free/Libre_Software, FSF, Google, Microsoft at 7:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇SFC IRS⦈ Context: Big_Money_Can_Do_Big_Damage_to_Membership-Dependent_Organisations_ (Which_Should_Remain_Accountable_to_Members,_Not_Big_Sponsors) Summary: A devoted reader of Techrights has studied documents submitted by an organisation that claims to speak on behalf of Free software (while its main sponsor is Google and whilst also selling keynote speeches to Microsoft) FOLLOWING our_screenshots_from_yesterday we received an interesting piece of feedback from a reader. She sought to highlight something to us. As a decades- long DMCA expert, she decided to look into DMCA exemptions submissions from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This post outlines her findings. “I was looking over the 17 classes of DMCA exemptions and this one… submitted by the SFC… has a typo. “I was already noticing the difference between the language from EFF on a different class and the SFC. “Honestly, the SFC_proposals seem broad and self-serving. Also, note no other organizations join the SFC in their proposed exemptions. The proposals are separate from SFC.” “As an DMCA expert, she decided to look into DMCA exemptions submissions from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).”“Just thought I’d mention, wow, not only is the language questionable, the proposed exemption seems self-serving to this org, and there’s a typo!!! This is a very interesting proposal as opposing this may seem to not be in line with community. However, giving orgs like SFC an exemption to police software is rather chilling.” To quote: “A proposed new exemption for circumvention of technological protetion [sic] measures on computer programs for the purpose of: (a) investigating potential copyright infringement of the computer programs; and (b) making lawful use of computer programs (e.g. copying, modifying, redistributing, and updating free and open source software (FOSS)).” “While we would like to keep our free or open software free and open,” our source explained, “in the past few decades, any legal action related to a violation of the GPL or other license has really not been positive. Are we expecting the Copyright Office to approve an exemption to allow a wild wild west-style policing of programs without due process or judicial record keeping? “Take for example the VMware “battle”. In fact, the SFC or Karen [Sandler of SFC] discussed how she was informed of the potential infringement. According to Karen herself, a letter was sent to VMware. She told a group of us, the VMware lawyer laughingly stated something like, “What are you going to do about it!” “I guess he was right. “It’s important to understand that the SFC of 2020 is not the same SFC we saw in 2010.”“We would hope others would respect our license(s), as we really should respect their choices also. Do you know of an org with the teeth to honestly pursue an actual infringement? “That being said, this proposed exemption does not respect those who choose to copyright. While I am not a proponent of copyrighted works, we still need to respect the choices of others. “Also, I recall in past copyright cases, judges have opened a portion of code relevant to the proceedings with regard to accusations of infringement – as part of the process, but did not open the entire codebase of a copyrighted work. The portion open was publicly noted during the case and there was record- keeping.” As a reminder, there's_no_doubt_VMWare_violated_the_GPL_because_insiders_say so. Not only that; it was all along deliberate and done partly by people from Microsoft (there was a Microsoft influx at VMware, including the top roles). “As a developer,” said our source, “I understand if someone were to take open code and close this (a violation of our terms/license), that is not in line with our intentions. However, bypassing technological measures protecting code for simple discovery could very well open a Pandora’s box of issues including viewing copyrighted code not in violation of a license. This seems like policing. “There is an issue, that could be addressed or proposed in a more specific and determined manner, but not this broadly drafted exemption proposal by an organization sponsored by Microsoft… and the submission has a typo…” It’s important to undersand that the SFC of 2020 is not the same SFC we saw in 2010. Things change over time; a decade is a very long time. █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 216 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/gnu-linux-and-gamers/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ Bringing_DRM_to_GNU/Linux_to_Attract_the_Stereotypical_‘Gamers’⠀✐ Posted in DRM, GNU/Linux, Wine at 11:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz DRM at the application level as opposed to operating system level 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇Mythical 'Gamer'; Stereotypical 'Gamer'⦈ Summary: With streaming disservices such as Google’s Stadia (GNU/Linux-powered, albeit proprietary and spying) and rental-like disservices such as Steam the situation is further complicated for Software Freedom; what can be done? Gamers aren’t ‘lamers’ and attracting them too would be better than leaving them stranded in Windows. THE “Linux Gamer” (Gardiner Bryant) cited our articles about DRM in Linux about a_year_ago, bemoaning what was happening to Linux (the kernel). But he himself is promoting lots of DRM (like Steam) and to many GNU/Linux users Valve is like an “ally” of GNU/Linux because SteamOS is Debian-based and there are WINE- centric efforts, which at times contribute to graphics drivers (upstream patches, so to speak). “This subject is very difficult for a lot of reasons.”Earlier this year Alex Oliva (the ‘young Stallman’) asked me why I kept linking to news about computer games which were clearly proprietary, albeit had been ported to GNU/Linux (usually native, ‘proper’ ports, not WINE or similar). I told him that people would accept or tolerate such DRM regardless of the system, so whether they gamed on GNU/Linux or on Windows would sort of leave us in a situation of flux. The unspoken hope is that by bringing those users over to GNU/Linux we can introduce them to Free software (like browsers) they otherwise would not be exposed to, or even games that are free/libre. Heck, maybe even the game developers themselves would decide to liberate the code, bearing it mind that can help them receive code contributions (improvements to their games, game engines and so on). This subject is very difficult for a lot of reasons. We’ll deal with only a few of them here. When I started using GNU/Linux more than two decades ago there were barely any games at all for the system (except very simple ones, nothing that could be taken seriously or be the equivalent of “killer app”). So seeing GOG, Humble, Steam, Itch and the rest of them sort of embracing GNU/Linux is perhaps more “gain” than “loss” (the alternative is no support at all). Remember that Linux_Game_Publishing and Loki_Entertainment weren’t exactly a free/libre thing. Neither were some of the earliest GNU/Linux distributions — some of which contained more binary (proprietary) blobs than today’s distributions. 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇Loki Entertainment⦈ We may have to disagree with Mr. Oliva on this; Oliva told me he had gotten addicted to some games and I can relate to it because I spent much of my childhood gaming and in my 20s I got hooked on some games again (to the point of playing from dusk till dawn and dreaming about those games at night). Games are not a good substitute for life, unless life sucks so badly (which is a reality for more and more people as the pandemic takes its toll). If people who love games choose GNU/Linux as their underlying platform (for better security, performance, maybe lower cost), let’s welcome them. Blasting Valve for its DRM schemes can be done politely, in conjunction, bearing in mind that they do in fact hire some Free software developers (last month they decided to pay the developer of Zink to carry on with his fine work). Life is full of trade-offs and compromises; whether Steam runs on Windows or on GNU/Linux, it’ll still be problematic for many reasons. The question is, does it tempt away existing GNU/Linux users from freedom? Are users of Free software going to suddenly drift away to Google Chrome (proprietary) and Oracle databases because there’s some game they like on Steam? It seems very unlikely. Moreover, with games there’s a lot of emphasis on copyrights of games’ “assets”; surveillance isn’t a main feature because users barely feed any personal data into games. So is there so much to be lost? It is not ideal, sure, but let’s pick our battles for Software Freedom carefully. I, for one, welcome heavy gamers who jump over to our camp. Even if they use Steam a great deal (Debian Developers were given free access to it, so quite a few of them play games in their spare time). █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 309 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/irc-log-041220/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ IRC_Proceedings:_Friday,_December_04,_2020⠀✐ Posted in IRC_Logs at 2:13 am by Needs Sunlight 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇H 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇HTML5_logs⦈_ #techrights_log_as_HTML5 #boycottnovell_log_as_HTML5 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇H 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇HTML5_logs⦈_ #boycottnovell-social_log_as_HTML5 #techbytes_log_as_HTML5 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇t 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇text_logs⦈_ #techrights_log_as_text #boycottnovell_log_as_text 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇t 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇text_logs⦈_ #boycottnovell-social_log_as_text #techbytes_log_as_text Enter_the_IRC_channels_now =============================================================================== § IPFS Mirrors⠀➾ CID Description Object type IRC log for  QmcqKfpTJnBHYyNKebavxDcas5Vdfj4vXQ4s89kJkGWTKF #boycottnovell 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇HTML5 logs⦈ (full IRC log as HTML) IRC log for #boycottnovell  QmUzjkcZ8Fj2HYxwfZKuwv1rmg9uXiBpH5HjMDurcmDM9K (full IRC log 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇text logs⦈ as plain/ASCII text) IRC log for #boycottnovell-  QmZXE791vAg3xFP9yLtP3Xv17pVUerYEs7vX24gm6v9yMy social 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇HTML5 logs⦈ (full IRC log as HTML) IRC log for #boycottnovell-  QmXcFF4Pc9NN2XiHm5y8CWkCgHwSU9nZHhzC8QM1cTW2Ha social 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇text logs⦈ (full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) IRC log for  QmaoGY9Bth5q5X1wfF68rcj17BbTf3rvoUfzv4rM8dfPCu #techbytes 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇HTML5 logs⦈ (full IRC log as HTML) IRC log for #techbytes  QmTfhscnrbbW8VRYd3bnQa6VsH6binxV4fLxVSa5KoTeJJ (full IRC log 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇text logs⦈ as plain/ASCII text) IRC log for  QmPRmaPDW7pd4xtNdqPeBH3qzz5bQj8nyA5krnpNxQtt9i #techrights 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇HTML5 logs⦈ (full IRC log as HTML) IRC log for #techrights  QmSLTKRMvze5yhhbB61W3BiGsv5JPEaew4wbD4BTM4Qi9G (full IRC log 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇text logs⦈ as plain/ASCII text) 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇IPFS logo⦈ § Bulletin for Yesterday⠀➾ Local_copy | CID (IPFS): Qmbeyyus6WJKney9DHZmnSFuEe3qvF2Sobtjn7Meuxzeax ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 422 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/journalist-campinos/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ A_Mister_António_Campinos_‘Joins’_IAM_‘Media’_and_IAM_‘Magazine’_(Symptom_of Dying_Media)⠀✐ Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇IAM Foreword EPO⦈ Summary: IAM “Foreword” composed by the EPO; is this journalism or just self- serving propaganda and agenda-steering operations with the veneer of reporting and/or expert advice? THE administration of the EPO is corrupt; and that’s a shame… That this administration moreover corrupts media and academia is an aspect that has disturbed me for many years; I physically met journalists who, in turn, told me stories about what the EPO had done, sometimes through their bosses. Heck, I used to exchange amicable E-mails with IP Kat (“Merpel” as their multi- person pseudonym) before a bunch of António_Campinos apologists took over — going as far as deleting entire comment threads for discussing Mr. Campinos. “Ever wondered why German officials are so eager to let UPCA in through the door? Despite what constitutional judges (Justices) are saying?”To those who wonder why we’re cynical about the media all we can suggest is, read our past articles! Blackmail, extortion, bribery… you name it! I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen letters, I’ve even been sent some (most of them also republished here at some point). It’s really ugly, it’s utterly disgusting, and it’s patently corrupt. Ever wondered why there’s media blackout about EPO scandals? Or why the Commission got stacked with 'cover-up_agents'_of_EPO_management? That’s not a coincidence. It’s all planned, and those people know each other and have phone books. A lot of this stuff/staff is pre-arranged, like the successor of Campinos at EUIPO (former EPO), the filling of his vacant position at CEIPI, even appointments of judges. These people always want to get what they need, including complete lack of oversight. Ever wondered why German officials are so eager to let UPCA in through the door? Despite what constitutional judges (Justices) are saying? Despite common sense? As Dimitris Xenos (British lecturer) told_me_yesterday: “The[re] should be a list of all German public officials, incl. academic propagandists involved in the policy/decision-making as ad hoc experts or otherwise under the title: ‘#unifiedpatentcourt – meet the Germans’ Re: Margot Frohlinger’s mini CV http://fordhamipinstitute.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/03/MF-biography.pdf […] We need details from the source of this info giving details, when the Commission considered UK’s request for new study, who Fraudlinger was with, when, etc. And, also how this has been followed up, as the Commission (2015) admitted problems for SMEs https:// ffii.org/is-germany-competing-with-hungary-and-poland-on-the-worst-rule-of-law- award-with-its-rushed-ratification-of-the-unitary-patent/… ref 16″ Workers of the EPO are aware of the sort of abuses we’ve come to expect; they experience those firsthand, almost every day. Now, to the ‘meat’ of this story, remember IAM with its so-called ‘quality’ benchmarks and Benoît_Battistelli puff pieces disguised as ‘interviews’? IAM is taking money to lobby for the UPC, sometimes with false reports and outright lies/fabrications. We covered many examples over the years. And now? 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇IAM Foreword EPO⦈ Guess what… Isn’t it amazing that officials_from_the_EPO now write for IAM as if the site is just a naked front group of their illegal agenda (or lawbreaking and theft)? Yes, that’s correct, “iam-media.com/foreword” is an article from Campinos, complete with photo and bio. As if he’s a journalist. The article is ridiculously shallow; Campinos totally exploits COVID-19 for marketing while he’s obstructing research and has done illegal things to staff and stakeholders. Harming their health… What does that say about IAM? Did it ever have any sense of integrity? And speaking of UPC, here’s another new_example of so-called ‘articles’ written not by journalists but self-serving lobbies. This one is “By Andrew White, Partner and UK & European patent attorney at intellectual property firm, Mathys & Squire” (i.e. marketing). “The implementation of the Unified Patent,” it says, “is seen as a priority in the action plan, indicating that it will reduce fragmentation and complexity, and will reduce costs for participants, as well as bridging “the gap between the cost of patent protection in Europe when compared with the US, Japan and other countries”. The action plan also indicates that it will “foster investment in R&D and facilitate the transfer of knowledge across the Single Market”.” These are all lies. Blame Breton et al. There’s a similar one from the_'Birds'_ (chronic_liars_from_Team_UPC) being promoted across several sites and hubs right now. It speaks_of “support a rapid roll-out of the unitary patent system, to create a one-stop-shop for patent protection and enforcement across the EU (2021)…” What we have here is an echo chamber of lies. EPO staff may still remember the days when World Intellectual Property Review (WIPR) covered the EPO affairs. Before management started threatening those who did the coverage (I know because they told me so!); since then the site has quit pretending to be an objective news site. It has become mouthpiece of patent trolls’ lobbyists and combatants (Bristows in this_new_case). Notice how all three articles (above; that’s all we’ve found) are in fact composed by Team UPC and litigation zealots. What happened to journalism? Oh, well… let’s turn to the experts from IAM, whose editor is apparently the President of the EPO now. Writing their “Foreward”, too… Later they wonder why people have become so cynical about the media. Maybe if its goal was still to inform people (exposing previously-unknown facts), more people would still trust it. █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 558 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/lies-about-epo-stakeholders/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ EPO_Management_is_Lying_About_the_Position_of_EPO_Stakeholders_While Compelling_Those_Stakeholders_to_Become_Accomplices⠀✐ Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz And again we ask, how much illegality will it take to hold EPO management accountable? The European Commission is clearly_compromised, so there’s nobody to talk to. Stakeholders aren’t only law firms, especially in patent oppositions. 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇Brand New Teeth⦈ “How to tell a politician is lying… his lips move” –famous saying Summary: With the media colluding (cooperating with EPO management, Team UPC etc. and sometimes just because they occupy this media) and with officials (in Germany, EU etc.) not lifting a finger, it doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to hold the EPO accountable for illegal behaviour; even the views of people, both inside and outside the Office, are being publicly distorted, sometimes with help from the media and from sites of the patent litigation ‘sector’ THREE days ago we wrote_about how the EPO had begun compelling EPO stakeholders to break the law; the Benoît_Battistelli regime, which illegally spied on EPO visitors, was never punished for it. The German government covered it all up. What about António_Campinos? Well, surveillance is imposed on parties, due process isn’t done right, and the EPC is clearly being violated (not for the first time; recall the_Haar_question for example). 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇No free information⦈ Stakeholders have strong feelings on the matter, which the general media (what’s left of it) is characteristically ignoring or doing_puff_pieces_on. There are already 46_comments_here (at the time of writing), ending with the statement: “Whilst interpretations based upon a “not expressly forbidden” standard may now be all the rage at the EPO, I would also encourage you to consider whether that standard has any legal basis under the EPC or the Vienna Convention.” It’s also noted (earlier on): From most of the comments published up to know, it becomes clear that Art 15a should at most be valid during the pandemic. I would even claim that not only after the pandemic, but as well during it, OP should only be held in form of ViCo if the parties agree. Where’s Campinos in all this? He keeps ignoring legitimate and politely-put complaints raised by the EPO’s staff representatives, who repeatedly warned about this (we showed documents to that effect and will show some more soon). Campinos is too busy globe-trotting from his living room or the Office where he’s not supposed to be (and where he’s not wearing a mask, not socially- distancing et cetera). “Where’s Campinos in all this? He keeps ignoring legitimate and politely-put complaints raised by the EPO’s staff representatives, who repeatedly warned about this…”Yesterday the regime pretended (warning: epo.org link) that Campinos had gone to China or something, saying he was in a “bilateral meeting” [sic] with CNIPA. To quote: “EPO President António Campinos and Commissioner of the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) Shen Changyu discussed recent developments and future co-operation between the offices at their annual bilateral meeting [sic] today.” Last month the EPO regime lied_about_the_preferences_and_views_of_stakeholders, just like it habitually lies about the sentiments and positions of EPO staff. Seeing those 46 comments (and links in them), it’s clear that the EPO ignores all the ‘inconvenient’ viewpoints. Quite frankly as usual. █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 643 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/older-epo-strike/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ EPO_Call_for_Strike_in_2019⠀✐ Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇EPO Call for Strike in 2019⦈ Summary: Staff of the EPO was fed up and extremely annoyed by the_“new”_and “nicer”_President less than a year after he took Battistelli‘s chair AS we noted yesterday and last_year_as_well, “it’s like Benoît Battistelli still controls the Office in absentia” because nothing really changed. Nobody was held accountable and policies have arguably gotten even worse, based on staff representatives (some actually said that). A year and a half ago this_publication was circulated among EPO staff, stating upfront: § Call for strike⠀➾ EPO Staff and SUEPO have been very patient since Mr Campinos took office, almost a year ago. It seems now clear that our new President does not intend to fix the problems created by his predecessor. Worse still, Mr Campinos intends to continue the catastrophic Battistelli’s HR policies. We have already seen the implementation of 5-year contracts policy for all newcomers, a worst-ever reporting round and no fundamental change to the career system. The latest Financial Study is designed to make the EPO look poor and points at further reducing staff’s benefits (salaries, pensions, allowances, …) in order to cope with this “misfortune”. . . A first CSC paper on the Financial Study (“Yet another Hoax”) is available on the SUEPO website here. SUEPO Central met the President on 16 May, as previously announced here. The meeting was disappointing. In the absence of progress in the discussion, we finally handed out a Call for Strike to the President, also considering the unrest within the EPO. We made clear that we would be ready to withdraw it, should tangible results be booked within the timeframe imposed by the (unlawful) regulations on strike. We purposely delayed the publication of the call for strike to give time to the President to reconsider his position. Recent feedback has unfortunately made clear that Mr Campinos is not likely to make concessions – for now. As you may recall the current (unlawful) regulations on strike are so stringent that organising a strike may take more than a month. The call for strike of 16 May ensures that a strike could take place around the next AC meeting (26/27 June). Any strike action remains, however, subject to a staff ballot. According to the absurd EPO strike regulations, it is now to the administration to organise the ballot before 16 June. It seems safe to publish this now. It has been a long time since then. As we noted at the end of last month, collective/industrial action is being ramped up at the moment, so expect some digital activism at a time of lock-downs/remote- working conditions. █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 723 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/only-connections-count/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ [Meme]_When_a_European_Patent_Office_President_Was_There_for_Only_2_Years_ (and_Some_Staff_for_Over_40_Years)⠀✐ Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇People who actually CARE about the Office; Nobody loves the office more than those trying to kill it?⦈ Summary: The EPO should never have been put at the hands of politicians like António_Campinos and Benoît_Battistelli (Campinos lacks the experience, but he has the connections) ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 749 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐋𝐄 ═════════════════════════════════════════════════╕ (ℹ) Images, hyperlinks and comments at http://techrights.org/2020/12/05/social-control-media-sucks/#comments ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ Twitter_Will_Abandon_Older_Systems/Geeks_on_December_15th_and_Fediverse_Rots Away_(Pleroma.site_and_Pleroma.fr_Shut_Down_Without_Notice)⠀✐ Posted in Deception, Servers, Site_News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz Because you need megabytes of HTML and complex JavaScript code to read (at most) 280 characters of text? 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴_🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽_⦇Twitter_dying⦈_ Maybe “social control media” is best suited for short memory span people who can’t_put_together_more_than_a_single_sentence, just unverified and random strands of thought, at best (as Merkel, Macron and others testified about Donald Trump’s lunatic ramblings) 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇They asked me to write a coherent speech; I tried; But instead I did a 'tweetstorm' of nasty attacks and mindless, fact-free drivel⦈ Summary: The promises of “social control media” are repeatedly being broken; it’s time to focus on simpler and more reliable means of communication (journalism cannot fit into short bursts of text with a fancy GUI) READERS of our IRC logs (or my personal social control media accounts) are probably aware by now that Pleroma.site and Pleroma.fr went offline without prior notice, without an explanation, without responding to queries (the person behind both, “href” by name, is incommunicado). It has been nearly a week now. The net effect or actual impact, on us at least, is that none of our IRC bots work now, except one. The chain of dependency has caused this before, rendering obsolete both our identi.ca bot and our Twitter bots (the ones syndicating them inwards — into IRC). A lot of development effort down the drain as APIs get deprecated, sites go offline and so on. That’s aside from the fact that I myself, personally, lost all my Fediverse connections and about a quarter million posts. This is the third time I lose my Fediverse account (the last time it was also an instance shutdown, but at least it was announced in advance and had no effect on IRC bots). “Many people have abandoned Git (Free software) and moved to GitHub (Microsoft proprietary software, the E.E.E. modus operandi) because they wrongly believe that bloat and “social control media”-like UI (the “UX” cargo cult) makes them more “hip” as developers.”Yesterday in IRC it was suggested that we also get off Freenode and start our own IRC server. That’s actually creating an infrastructure maintenance dilemma. As for social control media (all of it, including federated and Free software-based), it’s all turning out to be a waste of time, eventually. Far too much data loss, especially in the long run. Come December 15th, Twitter is going to block all browsers that are old and won’t run JavaScript (or not run it the way Twitter wants to). This means that most old computers won’t be able to access Twitter. Seriously! Twitter just doesn’t care. It’s all about brainwash, surveillance, and censorship. It’s about money. “Twitter is about social control rather than enabling people to communicate,” psydroid wrote moments ago in IRC, “nothing has been lost and it’s better to move on…” I won’t be participating in Twitter anymore. It just gets_copies_of_what_I_post in_Diaspora (same as the past decade or so). I’ve meanwhile begun making local copies of posts (e.g. today’s, updated in real time) and if Pleroma.site does not come back, we’ll code something as a contingency for IRC channels. This is all far from ideal but this conjunction or intersection between several incidents (Pleroma.site, Twitter) serves as a cautionary tale and important lesson; we need to get back to blogs, RSS, and simple interfaces based on plain text at their core. The Web is becoming obese, overly complex, unreliable, and expensive to maintain. Many sites go offline, let certificates expire (those certificates do not assure privacy; the servers and clients can still sell all the data), even become spam farms. 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇Bird catching⦈ One aspiration of ours is to ‘innovate’ all sorts of “suckless” Web technologies, including text-based articles, Web-less site access, P2P for article distribution and browser-less interaction, including over IRC. Matrix was suggested to us last week, but we see no practical benefit (some_outsource_their_'IRC_channels'_to_the_ICE_facilitator, Salesforce/Slack). Embracing so-called_'novelty' just for the sake of it isn’t “smart”; it’s just obedient, or mindless embrace of fashion-like trends, imposed on us by corporate media that rebrands servers as “clown computing” to compel us to give away control/sovereignty over our computers — in the same way social control media weakens or eliminates broad networks of blogs (what we use to have a lot more of 10-15 years ago). Many people have abandoned Git (Free software) and moved to GitHub (Microsoft proprietary software, the E.E.E. modus operandi) because they wrongly believe that bloat and “social control media”- like UI (GUI sans the “UX” cargo cult) makes them more “hip” as developers. How wrong are they… █ ䷩ 𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎 852 ╒═══════════════════ 𝐃𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐘 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒 ═════════════════════════════════════════════╕ ⠀⌧ █▇▆▅▄▃▂▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁ 12.05.20⠀▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█ ⌧ ✐ Links_5/12/2020:_Debian_10.7,_ExTiX_20.12,_and_Sparky_2020.12_Released⠀✐ Posted in News_Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇GNOME bluefish⦈ § Contents⠀➾ * GNU/Linux o Distributions o Devices/Embedded * Free_Software/Open_Source * Leftovers * § GNU/Linux⠀➾ o § Desktop/Laptop⠀➾ # ⚓ ZaReason_Linux_PC_Vendor_Closes_After_More_Than_A_Decade_Of Selling_Linux_Hardware⠀⇛ After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/ desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. ZaReason had been around since 2008 offering Linux across various laptops, desktops, and servers. In recent years we’ve heard less from the Berkeley based company as they battled increased competition from the likes of System76, Purism, Tuxedo Computers, and also more Linux pre-loaded devices coming directly from the likes of Lenovo and Dell. ZaReason offered Ubuntu and other Linux distributions on their systems that ranged from Intel NUC devices to customed Sager laptops geared for Linux/open-source driver support. o § Audiocasts/Shows⠀➾ # ⚓ A_Linux_Shell_Prompt_That’s_Out_Of_This_World!_–_YouTube⠀⇛ Starship is the minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell! It is written in Rust and is compatible with bash, fish and zsh. It has a ton of features, and the onfiguration is super easy. # ⚓ Episode_230_–_Door_05:_5_reasons_you_need_24/7_robot monitoring⠀⇛ Josh and Kurt talk about why you need 24/ 7 monitoring of all the things o § Kernel Space⠀➾ # ⚓ Auxiliary_Bus_Support_Coming_To_Linux_5.11_–_Phoronix⠀⇛ Auxiliary Bus is a new core driver feature set to be introduced in Linux 5.11 — it was queued yesterday into driver-core-next. Intel engineers led development of this new bus with an initial use-case being for their Sound Open Firmware and complex audio subsystem use-cases where multiple drivers can be at play depending upon interface and other factors. Besides Sound Open Firmware, another Intel use-case is regarding PCI network devices that are also RDMA-capable and splitting that RDMA functionality off into an auxiliary driver within the RDMA subsystem while the parent driver is the network driver. The Auxiliary Bus can be useful where one driver may want to export an interface for another subsystem, better compartmentalization of driver code, and similar splitting of a device’s support across drivers. This multiple driver scenario dealing with one device has already existed within the kernel (such as AMDGPU + AMDKFD compute) while Auxiliary Bus formalizes the design and associated interfaces for the registering and handling of the auxiliary device/driver. # ⚓ Loongson64_Finally_Seeing_KASLR_With_Mainline_Linux_5.11 Kernel_–_Phoronix⠀⇛ While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn’t been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform. The Chinese-made Loongson MIPS64 processors have been popular in some circles for their Linux usage and the Loongson-powered Lemote hardware even popular with Richard Stallman for a time due to fully open-source firmware. But surprisingly it has taken until now for enabling the common KASLR functionality for Loongson64. o § Applications⠀➾ # ⚓ 6_Best_Free_and_Open_Source_Google_Drive_Clients⠀⇛ Google Drive, formerly Google Docs, is a file storage and synchronization service created by Google. They are a multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, and software. Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud, share files, and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with collaborators. Google Drive includes Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, an office suite that permits collaborative editing of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, forms, and more. Google Drive lets you open and edit files from any device. Users get 15GB of free storage. This includes Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail. More storage can be purchased. Drive uses Google’s highly-secure, custom-built data centres. # ⚓ HPLIP_3.20.11_Released_with_Ubuntu_20.10_/_Debian_10.6 Support⠀⇛ HPLIP, HP developed printer and scanner drivers for Linux, released version 3.20.11 a few days ago. Different to previous releases, HPLIP 3.20.11 does not include new HP printers support. It only adds support for Ubuntu 20.10 and Debian 10.6. And it fixed usb print issue for ipp supported printers for Ubutnu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10 and Linux Mint 20. There are also known issues that ppd browsing is failing sometimes while doing hp-setup in Ubuntu 20.10. Basically few times it is failing to fetch ppd list from cups server. So you might face the same issue while testing. And hp-toolbox will not work for ippusbxd printers in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10 and LinuxMint 20. o § Instructionals/Technical⠀➾ # ⚓ How_to_Use_the_“cat”_Command_in_Bash?_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ The “cat” command in Bash stands for “concatenate”. This command is very frequently used for viewing, creating, and appending files in Linux. Today, we will explain to you the usage of this command in Bash in Linux Mint 20 by sharing some examples. # ⚓ Create_a_New_Database_in_MySQL_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ The first part after installing a DBMS, like MySQL, is to create a database and start building it. In this article, we will create a new database. We will learn about the Create Command in MySQL and also see how we can grant privileges to other users of the newly created database? So, let’s get started. # ⚓ How_do_I_use_Nginx_Docker?_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Nginx is a fast, open-source, and more reliable web server that is used for server-side application development. Nginx server application support to run on many different operating systems. Nginx is very useful for development tasks. Therefore, the Docker container provides support for the Nginx server. The open-source Docker platform contains a docker engine, a runtime environment that is used to execute, builds, and orchestrates containers. The term we have used in the below article is ‘docker hub’, a hosted service where containerized applications are shared, distributed, and collaborated with the rest of the development community. Dockerized applications are portable to implement on any environment like laptop, VM, cloud, or bare-metal server. The modular components can be reassembled again into the fully-featured applications and consciously do their work in a real-time environment. We will elaborate in this article on how you can use Nginx Docker and easily set up on your system. # ⚓ How_To_Properly_Change_Username_In_Linux_–_OSTechNix⠀⇛ This brief guide explains how to properly change username in Linux operating system. Not just the username, this guide also describes how to change the hostname, user group, home directory and the ownership and group of that directory to the new user, along with all files. A few days ago, I downloaded the Fedora 33 vagrant box and deployed it using libvirt/kvm provider. As you might already know, all vagrant boxes comes with a default user called “vagrant”. And the default hostname for the vagrant box is localhost. I changed the username and hostname in the Fedora VM for better accessibility in the network. If you’re ever looking for a proper way to change the username in Linux without messing the existing configuration files, here is how. # ⚓ What_is_Grub_in_Linux?_What_is_it_Used_for?⠀⇛ If you ever used a desktop Linux system, you must have seen this screen. This is called the GRUB screen. Yes, it is written in all capital letters. # ⚓ How_to_Change_User_in_Linux_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Linux is a robust multi-user operating system. There can be numerous users accessing the system and using system resources. Having separate user accounts also offer better control over various permissions. If there are multiple users in the system, there will be numerous occasions where you’d like to switch the current user. In this guide, check out how to change the user in Linux. # ⚓ How_to_suppress_all_Output_from_Bash_Command?_–_Linux Hint⠀⇛ Whenever we run a Bash command on our Linux Mint 20 terminal, the regular practice is to see some output on the terminal. This is the same for the commands as well as for the Bash scripts. Sometimes, we may not wish to see that output. This happens especially when we want to debug a program and are only interested in finding out the errors that are occurring. In this situation, if we will be presented with the whole output, then it will not only be useless for us but will also waste our time looking for the actual issue. That is why we prefer suppressing the actual output of the Bash commands or scripts in a way that only their errors (if any) are displayed on the terminal. Otherwise, nothing will be displayed. Therefore, today, we will be talking about the method of suppressing all output from Bash command in Linux Mint 20. # ⚓ How_to_Setup,_Modify,_and_Delete_Linux_Network_Bridges_and Bonds_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ In this guide, we will discuss two essential networking concepts that are bridging and bonding. We will see how to set up, modify, and delete the bridges and bonds in the Linux system. We will demonstrate the procedure on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana system. However, you can also implement the same procedure on Ubuntu or Debian. # ⚓ How_to_Setup_Flutter_and_Create_Hello_World_Web_Application in_Linux_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Flutter is an application development framework that can be used to develop cross-platform apps running on native code once compiled or built. Being developed by Google, Flutter allows you to create rapid prototypes in a short time as well as allows you to create full-fledged apps that make use of platform specific APIs. Using Flutter, you can create beautiful looking apps for mobile devices, desktop operating systems and web browsers using official material design widgets. This article will discuss installation of Flutter and creation of a new project for developing a web application. Flutter uses “Dart” as the main programming language for writing apps. # ⚓ How_to_drain_node_in_Kubernetes_cluster_for_maintenance activity._–_UX_Techno⠀⇛ In this article we will discuss about, how to drain node in Kubernetes cluster. For maintenance activity such as patching etc. requires downtime. In order to carry out such activities without impacting applications running within cluster, we need to follow some step by step command. We will discuss those commands in this article for impact less maintenance. # ⚓ How_to_get_the_best_Arch_Linux_servers_to_update_your system⠀⇛ You may have seen me struggle with the Arch Linux servers in one of my videos. Time to dive into the application reflector. Read all about it on your own computer. Type reflector –help in the terminal and read more. # ⚓ How_to_set_up_a_wireless_internet_connection_in_Zorin_OS⠀⇛ Activating a wireless connection in Zorin OS or in Linux in general is pretty easy, but of course you need to successfully set up your wireless adapter first to make that happen, which in Linux can be everything between very easy and sometimes impossible. The modern Linux distributions have out of the box terrific support for most of the available hardware components, like graphics cards, printers and Wi-Fi adapters. And with HWE, or Hardware Enablement, it has become even more convenient catching up with the latest hardware technologies in your Ubuntu based Linux distro of choice, like Zorin OS. But it is always possible that the setup procedure, when installing the distro from scratch, doesn’t come up directly with the correct or most optimized drivers for your devices. In this article as part of my free Zorin OS beginner course I explain how to set up a wireless internet connection in Zorin OS if you already have a working wireless adapter, how to install wireless drivers in Zorin OS, and what to do when your Wi-Fi adapter is not recognized at all and there is no solution for your specific hardware. # ⚓ How_to_use_Zorin_OS_without_installing_on_a_PC_or_Mac⠀⇛ In the previous tutorial I explained how to create a Linux bootable usb drive in Windows and macOS. As already explained one of the many incredible features of most Linux distributions is the ability to boot and use a distribution directly from the USB stick you created, without the need to install Linux and affecting your hard drive and the current operating system on it. It is not necessary to perform a complete installation to first use and try out Linux to see if it is something for you. This short tutorial will explain how to boot from your previously created Linux usb drive so you can use Zorin OS without installing it on a PC or Mac. # ⚓ How_To_Install_Apache_Solr_on_CentOS_8⠀⇛ In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Solr on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Solr is an open-source search platform written on Java. It is based on Apache Lucene and is written in Java. Just like Elasticsearch, it supports database queries through REST APIs. Solr aims at providing distributed indexing, replication, and load-balanced querying with automated failover and recovery. 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. I will show you through the step by step installation of Apache Solr in CentOS 8. # ⚓ How_to_Install_MongoDB_on_Ubuntu_20.04_Linux_–_Linux Concept⠀⇛ MongoDB is an open-source and free NoSQL document based database system. Nowadays, it is prevalent as most application developers are using MongoDB, which can handle big data. As a MongoDB is a NoSQL database, It stores data in JSON-like documents where fields can vary. You also get benefits with MongoDB like it doesn’t require any predefined database schema or data structure; it can be changed over time. In this tutorial, we will explain the process of MongoDB installation step-by-step on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux using MongoDB’s official repositories. # ⚓ How_to_print_from_your_personal_Chromebook_without_Google Cloud_Print [Ed: How about… install proper GNU/Linux on the machine to actually have real printer support with CUPS?⠀⇛ With Google Cloud Print being whisked away into the sunset in just a few weeks on December 31, 2020, many of you have seen the notice plastered at the top of your Chromebook’s print dialogue and have reached out to ask us what your options are going forward into the new year. Google Cloud Print, or GCP, was created during a time when Google needed to act as an intermediary for Chromebook users’ print jobs because many printer manufacturers did not create drivers for Chrome OS due to its lack of widespread usage. Since that has changed so drastically in the past few years, GCP is no longer necessary (even though it will be missed), and most printers work with Chromebooks out of the box with minimal setup. # ⚓ How_to_Avoid_Locking_Yourself_Out_of_Linux⠀⇛ It can happen. It happens to every developer at least once in their lifetime. Let’s find a way to avoid having to start setting up all over again, or purging your entire virtual machine because you’ve been locked out. It’s common when working with Virtualization there will be a need to manage users and accounts manually but this is not very efficient. Let’s write a bash script that can handle authentication for a new User. We begin by initializing the script as a file that can be accessed by Bash on our machine, using the hashbang !#. This hashbang will set up the program loader with an instruction to run the program /bin/sh or /bin/ bash then pass /path/to/script as the first argument. # ⚓ How_to_run_a_Jenkins_WAR_file_–_Coffee_Talk:_Java,_News, Stories_and_Opinions⠀⇛ The easiest way to install Jenkins and run the popular CI/CD tools is to simply download the jenkins.war file and run the Jenkins war at the command line. # ⚓ How_to_install_Tixati_Torrent_client_on_Ubuntu_20.04_LTS_– Linux_Shout⠀⇛ Like most of the BitTorrent clients, Tixati is also a peer- to peer file sharing program that uses BitTorrent protocol to download content from the decentralized network of systems. It can easily open Torrent files and Magnet links with just a torrent click. In addition to a chat function, the program also includes numerous details about the network currently in use and others. Such as Speed ​​and data statistics are displayed in real-time; DHT, PEX, and Magnet Link support, peer selection and choking; RC4 connection encryption for added security; NAT router hole-punching, RSS, IP Filtering, Event Scheduler, and more… # ⚓ How_to_use_journalctl_to_View_and_Analyze_Systemd_Logs_ [With_Examples]⠀⇛ This guide explains the basics of the journalctl utility of Systemd and its various commands. You can use these commands for troubleshooting desktop and server logs in Linux. This is how you can use journalctl to view and analyze Systemd Logs with different examples. o § Wine or Emulation⠀➾ # ⚓ Wine-Staging_6.0-RC1_Stacks_740_Patches_Atop_Upstream Wine⠀⇛ Following yesterday’s release of Wine 6.0-RC1 that is kicking off the release process for this annual release of Wine, the Wine-Staging experimental/ testing blend of Wine is also updated. Wine-Staging 6.0-RC1 is out today with some 740 patches atop the upstream code-base. This year the Wine-Staging code-base has been largely residing in the 600 to 800 patch range. With Wine-Staging 6.0- RC1 it’s a bit lighter thanks to some patches being upstreamed around Wine’s GStreamer code, mf/ topoloader, and other fixes working their way into the proper code-base. o § Games⠀➾ # ⚓ Take_care_of_the_bees_in_the_latest_demo_of_the_super_sweet APICO⠀⇛ APICO is a game you absolutely have to try if you love casual farming, building and exploration. It’s simply wonderful as you run around collecting and breeding bees to build up an apiary. We briefly mentioned APICO back in September, being completely charmed by its wonderful non-violent gameplay that sees you keep an eye on one of nature’s most important insects. # ⚓ Check_out_the_brand_new_trailer_for_the_RTS_‘Liquidation_– Echoes_of_the_Past’⠀⇛ Liquidation – Echoes of the Past is an upcoming tactical fantasy/sci-fi singleplayer and multiplayer real-time strategy game with rpg elements. It’s looking and sounding impressive with a curious mix of themes from the likes of Starcraft and Dawn of War and it’s coming along with Linux support eventually. “The game takes place in the dying plane of Veá, which has been repeatedly ravaged and drained of its very life essence over the course of a massive war that has been going on for centuries. Now, with the doomed world drawing its last breath, you arise as a lesser deity tasked with restoring the balance in Veá and ending this war before it’s too late.” # ⚓ XMPP_Client_in_Godot_–_Wolthera.info⠀⇛ I started on last Thursday, with setting up the TCP connection. I first set up prosody on my computer, with it only accepting traffic from the localhost so I had something to test again. I also installed Gajim and Kaidan so I had an idea of what proper xmpp clients look like (and so I could chat with myself). Unfortunately, because of QML shenigans, Kaidan doesn’t start. For the stream itself, I am very indebted to this little project, as it showed me that you can use the process function in Godot to periodically listen to the TCP stream, which was a connection I hadn’t been able to make from the documentation. After I got that done, I still had some trouble getting the server to accept my data… turns out Godot’s convenience functions for strings and others helpfully prefixes it with a few bytes to indicate the size of the sent data. Using put_data (string.to_utf8()) for this solved everything. Now the server was accepting my stream! I also came across one annoying limitation in Godot: I can do host resolving, but I cannot seem to do a lookup on DNS SRV, which is used in the XMPP spec to point at the precise IP address and port to use for an XMPP Client. This means that right now the add-account button requires you type in the IP address and port of the server manually, which is really annoying. # ⚓ Cordless_Discord_Developer_BANNED_From_Discord⠀⇛ 3rd party Discord clients have never been allowed on Discord but most people who use them don’t care but due to seem recent bans involving the Cordless developer being banned from discord I don’t feel comfortable recommending that people use them anymore. o § Desktop Environments/WMs⠀➾ # § K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt⠀➾ # ⚓ Why_2020_is_the_best_time_to_use_the_Kate_text editor⠀⇛ The KDE Plasma Desktop has a lot to offer—a great desktop, a flexible file manager, and tightly integrated applications. However, it can be easy to overlook its default text editors, one of which is Kate. On December 14, 2020, Kate turns 20 years old, and in its two decades of development, it has achieved a perfect balance between a straightforward editor and a modest Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Kate seems, at first, unassuming. It looks like every other text editor—a big blank window ready to accept lots of typed input, a menu bar along the top, some metadata around the edges to indicate character encoding and line count. The moment you start using it, though, you realize that it has all the features you need, right where you want them. # ⚓ This_week_in_KDE:_Big_new_accented/alternative character_input_feature⠀⇛ A big new Plasma feature was merged this week that I’m very excited to present! Now, when you press-and-hold a key, a small palette will appear offering alternative characters similar to the one you’re holding down. This makes it enormously easier to type accented characters from other languages or symbols uncommon in your language without having to change your keyboard layout or memorize compose key sequences. # ⚓ KDE_Plasma_5.21_To_Add_Palette_For_Easier_Input_Of Accented_Characters⠀⇛ KDE developers have been busy so far in December making improvements from seemingly never-ending Wayland improvements to new features like easier support for accented character input without having to remember key sequences or changing your keyboard layout. Some of the KDE advancements for the past week include: - With Plasma 5.21 by default when you press- and-hold a key, a palette will appear that will offer alternative characters similar to the character currently being pressed. The Intention is to make it easier to use accented characters from other languages or symbols without the need to change your keyboard layout or memorize key sequences. This alternative character palette also includes the likes of alternative currency symbols when holding down the dollar sign on a keyboard. It’s enabled by default on Plasma 5.21+ but can also be disabled from the settings. o § Distributions⠀➾ # § New Releases⠀➾ # ⚓ ExTiX_20.12_KDE_Plasma_together_with_Anbox_(“Android in_a_Box”_with_Google_Play_Store_pre-installed)_:: Build_201205⠀⇛ I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 20.12 KDE Anbox Live DVD. (The previous KDE/Anbox version was 20.9 from 200825). I have now included Anbox (Android in a Box – Anbox puts the Android operating system into a container, abstracts hardware access and integrates core system services into a GNU/ Linux system. Every Android application will be integrated with your operating system like any other native application). So now you can run Android apps in ExTiX. GAPPS (Google Play Services and Google Play Store) are pre- installed in ExTiX 20.12. The second best thing with ExTiX 20.12 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Snapshot (pre- installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu/Anbox system. So easy that a ten year child can do it! ExTiX 20.12 KDE Plasma DVD 64 bit is based on Debian and Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS. The original system includes the Desktop Environment Gnome. After removing Gnome I have installed KDE Frameworks 5.68.0 with KDE 4.19. KDE Frameworks are 60 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. # ⚓ Sparky_2020.12⠀⇛ The December snapshot of Sparky 2020.12 of the (semi-)rolling line is out. It is based on the Debian testing “Bullseye”. Changes: • packages updated from Debian testing repos as of December 3, 2020 • Linux kernel 5.9.11 (5.9.12 & 5.10-rc6 in Sparky unstable repos) • Calamares 3.2.34 + kpmcore 4.2.0 • APTus replaced by APTus AppCenter 20201203- RC1; it is still under development but it is enough stable to let you test and work on it https://sparkylinux.org/sparky-aptus- appcenter/ • added ‘sparky-www’ – it is a small package, which provides a custom Sparky’s start page, powered by DuckDuckGo, to your favorite web browser; the start page is located at /opt/ sparky/index.html and has to be loaded manually to a web browser, after installing the package https://wiki.sparkylinux.org/ doku.php/sparky_www • Firefox 83.0 • Thunderbird 78.5.0 • LibreOffice 7.0.3 • VLC 3.0.11 • Exaile 4.1.0 beta1 • libpython3.9 is installed, but Python 3.8 is still the default one • python2.x & libpython2.x removed • GCC 10.2.0 as the default compiler • added RSS feed clients: QuiteRSS to LXQt and Liferea to MATE and Xfce iso images # § Debian Family⠀➾ # ⚓ Updated_Debian_10:_10.7_released⠀⇛ The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename “buster”). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available. Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 10 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “buster” media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up- to-date Debian mirror. Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release. New installation images will be available soon at the regular locations. Upgrading an existing installation to this revision can be achieved by pointing the package management system at one of Debian’s many HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list of mirrors is available at… # ⚓ Debian_10.7_Released_With_Numerous_Security_Fixes⠀⇛ # ⚓ FLOSSLinux:_Part_way_through_Debian_CD_release process_–_always_fun_to_do_–_Debian_10.7_in_process⠀⇛ Working through the test suite: RattusRattus, Sledge, Isy, Schweer and I. We’ve been joined by somebody new – jlsantos – who has done his first test for us 🄸🄼🄰🄶🄴 🄳🄴🅂🄲🅁🄸🄿🅃🄸🄾🄽 ⦇:)⦈ A couple of changes: there’s now a different automatic partitioning layout. /boot has been resized to ~500MB – to allow for more than one kernel but also the other initramfs files. The filesystem size allocated for a swap partition is now 1GB by default. # ⚓ FLOSSLinux:_Lots_further_forwards_–_but_moving_slowly through_live_CD_testing⠀⇛ All of the testing of the normal Debian images has gone through the steps we lay out. We’re now working on the Debian live CDs which take significantly longer per image. Looks like a long night until Steve is ready to sign the release and begin the final transfer – however much we try to minimise it, it’s a 12-15 hour process and my thanks go to RattusRattus and Steve for the final stages of a very long day. o § Devices/Embedded⠀➾ # § Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications⠀➾ # ⚓ Telegram_Beta_Adds_Group_Voice_Calling_on_Android_ (Guide)⠀⇛ # ⚓ Jio-Google_4G_Android_phone_to_launch_in_first quarter_of_2021⠀⇛ # ⚓ How_to_restore_your_deleted_photos_&_videos_on Android:_Check_details_here⠀⇛ # ⚓ vivo_V20_Pro_5G_gets_Android_11_update⠀⇛ # ⚓ Nokia_TA-1335_weighing_122g_with_Android_10_appears on_TENAA⠀⇛ # ⚓ 14_new_and_notable_Android_apps_and_live_wallpapers from_the_last_two_weeks_including_FamiSafe,_Google Assistant_–_Interpreter_Mode,_and_The_Mandalorian_AR Experience_(11/21/20_–_12/05/20)⠀⇛ # ⚓ How_Snapdragon_888_Will_Improve_Android_Phone_Cameras &_Photography⠀⇛ # ⚓ Remarkable_2_review:_The_writing_tablet_that_changed my_life⠀⇛ # ⚓ 5_Android_apps_you_shouldn’t_miss_this_week_–_Android Apps_Weekly⠀⇛ # ⚓ Sony_announces_Android_11_upgrade_plans:_Only_the Xperia_1_II_will_receive_OS_upgrade_before_2021⠀⇛ # ⚓ Samsung’s_Android_11_update_plans_revealed:_here’s when_your_phone_gets_it⠀⇛ # ⚓ Android_12_release_date,_rumors_and_what_we_want_to see⠀⇛ # ⚓ You_can_now_submit_your_own_Google_Maps_Street_View photos_from_Android⠀⇛ # ⚓ Pixel_XE_surfaces_in_live_images;_is_this_the_5G flagship_that_Android_super_fans_want?⠀⇛ # ⚓ Android_users_can_create_SafeEntry_shortcut_on_phone to_scan_QR_codes_with_only_1_click⠀⇛ # ⚓ Google_brings_enterprise-grade_Android_security_to SMBs⠀⇛ # ⚓ How_to_set_your_Google_Photos_images_as_a_live wallpaper_on_Android⠀⇛ # ⚓ How_to_Automatically_Revoke_Permissions_for_Unused Android_Apps⠀⇛ # ⚓ How_to_send_a_large_video_file_on_an_Android_device in_3_different_ways⠀⇛ # ⚓ [Exclusive]_Jio_and_Google’s_4G_Android_phone_will not_launch_in_December⠀⇛ # ⚓ 10_Best_Free_Hidden_Spy_Apps_for_Android_ (Undetectable)⠀⇛ # ⚓ The_Best_Wireless_Chargers_for_iPhone_or_Android⠀⇛ # ⚓ 5_Nifty_Little_Tricks_to_Make_Typing_Easier_on Android⠀⇛ # ⚓ The_best_Android_phones_available_at_Cricket_Wireless (December_2020)⠀⇛ # ⚓ Motorola_is_the_latest_to_start_shipping_an_Android desktop,_and_that’s_good_news_for_Chromebooks⠀⇛ # ⚓ Realme_X50_Pro_5G_starts_getting_Realme_UI_2.0_update based_Android_11⠀⇛ # ⚓ Samsung_finally_starts_its_Android_11_rollout,_three months_after_release⠀⇛ # ⚓ Reliance_Jio_and_Google_Reportedly_Not_Launching_Low- Cost_4G_Android_Phone_This_Year⠀⇛ # ⚓ Nokia_1_and_Nokia_6.2_receiving_a_new_Android update⠀⇛ # ⚓ These_are_the_best_Android_TV_devices_[Late_2020]⠀⇛ # ⚓ Lilbits:_GMK’s_2.4_inch_mini_PC_is_now_available, Android_picks_up_new_features,_and_Raspberry_Pi_OS gains_performance_enhancements⠀⇛ o § Free, Libre, and Open Source Software⠀➾ # § CMS⠀➾ # ⚓ State_of_the_Word_2020⠀⇛ State of the Word is an annual keynote address delivered by the project co-founder, Matt Mullenweg. [...] A Question and Answer period with pre- recorded videos will follow State of the Word. To take part, record a video of you asking your question to Matt on your computer or phone (landscape format, please). Don’t forget to include your name and how you use WordPress! Try to keep your video to under a minute so Matt can answer as many questions as possible. # ⚓ Showcase_Your_Work_to_the_Best_Effect_with_a WordPress_Gallery_Plugin⠀⇛ In this article, we are going to see best WordPress Gallery Plugin to Showcase your Portfolio. showcase your work to the best effect with a WordPress Gallery Plugin. No matter what kind of website you have, be it an online shop or a blog, you have to make it stand out. There are about two billion websites today, which means that getting yours noticed is extremely hard. Granted, less than half of these pages are active. However, even with those numbers it will be difficult to attract traffic to your page and then keep visitors interested enough to stick. Increasing the visual appeal of your site is as important as offering valuable content if you want to keep people interested. # ⚓ What_Happens_When_You_Install_Too_Many_Shopify_Apps_– SpeedySense⠀⇛ In a nutshell, when you install too many apps, you call on problems. Your site will get sluggish, and you will lose customers due to the site’s poor performance. And it will be much harder to fix those issues. # § Programming/Development⠀➾ # ⚓ Input_Events_in_Qt_6⠀⇛ The delivery of mouse and touch events in Qt Quick is complex, and it became clear a few years ago that we needed to refactor the event inheritance hierarchy, to have some common API for various event types, so that more of the delivery code could be shared. In Qt 5.8 we added QQuickPointerEvent and associated types, as a way of prototyping what that could look like. They are QObjects; and since then, QQuickWindow has been delivering these wrapper events that carry the original events inside. Now finally in Qt 6 we have been able to complete the QEvent refactoring, so that QQuickWindow no longer needs the wrappers. Along with that, we were able to add a few features and fix a few bugs. Many of the remaining bugs that seemed intractable in Qt 5 should at least be possible to fix later on. # ⚓ Initial_AMD_Zen_3_Support_Successfully_Lands_In_GCC 11_–_Phoronix⠀⇛ A few days ago AMD finally sent out the initial AMD Zen 3 “znver3″ support to the GCC compiler with the LLVM Clang support to follow. That initial “-march=znver3″ targeting support has now been merged for GCC 11. While past the feature development stage of GCC 11, the znver3 patch was permitted to land with new targets / hardware support allowed to land still as it doesn’t risk regressing the existing compiler support. # ⚓ How_to_parse_JSON_in_C++⠀⇛ The intention of this tutorial is to understand the JSON data and how to parse JSON data in C++. We will discuss JSON data, Object, Array, JSON syntax, and then go through several working examples to understand the parsing mechanism of JSON data in C++. What is JSON? JSON is a light-weight text-based representation for storing and transferring structured data in an organized way. The JSON data is represented in the form of ordered lists and key-value pairs. JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. As the full name indicates, it is derived from JavaScript. However, JSON data is supported in most of the popular programming languages. It is often used to transfer the data from the server to a web page. It is much easier and cleaner to represent the structured data in JSON than XML. # ⚓ Wasmer_1.0_Beta_Released_For_Running_WebAssembly_Code Anywhere_–_Phoronix⠀⇛ Wasmer is one of the leading software solutions aiming to bring WebAssembly (WASM) to the desktop rather than largely isolated to the web browser as is the case now. Wasmer aims to allow WASM programs anywhere and on any client while quickly closing in on its 1.0 release. Wasmer 1.0 Alpha debuted in September while as we approach the end of the year the beta is now available. Wasmer provides a universal run-time so that WebAssembly can run across platforms / operating systems in a trusted manner # ⚓ Joachim_Breitner:_Named_goals_in_Coq⠀⇛ # § Perl/Raku⠀➾ # ⚓ Day_5:_Raku_&_Pakku⠀⇛ A hobby One day I woke and decided I want to learn programming as a hobby. For someone who doesn’t know much about the subject other than writing a few Bash scripts, words like Functional Programming, Object Oriented or even the word class by itself were mysterious. Lost Doing my research to find out where to start, very soon I was lost in tons of information available online, but I wanted to start learning anyway, and it is time to pick a programming language. There are so many programming languages out there, deciding which language to learn was a difficult task for me, mainly because comparing languages based on technical knowledge was not an option. [...] Pakku timemachine figured out how to time travel not only to the future but also to the past! Pakku timemachine can save the current state of Raku repositories, store a list of installed distributions per repo, and can go back to this state any time when needed (for example after reinstalling Raku) This is still a work in progress, however by the time you are reading this, this feature may be ready. # § Python⠀➾ # ⚓ Python_Decorators_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ In this article, we are going to discuss Python Decorators. Definition: Decorator is a design pattern in Python. It is a function that takes another function as an argument, add some functionality to it without modifying it, and returns another function. # § Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh⠀➾ # ⚓ How_to_Replace_Newline_with_Comma_Using_the `sed`_Command_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Any character or string can be replaced by using the `sed` command. Sometimes, we need to replace the newline character (\n) in a file with a comma. In this article, we use the `sed` command to replace \n with a comma. [...] It may be necessary to replace \n with a comma to transfer data from one file format to another. This type of replacement can also be done by using other Linux commands. Many command options, such as H, N, h, and x, can be used with the `sed` command to complete this task. This tutorial goes over several ways to use the `sed` command to replace \n with a comma. # ⚓ How_to_Use_Regex_with_the_`awk`_Command_–_Linux Hint⠀⇛ A regular expression (regex) is used to find a given sequence of characters within a file. Symbols such as letters, digits, and special characters can be used to define the pattern. Various tasks can be easily completed by using regex patterns. In this tutorial, we will show you how to use regex patterns with the `awk` command. # ⚓ How_to_Print_the_First_Column_or_Last_Column_or Both_Using_`awk`_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Linux’s `awk` command is a powerful utility for different operations on text files such as search, replace, and print. It is easy to use with tabular data because it automatically divides each line into fields or columns based on the field separator. When you work with a text file that contains tabular data and want to print the data of a particular column, then the `awk` command is the best option. In this tutorial, we will show you how to print the first column and/or last column of a line or text file. Print the first column and/or last column of a command output Many Linux commands such as the ‘ls’ command generate tabular outputs. Here, we will show you how to print the first column and/or last column from the output of the ‘ls -l’ command. # ⚓ How_to_Skip_the_First_Line_of_a_File_Using `awk`⠀⇛ There are various uses of the `awk` command in Linux. For example, it can be used to print the content of a text file. The first line of many text files contains the heading of the file, and sometimes, the first line must be skipped when printing the content of the file. In this tutorial, we will show you how to accomplish this task by using the `awk` command. # ⚓ Bash_Tree_Command⠀⇛ The intention of this tutorial is to understand the JSON data and how to parse JSON data in C++. We will discuss JSON data, Object, Array, JSON syntax, and then go through several working examples to understand the parsing mechanism of JSON data in C++. The “tree” command is a very extensively used Bash command in Linux. It is used to display the contents of any desired directory of your computer system in the form of a tree structure. By using this tree structure, you can easily find out the paths of your files and directories, check their access permissions, and view the hidden files and directories. Therefore, today we will be talking about using the Bash “tree” command in Linux Mint 20 by sharing some examples with you. # ⚓ How_do_I_Pass_Argument_in_a_Bash_Script?_– Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Most of the Linux Mint 20 Users find themselves stuck when passing an argument in a bash script. You can pass the arguments to any bash script when it is executed. There are several simple and useful ways to pass arguments in a bash script. In this article guide, we will let you know about some very easy ways to pass and use arguments in your bash scripts. # ⚓ How_to_Truncate_a_File_in_Bash_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Some Linux users might find it difficult to truncate the files in Linux Mint 20. Truncate means to remove or clear the contents of any file without even opening it or without deleting the particular file. Using truncate, you can remove the contents of the file up to zero. There are a lot of easy commands to truncate files from the terminal instead of directly doing it from the directory location. In this article, we are studying the following listed new truncate commands. # § Rust⠀➾ # ⚓ Advent_of_Rust_2:_You_Forgot_the_&_Operator!_| The_Mad_Scientist_Review⠀⇛ I’m half-surprised to find myself continuing on this half-baked plan to do a programming puzzle every day to learn Rust and write a stream-of- consciousness blog post detailing all the mistakes I make! I’m not sure if I’ll keep up the blogging every day, especially because I hope that I’ll make fewer mistakes and wrong turns as the month goes on, and then it won’t be so interesting to blog about. But for now, here’s day 2 of Advent of Code 2020, in which we examine some bizarre password policies. [...] I go back to googling “rust iterator foreach” and read a bit more. It looks like there was an RFC to add such a method, which was eventually closed. In that RFC I read that although there is no foreach() method in Rust iterators, you can use a for loop for that purpose. But also, the count() method is a quick hack that will consume the iterator. Although I generally don’t like quick hacks, I think I will go for the quick hack this time, for two reasons. One is that I believe I might be able to solve the rest of the puzzle using iterator methods, so it would be inconvenient to go from iterator methods to a for loop and then back to iterator methods. The other reason is that the eventual solution to the puzzle is actually a count of valid passwords, so ending the code with the count() method seems appropriate and I hope I’ll be able to use it later! # ⚓ Advent_of_Rust_4:_It’s_Hard_to_Return_an Iterator⠀⇛ Welcome again to this stream-of- consciousness log about learning the Rust programming language by doing the programming puzzles in Advent of Code 2020, or as I like to call it, On the Code by Jack Kerouac.1 Let’s get on with it! # § JavaScript⠀➾ # ⚓ Vue.js_Router_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Vue.js is a reactive javascript framework, which is used to build UIs (User Interfaces) and SPAs(Single-page Applications) and developers love to code and feel freedom and comfort while developing applications in Vue.js. For routing purposes, Vue.js does not provide the built-in routing feature. But there is an official third party library with the name of Vue Router for providing this feature. By using this feature we can navigate between the web pages but without reloading. So, in this article, we are going to see how we can install and use Vue Router in Vue.js. # ⚓ Vue.js_Emit_Custom_Events_–_Linux_Hint⠀⇛ Vue.js is a versatile and full-fledged framework for building huge web applications. Any web application is divided into the Components. For example, a simple website that includes a header, sidebar, and some other components. In order to manage and handle this component-based approach, Vue.js offers the parent-child relationship between the components and if we want to send some data across components. Vue.js offers props to send data from the parent to a child component but to send data from the child to the parent; we have to emit custom events. In this article, we learn about firing and listening to custom events.First of all, let’s see how to fire a custom event in Vue.js and then how to listen to that event. * § Leftovers⠀➾ o ⚓ The_Relevance_of_Utopianism⠀⇛ The tubes emerged of a portal high up near the 16 feet ceiling and about thirty feet distant from the assembly line. They were carried on a track by a clasp around the electron gun side, like the stem side of the pear. I was working below on the line for a few hours chatting with the guy next to me when suddenly I heard a crunching, banging sound and the guy I was chatting with grabbed me and pulled me away from the line. We ran and as I looked back and up, I saw tubes jerking back and forth as the belt that carried them shuttered to a stop. The tubes swung by their necks, smashing into each other and then some began to fall and explode hurtling bits of glass all around. Luckily my workmate saved me from possible injury. I was told that “accidents” like this happened once a month on average, but despite the danger of injury no protective gear was issued to the workers below the tubes. This happened years before OSHA was formed in 1971. I left that job at lunch time. o ⚓ Spirituality_in_a_Postmodern_Age⠀⇛ Something is definitely up and needs investigating. Skeptics take note. You will not be able to write “spirituality” off as the pastime of quacks or flat-earth advocates or Ouija board conjurors. In fact, I will argue that a compelling linkage between the postmodern times we inhabit and the explosion of interest in spirituality exists. Our times are very dispiriting. The shadows of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment have grown very long. Materialism does not fill the bottomless pit of yearning. Orthodox religion seems behind the times or too ferociously involved in them. And the atheism pitched by Dawkins and his ilk is so distempered and devoid of depth that we are sent away reeling, hoping to see a rose garden or a gorgeous sunset to aright our gloomy mood. But the dubious certainties of evangelicals offer little consolation in return. Interpenetrating worlds o § Science⠀➾ # ⚓ Google_Researcher_Says_She_Was_Fired_Over_Paper Highlighting_Bias_in_A.I.⠀⇛ A well-respected Google researcher said she was fired by the company after criticizing its approach to minority hiring and the biases built into today’s artificial intelligence systems. Timnit Gebru, who was a co-leader of Google’s Ethical A.I. team, said in a tweet on Wednesday evening that she was fired because of an email she had sent a day earlier to a group that included company employees. In the email, reviewed by The New York Times, she expressed exasperation over Google’s response to efforts by her and other employees to increase minority hiring and draw attention to bias in artificial intelligence. o § Health/Nutrition⠀➾ # ⚓ Dr._Paul_Farmer:_Centuries_of_Inequality_in_the_U.S._Laid Groundwork_for_Pandemic_Devastation⠀⇛ As the United States sets new records for COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, we speak with one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases, Dr. Paul Farmer, who says the devastating death toll in the U.S. reflects decades of underinvestment in public health and centuries of social inequality. “All the social pathologies of our nation come to the fore during epidemics,” says Dr. Farmer, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, chair of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder and chief strategist of Partners in Health. # ⚓ The_Pandemic_Is_Raging_Out_of_Control,_So_Pompeo_Invited 900_People_to_an_Indoor_Holiday_Party?⠀⇛ “It’s so insane, it just makes sense.” # ⚓ ’50_Years_in_the_Making’:_In_Historic_Vote_Against_Failed War_on_Drugs,_House_Passes_Marijuana_Decriminalization⠀⇛ “Don’t let anyone tell you that organizing doesn’t matter.” # ⚓ In_Historic_First,_House_Votes_to_Decriminalize_Marijuana⠀⇛ # ⚓ Coronavirus_Conspiracy_Theories_in_Germany⠀⇛ Notwithstanding the continuing significant health risks posed by the virus, more and more Germans seem to be largely dissatisfied with the government’s measures to contain the virus. Many are simply fed up. At the beginning of the pandemic, only a few critical voices appeared. In recent months, however, the people who have doubts about the existence of the virus and who believe in obscure conspiracy myths have grown. They show a very serious dissatisfaction with the politically prescribed restrictions and the impact it has on them and public life. Last August, this dissatisfaction culminated in a massive rally in Germany’s capital Berlin. An estimated 40,000 people took part in an anti- government rally on 29th August 2020. The attempted storming of Germany’s parliament had sent shockwaves through Germany. Some of the protesters were outright right-wing extremists and local Neo- Nazis while others just wore their tin-foil hats. The tin-foil hat remains an insignia of those believing in conspiracy theories. These rallies are organised under the popular heading of being so- called hygiene rallies. At times several hundred protesters including numerous right-wing extremists as well as AfD supporters and local Neo-Nazis blocked the entrance of the Reichstag – Germany’s parliament in Berlin – and thereby causing widespread horror on the democratic side of politics and society. # ⚓ The_Pandemic_Is_Making_Our_Deadly_Drug_Policy_Even_More Lethal⠀⇛ We will not—and cannot—wait any longer. The drug war is an infestation that continues to grow, and every day we wait is another day tragedy unfolds. # ⚓ As_Thanksgiving_COVID_Cases_Materialize,_CDC_Urges_Against Christmas_Travel⠀⇛ # ⚓ The_New_Face_of_Drug_Addiction_in_Afghanistan⠀⇛ A U.S.- funded study released in April of 2015, found that one in every nine Afghans -including women and children- uses illegal drugs. For several years, donors have disbursed hundreds of millions of dollars to control Afghanistan’s drug problem. However, most of those funds have been spent on poppy eradication and much less attention has been paid to the rising addiction problem. The U.S. has spent over $8.62 billion in taxpayer funds on counternarcotic efforts. Although the U.S. government has paid poppy farmers to switch to legitimate crops such as wheat, poppy cultivation has proven to be too lucrative to stop. In 2014, opium cultivation reached record levels: more than 553,000 acres, an increase of seven percent from the year before, according to estimates of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). # ⚓ Biden_Hires_Fauci_and_Asks_US_to_Wear_Masks_for_His_First 100_Days_in_Office⠀⇛ # ⚓ The_antivaccine_disinformation_war_against_COVID-19 vaccines_continues_apace⠀⇛ And so it begins…the real antivaccine disinformation war against COVID-19 vaccines. # ⚓ A_Guide_to_Navigating_the_Texas_Unemployment_System_During the_Coronavirus_Pandemic⠀⇛ If you’re confused about how the Texas Workforce Commission is handling your unemployment claim, you aren’t alone. More than 3.8 million Texans have applied for unemployment benefits since March, and we’ve heard from thousands who have struggled with their unemployment claims ever since. They have endured months of problems getting in touch with the TWC, been kicked off of additional weekly benefits and tried to maneuver through a confusing appeals process. # ⚓ Dissenter_Weekly:_FDA_Whistleblower_Exposes_‘Biohazard Nightmare’_At_Merck_Plant⠀⇛ On this edition of the “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola highlights a report in Vanity Fair that reveals horrendous and unsanitary conditions at a Merck vaccine plant in Durham, North Carolina. Later in the show, Gosztola covers a lawsuit filed by employees of Denver Health, who have faced retaliation for speaking out on COVID-19 and systemic racism. He also shares some key quotes from the prosecution’s closing argument in Julian Assange’s extradition case. # ⚓ Hands_Off_Canada’s_Drug_Supply!⠀⇛ That rule would allow U.S. states, wholesalers and pharmacies to import drugs directly from Canada, thereby cutting the price of drugs for Americans. The Trump administration had announced the new rule back in September when President Donald Trump signed a pre-election executive order. Trump campaigned on this issue during the election as a way to cut U.S. drug prices. But as Canadian federal Minister Haidu noted, “Certain drugs intended for the Canadian market are prohibited from being distributed for consumption outside of Canada if that sale would cause or worsen a drug shortage. Our health care system is a symbol of our national identity and we are committed to defending it.” Her statement added, “The actions we are taking today will help protect Canadians’ access to the medication they rely on.” Especially during the pandemic, Canada has experienced serious shortages of some prescription drugs, according to Health Canada. # ⚓ We_Need_an_Essential_Workers_Bill_of_Rights⠀⇛ With so many people seeing firsthand how low-wage workers make our society function, we have a once- in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform our society so that everyone can earn quality pay and benefits. But beyond symbolic displays of gratitude, essential retail workers have not yet seen this transformation. # ⚓ How_Racist_Capitalism_Fuels_COVID⠀⇛ Why did advanced capitalist countries, after fair warnings from a history of earlier pandemics, respond to this time around first with denial, followed by ignorance and panic, resulting in chaos, fragmentation, and now a deadly second surges in cases? As a Health Worker and Nurse… # ⚓ Make_USDA_‘The_People’s_Department’_Again⠀⇛ For years, the Department of Agriculture has been run by Big Ag acolytes. Biden has a chance to change that. # ⚓ That_booster_shot_is_a_doozy_Production_problems_involving Sputnik_V’s_second_dose_complicate_Russia’s_plans_for_mass coronavirus_vaccinations⠀⇛ Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin vowed that Russia will produce 2 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine, known as “Sputnik V,” in the coming days. Under his orders, the nation will launch a mass vaccination campaign, beginning on Saturday in Moscow. Meduza has learned, however, that Russian pharmaceutical companies are struggling to build a stable supply chain for Sputnik V’s required booster shots. In other words, Russia can start its mass vaccinations, but it can’t currently complete them.  # ⚓ Inside_the_Weed_Legalization_Bill_Congress_Is_Voting_on This_Week⠀⇛ These provisions were developed in part by the Marijuana Justice Coalition, a diverse group of advocacy organizations the Drug Policy Alliance helped convene in 2018 to hash out what would need to be included in a potential bill. The coalition featured organizations representing people of color, veterans, immigrants, students, labor unions, the formerly incarcerated, and other marginalized interests with a stake in cannabis legalization. It soon began lobbying lawmakers like House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D- N.Y.), a longtime supporter of legalization, who in July of 2019 introduced the MORE Act in the House, with future Vice President Kamala Harris introducing a companion bill in the Senate. Nadler moved the bill through the Judiciary Committee that fall, setting the stage for a House-wide vote this year # ⚓ Employer-Based_Healthcare_Still_Needs_To_Go_—_More_Than Ever⠀⇛ With more and more companies laying off more and more employees during the pandemic, plus with more people freelance than ever, it’s time to give this dinosaur the boot. I’ve mentioned many times that after I went freelance in my 20s, I signed up for an HMO, which I paid for myself out of pocket, no employer. This is how it should be for all of us. o § Integrity/Availability⠀➾ # § Proprietary⠀➾ # ⚓ Salesforce_scoops_up_team_chat_pioneer_Slack_for $27.7B⠀⇛ Salesforce has acquired collaboration software vendor Slack in a deal worth $27.7 billion. The acquisition — details of which leaked last week — will see Slack’s business chat application integrated with Salesforce’s cloud tools, serving as the new interface for its Customer 360 product portfolio. # ⚓ Slack’s_Butterfield_Expects_to_Become_a_Salesforce President⠀⇛ Slack Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield said he believes he will become one of Salesforce.com Inc.’s presidents after the companies’ $27.7 billion combination is completed. Butterfield, who will continue to lead his workplace chat upstart when it becomes a Salesforce unit, also said the idea that competition from Microsoft Corp. forced the deal will be “dispelled.” # ⚓ Microsoft_apologises_for_feature_criticised_as workplace_surveillance [Ed: Fake apology. "We're sorry we got caught!!!" Microsoft spin echoed by this Bill Gates-bribed (repeatedly even) 'news' site]⠀⇛ Microsoft has apologised for enabling a feature, “productivity score”, which critics said was tantamount to workplace surveillance. # § Security⠀➾ # ⚓ Windows_ransomware_used_to_hit_aircraft_leasing asset_manager⠀⇛ Premier aircraft leasing asset manager SKY Leasing has been hit by a gang of cyber criminals using the Windows Avaddon ransomware and the attackers have leaked 20 files of the company’s data on the dark web. # § Privacy/Surveillance⠀➾ # ⚓ What_You_Need_to_Know_About_the_COVID Alert_App⠀⇛ # ⚓ What_Facebook’s_empty_campus_says_about the_post-Covid_world⠀⇛ Tech companies don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the past. If they did, they might recognise that these sprawling HQs are very much rooted in tech’s early days, when companies such as Bell Labs set the template for spaces of innovation. Bell’s bucolic campus in Holmdel, New Jersey, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1959, provided offices and laboratories for 6,000 workers in a single building. But finding places that can accommodate these massive floor plates today, especially in dense urban environments, is a far more complicated endeavour. And the pursuit and acquisition of real estate that enables them has impacted locational decisions and reshaped neighbourhoods and city blocks – until it didn’t. # ⚓ The_US_government_will_let_TikTok_run_out the_clock_and_‘overlook’_its_own_deadline⠀⇛ The latest deadline for that move, given by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) on November 28th, was today, December 4th. An extension isn’t expected, though the current deadline will “be overlooked while the discussions continue” between the Trump administration and TikTok, Bloomberg reports. # ⚓ TikTok_Sale_Deadline_on_Hold_as_Talks With_U.S._Continue⠀⇛ A deadline set by the Trump administration for the forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. assets will come and go Friday without a final deal, according to people familiar with the discussions. While the deadline has been extended multiple times, TikTok isn’t expected to receive a new one, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the decision isn’t yet public. TikTok is still in talks with the U.S. government about a sale that satisfies the administration’s national security concerns, but Friday’s deadline will be allowed to lapse while the discussions continue. # ⚓ Deleted_e-mails_in_an_Office_365_Outlook account_keep_reappearing_in_the_Thunderbird e-mail_client⠀⇛ Whatever OS and e-mail client you use, if you search the Web you’ll find plenty of posts about deleted e-mails that reappear after you empty the ‘Trash’/ ’Deleted Items’/’Recycle bin’ folder. o § Defence/Aggression⠀➾ # ⚓ The_American_Empire_Is_Falling_Apart⠀⇛ We’re now living in an age of opacity, as Rudy Giuliani pointed out in a courtroom recently. Here was the exchange: “In the plaintiffs’ counties, they were denied the opportunity to have an unobstructed observation and ensure opacity,” Giuliani said. “I’m not quite sure I know what opacity means. It probably means you can see, right?” “It means you can’t,” said U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann.“Big words, your honor,” Giuliani said. # ⚓ Killing_in_Brush_Place:_Chesa_Boudin_is_Not_the_First_San Francisco_District_Attorney_to_Charge_a_Police_Officer_with Homicide⠀⇛ Those reports are wrong. I know this because my late aunt served on the jury in the manslaughter trial of police officer Michael R. O’Brien, charged with shooting dead a Black truck driver named George Baskett in 1968. I don’t want to take anything away from District Attorney Chesa Boudin for his bold action, but this story needs to be told. Let’s hope that the Samayoa trial doesn’t end in the same kerfuffle that the O’Brien trial did. # ⚓ Time_to_Grow_Up:_Ending_Divisions_Creating_Peace⠀⇛ Research shows that less people are dying in such clashes than at any time in history. This is positive of course, but the number of deaths isn’t really the issue, although clearly less is better. What’s important is to unearth the reasons for violence, to create a world in which the causes of conflict are removed and allow peace, that long held ideal, to be realized. In addition to armed battles, societies everywhere are violent, dangerous places in varying degrees, as are many personal relationships and homes. Then there is the vandalism mankind is inflicting on the natural world, on intricate ecosystems, on plant and animal species, on the air, the waterways and the earth itself. Although this form of abuse may appear separate from uniformed killings, stabbings or roadside bombs, it flows from the same destructive source – human consciousness and behavior. # ⚓ A_Military_Spouse’s_Perspective_on_Bringing_the_Troops_Home From_Afghanistan_and_Iraq⠀⇛ When it comes to honoring active-duty troops and veterans of this country’s forever wars, we Americans have proven big on symbolic gestures, but small on action. Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s organization, Joining Forces, was a short-lived but notable exception: its advocacy and awareness- raising led dozens of companies to commit to hiring more veterans. Unfortunately, those efforts proved limited in scope and didn’t last long. # ⚓ Pentagon_Says_Almost_All_US_Troops_to_Leave_Somalia—But Military_Operations_Will_Continue⠀⇛ “This action is not a change in U.S. policy,” said the Defense Department, which has been conducting an air and ground war in the East African nation since 2007.  # ⚓ Insanity_Reigns_–_the_US,_Israel_and_Iran⠀⇛ In its reporting on the possibility of the US or Israel attacking Iran, the US corporate-controlled media usually fails to mention that these threats are illegal under international law. Of course, illegality is not an issue for the media when these two countries are involved. In addition, also seldom mentioned is the fact that the US is the only nation that has dropped atomic bombs on another country. The US is also a country that many nations claim has not complied with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Moreover, Israel is a country that has not even accepted the NPT and also has nuclear weapons. Also generally ignored is the fact that the US and Israel routinely violate international law with their unprovoked attacks on other nations. These are the two nations threatening Iran over the possibility that it might develop nuclear weapons. Such incredible hypocrisy and the media fails to call it out! # ⚓ The_Assassination_of_an_Iranian_Scientist_and_the_Double- Standards_of_American_Outrage⠀⇛ Public discourse on these state-sponsored acts of terrorism (we wouldn’t hesitate to characterize these acts as terrorism if Iran assassinated an Israeli or U.S scientist, would we?) has historically been largely absent. # ⚓ After_Trump_leaves,_US_and_Israeli_aggression_against_Iran remains⠀⇛ # ⚓ Eisenhower’s_Ghost_Haunts_Biden’s_Foreign_Policy_Team⠀⇛ Biden’s foreign policy team will also need a special kind of confidence to confront the most serious challenge they face. That will not be a threat from a hostile foreign country, but the controlling and corrupting power of the Military- Industrial Complex, which President Eisenhower warned our grandparents about 60 years ago, but whose “unwarranted influence” has only grown ever since, as Eisenhower warned, and in spite of his warning. The Covid pandemic is a tragic demonstration of why America’s new leaders should listen humbly to our neighbors around the world instead of trying to reassert American “leadership.” While the United States compromised with a deadly virus to protect corporate financial interests, abandoning Americans to both the pandemic and its economic effects, other countries put their people’s health first and contained, controlled or even eliminated the virus. # ⚓ It_Wasn’t_the_First_Time_the_NYPD_Killed_Someone_in_Crisis. For_Kawaski_Trawick,_It_Only_Took_112_Seconds.⠀⇛ Ellen Trawick had long been skeptical of the New York Police Department’s account of how her firstborn son was killed by an officer last year in the Bronx. The NYPD had announced on April 15, 2019, that there had been a “Police Involved Shooting” the night before. It said Kawaski Trawick, 32 years old and Black, had been fatally shot when he charged at officers with a knife and a stick. “It escalated quickly,” one of the NYPD’s top officials told reporters, saying the shooting “appears to be justified.” # ⚓ The_NYPD_Said_the_Killing_of_Kawaski_Trawick_“Appears_to_Be Justified.”_Video_Shows_Officers_Escalated_the_Situation.⠀⇛ Kawaski Trawick was shot and killed in his Bronx apartment by a New York Police Department officer on April 14, 2019. The NYPD said Trawick had charged at officers with a knife. Video of the shooting shows the officers had escalated the situation — and that one officer then shot Trawick over his more-experienced partner’s objections. While the NYPD has never released video of the shooting, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office released footage of it last month, along with a detailed report. ProPublica separately obtained parts of the videos. # ⚓ Billion-dollar_business_with_throw-away_military_drones⠀⇛ The defence company Airbus is expected to have produced 2,000 target drones soon, at a unit price in the six-digit range. The Bundeswehr uses them for air defence training. Further missions are testing swarms of drones. # ⚓ Trump_Doubles_Down_On_Threat_To_Defund_Military_Because People_Are_Mean_To_Him_Online;_Republicans_Threaten_To Override_His_Veto⠀⇛ On Tuesday, we highlighted that it looked like Congressional Republicans were willing to finally stand up to their party’s insecure and whiny lame duck president and refuse to include a Section 230 repeal as part of the military authorization bill, the NDAA. # ⚓ Liliana_Segura_on_Trump’s_Execution_Spree,_Gaurav_Laroia_on Ajit_Pai’s_FCC⠀⇛ # ⚓ Each_Inmate_Awaiting_Execution_on_Trump’s_Watch_Is_a Person—One_Whose_Life_Story_Cries_Out_for_Mercy⠀⇛ No matter how terrible the crime, God-like decisions of life or death at the hands of government officials are too weighty and unwieldy for humans to handle. # ⚓ The_Next_President_Should_Get_Us_Out_of_Yemen⠀⇛ This is at most a conflict of regional import in which the US role has been to protract hostilities, facilitate unconscionable treatment of innocents, and unintentionally benefit the very terrorists we oppose. # ⚓ Biden_Must_Address_Yemen_on_Day_One_and_Move_Immediately_to Prevent_Future_Wars⠀⇛ # ⚓ “Everyone_Knows_What_Happens_Here_to_Girls”:_the_Plight_the Children_of_Mumbai’s_Sex_Workers_During_the_COVID_Lockdown⠀⇛ After a gap of nearly four months, by mid-July, 21- year-old Soni started once again standing on the pavements of Falkland road every evening, in the Kamathipura area of central Mumbai. She’d leave behind her five-year-old daughter Esha in the care of the landlady, while she met with clients in nearby small hotels or a friend’s room. She could no longer bring them to her own room because of Esha. (All names in this story have been changed.) On August 4, when Soni took a break from work around 11 p.m. and came back to her room, she saw Esha crying. “She would be asleep by the time I came to check on her,” Soni says. “But [that night] she kept saying it’s paining, while pointing to her body. It took me some time to understand everything…” # ⚓ Daniel_Ellsberg_Voices_Opposition_to_Biden’s_Frontrunner for_Defense_Secretary⠀⇛ # ⚓ Because_She_Was_Wrong_About_Iraq,_Afghanistan,_Syria, Yemen,_and_Libya,_Daniel_Ellsberg_Joins_Campaign_Against Flournoy⠀⇛ Declaring that “we do not need a hawk with relationships with the weapons industry,” Nobel Prize-winning peace activist Jody Williams also urged Biden not to pick Michèle Flournoy as defense secretary. # ⚓ Liberalism,_Class_and_the_Politics_of_Austerity⠀⇛ With the restoration of the neoliberal order that preceded Donald Trump almost completed, remarkably little attention is being given to the role that this order played in making Mr. Trump’s rise possible. This is partly a function of the denial of culpability that Democrats have maintained since 2016. And in fact, the coalition to oust Mr. Trump that arose in the early days of his administration was premised on blaming voters for his rise. That this coalition came from a nearly unified class position was hidden by differing ideologies. This self-same class blindness currently hides differences in material conditions that will be the likely catalyst of the next stage of political crisis. The map of income distribution provided below ties quite closely to political divisions between self- described liberals, which now includes much of the bourgeois Left, and a coalition of those dispossessed by neoliberal economic policies, industrialists, and rural conservatives. In Gramscian fashion, liberals insisted that views that were crafted and framed by political operatives working for the national Democrats were both authentic and descriptively accurate, even though they were crafted and framed by political operatives working for the national Democrats. They were manufactured dissent if you will. As such, they were an expression from power, not against it. # ⚓ Ending_America’s_Forever_Wars⠀⇛ A November 2006, CounterPunch article by Macgregor was headlined, “There’s Only One Option Left: Leave.” He depicted the Bush regime’s Iraq war strategy as fundamentally flawed, noting that “occupying and governing it directly with thousands of conventional U.S. combat troops under generals whose only strategy was brute force was even more disastrous…disengaging from Iraq would seem imperative.” In the ensuing years, he wrote and published regularly against America’s wars in the Middle East, calling the U.S. military policy in that region the unmitigated calamity that it was. The disaster continues. The antiwar vote may very well have put Trump over the top in 2016 – but then he waited, four long years, to reduce the number of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East. In fact, early in his tenure, he increased the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. And he has added soldiers in Iraq. He also dropped more bombs on the Middle East than Obama did, if such is imaginable. According to some calculations, Trump dropped a bomb every 12 minutes, surpassing Obama’s record of one every half hour. Trump did attempt to disengage from Syria, but managed to stab the Kurds in the back in the process, greenlighting ethnic cleansing by Turks and thus causing thousands of Kurdish deaths. Besides, regarding exiting Syria, his generals and the defense department weren’t having it. So the whole thing was bloodily, criminally botched from the start. # ⚓ Philippines:_Islamist_militants_attack_army_camp⠀⇛ The Philippine military has repelled an attack on Datu Piang, a municipality with some 26,000 residents. The attack sparked fears of a repeat of the Marawi city siege of 2017 that left some 1,200 dead. # ⚓ Zoroaster,_Biden_and_Iran⠀⇛ For more than half a century, this logic has kept the United States and Iran from enhancing their shared interests. Things were not always this way. Both before and after World War I, the U.S. government encouraged American financial experts to help Iran free itself from debts to Russia and Europe. In 1946 the United States mobilized the United Nations to press Soviet forces to leave northern Iran. Having intervened in 1953 to remove a nationalist leader, the United States backed the Shah and his white revolution. Over time, however, Washington ignored the increasingly dictatorial policies of the Shah and was shocked that many Iranians blamed the United States for the Shah’s despotism. Relations got worse when Washington helped Iraq in its war against Iran and when a U.S. ship shot down an Iranian Airbus (probably by mistake). Besides needing to deal with the United States, Iranian leaders believe they are threatened by Israel and by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states. For now, Israel is the only nuclear-armed power in the region. Israel points out that it needs nuclear weapons to keep its hostile neighbors at bay. Some Iranian leaders have pledged to destroy Israel. Some believe that Iran is also entitled to possess the most advanced weapons. # ⚓ Mozambique_Terrorist_Group_Poised_to_Establish_an_Islamic Emirate⠀⇛ Ansar al-Sunna, estimated to consist of about 20 cells operating throughout northeast Mozambique, is responsible for the murders of about 2,000 people, mostly civilians. The terrorist group has driven approximately 200,000 people from their homes and burdened the majority Christian country’s central government. # ⚓ France_to_investigate_dozens_of_mosques_suspected_of ‘separatism’⠀⇛ The government has launched what it calls an unprecedented action against “separatism” following several Islamist attacks in France this autumn, including the beheading of a teacher who had shown his class caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad. Darmanin said 76 mosques out of the more than 2,600 Muslim places of worship had been flagged as possible threats to France’s Republican values and its security. Where suspicions are confirmed, the mosque will be closed down, he said. # ⚓ Islamic_groups_outraged_as_call_to_prayer_modified_to include_call_for_jihad_in_Indonesia⠀⇛ In at least one of the many viral videos, several men were standing behind the muezzin and lifted their machetes and sickles into the air when the modified verse was recited. The Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), the highest clerical body in the nation, has condemned the modified adhan. # ⚓ Muslim_scholars_slam_Saudi’s_anti-Muslim_Brotherhood fatwa⠀⇛ “The Muslim Brotherhood exists and is known around the globe and it has tens of thousands of members and supporters in every country, including Saudi Arabia,” the IUMS’ statement said, noting that the group has “political and advocacy presences in most of the world.” o § Environment⠀➾ # ⚓ How_Biden_Can_Do_More_Than_Just_Restore_Trump’s Environmental_Rollbacks⠀⇛ # ⚓ This_Loophole_in_New_Mexico’s_Methane_Rules_Is_a_Gift_to Big_Oil_and_Gas⠀⇛ New Mexico, along with West Texas, is home to the nation’s most prolific, and polluting, oil and gas field, the Permian Basin. Even industry leaders have acknowledged that the Permian needs to address its wasteful practices of flaring (burning) and venting (directly releasing) natural gas, which is primarily methane.  # ⚓ Mayan_activist-beekeeper_wins_international_environmental prize⠀⇛ Activist Leydy Pech, leader of a coalition opposed to the use of genetically modified seeds, has been recognized for her work in stopping the agrochemical company Monsanto from growing genetically modified soybeans in seven states. The head of Sin Transgénicos (Without Transgenics) has been awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for North America. A beekeeper by trade, a Mayan by identity, Pech, 55, united farmers, beekeepers and nongovernmental organizations in a fight to get the government to revoke permits granted to the company in southern Mexico, saying its seeds were contaminating crops and the nation’s honey supplies with genetically modified material. # ⚓ Ahead_of_Youth-Led_Day_of_Action,_Young_Elected_Officials Push_Biden_to_Enact_National_Emergency_Climate_Plan⠀⇛ In a letter to the president-elect, the officials say they “believe it is imperative we take action on the climate crisis because it is a threat multiplier for water security, deadly disease, and environmental racism.” # ⚓ More_carbon_may_benefit_trees_less_than_thought⠀⇛ Earlier tree growth results from more atmospheric carbon. It may mean earlier leaf fall too, muddying climate calculations. # § Energy⠀➾ # ⚓ A_Coal_Company_Owned_by_This_Billionaire_Governor_Has Pledged_to_Stop_Breaking_Pollution_Laws⠀⇛ A coal company owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice pledged to stop violating water pollution rules at a large strip-mining site in the state, according to a settlement filed Thursday in federal court with local and national environmental groups. By agreeing to come into compliance within a year, Justice’s Bluestone Coal Corp. will avoid the harshest financial penalties that could have been levied — the maximum potential federal fines were nearly $170 million. # ⚓ ‘We’re_in_a_Climate_Emergency._Act_Accordingly’: Greta_Thunberg_Says_Denmark’s_30-Year_Fossil_Fuel Phase-Out_Not_Fast_Enough⠀⇛ “The real news here is that Denmark will apparently go on extracting fossil fuels for another three decades,” said climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.  # ⚓ Tanzania_arrests_youth_recruited_by_Somali militants⠀⇛ Since 2017, the militants have been focusing their attention on Cabo Delgado Province, an investment area for oil and gas multinationals. The strategic port is used for cargo deliveries to the $60 billion-worth gas projects located 60 kilometres further north that are being developed by oil giants Total and Exxon Mobil Corp. In 2018, Tanzania police were on high alert following rising concerns that young fighters were travelling to northern Mozambique to join the insurgency and participate in criminal activities. # § Wildlife/Nature⠀➾ # ⚓ ‘Few_Things_Matter_More_to_Humans’:_UN_Report_Says_We Must_Protect_and_Restore_Biodiversity_of_World’s_Soil⠀⇛ “If things carry on as they are, the outlook is bleak, unquestionably. But I think it’s not too late to introduce measures now.” # ⚓ Forest_Service_Plans_Massive_1.7_Million_Acre Prescribed_Burn_in_Greater_Yellowstone⠀⇛ As reported in the Jackson Hole Guide, the “problem,” according to Fire Management Officer Michael Johnston, is that the northern reaches of the Caribou-Targhee are dominated by mature, decadent stands of timber now poised for massive and potentially catastrophic wildfires. The answer, he said, is using controlled burns to replicate wildfire’s natural role and curb the hazard to nearby communities. There are all kinds of factual inaccuracies in that statement and pejorative language indicative of an agency that sees Nature as a problem. # § Overpopulation⠀➾ # ⚓ [Old] Half_a_million_fewer_children?_The_coming_COVID baby_bust⠀⇛ The COVID-19 episode will likely lead to a large, lasting baby bust. The pandemic has thrust the country into an economic recession. Economic reasoning and past evidence suggest that this will lead people to have fewer children. The decline in births could be on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year. We base this expectation on lessons drawn from economic studies of fertility behavior, along with data presented here from the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and the 1918 Spanish Flu. o § Finance⠀➾ # ⚓ Colonization_Fueled_Ebola:_Dr._Paul_Farmer_on_“Fevers, Feuds_&_Diamonds”_&_Lessons_from_West_Africa⠀⇛ We continue our conversation with medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer, whose new book, “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds,” tells the story of his efforts to fight Ebola in 2014 and how the history of slavery, colonialism and violence in West Africa exacerbated the outbreak. “Care for Ebola is not rocket science,” says Dr. Farmer, who notes that doctors know how to treat sick patients. But the public health response was overwhelmingly focused not on care but containment, Dr. Farmer says, which “generated very painful echoes from colonial rule.” # ⚓ Interpol_removes_former_Promsvyazbank_co-owners_from_its wanted_list⠀⇛ Interpol has removed Dmitry and Alexey Ananiev, the former owners of Promsvyazbank, from its wanted list. In Russia, the brothers stand accused of multi-million-dollar embezzlement and theft. # ⚓ Neoliberalism_is_Finished,_OSHA’s_Time_Has_Come⠀⇛ “Amtrak Joe” just might rebuild our national passenger and freight system; lower the Medicare age to 60; introduce a Public Option to the ACA; enhance Medicaid; move up the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour; oil & gas regulations in line with Climate demands; environmental climatic changes to deal with California fires and winds; and southern coastal issues to deal with increasing hurricane, tornadoes, rain/wind disasters and other immediate promises. About 120 years ago Vladimir Lenin published his pamphlet “What is to be done?” It was based on a Russian revolutionary writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky novel. But, that question is often asked in periods of cataclysmic events which can guide and will influence tens of millions of people’s. The question asked: “What is to be Done?” # ⚓ Centuries_of_Inequality_in_the_US_Laid_the_Groundwork_for COVID-19_Devastation⠀⇛ # ⚓ Unemployment_Falls_to_6.7_Percent,_But_It_Comes_With_a Longer_Work_Week⠀⇛ # ⚓ Urging_Tens_of_Billions_in_Emergency_Aid,_Top_UN_Officials Warn_2021_Set_to_Be_‘Catastrophic’_for_World’s_Poorest⠀⇛ “This is a global crisis and the solutions must be shared equitably as global public goods.” # ⚓ Critics_of_Canceling_Student_Debt_Aren’t_Afraid_It_Won’t Work—They’re_Afraid_It_Will⠀⇛ If more people reap the benefits of student loan forgiveness, allowing them to enjoy freer lives with more chances for economic advancement, then other progressive and social democratic policies are going to be more appealing. # ⚓ Nonprofit_Hospital_Almost_Never_Gave_Discounts_to_Poor Patients_During_Collections,_Documents_Show⠀⇛ MEMPHIS, Tennessee — Memphis’ largest health care system almost never gave patients discounts based on their income even as it pursued thousands for overdue bills in the last several years, according to new information released this week. Since 2014, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit, collected just over $169 million from more than 977,000 patients with bills at least 30 days past due, but only 1% of those received financial assistance during the collections process, the hospital reported in a lengthy response to a query from Sen. Charles Grassley, R- Iowa, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee. # ⚓ House_Hearing:_Wall_Street_Gets_Bailed_Out_by_Fed;_Main Street_Gets_Sold_Out⠀⇛ There was good reason for the hostility. For the second time in a dozen years, another former Goldman Sachs banker holds the reins at the Treasury Department as it bails out Wall Street while crushing Main Street businesses and American families. This time it’s Mnuchin rather than Hank Paulson, who served as Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush during the financial crisis. Before we get into the guts of yesterday’s hearing, it’s important to have the background on how Wall Street was bailed out and Main Street was sold out the last time around – as the parallels are downright eerie. # ⚓ Sanders_Opposed_to_Relief_Plan_That_Gives_‘Absolutely_No Financial_Help’_to_Tens_of_Millions_of_Suffering_People⠀⇛ “Given the enormous economic desperation facing working families in this country today, I will not be able to support the recently announced Manchin- Romney Covid proposal unless it is significantly improved.” # ⚓ Biden_Could_Cancel_Student_Debt._Will_He?⠀⇛ The Department of Education owns about 92 percent of the $1.6 trillion in student loans Americans owe. Many legal scholars say the department has the authority to wipe these burdens away with the stroke of a pen. “This is the single most effective executive action available to provide massive consumer-driven stimulus,” Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. # ⚓ ‘What_the_Hell_Are_They_Doing?’_Outrage_as_GOP_Tries_to Adjourn_House_With_Millions_Going_Hungry,_Covid_Surging⠀⇛ “They’re treating this like a game. Leaders don’t abandon people in their time of greatest need,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. # ⚓ Largest_US_Federal_Workers_Union_Blasts_Trump-GOP_Push_for Pay_Freeze_as_‘Demeaning,_Dishonest,_and_Cruel’⠀⇛ “It’s sad that even on his way out, President Trump still can’t resist the opportunity to stick it to the government workers.” # ⚓ US_judge_blocks_Trump_bid_to_hike_minimum_pay_for_H-1B_visa holders⠀⇛ The US bid to put in place new wage rules for those employed on H-1B visas has been blocked by a court, with a federal judge in New Jersey granting a business group a preliminary injunction which prevents the US Department of Labour from putting the rule into practice. # ⚓ GOP_Motions_to_Adjourn_Congress_as_COVID,_Eviction_and Hunger_Crises_Worsen⠀⇛ # ⚓ We_Can’t_Wait_for_Politician’s_Promises:_We_Need_a_Public Works_Program_to_Create_Jobs Now!⠀⇛ Nine months into a deadly pandemic, workers, farmers and small proprietors of all kinds face a deep and intertwined crisis of jobs, wages, safety and health. Neither party has acted to provide new stimulus checks for individuals and small businesses, each blaming the other. New shutdowns in California promise tens of thousands of new unemployed workers. We are told to wait and place our faith in Biden, Newsom or Garcetti as more of us become unemployed and near homelessness. Millions are without jobs. Hospitalizations are up 40%. Food banks are overrun, especially heading into Thanksgiving. People waited hours in San Pedro for the distribution of 2,000 turkeys. The few remaining supplemental government aid programs run out in a month. And state and city governments are moving to impose new lockdowns without providing financial relief. # ⚓ Status_Quo_Ante_and_the_Return_to_Normal⠀⇛ According to this popular narrative, multilateralism will flourish with renewed American leadership. The four years of the Trump administration, it is said, has been one of those rare periods of U.S. isolationism. Biden’s nomination of many ex-Obama administration officials is a strong indication of the desire to go back to pre-2017. Domestically, democracy will survive in the U.S. after coming to the edge of a totalitarian abyss. The Latin expression status quo ante, translated as the state of affairs that existed previously, may serve in legal terms to mean a return to the previous diplomatic situation, but in human terms the expression is extremely limited. As time moves forward, how can we return to a condition that existed before? o § AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics⠀➾ # ⚓ We_Can’t_Vote_‘Em_Out⠀⇛ But we can’t vote out the assholes. Of course, right now, if you’re a Joe Biden supporter, you’re yelling out loud to your laptop or phone, “That’s not true! We just DID! We just did vote out the assholes!” And I’m not arguing that Donald Trump and his motley squad of parasitic shit stains aren’t awful. (They are “parashits,” if you will. Copyright pending.) # ⚓ Crooked_David_Perdue_Is_Afraid_to_Debate_His_Record_of Self-Dealing⠀⇛ Sunday night’s Georgia Senate debate between appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock is attracting national attention. Rightly so; the Loeffler- Warnock race is one of two January 5 contests that will decide control of the Senate. # ⚓ Trying_to_Repair_a_Room_in_a_House_Still_Burning⠀⇛ With Trump gone . . . Wait. What is it about Donald J. Trump that draws so many to him, rivalled now probably only by TikTok’s 16-year-old, Charli D’Amelio who has 100 million minds she passionately influences? Are we dealing with a supra-rational bond between Trump and so many that doesn’t leave us, making him in Influencer whose influence is beyond our comprehension? There’s much now that seems almost beyond conceivability. Take the notion that the science of climate change or pandemic doesn’t hold up against one’s personal review, or that “almost a million and a half Americans will be represented in Congress by people who support a community bent on proving that President Donald Trump is waging a holy war against a high-powered cabal of child traffickers and blood-drinking Satanists that includes prominent Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities.” (Kaitlyn Tiffany, “QAnon is Winning,” The Atlantic, Nov. 5, 2020). # ⚓ The_Trump_FCC’s_Parting_Gift_to_Fox_Is_Bad_News_for_Media Diversity⠀⇛ Trump may have soured on Fox since he lost the election, but it seems his FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, has not. # ⚓ Trump—Consumed_With_‘Narcissistic_Crusade’_Over_Election Loss—Slammed_for_Silence_on_Surging_Pandemic⠀⇛ As U.S. daily deaths set a new record on Wednesday, topping 2,800, the president posted an “unhinged” 46-minute-long rant on Facebook, claiming without any evidence that “this election was rigged.” # ⚓ The_“Trump_Virus”⠀⇛ Most members of the Republican Party, most notably in the Senate have been cowed and rendered helpless by The Mad King, even after his defeat demonstrating the power Trump continue to wield over his minions. # ⚓ ‘Nones’_Elected_Biden-Harris⠀⇛ That’s the conclusion of a top socio-political researcher, Dr. Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University. “I think that Joe Biden should thank the ‘nones’ for being the president-elect right now,” Dr. Burge wrote for the Religion in Public website. # ⚓ What_Biden_Could_Be_Good_For⠀⇛ Since the late seventies, Democrats have been promoting the political line that made Trump and Trumpism possible – Wall Street and corporate friendly neoliberal austerity politics at home, sustained by an industrial policy based not on the needs of the “defense” industry and a Pentagon hellbent on full spectrum global dominance. By a year or two into the Clinton presidency, with the dying embers of New Deal-Great Society politics all but entirely snuffed out, that has been pretty much the entire party’s general line. # ⚓ Pistols,_a_Hearse_and_Trucks_Playing_Chicken:_Why_Some Voters_Felt_Harassed_and_Intimidated_at_the_Polls⠀⇛ While the 2020 election went more smoothly than most had dared to hope, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan election protection group, nonetheless received a steady drumbeat of complaints to its hotline about voter intimidation and harassment during early voting and on Election Day. The reports described threats, overly aggressive electioneering, racist language and more. They came from states across the country, including those where the outcome was decided by relatively small numbers of votes. # ⚓ America’s_Lame_Duck_Period_is_Palestine’s_Nightmare⠀⇛ Sure, President Trump will pardon his buddies, maintain the relentless grift of frivolous lawsuits, and do his best to undermine public confidence in the integrity of this and future elections. Ultimately, however, his shenanigans are most damaging in obstructing the urgent task of containing the second wave of COVID-19. Americans will continue to die in shocking numbers not because of bombs or bullets, but abject government failure. Abroad, things are different. # ⚓ A_Movement_to_FORCE_the_Government_to_Give_Us_What_We Need⠀⇛ Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have openly stated that they are not for free universal health care/ Medicare for All and the desperately needed Green New Deal (watered down from the plan originated by the Green Party). Biden has broken his promise to end hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – taking the taunting bait of the Republicans. Biden and Trump are outdoing one another at being tough on China – both springing another dangerous trap on our heads – as well as taking the exact retrograde tack on Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and North Korea. We know the political histories of Biden and Harris. After the treachery of the DNC (anti- Democratic Nominating Cabal) against the moderate reformer Bernie Sanders (screwing him twice! – and not in a good way), we the people have no one at the top tiers of government advocating for us. On the contrary, both major US parties are nakedly taking the bucks in one hand and scratching the rich donors’ (insert body part of your choice) with the other, throwing us a bone now and then (to prevent revolution? In these United States? Seems like they have it all wrapped up – or at least the major parties think they do…). # ⚓ Progressive_Media_Promoted_a_False_Story_of_‘Conflict_Beef’ From_Nicaragua⠀⇛ Reports by Reveal (10/21/20) and PBS NewsHour (10/ 20/21) called for a boycott of  “conflict beef” from Nicaragua. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal claims to be “fair and comprehensive” and PBS to be “trusted,” but their misleading and inaccurate reports could have drastic consequences for Nicaragua, at a time when the country is already struggling to deal with US sanctions, the pandemic and the aftermath of two damaging hurricanes. Their argument is that cattle farmers who produce the beef that is exported have in many cases illegally settled territory in the rainforest that belongs to Indigenous communities, and that the government does little to resolve the violent conflict that results. # ⚓ If_Only_Trump_Could_Sing⠀⇛ The work’s commercial failure surely had to do with the subject matter: the piece concludes with the execution of a pair of Christian martyrs as decreed by the unforgiving President of Roman Antioch (now Antakya in Turkey), Valens. This gloomy ending did not make for the rousing good time desired and expected by many of Handel’s patrons, more than a few of whom had anyway fled London a few days earlier when an earthquake had rocked the city. God, it must have seemed to some, was displeased with these religious entertainments that appropriated churchly themes and texts for the theatre, and for the monetary gain of the composer and his star singers, first among them the male castrato, Gaetano Guadagni who sang the role of the Roman soldier, Didymus, who converted to Christianity. Guadagni was an Italian, a catholic, and a “eunuch,” as English detractors of these foreign imports viciously put it. Little wonder they thought that disasters threatened Babylon Britain. # ⚓ The_King’s_Man:_Blinken’s_Appointment_Reassures_Israel_that Little_Will_Change_under_Biden⠀⇛ President-elect, Joe Biden’s appointment of Antony J. Blinken as his Secretary of State was a master stroke, according to the Biden Administration. Blinken is a State Department veteran, a strong believer in a US-led Western alliance and a true friend of Israel. The immediate message that Biden wished to communicate through this particular appointment – and also the appointment of Jake Sullivan as the US’ new National Security Adviser – is that the United States will edge back to its default position as a global leader, and away from Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy agenda. # ⚓ Dozens_of_Trump’s_Appointees_Will_Keep_Their_Jobs_After Biden_Takes_Over⠀⇛ # ⚓ Simon_Says⠀⇛ Flicking around the channel spectrum last Sunday I ran across the fascist charlatan Donald Trump in real time. He was telling a mentally challenged Fatherland (FOX) News host named Maria that he actually won the election and the “the Democrats used covid to stuff the ballot boxes.” “Everybody knows that,” Trump said. # ⚓ Against_the_Center:_the_Past_and_Future_of_Donald Trump⠀⇛ The second is that Trump will not concede defeat. Though he will eventually leave, calling out the election results as fake maintains his brand of defiance of the “deep state.” Truth, for Trump, and his followers, is whatever they proclaim, and that outlook is reinforced when he makes his own “facts.” Conventional opinion rightly holds that Trump’s bluster regarding the election is posturing. Trump wants relevance. Conceding defeat would consign him to irrelevance. His visibility intact, Trump remains undiminished among his followers. This sets the stage for him to create a post-presidential digital politico/info/ entertainment platform to take in gobs of cash, while keeping the Trump family in political business. It is also, in James Brown fashion, “The Payback” for Democrats’ impeachment efforts over Russia and Ukraine, which, it must be conceded, was short on substance and long on politics. While Trump’s pursuit of action in the courts and through state electors in the Electoral College will not succeed, their main value does not lie in helping him keep the office, but in fueling indignation among his flock that the election was stolen. But, this raises the question of how the US got Trump and his movement? The question brings to mind Leon Trotsky’s characterization of Hitler’s base one year into Nazi rule, published in The Yale Review—they don’t get A-list talent like that anymore! Trotsky saw men of the middle strata (the petty bourgeoisie) as Hitler’s base. Facing uncertain economic conditions and diminished social status after the First World War, they considered bankers and journalists their enemies. The former profited as the conditions of others suffered while the latter were tarred as purveyors of “fake news.” Much of the industrial working class, by contrast, was immunized against the fascist contagion by the work of the communist party. # ⚓ Roaming_Charges:_Let’s_Get_Small⠀⇛ + One of the most useful things about Obama’s memoir is that he reminds who some of the people now being recycled into the Biden administration really are. John Kerry, for example, who Obama describes as working assiduously to convince greens to “offer up concessions on subsidies for nuclear power and the opening of addition US coastlines to offshore oil drilled.” Obama writes this with gratitude and admiration, naturally, and was probably all the recommendation Biden need to tap Kerry as his “climate czar.” + It gets worse. This week Biden picked Obama’s sidekick Brian Deese, a wheeler-dealer executive at BlackRock, to head his National Economic Council. Deese, a budget hawk, like many veterans of the Obama White House, handled the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, the NY investment house with $168 billion in assets, many of them in environmentally hostile enterprises. In 2019, BlackRock was listed as one of  the top three shareholders in every “supermajority” oil, except for Total. It  was also among the top 10 shareholders in 7 of the 10 biggest coal producers in the world. # ⚓ How_800_Families_Descended_From_Slaves_Could_Be_Pushed_Out by_a_Bolsonaro-U.S._Base_Deal_in_Brazil⠀⇛ The Movement of People Affected by the Launch Base  (MABE) estimates that about 800 quilombola families, such as that of Diniz, will be expelled if the expansion of the base takes place. (The term quilombola refers to descendants of African and Afro-Brazilian people who escaped from slave plantations.) The Alcântara base has one of the most strategic locations in the world for launching satellites. It was built in 1983 in the state of Maranhão, which has the second-worst Municipal Human Development Index in the country. One of the reasons for choosing the location is the proximity to the equator, which allows savings of up to 30 percent in fuel. # ⚓ Will_This_Be_the_Radicalization_of_Black_Lives_Matter?⠀⇛ In what appears to be an ongoing internal discussion, the chapters claimed that BLMGN not only did not collaborate on political visioning and collective analysis with the chapters but shockingly, with the millions reported in the media that was raised from foundations and corporations, “most chapters have received little to no financial support since the launch in 2013.” The lack of accountability and questions regarding the use of funds were almost inevitable because it was designed that way. Counterinsurgency efforts in the U.S. and elsewhere discovered that these methods are effective and adopted them as part of the playbook for corrupting and redirecting potential oppositional groups. # ⚓ RNC’s_highest-paid_vendor_of_the_2020_election:_A_mystery company_formed_nine_months_ago⠀⇛ In August, Salon reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had paid about $5 million to a mystery marketing services company called Digital Consulting Group LLC, starting with a $2 million expenditure in February, just a month after the company was formed. Now, filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group more than $42 million for media buys, consulting and marketing between February and October. The company went from nonexistent to being the Republican Party’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election, all in the space of eight months. # ⚓ France_to_investigate_dozens_of_mosques_suspected_of radicalisation⠀⇛ French authorities will swoop down Thursday on dozens of mosques and prayer halls suspected of radical teachings as part of a crackdown on Islamist extremists following a spate of attacks, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said. Darmanin told RTL radio that if any prayer hall was found to promote extremism it would be closed down. # ⚓ Tibet’s_government_in_exile_appoints_new_envoy_in_Taiwan⠀⇛ The Tibetan government in exile will move its envoy in Australia, Kelsang Gyaltsen Bawa, to Taiwan to serve as its de facto representative, reports said Friday (Dec. 4). Kelsang will succeed Dawa Tsering, who served the maximum six years as chairman of the Tibet Religious Foundation of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, CNA reported. The new envoy is scheduled to take up his post on Jan. 4 and serve a four-year term. o § Censorship/Free Speech⠀➾ # ⚓ Content_Moderation_Case_Study:_Google’s_Photo_App_Tags Photos_Of_Black_People_As_‘Gorillas’_(2015)⠀⇛ Summary: In May 2015, Google rolled out its “Google Photos” service. This service allowed users to store their images in Google’s cloud and share them with other users. Unlike some other services, Google’s photo service provided unlimited storage for photos under a certain resolution, making it an attractive replacement for other paid services. # ⚓ For_Islam,_French_cartoons_are_more_blasphemous_than_China jailing_Uyghurs⠀⇛ Beijing is Turkey’s second largest import partner, after Russia, and has invested three billion dollars there in three years, with a view to doubling it by 2021. And when the value of the Turkish lira fell by 40 percent in 2018, China provided 3.6 billion in loans to the Turkish government. Boycott France for cartoons and cower before China’s filling of Uyghur concentration camps. A masterpiece of Islamic hypocrisy. o § Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press⠀➾ # ⚓ Minsk_court_revokes_media_status_of_Belarusian_news_outlet ‘TUT.by’⠀⇛ A Minsk court has revoked the media status of the Belarusian online news outlet Tut.by.  o § Civil Rights/Policing⠀➾ # ⚓ Seasonal_Depression_and_the_Fallacy_of_White_Guilt⠀⇛ The consolation this year is that the whole damn country seems to be nearly as miserable as me for a change. America is a full blown basket case. The election that never ended never did, leaving a nation of shrieking partisan imbeciles with one more reason to mow each other down in holiday traffic. We now have two sexual predators with dementia proclaiming themselves leader of the free world and our only hope for salvation from the other. Our best hope may be that the Covid plague kills them both before anyone can bomb another hospital. Precious moments like these find me pondering the people we stole this hemisphere from and thinking out loud; Jesus Christ, we fucking deserve this. And even in the sweet psychosis of my depression fried lizard brain, I’ve got a point worth making. America is essentially a colossal luxury resort built on an Indian burial ground. How can any of us feign shock that this country is haunted? There was no First Thanksgiving Dinner. Not really. Just a bunch of Colonel Kurtz-ian colonial psychopaths in buckle hats, murdering tribe after tribe and fucking their daughters before they burnt them at the stake for doing long division. And the massacres never stopped. That tsunami of blood loosed from the elevator of the Santa Maria known as Manifest Destiny swept from sea to shining sea in what is still likely the most devastating holocaust in recorded history. # ⚓ Paying_Politicians_to_Criminalize_Protests⠀⇛ But since then, rather than scaling back their attacks on these communities, the fossil fuel industry decided to attack them even more fiercely. Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock were subject to a violent law enforcement response. They were blasted with water cannons in the freezing cold and faced down by heavily armed police in military vehicles. # ⚓ French_Legislators_Outlaw_Discriminating_Against_People Because_Of_Their_‘Regional_Accents’⠀⇛ France’s relationship with free speech is strange. On one hand, no one protests like the French protest. Given the nation’s predilection for targeted vandalism and guillotine construction, it would seem the government would have taken notice of citizens’ right to engage in speech that’s right on the edge of targeted violence… all without losing sight of the importance of that speech. # ⚓ 155_Years_After_Abolition,_Slavery_Is_Still_Legal_in_the United_States—Democratic_Lawmakers_Are_Trying_to_Fix_That⠀⇛ A joint congressional resolution would close the 13th Amendment’s “slavery loophole,” from which the prison-industrial complex and businesses big and small profit.  # ⚓ Demanding_Clemency_for_Lisa_Montgomery,_UN_Experts_Warn_US on_Verge_of_‘Arbitrary_Execution’⠀⇛ “Ms. Montgomery was the victim of an extreme level of physical and sexual abuse throughout her life against which the state never provided protection and for which it failed to offer remedies.” # ⚓ ‘Short-Sighted_and_Inhumane’:_Human_Rights_Groups_Sound Warnings_as_Bangladesh_Sends_Rohingya_Refugees_to_Low-Lying Silt_Island⠀⇛ “The relocation of so many Rohingya refugees to a remote island, which is still off limits to everyone including rights groups and journalists without prior permission, poses grave concerns about independent human rights monitoring.” # ⚓ Biographies_of_a_Revolutionary_Moment⠀⇛ Given this apparent reconsideration of Marxism and its meaning to life in today’s world, the publication of books like The Brother You Choose: Paul Coates and Eddie Conway Talk About Life, Politics, and the Revolution are not only useful, but important. Both Coates and Conway are former Black Panthers whose lives intertwined while simultaneously taking quite different directions. Conway ended up in a Maryland prison for decades after being convicted under very questionable circumstances of killing a Baltimore policeman. Coates, on the other hand, founded the publishing company Black Classic Press—an endeavor which continues to thrive, publishing classic and contemporary texts by Black writers. Conway was finally released from prison in 2014 after almost forty years inside. During his incarceration, Coates was Conway’s friend and support, working on Conway’s legal issues, helping him stay in touch with family, and visiting regularly. Upon Conway’s release, Coates provided him with a place to live. The two men remain friends and comrades, working and socializing together. Susie Day, whose sharp satire appears often in various LBGQT and leftist journals, put this book together. She first met Conway in a visit to Jessup Correctional Institute in Maryland. Struck by his mostly upbeat attitude and his certainty that he would eventually be released despite his indeterminant sentence, she continued the relationship after he finally was released. This book is the result of conversations she recorded between Conway and Coates, mostly at the offices of the Black Classics Press. They are flawlessly transcribed, bringing out the two men’s humor, love of life, understanding of history—both personal and in terms of their political and cultural heritage, and their concerns for the future. Day divides the text into chapters, providing a brief introduction to each that summarizes the men’s individual and political situation. The book begins with each man remembering how they met, their roles in the Panthers, what it meant to be in the Black Panther Party and ends with a discussion of what it means to be a revolutionary at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century. In between, the reader meets both men’s families (who include the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates), and their friends and comrades living and dead. There are also discussions of Conway’s life behind bars and Coates’ frustration at his inability to change that situation for so long. The politics of Black Lives Matter and other current movements are analyzed by the men and contrasted to the politics of their youth. Inside this particular discussion issues of class in the Black community are considered, as is the question of leadership. The result is a convivial and engaging conversation that is both oral history and political discussion. Contextualized and compact, The Brother You Choose is a useful addition to the literature arising from the social movements challenging systemic racism in the United States. # ⚓ Paul_Robeson,_Artist_as_Revolutionary⠀⇛ Anybody with an open mind who reads Sharon Rudahl’s superlative A Graphic Biography of Paul Robeson: Ballad of an American will conclude that Hannah- Jones’s statement is truthful. The degree to which racists both in and outside of government tried to “cancel” this African-American icon is shocking. Like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Paul Robeson was an assassination victim. In his case, the murder weapon wasn’t a bullet but decades of harassment and even a possible drug attempt to make him lose his mind. It was an example of a death by a thousand cuts. Although it is “merely” a comic book, the term that Harvey Pekar preferred to describe his own and similar works, it draws from a wealth of other books, including Martin Duberman’s highly regarded 1988 biography. However, the relationship between his life’s details and the popular form the book assumes is seamless. It is stunning to see how the minutiae of a man’s life can capture your attention. Of course, with someone like Paul Robeson, the inherent drama can overcome even the most pedestrian rendering. Suffice it to say that Rudahl has written one of the best radical comic books I have ever read. # ⚓ Federal_Judge_Delivers_‘Huge_Victory’_for_Immigrants, Ordering_Trump_Administration_to_Fully_Restore_DACA⠀⇛ “It opens the door for more than a million immigrant youth who have been unfairly denied their chance to apply for DACA,” said the director of the Justice Action Center. # ⚓ The_Pinkertons_Are_Still_Messing_With_Workers,_Now_for Amazon⠀⇛ The over 200-year-old Pinkerton security agency, synonymous with anti-labor activities, is still spying on workers in 2020. # ⚓ Death_of_a_Liberal_and_Black_Lives_Matter⠀⇛ Of course, that is not what happened. Instead the virus spread like a medieval plague, wreaking havoc across the world, forcing nations to close their borders, economies to descale and whole populations to go into lockdown. In Italy, the death count grew so rapidly that the military was brought in to store the corpses in churches and warehouses. In Ecuador, the bodies of the victims grew so numerous that many were just abandoned on the side of dusty roads like so much rubbish. The images broadcast from the global media were at the same time heart- rending and apocalyptic. The designation ‘Covid-19’ which, only a few months ago, meant very little to very many, is now on the tip of everyone’s lips. It’s hard, clinical syllables speak of the cold and relentless march of infinitesimally small particles of virus and our vulnerability as a species to them – even in an epoch where we have split the atom and space travel has morphed from science fiction into accomplished fact. But the virus laid bare more than just the fallibilities which inhere in our biology. It also laid bare the fallibilities in our forms of social organisation. While the rich were able to socially isolate, to retreat to lonely country mansions or second homes in sea-side villages, the poor, as ever, had no way out. Locked into tenement housing, often many people to a floor, even to a room – pressed into tight urban spaces with squat accommodation, and no feasible form of ‘socially distancing’ – the illness cut a swathe through their numbers, in the most painful and ruthless of ways. Men and women who couldn’t distance themselves, who couldn’t work from home but couldn’t afford to take a break from their jobs in the wider world either, often brought death back with them, carrying it into their homes on their clothes, their hands, their breaths – an invisible time bomb which would blow families apart and finish off loved ones. Lives lost – and to the sickening pain of grief was added the sting of guilt, and of utter, utter helplessness which is so often the lot of poverty. # ⚓ Justice_Department_Files_Lawsuit_Against_Facebook_for Discriminating_Against_U.S._Workers⠀⇛ The Department of Justice announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Facebook Inc. for discriminating against U.S. workers. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook refused to recruit, consider, or hire qualified and available U.S. workers for over 2,600 positions that Facebook, instead, reserved for temporary visa holders it sponsored for permanent work authorization (or “green cards”) in connection with the permanent labor certification process (PERM). The positions that were the subject of Facebook’s alleged discrimination against U.S. workers offered an average salary of approximately $156,000. According to the lawsuit, and based on the department’s nearly two-year investigation, Facebook intentionally created a hiring system in which it denied qualified U.S. workers a fair opportunity to learn about and apply for jobs that Facebook instead sought to channel to temporary visa holders Facebook wanted to sponsor for green cards. # ⚓ US_Justice_Department_lawsuit_says_Facebook_favoured immigrants_over_US_workers⠀⇛ “The Department of Justice’s lawsuit alleges that Facebook engaged in intentional and widespread violations of the law, by setting aside positions for temporary visa holders instead of considering interested and qualified US workers,” assistant attorney general Eric Dreiband, of the department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. The suit concerns more than 2,600 positions with an average salary of some $156,000, offered from January 2018 to September 2019. # ⚓ Justice_Dept._Suit_Says_Facebook_Discriminates_Against_U.S. Workers⠀⇛ In the complaint, the department’s civil rights division said Facebook “refused to recruit, consider or hire qualified and available U.S. workers” for more than 2,600 positions, with an average salary of $156,000. Those jobs instead went to immigrant visa holders, according to the complaint. The action followed a two-year investigation into whether Facebook intentionally favored so-called H1-B visa and other temporary immigrant workers over U.S. workers, the Justice Department said. # ⚓ MP:_Muslim_man_held_for_torturing_Hindu_wife,_forcing_her to_adopt_Islamic_culture⠀⇛ Two years later on Saturday, the woman returned to her parents’ house and refused to go back to Irshad’s house, alleging that she was being tortured by him and his family to adapt to his culture and learn Urdu and Arabic language. “I was being regularly tortured by him (Irshad) for adapting to his culture and also learn Urdu and Arabic language. Unable to bear the torture, I’ve returned to my parents’ house and will not return to him. I made a big mistake in leaving my house two years back and marrying him,” the woman said on Sunday. Confirming the development, the sub-divisional officer police (SDOP-Dhanpuri) Bharat Dube said on Monday, “The woman had left her house and started living with Irshad in 2018. Following a complaint from her parents’ then, we had recorded her statements. She had then told the police and sub- divisional magistrate (SDM) that she had left her house on own and was living with Irshad as his wife.” o § Internet Policy/Net Neutrality⠀➾ # ⚓ Somehow,_5G_Paranoia_Is_Only_Getting_Dumber⠀⇛ We’ve made it repeatedly clear that 5G now exists in some kind of alternate reality, untethered from this complicated mortal plane. One one side, you’ve got telecom giants, hardware vendors, and some politicians busy pretending that 5G is a revolutionary game changer, something you just sprinkle around to create near Utopian smart cities, smart vehicles, and miracle cancer cures. On the other side, you’ve got an international cabal of conspiracy theorists with a head full of pudding, who think 5G gives them COVID or is a diabolical deep state, mind-surveillance tool. # ⚓ The_Trump_FCC_Has_Failed_To_Protect_Low-Income_Americans During_A_Health_Crisis⠀⇛ # ⚓ Benton_Study_Again_Shows_How_‘Open_Access’_Broadband Networks_Can_Drive_Competition,_Improve_Service⠀⇛ In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access broadband networks (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service in numerous locations worldwide. Of course when the FCC released its “National Broadband Plan” back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector’s limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Both parties ignored the data and instead doubled down on our existing national telecom policy plan: letting AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast do pretty much whatever they’d like. # ⚓ Broadcast_Reform_Bill_Could_Spell_the_End_of_Canadian Ownership_Requirements⠀⇛ (prior posts in the Broadcasting Act Blunder series include Day 1: Why there is no Canadian Content Crisis, Day 2: What the Government Doesn’t Say About Creating a “Level Playing Field”, Day 3: Minister Guilbeault Says Bill C-10 Contains Economic Thresholds That Limit Internet Regulation. It Doesn’t, Day 4: Why Many News Sites are Captured by Bill C-10), Day 5: Narrow Exclusion of User Generated Content Services, Day 6: The Beginning of the End of Canadian Broadcast Ownership and Control Requirements, Day 7: Beware Bill C-10’s Unintended Consequences, Day 8: The Unnecessary Discoverability Requirements, Day 9: Why Use Cross- Subsidies When the Government is Rolling out Tech Tax Policies?, Day 10: Downgrading the Role of Canadians in their Own Programming, Day 11: The “Regulate Everything” Approach – Licence or Registration Required) o § Digital Restrictions (DRM)⠀➾ # ⚓ Stream-Ripping_Is_Next_Frontier_for_Piracy_Wars⠀⇛ The developing fight has the potential to be a consequential one both for the entertainment industry and beyond. Section 1201 has been around for a quarter century and has been explored a few times in court — most notably when the movie industry fought to ensure that no one cracked encryption and made permanent computer copies of DVDs and Blu-Rays. That said, copyright experts say that what constitutes an illegal “circumvention” is largely untested in American courts. What’s more, with auto owners, smart phone owners and others now complaining that copyright law prevents them from tinkering, Congress has taken a renewed interest in 1201. Recently, Sen. Thomas Tillis (R-NC) has highlighted the need for reform, commenting, “I’m looking forward to our section 1201 hearing this month because my sense is that we may need to tweak that provision to ensure that the exemptions adequately account for consumer concerns, including by allowing for third-party repair of software- enabled devices.” As for the Section 1201 debate around youtube-dl, the conversation confronts so-called “stream- ripping,” a phenomenon that some in the industry worry will erode revenue. Given that streaming platforms have largely supplanted file-sharing hubs this century, it makes sense that access control has become a focal point. Taking steps like a crack down on password sharing is one part of the picture. The industry is also waging a quiet legal war against illegal [sic] streaming boxes, pirate IPTV and, now, rippers. # ⚓ Why_Warner_Bros._had_to_move_its_2021_films_to_HBO_Max⠀⇛ But the shift to HBO Max is a bet on long-term growth in streaming offsetting the immediate loss from theatrical and other revenue streams. It’s part of a long-term play at making streaming a primary business for WarnerMedia that’s been accelerated by the effects of the pandemic. This does come with some downfalls that are impossible to ignore: In 2019, Warner Bros. was the top earner for WarnerMedia, bringing in $14.4 billion — just under 50 percent of all revenues within the division. Some of it was from the box office, but a lot of it came from home video purchases and syndication. Since HBO Max is paying Warner Bros. for the rights to the films, it’s not additional revenue but shifting catalogs between one WarnerMedia property to another. o § Monopolies⠀➾ # ⚓ EU_Commission_sets_out_new_intellectual_property_action plan_affecting_SEPs,_patent_pooling_and_EU_design protection⠀⇛ The EU Commission published a new intellectual property action plan. The action plan, touted as “an intellectual property action plan to support the EU’s recovery and resilience” outlines possible future moves, noting that intangible assets are “the cornerstone of today’s economy”, with IPR- intensive industries generating 29.2% (63 million) of all jobs in the EU during the period 2014-2016, and contributing 45% of the total economic activity (GDP) in the EU worth €6 trillion. # ⚓ COVID_pledge_co-founder:_‘Only_sharing_can_effect_global change’⠀⇛ Diane Peters, general counsel at Creative Commons, reveals how she got involved in the Open COVID Pledge and what she wants in IP policy # § Patents⠀➾ # ⚓ FOSS_Patents:_Desperate-defiant_Nokia_withdraws_two Dusseldorf_patent_cases_against_Daimler,_trollishly refiles_in_Munich–where_it’s_losing_ground_as_well⠀⇛ Nokia’s litigation counsel can’t be blamed–their “hit rate” is higher than the industry average in SEP enforcement, though an independent analysis showed this year that the quality of Nokia’s aging SEP portfolio is average at best. But the purpose of litigation typically isn’t to stick copies of symbolical courtroom victories to a wall. It’s about leverage, and that’s precisely what Nokia is still lacking. Nokia’s lobbying prowess (with Daimler and some of its suppliers failing miserably in that regard) has so far dissuaded the European Commission from letting its Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) do its job and investigate Nokia’s SEP abuse. I’m sorry I temporarily blamed DG COMP for not taking action. Over time it became clearer and clearer that the problem has nothing to do with DG COMP. The main culprit is Thierry Breton (the EU’s internal market commissioner). It’s just not conducive to DG COMP’s credibility (even with a non- competition commissioner being the one to blame). Whenever the Commission does or does not decide to investigate a high-profile complaint, a displeased party may insinuate protectionism. Just last month I expressed my fundamental skepticism concerning claims that certain antitrust complaints over SAP’s software licensing terms (and as an app developer I am sympathetic to software makers who want to maintain a reasonable degree of flexibility, especially in the business-to- business segment, as to the scope of what users may do with the licensed products) don’t get traction just because of SAP’s importance to Europe’s digital economy. It actually appears those complaints are contrived and unpersuasive. Still, some try to leverage an allegation of protectionism in a context like that, and by not taking action against Nokia, the Commission harms its own reputation as a competition enforcer at a time when that function is morei important than ever (not only–but also–in the SEP context). # § Copyrights⠀➾ # ⚓ Nancy_Pelosi_Sells_Out_The_Public:_Agrees_To_Put Massive_Copyright_Reform_In_‘Must_Pass’_Spending_Bill⠀⇛ I know everyone is focused on Trump’s attempt to take away Section 230 in the NDAA, but an equally important issue is that members of Congress have been trying to do Hollywood’s bidding and sneak massive copyright reform into a must-pass government appropriations bill. The CASE Act has many problems that we’ve discussed, including the fact that it would unleash a wave of copyright trolling for people accidentally or innocently sharing works they don’t realize are covered by copyright. There are also significant Constitutional problems with it, in that it routes around the Title III courts by handing disputes about private rights to the executive branch. That’s not allowed. # ⚓ Movie_Theaters_Aren’t_Dying—They’re_Being_Murdered⠀⇛ Aron’s alarm is justified. We’re witnessing a transformation of what it means to watch a movie. For over a century, film was at its core a theatrical art form: While it’s true that movies could be watched on TV, the primary cinematic experience was immersive viewing in a theater surrounded by strangers. Now there is a push to make the movie theater merely one platform among others, offering an experience deemed no more meaningful than watching the same feature-length visual narratives on a home entertainment system, a laptop, or even a cell phone. # ⚓ Search_Engines_Reported_to_Monopoly_Investigators Over_Pirated_Content⠀⇛ The Association for the Protection of Copyright on the Internet (AZAPI) has filed complaints with Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service against Internet giants Yandex and Mail.ru. According to AZAPI, granting some rightsholders access to tools that remove links to pirated copies from search results while denying the same to publishers amounts to an abuse of their dominant market positions. # ⚓ ACE_&_MPA_Target_Pirate_IPTV_Provider_&_Yet_Again, VOD_Will_Be_The_Achilles’_Heel⠀⇛ By their very nature, pirate IPTV services are clearly illegal and several have faced action through the courts in the US. To date, Hollywood studios have won every lawsuit in a devastating fashion. Yet, despite these cases being reported in detail, some IPTV services still haven’t worked out how to stay off the radar. # ⚓ Reform_The_DMCA?_OK,_But_Only_If_It’s_Done_Really, Really_Carefully⠀⇛ The DMCA is a weird law. It’s comprised of two almost completely unrelated provisions: Section 512, with its platform safe harbors, and Section 1201, which forbids circumventing technological measures. Both parts are full of problems, but to the extent that the DMCA provides platforms with liability protection via the safe harbors, it is also a critically important law. We are therefore fans of the DMCA because of this platform protection it provides, but it’s like being fans of a terrible actor who had one absolutely fantastic performance in a classic movie we can’t stop loving, even though the rest of his work is unwatchable dreck. In other words, we can’t pretend the law is without its appeal, but we nevertheless fervently wish it were a whole lot better since we’re stuck having to deal with the rest of it. # ⚓ We’re_Against_Digital_Rights_Management._Here’s Why.⠀⇛ What is DRM? DRM consists of access control technologies or restrictive licensing agreements that attempt to restrict the use, modification, and distribution of legally- acquired works. Examples include encryption technology used on DVDs, keys (or passwords) with video games or copying restrictions on ebooks.  ╘══════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╛ ¶ Lines in total: 4991 ➮ Generation completed at 00:16, i.e. 100 seconds to (re)generate ⟲