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Posted in News Roundup at 7:59 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
↺ TUXEDO Stellaris 15 Linux Gaming Laptop Launches with AMD Ryzen 9, NVIDIA RTX 3080, and 3K Display
Meet TUXEDO Stellaris 15, the newest member of the ever-growing line of Linux computers from TUXEDO Computers, and the second to ship with a 3K display, after TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14, featuring a generous and sharp 15.6-inch size with a 2560×1440 pixels resolution, 350 nits brightness, 800:1 contrast, and an 165 Hz refresh rate.
But TUXEDO Stellaris 15 is a high-performance gaming laptop, and its best feature is that it lets you customize it with either AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, or Intel Core i7-11800H “Tiger Lake” H45 processors with 8 cores and 16 threads, as well as a power consumption of 45 watts.
The latest Linux kernel release, version 5.13, has become the first official kernel to support Apple M1-powered devices.
In the works for two months, the larger-than-usual release had a relatively uneventful development cycle. For reasons that continue to remain a mystery, the codename for this release has been changed to “Opossums on Parade”.
In addition to the usual round of improvements, the highlight of the release is initial support for Apple’s homebrewed Arm-based M1 system on a chip (SoC), thanks primarily to the efforts of Hector Martin’s Asahi Linux project.
“So over the years the seven release candidates have become the ‘expected number’ when things go normally, and then occasionally we have an extra week and an extra release candidate if there’s some question about late fixes,” he added.
“The last time we had more than that was 4.15, which went to nine, but that’s over three years ago, so it’s rare.
“So 5.13 looks normal. Of course, there might be some surprises lurking that we just didn’t catch, but on the whole it looks smooth, particularly considering how big the merge window was.”
Announcing the release on the Linux kernel making list Linus Torvalds commented that: “[Linux] 5.13 overall is actually fairly large. In fact, it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers”.
What makes the latest Linux kernel update so big?
Read on to find out.
Linux Torvalds announced the release of Linux Kernel 5.13. Here’s a recap of the new features and we give you the details on downloading this Kernel.
The previous release, Linux 5.12, added support for the ACRN hypervisor designed for IoT & embedded devices, Playstation DualSense & Nintendo 64 game controllers, as well as Nintendo 64 data cartridges, implemented dynamic thermal power management via a subsystem that allows the power usage of groups of devices to be capped to meet thermal constraints, and said goodbye to O-profile, replaced by perf events, among many other changes.
Yes, Linux 5.13 was released yesterday, but we never published the blog post detailing our contributions to Linux 5.12, so let’s do this now! First of all the usual links to the excellent LWN.net articles on the 5.12 merge window: part 1 and part 2.
LWN.net also published an article with Linux 5.12 development statistics, and two Bootlin engineers made their way to the statistics: Alexandre Belloni in the list of top contributors by number of changesets, with 69 commits, and Paul Kocialkowski in the list of top contributors by number of changed lines, with over 6000 lines changed.
Among the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.14 merge window are the scheduler updates that includes the introduction of Core Scheduling. The Core Scheduling functionality has been in the works for the past few years by multiple vendors for better securing SMT systems following various vulnerabilities coming to light around Hyper Threading.
Core-Scheduling is finally going mainline for Linux 5.14. Linux core scheduling has been worked on by hyperscalers and public cloud providers to improve security without disabling Hyper Threading. The functionality amounts to what resources can share a CPU core and ensuring potentially unsafe tasks don’t run on a sibling thread of a trusted task. By ensuring trusted/untrusted tasks don’t share a core by way of HT/SMT, they can more comfortably keep Hyper Threading enabled, which for public cloud providers is particularly important with the amount of “vCPUs” they can offer per server.
The KVM changes were submitted early ahead of the now-open Linux 5.14 merge window.
When it comes to photo management software in Linux, Shotwell is perhaps the most famous of them all. No wonder it comes preinstalled in many distributions.
But if you are looking for a Shotwell like application which is a bit faster, Fotoxx could be a good choice.
It may not have a modern user interface, but it is fast in handling a large collection of photos. And it matters because indexing and showing thumbnails for thousands of photos could take considerable time and computing resources.
In this series, I’ll describe a few best practices for setting up NTP in a standard 64-bit Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS environment. Bear in mind this quite limited scope; this advice will not apply in all circumstances and intentionally ignores the less common use cases. Further caveats: [...]
Are you new for Linux and even don’t know “how to delete file in Linux Ubuntu 20.04″? Or Do you want to learn more options to delete files? Don’t worry.
As you know the graphical environment is growing day by day, And now you can use a graphical interface to delete the file.
Trust me Command line interface is more interesting then GUI. Once you will be habitual of commands you never like press right/left click on objects through mouse of your computer.
On Linux, you may be familiar with the standard Unix archive command: tar. There’s a version of tar on FreeDOS too (and a bunch of other popular archive programs), but the de facto standard archiver on DOS is Zip and Unzip. Both Zip and Unzip are installed in FreeDOS 1.3 RC4 by default.
The Zip file format was originally conceived in 1989 by Phil Katz of PKWARE, for the PKZIP and PKUNZIP pair of DOS archive utilities. Katz released the specification for Zip files as an open standard, so anyone could create Zip archives. As a result of the open specification, Zip became a standard archive on DOS. The Info-ZIP project implements an open source set of ZIP and UNZIP programs.
Have you noticed “how can you see the size of directory in Linux?” where have you seen the size of a directory in Linux?
Don’t you remember?
But in fact, you can’t see the directory size in a general way. You must do some extra effort for completing this task.
I will cover everything in this article.
It is quite easy in windows, You just move the cursor over the directory and you will see the file and directory size. and It is the total size of the directory.
Keeping program configurations separate from code is important. It enables non-programmers to alter configurations without having to modify the program’s code. With compiled binary executables, that would be impossible for non-programmers because it not only requires access to source files (which we do have with open source programs) but also a programmer’s skill set. Few people have that, and most people don’t want to learn.
[...]
So placing configuration items into easily maintained text files provides separation and allows non-programmers to edit configuration elements without the danger of making unintentional changes to the code. Many developers do this for programs written in compiled languages because they don’t expect the users to be developers. For many of the same reasons, it also makes sense to do this with interpreted shell languages.
The highly respected developer known as Near, creator of emulators like bsnes, higan and more has died. Near has a long history in the emulation scene, working with others and often alone to create some really important software focused on accuracy and also contributions to translating some really popular titles.
Please be aware the following links have some disturbing content that touches on bullying, suicide and more.
In the early hours of June 27, Near (whose real name is Dave and identifies as non-binary) posted a very concerning thread on Twitter, explaining how they’ve suffered their whole life from bullying, harassment and more. This wasn’t just in early life but across the internet too from the likes of 4chan and later a site called Kiwi Farms. The Twitter post was very alarming and painted a concerning picture of their declining mental health. Later that same day, respected security consultant and hacker Hector Martin posted on Twitter a Google Document file to explain that Near has died.
It’s been a long road for Valve fighting against bots in Team Fortress 2 but it looks like the community has been overall quite happy with the latest changes.
This has led to Team Fortress 2 seeing a popularity explosion in users playing, with it hitting a new all-time peak of 151,253 around 3 days ago with the previous peak being 147,360 back in December 2020 which you can see (along with much more) on the useful SteamDB website.
This is the reason why gaming on Linux, an operating system that currently holds a market share of just 2.38%, has been a difficult task for most players.
[...]
Linux gamers get the best experience when software developers create titles that are programmed to natively run on the operating system. This may be through coding it to run on the Linux kernel from the ground up or porting it over to be compatible with how it works.
The first ported game was Doom 1994, thanks to the efforts of Dave D. Taylor who worked on it in his spare time. However, little progress would be made until the late 2000s when Humble Bundle began selling its Humble Indie Bundles which supported Linux. Users of the operating system account for 25% of revenue, and this helped developers to see the potential of the market.
In 2012, Valve announced it would port its game engine to Linux, making it easy for developers to create Linux versions of games. The following year, the company released SteamOS, a Linux distro designed specifically for gaming.
Valve was quickly followed by Unity Technologies, Feral Interactive, GOG, and Epic Games who have also since begun supporting Linux. This helped titles like Insurgency: Sandstorm and Borderlands get released on the OS.
Unvanquished, the free and open source humans vs aliens strategic shooter had another update recently, although mostly a cleaning up build from the recent big release.
To make things easier and to ensure people across different distributions can access it easily and keep it up to date, Unvanquished is now available on Flathub as a Flatpak package. Nice to see more games do this officially as it’s a good solution for so many distributions.
For bug fixes they solved a really rendering old bug with stray lines appearing across the screen, a bug causing weapon models to disappear was also solved and an NVIDIA big affecting all OpenGL3+ hardware on proprietary drivers across all operating systems that caused z-fighting (you would see weird black artifacts) has been solved. So now most users will see a much nicer gameplay experience, except Intel UHD who are advised to stick to the Medium graphical preset as there may be a driver bug resulting in graphical issues.
Hear more and more about NAS servers or “Network Attached Storage Devices”, a specific class of computers that allow us to do this Setting up our personal cloud Even hosting backups, a medical center, or a torrent download client.
However, what sets it apart is that, whether we use a commercial device or configure our NAS at home to reuse an old computer, The operating systems and/or distributions we will use are not the same we are used to For use in home computers.
So we compiled Four Most Used NAS Operating Systems (two in the “open source” category, and two more in the commercial [sic] solutions category), so we can start to get to know them a little better.
Containers and orchestration make up a growing part of IT’s present and future. The majority of IT leaders surveyed in Red Hat’s 2021 State of Enterprise Open Source report said they anticipated increasing container usage in their organizations during the next 12 months: 30 percent expect a significant increase, and 42 percent expect a slight increase. Kubernetes adoption is rising alongside that trend.
Containerization and orchestration also overlap two other key trends right now: Application migration and application modernization. Migration typically refers to moving workloads from one environment (today, usually a traditional datacenter) to another (usually a cloud platform.) Modernization, often used as an umbrella term, refers to the various methods of migrating applications to a cloud environment. These run the gamut from leaving the code largely as-is to a significant (or total) overhaul in order to optimize a workload for cloud-native technologies.
Red Hat technology evangelist Gordon Haff notes that this spectrum bears out in Red Hat’s enterprise open source research: The 2020 report found a healthy mix of strategies for managing legacy applications, including “leave as-is” (31 percent), “update or modernize” (17 percent), “re-architect as cloud-enabled (16 percent), and “re-architect as cloud-native” (14 percent).
Digital transformation today is intertwined with processes and tools that foster speed, agility, flexibility, and experimentation. “The goal of digital transformation is to evolve a business to compete in a digital landscape,” says Helen Beal, chief ambassador for DevOps Institute. “This necessitates becoming a technology- or software-led business.”
That’s why DevOps and digital transformation go hand in hand.
DevOps emerged more than a decade ago, borrowing a page from the manufacturing industry. Instead of focusing on the discrete and — for many years, disparate — tasks involved in the development and ongoing operations of software, DevOps took a more integrated product-centric approach that eliminated a significant amount of overhead and rework and improved quality, speed, and overall outcomes.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has said “yes” to using Yescrypt for hashing shadow passwords with this distribution’s next release. Using Yescrypt in place of SHA256/SHA512 should lead to greater security for new user accounts.
For a few weeks there has been a change proposal to use Yescrypt as the default hashing method for new user passwords stored in /etc/shadow. Yescrypt should be more secure and other Linux distributions like Debian Testing, Kali Linux, and ALT Linux have also been switching over to it.
GUIs are nice pieces of software. They often help with a lot of daily tasks. For example, they let you visualize what you’re doing on the system, surf the internet, and much more, but they don’t belong on servers. The reason for this strong claim comes from the fact that sysadmins shouldn’t be using a server as a desktop, and generally speaking, a server can be administered completely via the command line interface (CLI).
A full-fledged desktop environment is also resource-heavy. It can easily require 2 GB of RAM and three gigabytes or more disk space just to exist. Yes, you can install lightweight GUIs, but again, resources are unnecessarily wasted.
Are you on Debian and keep missing packages or want some of the latest applications on top of your stable system? Say hello to the brand new Debian User Repository in the style of the Arch User Repository. It only got announced a couple of days ago so it’s very fresh-faced and so there’s not many packages yet, but it could end up being something revolutionary for Debian – perhaps anyway.
The creator, Hunter Wittenborn, mentioned how they initially started off developing makedeb, which makes Debian packages from Arch PKGBUILDs as they loved “Arch Linux’s simple and efficient PKGBUILD format for creating packages”. Another project, mpm, came later as a package manager for makedeb to make it even easier. So the Debian User Repository seems like the natural evolution of their ongoing work.
Version 2.8.1 was released on June 10, see blog announcement:
https://bkhome.org/news/202106/easyos-dunfell-series-281-released.html
I was intending to wait until SeaMonkey 2.53.8 is released for building the next release of EasyOS. However, it could be tomorrow, or it could be a few weeks away, so decided to bring out Easy 2.8.3 now (there is no 2.8.2).
I have received 4 or 5 emails asking when there will be another release of the Debian-based Buster-series. I had announced that want to consolidate, and only develop the Dunfell-series, for x86_64 PC and aarch64 Pi4, however, given the interest in the Buster-series, I suppose can keep it going, with the occasional update. I would, however, encourage newcomers to choose the Dunfell-series, as that is where most development effort is happening.
Let’s a lot of excitement around RISC-V open architecture, but a lot of work still needs to be done to bring the ecosystem to level with Arm or x86 architecture from the silicon to the software. Progress is made step-by-step and one of these steps is Canonical released Ubuntu 64-bit RISC-V (RISCV64) images for some of SiFive HiFive boards, as well as QEMU open-source emulator.
Specifically, Canonical released an Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS image for HiFive Unleashed & QEMU, and an Ubuntu 21.04 image for HiFive Unleashed, HiFive Unmatched, and QEMU. Note those are only server images, and there’s no desktop image yet like for Ubuntu 21.04 on Raspberry Pi 2/3/4.
The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites, product web interfaces and much more. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
The same UR5 robot arm and Intel RealSense D-435 deployed on a customized four-wheeled vehicle. (Figure 3) The system runs on a Dell (Round Rock, TX, USA; www.dell.com) Inspiron PC with Intel i7-6700 CPU and NVIDIA GT-1070 GPU, again running the Kinetic version of ROS and Linux Ubuntu 16.04. A RealSense communication package connects the camera, robot, and PC.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on cloud services. This is purely ideological, I have no real reason to distrust the cloud, nor am I going to attempt to convince you to. I just made a decision a while ago that all my mission critical/sensitive stuff needed to be moved off of centralised cloud storage. The stories of people losing their Google accounts for practically no reason scare me.
One particularly scary change that happened recently was Google Photos deciding to change their ‘unlimited’ storage plan to not be unlimited anymore. This was obviously going to happen at some point, but frankly I feel like companies need to stop pretending like they can offer unlimited use of something unless they plan to honour that for the lifetime of the service. Either way, I’ve always felt pretty uncomfortable with having my photos being hosted and managed by someone else, so I started to explore alternatives.
This year, I decided to participate as speaker in esLibre 2021 conference. esLibre is a Spanish free software conference that covers a lot of different topics related to open-source projects: from the technical point of view to its social impact.
This year the conference had talks about game development with Godot, KDE, LibreOffice, Free Software in Universities among many others. Check out the program.
[...]
My talk was an introduction to Mesa where I covered things like where is Mesa in the open-source graphics stack, a summary of what it does, the drivers implemented in Mesa, how our community is organized and how to contribute to it. If you know Spanish, you can check it out here (PDF). But in case you want an English version of it, this talk is very similar to the one I gave at Ubucon Europe 2018.
The Netherlands is becoming dependent on a digital infrastructure that is dominated by a small number of monopolistic companies. Although the Dutch Cyber Security Council recognises the consequent risk, their report neglects focusing on Open Standards and Free Software, the proven best practices to face this problem. The FSFE calls on the Dutch government to stand firm and get a grip on their digital security and autonomy by adhering to Open Standards and Free Software, in line with their earlier commitment to use Free Software by default.
Our team emphatically defends digital rights in the Netherlands. In 2018, Jos van den Oever noticed that the ‘Debat Direct’ app could not be downloaded to his Firefox OS phone. In other words, the official application for parliamentary debates was not available under a Free Software license. Jos’ request to get the app’s source code was denied, and he brought the case to court. The Council of State ruled on 31 March 2021 that the Parliament does not have to publish the source code. As a result, the participation app remains closed to those who wish to use only Free Software apps.
Jos van den Oever, the person behind this initiative, is a FSFE volunteer and part of our country team Netherlands. Its members kept in touch even during the pandemic, when they had to replace booths for online meetings. Nico Rikken, one of the two coordinators, shares his experiences about this transition in a blogpost, and calls anyone interested to join the FSFE community based in the Netherlands..
One area in which Ada excels is that the language was designed specifically to solve the problems faced by long-lived embedded projects, which means portability is a primary concern. To achieve (among other benefits) improved portability, Ada has rich specification semantics that give the programmer the tools to precisely control how data is represented in memory, down to the bit!
This feature of the Ada language is known as the record representation clause. To understand this feature, we’ll quickly introduce the concepts of a machine scalar and storage element. Simply put, a storage element is the smallest amount of addressable memory (typically a byte) and a machine scalar is an integer multiple of storage elements that can be efficiently loaded, stored, or operated on by the hardware.
In today’s digital-first world, businesses are rethinking their approach to security. Instead of a traditional reactive approach of band-aid security solutions, CISOs are now looking for scalable, long-term strategies that could proactively protect their enterprise environment and prevent cyber criminals from taking advantage of vulnerabilities that got exposed during crisis situations like the one we all are currently going through.
On Linux, you can do a single task in several ways. Likewise, if you want to count the number of lines in single or multiple files, you can use different commands. In this article, I’ll share five different ways including that you can use to print a total number of lines in a large file.
Linux offers a lot of commands to help users gather information about their host operating system: listing files or directories to check attributes; querying to see what packages are installed, processes are running, and services start at boot; or learning about the system’s hardware.
Each command uses its own output format to list this information. You need to use tools like grep, sed, and awk to filter the results to find specific information. Also, a lot of this information changes frequently, leading to changes in the system’s state.
Compressing webpages to make them smaller is crucial to ensure fast webpage load times. Gzip and Brotli are the web’s two most used compression formats. A third contender, HTTP Deflate, has been around as long as Gzip, but it never caught on. Do you still need to support it on your websites and apps? or is it time to retire HTTP Deflate from the web platform?
Every major web browser and all sorts of other tools and apps send an Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip header to every web server they connect to. The request header advertises to the server that the client support the listed compression formats (“encodings.”) Both HTTP Deflate and Gzip have been supported since HTTP version 1.1 back in 1999. Most modern web browsers also announce support for the newer Brotli (br) format.
The Gzip format is much more common than HTTP Deflate, despite their similar history. The 2020 Web Almanac analyzed more than 7,5 million website homepages to study compression trends. If found that only 0,015 % of servers returned an HTTP Deflate encoded response. Roughly 30 % of responses used Gzip, and about 10 % used the newer Brotli compression format.
Google has a firm grip on the desktop. Their products and services are ubiquitous. Don’t get us wrong, we’re long-standing admirers of many of Google’s products and services. They are often high quality, easy to use, and ‘free’, but there can be downsides of over-reliance on a specific company. For example, there are concerns about their privacy policies, business practices, and an almost insatiable desire to control all of our data, all of the time.
What if you are looking to move away from Google and embark on a new world of online freedom, where you are not constantly tracked, monetised and attached to Google’s ecosystem.
In this series, we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything.
The awesomeness of this program is acceptable, I suppose. However I wrote it when I was just starting to get the hang of Mathematica. For a more idiomatic approach to the geometry (one using Position), see my more recent cellular automata 3D 1. And for a more methodical approach to structuring larger programs of this kind, see my matrix replacement 2.
“Creating emails and PPTs, handling social media, and understanding cyber security rules are most common features of digital space. But rural women were hardly aware of such facilities,” says Priyanka.
The study evaluated digital habits as the way people understand digital terms of service and app permissions, privacy awareness was assessed based on how people use digital devices and passwords, and the digital risk tolerance was judged based on how people react to phishing emails or online blackmail. Globally, digital security awareness has a long way to go, the study adds, adding that almost half of respondents polled globally believe that deleting the browsing history wipes out their digital footprint. “Websites, internet service providers, and even governments can monitor your browsing data long after you’ve cleared your history,” it notes.
The global natural environment has become very dangerous for our health, as we breathe hazardous air, eat toxic food, watching extreme weather episodes and every coming year more warmed than the previous one, yet the health policies and death records all over the world do not document these facts. Death records reflect different injuries, lung failure, heart attack, and failures of the different organ that occur at the end of life, however, they do not indicate environmental issues that are mainly responsible for these lethal factors.
Microsoft tests drivers before assigning them a digital certificate that approves them to be installed by default. Somehow, a driver called Netfilter that redirects traffic to an IP in China and installs a root certificate to the registry managed to make it through that testing without being detected as malware.
Karsten Hahn, a malware analyst at G Data, found the malicious driver and notified Microsoft, “who promptly added malware signatures to Windows Defender and are now conducting an internal investigation.” Microsoft also suspended the account that submitted the driver, and is currently going over their previous submissions.
The company did not say whether the attackers are targeting known or new vulnerabilities in the enterprise appliances.
The investment comes in the form of convertible notes and Splunk says it plans on using the money to “fund growth initiatives and manage its capital structure.” This includes a share repurchase program of up to $1 billion that will be executed over time.
The convertible senior notes purchased by Silver Lake will have an initial conversion price of $160 per share, and they will mature in July 2026, with an annual interest of 0.75%.
The Exchange caught up with Mike Volpi of Index Ventures, an early backer of Confluent, on the company’s IPO day. During our chat, we got to nibble on the open-source (OSS) startup world, which Volpi said changed dramatically in recent years. From his telling, venture investors back in 2015 weren’t too hyped about open-source startups, arguing that there already was one (Red Hat), and that that was going to be roughly about it.
After successfully setting up our team, office and processes in the past years, 2020 marks the year in which we could truly focus on our legal work and enforcement strategy. Our team in Vienna grew to 15 people from 10 countries by the end of the year and was responsible for more than 125 complaints and six cases before courts, as well as our home-made wiki GDPRhub and keeping our processes up and running. In July 2020, we celebrated our biggest success so far when the European Court of Justice invalidated Privacy Shield and ultimately changed how data transfers need to be handled in the future. Furthermore, substantial fines have been imposed based on our complaints.
In 2020 we were able to fight back and show our teeth: In our long lasting case on EU-US data transfers (“Schrems II”) the European Court of Justice invalidated the Privacy Shield and substantially changed how data transfers need to be handled in the future. We filed 101 complaints against controllers still forwarding data to the US in August 2020 which lead to a specific task force of the EDPB, we provided information for EU companies on how to comply with the ruling and informing users about their options to stop data transfers to the US. Furthermore, noyb is fighting a legal battle with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, the responsible authority for Facebook, to enforce the judgment and stop Facebook’s data transfers to the US. Representatives of noyb were participating in hearings and discussions on future data transfer mechanisms. We commented on a draft by the European Commission on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) to have an impact on how future data transfer mechanisms will be designed. But our work was not limited to data transfer, we also filed numerous complaints to fight against infringements of the GDPR, being it violations of data subject rights or online tracking.
End-to-end encrypted messaging application Signal is not in compliance with the new social media and intermediary guidelines, officials aware of the matter said. The privacy-focused app is also likely to be liable under the Information Technology Act and the provision of safe harbour in it is unlikely to be applicable to it due to the non-compliance, they added.
The officials said the app, developed by the Silicon Valley based nonprofit Signal Foundation, has not shared the details of a compliance officer with the government under the new guidelines.
Signal is a significant social media intermediary as it has over five million users in the country.
The average full-time worker gained about 15% more spare time during the pandemic, according to a survey by MIDiA of consumers in America, Australia, Britain and Canada. Not only did they have more time, but those who kept their jobs had more money, too. Americans’ spending on recreation such as sports, theme parks and holidays, fell by 30% in 2020.
Instead, people turned to their screens. In Britain, the time people spent online last year (including television streaming services) rose by more than half an hour a day, to nearly five hours, according to Ofcom, a communications regulator. Being connected became essential. At the start of the pandemic one in ten British homes lacked internet access, but since then about half of those have got online. Seeking new distractions, smartphone users around the world installed 143bn new apps on their devices, a quarter more than in 2019 (and more than double the previous year’s rate of growth), according to Craig Chapple of Sensor Tower, which monitors app stores.
In April, Facebook introduced new Myanmar-specific rules against praising or supporting the military for arrests or acts of violence against civilians. It also banned praise of protesters who attack the military or security forces. But according to Global Witness, Facebook’s own recommendation algorithms have been inviting users to like pages that share pro-military propaganda that violates the platform’s rules.
Former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel, most well known for putting the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record to make them available to the American public, has died at the age of 91, according to multiple news reports on Sunday.
He died on June 26 in his Seaside, Calif. home, the Washington Post reported.
Iran has been reducing its cooperation with the UN watchdog that formed part of the 2015 deal with world powers to contain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
But the two sides had agreed on a three-month deal in February to share some images so as to maintain at least some monitoring of its atomic activities.
Parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf told lawmakers that “nothing has been extended after the three-month period and following that, none of the information subject to recording will be given to the IAEA, but will remain at the disposal of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Patrick Worman, acting director of the U.S. Office of the Special Envoy to Defeat ISIS, told reporters a particular focus of the meeting will be “new challenges ISIS is posing in Africa,” particularly West Africa and the Sahel.
The United States launched a coalition effort, now involving 83 members, aimed at defeating the Islamic State group in 2014 after the militants seized control of a large area across northern Syria and Iraq, and in 2019 declared the militants had been ousted from their last remaining territory.
One set of documents discusses the likely Russian reaction to the ship’s passage through Ukrainian waters off the Crimea coast on Wednesday.
Another details plans for a possible UK military presence in Afghanistan after the US-led [NATO] operation there ends.
Hundreds of young activists with the Sunrise Movement are set to gather outside the White House Monday to reiterate their demands that Democrats “stop negotiating with a GOP who is not serious about climate action” and include in an infrastructure package a “fully funded and robust” Civilian Climate Corps.
“The people are on our side and they know what’s at stake,” the climate group tweeted Sunday.
When you picture Yellowstone National Park and its neighbor, Grand Teton, the snowcapped peaks and Old Faithful Geyser almost certainly come to mind. Climate change threatens all of these iconic scenes, and its impact reaches far beyond the parks’ borders.
Seventy percent of the US economy depends on consumer spending. But wealthy people, who now own more of the economy than at any time since the 1920s, spend only a small percentage of their incomes. Lower-income people, who were in trouble even before the pandemic, spend whatever they have – which has become very little.
When it comes to assaults on Medicare, the same thing happens. Medicare Advantage, originally called Medicare Choice, introduced in 1997 during the Clinton administration, got its even slippery monicker in 2003. It neither improves choice nor is an advantage. Presented to Medicare enrollees as a better option than the government’s traditional Medicare Parts A and B and D, it actually reduces the choice of doctor and can leave patients without any protection from huge health costs or any ability to buy supplemental insurance.
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Readers of the Washington Post this past Sunday, many of whom work at least a 40-hour week with short vacations, were informed by reporter Paul Kane about the large number of recess days the Senate and the House are taking this summer. In the midst of a huge backlog of critical legislation – as with the multi-trillion-dollar public and human infrastructure bills and other responsibilities deferred under prior periods of Republican control – these recess periods constitute reckless abandon and endangerment to the country.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday urged President Joe Biden against being “limited by Republicans” in moving infrastructure legislation forward, calling the political moment “our one big shot” on issues from Medicare to the climate emergency.
The New York Democrat’s remarks in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” came a day after Biden walked back his vow of a two-track approach to infrastructure in which, to progressive praise and GOP ire, he would sign a $579 billion bipartisan deal if it came with a separate Democratic reconciliation bill “in tandem.”
ABC News’s Jonathan Karl played a fairly lurid role in the Benghazi nontroversy of 2013 (and beyond). He was one of several reporters stovepiping distorted “evidence” from constantly leaking House GOP investigators directly into the mainstream media.
The development comes at a time when the micro-blogging platform has been engaged in a tussle with the Indian government over the new social media rules. The government has slammed Twitter for deliberate defiance and failure to comply with the country’s new IT rules.
The new rules which came into effect from May 25 mandate social media companies to establish a grievance redressal mechanism for resolving complaints from the users or victims.
During this pandemic, I have… at some point I realized: There’s all the complexity around the virus itself and understanding the science and understanding how to respond to it. But the misinformation and the disinformation that was in the ecosystem was unlike anything I had ever seen or read about from history or experience. And it really ended up becoming a very large part of what I think hobbled us as a country and as a globe and continues to plague us today. It really is stuff we’ve seen before, but at a very, very different level.
eloped countries. What you’ll find is a dynamic that New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel likened to a car thief who perfects a strategy in less-policed areas before taking it to better-patrolled Beverly Hills. “In some ways, [what you see is] so much more egregious than what happens here in the United States,” Frenkel said Thursday at the 360/Open Summit, hosted by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Frenkel, author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, joined Casey Newton, the founder of Platformer, to discuss recent shifts in the spread of disinformation, how tech platforms can enhance accountability and transparency, and how journalists can work to foster trust with their audience.
Below are some of the key takeaways from their conversation. [...]
Google will start warning users about potentially unreliable information for search results during breaking news or emerging topics, the company said Friday.
The search engine said its systems have been trained to now detect when a topic is rapidly evolving and a “range of sources hasn’t yet weighed in,” according to a blog post.
In those cases, Google will show users a notice indicating to check back later when more information may be available.
Prabhat Agarwal, head of the Commission’s Digital Services and Platforms unit, and Gerard de Graaf, director for the digital transformation in the Commission’s Communications Networks, Content and Technology directorate-general, were the leading drafters of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The bill is a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive regulatory framework for governing digital services proposed by the European Commission to EU lawmakers in December. Aimed at making the internet safer while protecting fundamental human rights and freedoms, the DSA takes on modern digital challenges from content moderation to transparent data reporting and oversight.
The DSA is currently being considered by the European Parliament and European Council for revision, with the goal of passing it in early 2022. And its wide-ranging scope makes it “more than just an EU regulation; it’s a potential model and the only fulsome democratic standard with which to engage at the moment,” said moderator Rose Jackson, director of the Democracy & Tech Policy Initiative at the Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Below are some of the highlights from their discussion. [...]
↺ China Manipulating American Businesses to Serve Beijing’s Interests, House GOP Investigation Finds
The probe also found that U.S. corporate executives and employees practiced “self-censorship,” adjusting their business strategies “due to concerns of Chinese opposition.”
Some of China’s influence came from inside U.S. companies. CCP members, either sitting on the boards or holding executive positions in American firms, are known to be “advancing China’s initiatives in acquiring technology and penetrating U.S. markets,” according to the interim findings.
A major witness in the United States’ Department of Justice case against Julian Assange has admitted to fabricating key accusations in the indictment against the Wikileaks founder. The witness, who has a documented history with sociopathy and has received several convictions for sexual abuse of minors and wide-ranging financial fraud, made the admission in a newly published interview in Stundin where he also confessed to having continued his crime spree whilst working with the Department of Justice and FBI and receiving a promise of immunity from prosecution.
The man in question, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, was recruited by US authorities to build a case against Assange after misleading them to believe he was previously a close associate of his. In fact he had volunteered on a limited basis to raise money for Wikileaks in 2010 but was found to have used that opportunity to embezzle more than $50,000 from the organization. Julian Assange was visiting Thordarson’s home country of Iceland around this time due to his work with Icelandic media and members of parliament in preparing the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a press freedom project that produced a parliamentary resolution supporting whistleblowers and investigative journalism.
On June 17, Hong Kong police raided Apply Daily’s newsroom and arrested its top executives while freezing the paper’s assets, which totaled US$2.32 million, forcing the paper’s closure.
“The Apple Daily journalists exposed (Chinese) Chairman Xi as a man afraid of the people he seeks to hold down. The free world owes them our gratitude, and the least we can do is award them the Congressional Gold Medal,” the Nebraska senator said in a statement.
The Congressional Gold Medal is the American legislature’s highest expression of national appreciation for individuals and institutes. Past recipients include the crew of the Apollo 11 spaceflight and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
It is no longer an unknown fact or a view propounded by a handful of radical historians and political scientists: the American political system has such severe structural flaws that it is potentially antithetical to democracy and surely detrimental to the promotion of the common good.
The man hailed as a hero for preventing further bloodshed after a gunman fatally shot a police officer in Arvada, Colorado, on Monday was himself fatally shot by police, Arvada police said in a statement Friday afternoon.
Police say Johnny Hurley, 40, confronted the gunman, identified as Ronald Troyke, after Troyke had shot and killed Arvada police officer Gordon Beesley near Arvada’s Olde Town Square on Monday afternoon.
Nayab claimed in her May 21 application that she was an adult, “unmarried woman,” yet her alleged Islamic marriage certificate (Nikah Nama) was registered on May 20, the day she went missing. The judge ignored these conflicting claims as he ignored other evidence, Gill said.
Nayab’s family met her at the shelter on May 26, and she told her grandmother that she wanted to return home and was willing to state this in an application to the court, Gill said.
In the Sarla Mudgal case, the court had held that the religious conversion into Islam by a person from non-Islamic faith is not valid if the conversion is done for the purpose of polygamy.
In the Lily Thomas case it was observed that marrying another woman after converting to Islam is punishable under the bigamy laws.
Ourghi touts a liberal form of Islam, which conflicts with the views of many conservative practitioners.
For example, he has published a book of theses for peaceful and gender-equitable religious practice, and warned future religion teachers in his seminars against political Islam and what he called the “outdated views of conservative scholars.”
His books include You Don’t Have to Wear a Headscarf and Reform Islam: 40 Theses.
“Because I stand up for a secular and liberal Islam, they want to get rid of me,” Ourghi told Die Welt newspaper on Friday.
The only bill the three Democrats supported was legislation that would increase filing fees for mergers. A companion measure was recently included in the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed by the Senate earlier this month.
Sources from MIT, the University of Florida and the University of Pennsylvania say relationships, reputation and budgets are key considerations for patent cases
Kilburn & Strode continues to expand its partnership across Europe with the hire of Jo Bradley. She specialises in life sciences and chemistry, which includes fuel cell technology, batteries, gas sensors, solar cells and LED technology.
Bradley has a particular interest in speciality-performance chemicals in a variety of areas. This includes consumer-facing products such as anti-wrinkle cream, battery and fuel cell technology. She also focuses on upcoming areas, such as 3D printed materials.
Five in-house counsel from Sanofi, USG and other companies reveal how to sway the board to deny IPR institution
The legal basis for patent law in Saudi Arabia is contained in Law no. 159 – Patents, Layout Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties and Industrial Models Law of 2004.
The provisions for compulsory licenses are contained in Articles 24 to 30 of the Saudi Arabia Patent Law Decree.
[...]
Compulsory license disputes are submitted to a Committee which is made up of three law specialists and two technical experts pursuant to Article 35. The Committee looks into all matters relating to infringements, appeals, oppositions to compulsory licensing and validity of same. The committee’s decision may then be appealed to the Board of Grievances (a civil judicial system) whose decision is final.
The Enlarged Board of Appeal which is the highest judicial authority under the European Patent Convention (EPC), on the 22nd of June issued Decision G4/19 holding that a European patent application can be refused by reason of the prohibition on double patenting. The principle of the prohibition on double patenting excludes two patents being granted to the same applicant for one invention. The examining division applied this principle and refused European patent application 10718590.2 under Articles 97(2) and 125 EPC on the ground that the applicant already had a patent for the same invention.
“In April, white supremacist slogans were painted on the MLK display by parties still unknown. Reclaiming the space, the community gathered peacefully placing flowers and artifacts in remembrance of those who had been killed by police and white supremacists.” https://www.centredaily.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article252401513.html
When internet subscribers receive a letter through the mail demanding cash settlements for alleged movie piracy, these can come as a shock. But what if it was possible to predict whether a specific movie is being monitored and therefore more likely to result in legal action? Today we dust off the crystal ball, look into the future, and see nothing good.
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