● 04.01.20

● Links 1/4/2020: Linux 5.7 Merges, Qt 5.14.2, GhostBSD 20.03, Linux Mint 20 Ulyana Plans, WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”

Posted in News Roundup at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Performing A Linux System Backup The Right Way

• In order to conduct a full system backup, you need to first create a directory called bin. The second step involves informing Linux that bash will be used as the interpreter with the following command.

=> ↺ Is the Switch from Windows to Linux Really That Hard?

=> ↺ This is what HoneyComb LX2K 16-core Arm Workstation Looks Like (Video)

• Back in February 2019, while referring to Arm server, Linus Torvalds famously said:

• I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won’t be all that stable. Or successful.

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ My story of transitioning from Mac to Linux

• There’s growing awareness in the design community about the importance of design ethics and the way proprietary technology subjugates users. As a user experience designer, I believe technology should be designed to respect the earth as well as creators and users. Using and contributing to Linux is one way to align my design ethics with my practice.

• This is why I bought a ThinkPad and installed the Linux distribution Elementary OS, even though macOS is, by far, the most popular operating system among designers. Linux doesn’t have a great reputation for ease of use, and switching operating systems can be disorienting and frustrating. When I told people I was making the switch, many (especially designers!) thought I was foolish. However, after making the switch, I am happy to report that I have a design workflow that I really love and an operating system that aligns with my values.

=> ↺ Help with COVID-19 research using Folding@home on Linux

• Right now, every human on the planet is affected in some way by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people are looking for ways they can help. People are making masks and starting projects to invent or provide critical equipment. One thing you can do is donate what you have. If you’re like me, you have computing hardware sitting idle much of the time—that’s a resource that can contribute to finding a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as things like Alzheimer’s disease and cancer.

• [...]

• Folding@home started in 2000 with volunteers donating CPU and GPU time on computers that would otherwise be idle to work on things like creating antibiotics and curing cancer, and since then has made many important contributions. Currently, Folding@home makes more than 100 petaflops of processing power available to researchers. One current high-priority project is the research being done to find ways to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The Folding@home software can be installed on almost any computer. There are client downloads for Windows, macOS, and Linux. There is a VMware appliance. There are also projects to get the client running on Android and a Chrome plugin. There’s even a Docker image.

• In this article, we’ll look at the Linux install and configuration, and we’ll look at a headless install for CentOS 7 that you can use to build multiple VMs.

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux and TUXEDO Computers launch custom InfinityBook laptop

• TUXEDO Computers is a pretty cool company that not only sells machines running Linux, but partners with Linux distribution developers for officially licensed branded laptops too. For instance, Tuxedo partnered with Kubuntu on the official Focus laptop. It’s a great way for Linux users to represent their favorite Linux-based operating system while also financially supporting the developers.

• Today, Manjaro Linux and TUXEDO Computers launch the InfinityBook Manjaro laptop. This is Tuxedo’s 15.6-inch InfinityBook, customized with Manjaro branding and that Linux-based operating system pre-installed.

=> ↺ TUXEDO Computers Announces InfinityBook Manjaro Linux Laptop

• TUXEDO Computers in collaboration with Manjaro Linux announced today a new variant of their popular InfinityBook Linux laptop powered exclusively by Manjaro Linux, InfinityBook Manjaro.

• The InfinityBook Manjaro laptop is, in fact, an InfinityBook Pro 15 laptop, but highly optimized by the Manjaro development team to offer customers the best user experience and battery life on a Linux-powered laptop.

• By joining forces, both TUXEDO Computers and the Manjaro Project will provide customers with the technical and software support they need for the new laptop, which is fully configurable.

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Arm is Here | LINUX Unplugged 347

• We discover a few simple Raspberry Pi tricks that unlock incredible performance and make us re-think the capabilities of Arm systems.

• Plus we celebrate Wireguard finally landing in Linux, catch up on feedback, and check out the new Manjaro laptop.

=> ↺ User Error: What Will Change Post-virus? | Jupiter Extras 67

• Joe, Alan, and Dan speculate about what the world will be like after the situation with Coronavirus is under control and life returns to something resembling normality.

=> ↺ Late Night Linux – Episode 86

• The impacts of Coronovirus on Linux and open source, KDE Korner, and whether we are seeing the second big split in the FOSS world.

=> ↺ All Backup Solutions for the Home | Rsync, Synology, and FreeNAS

=> ↺ 2020-03-31 | Linux Headlines

• The MANRS initiative gains several new members, GitLab wants customers to help migrate premier features to its free tier, Eclipse Theia reaches 1.0, Lutris lands Humble Bundle game store integration, and Steam scales back automatic updates.

=> ↺ An Open Source Toolchain For Natural Language Processing From Explosion AI

• The state of the art in natural language processing is a constantly moving target. With the rise of deep learning, previously cutting edge techniques have given way to robust language models. Through it all the team at Explosion AI have built a strong presence with the trifecta of SpaCy, Thinc, and Prodigy to support fast and flexible data labeling to feed deep learning models and performant and scalable text processing. In this episode founder and open source author Matthew Honnibal shares his experience growing a business around cutting edge open source libraries for the machine learning developent process.

=> ↺ mintCast 331.5 – Audio Schmaudio

• In our Innards section, we talk more about how we do this show.

• And finally, our listener feedback and a few suggestions.

=> ↺ Checking out Ubuntu 20.04 Ahead of its Release

• Ubuntu 20.04 is coming soon! Ahead of the new release, I check out the current state of this in-progress distribution, in anticipation of its April 2020 release.

=> ↺ LHS Episode #335: Clean My Glasses

• Welcome to Episode 335 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, we cover COVID-19 and contesting (duh), virtual amateur radio exams, emergency broadband on 5.8GHz, the Hamvention 2020 QSO party, exFAT, OBS, AREDN and much more. Thank you for listening. Stay safe and play more radio!

Kernel Space

=> ↺ WireGuard VPN added to Linux 5.6

• Linux users now have another choice when it comes to protecting themselves online as WireGuard VPN has been added to the Linux kernel in version 5.6.

• Up until now, the fast and flexible VPN, which was designed specifically for Linux implementations, was only available as a third-party addition. However, WireGuard VPN is now available by default with release of Linux 5.6.

• In an announcement, president and security researcher at Edge Security, Jason Donenfeld explained that future Linux kernels will have WireGuard built-in by default, saying…

=> ↺ Linux 5.6 Debuts with Wireguard Secure VPN for Remote Networking

• On March 29, Linux creator Linus Torvalds released the Linux 5.6 kernel providing a long list of new features. Of particular note for networking professionals is the inclusion of WireGuard Virtual Private Network (VPN) open source technology. Work to include WireGuard directly into Linux has been ongoing since March 2019 though WireGuard development itself has been ongoing since 2015.

• At its core, WireGuard is a secure network tunnel written especially for Linux, and optimized for performance and ease of configuration.

• “It has been designed with the primary goal of being both easy to audit by virtue of being small and highly secure from a cryptography and systems security perspective,” WireGuard creator Jason Donenfeld wrote in a Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) commit message.

• Even before WireGuard was directly integrated into Linux, it had been available in what is known as an out-of-tree module, as wall as userspace tools. By being directly integrated into Linux, WireGuard is now however even more accessible to a wider user community. In contrast with other options for VPN, WireGuard provides a very small attack surface for any potential attacker.

=> ↺ It’s Looking Like Android Could Be Embracing WireGuard – “A Sane VPN”

• Following the release of Linux 5.6 and WireGuard 1.0 declared, Google has now enabled WireGuard within their Android open-source Linux kernel build.

• Android’s Generic Kernel Image (GKI) now has the WireGuard support enabled as a built-in option as of yesterday. In the Git commit enabling it, Google’s Greg Kroah-Hartman commented, “Add native kernel support for a sane VPN.”

• The upstream WireGuard project has long offered an Android port available from the Play Store as a user-space implementation while it’s promising that Google is now enabling the WireGuard support as part of the GKI kernel for Android. WireGuard was upstreamed in Linux 5.6 after years of development and working out the encryption kernel changes that previously held up its integration.

=> ↺ Linux 5.6, Bootlin contributions inside

• Linux 5.6 was released last Sunday. As usual, LWN has the best coverage of the new features merged in this release: part 1 and part 2. Sadly, the corresponding KernelNewbies page has not yet been updated with the usual very interesting summary of the important changes.

• Bootlin contributed a total of 95 patches to this release, which makes us the 27th contributing company by number of commits, according to the statistics.

=> ↺ [Collaborans] Linux Kernel 5.6

• The Linux kernel development process has always prided itself in being a distributed effort, with contributions coming in from all parts of the world. Long before video conferencing became the new normal, kernel developers were collaborating remotely, using tools like IRC and mailing lists to successfully work together. It comes to no surprise, then, that despite the challenges presented by COVID-19, kernel development has continued.

• Of course, the merge window for kernel 5.6 closed before most countries had implemented any COVID-19 countermeasures. Since then, most of us have been, and continue to be, affected by COVID-19 in one way or another. And while 5.7 already promises to be another great release, what matters most right now is that everyone in the community stays safe. Take care of yourselves and those around you!

• That being said, kernel 5.6 was released over the weekend, so let’s take a look at the various projects Collaborans have been involved in, and the progress made. As usual, you can learn more about this release in thise LWN posts: part 1, part 2, and development statistics.

=> ↺ FSINFO System Call, Mount Notifications Sent In For Linux 5.7 To Provide Better Storage Details

• Red Hat’s David Howells has sent in pull requests introducing the new fsinfo() system call and mount/superblock notifications and as part of that a general notification mechanism for the kernel.

• This stems from work Howells has been pursuing for the past several months for exposing more file-system information and mount notifications. The fsinfo() system call exposes more file-system / VFS information like file-system UUIDs, capabilities, mount attributes, and other possible bits. With the fsinfo() pull request are also implementations for EXT4 and NFS.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 EFI Changes: “The GRUB Project Is Showing Signs Of Life Again”

• Ingo Molnar on Monday began sending in his feature pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window. Of the pull requests worth noting are the EFI changes.

• Molnar characterized the GRUB boot-loader project as “showing signs of life again” following the recent introduction of a generic Linux/UEFI boot protocol rather than “x86 specific hacks”. The hope is that over time all new extensions will be introduced via that protocol to avoid these hacks for cleaning up the EFI kernel boot code in due course.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 For 64-bit ARM Brings In-Kernel Pointer Authentication, Activity Monitors

• The 64-bit ARM architecture code will support several new features with the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel.

• Highlights of the 64-bit ARM (AArch64 / ARM64) code for Linux 5.7 include:

• • In-kernel pointer authentication is now supported. Back in 2018 added to the kernel was pointer authentication support but only exposed for user-space usage. As explained back then, “Pointer authentication can be supported by ARMv8.3 hardware and newer to allow for signing and authenticating of pointers against secret keys. The purpose of this pointer authentication is to mitigate ROP attacks and other potential buffer-overrun-style attacks.” Now with Linux 5.7 the ARMv8.3+ pointer authentication support also works within the kernel.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 Networking Changes Bring Qualcomm IPA, New Intel Driver Additions

• The networking changes for the Linux 5.7 kernel have already been merged and as usual there is a lot of new wired and wireless networking driver activity.

• Some of the highlights in the networking subsystem for Linux 5.7 include:

• • Introducing the Qualcomm IPA driver as the IP Accelerator. The IPA allows for network functionality like filtering, routing, and NAT to be performed without occupying the main application processor. The IPA driver also allows for the modem’s LTE network to be made available to the application processor. This driver is based on previous open-source Qualcomm code and has been floating around the mailing list for the past few years while now finally is merged.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 Media Updates Add H.264 / H.265 / VP9 Decode To The Meson Driver

• The media subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

• The media subsystem updates are predominantly made up by individual media driver updates as usual. Some of the highlights include:

• • The Amlogic Meson VDEC driver now has support for VP9 decoding, H.264 decoding, and HEVC decode.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 Power Management Includes Fixes, Tiny Power Button Driver

• Intel’s Rafael Wysocki who oversees the kernel’s power management area has sent in his relevant pull requests for the Linux 5.7 kernel merge window.

• Highlights of the power management updates for Linux 5.7 include:

• • Support for Krait-based SoCs within the Qualcomm driver.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7′s USB Changes Range From Apple Fast Charging To Reporting USB-C Orientation

• With the newly-minted Linux 5.6 kernel is initial support for USB4 based on Intel’s Thunderbolt code while for Linux 5.7 is a wide variety of other USB changes.

• There aren’t any big USB4 changes to note with the Linux 5.7 kernel that is now going through its merge window. But there are plenty of other interesting USB changes for the 5.7 version…

=> ↺ Split Lock Detection Sent In For Linux 5.7 To Spot Performance Issues, Unprivileged DoS

• The previously reported work on split lock detection due to its big performance hit is now queued up for Linux 5.7.

• Split locks occur when an atomic instruction spans multiple cache lines and requires a global bus lock for ensuring atomicity. These split locks can take at least 1,000 more cycles than an atomic operation within a single cache line.

=> ↺ Intel Begins Prepping More Linux Code For Data Streaming Accelerator In Sapphire Rapids

• Last year Intel outlined the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) as a feature on future Intel CPUs for high-performance data movement and transformation operations for networking and storage / persistent memory. We are now seeing more of the Intel DSA work beginning to take shape for the Linux kernel.

=> ↺ The Linux 5.7 Scheduler Changes Bring Prominent Additions For Intel & Arm CPUs

• Ingo Molnar on Monday sent in the scheduler updates for the Linux 5.7 kernel that saw its merge window open at the start of this week. For the Linux 5.7 cycle are a number of prominent scheduler additions.

• Highlights on the scheduler side for Linux 5.7 include:

• • NUMA scheduling updates so the load balancer and placement logic do not fight each other in order to improve locality and utilization with less migrations.

=> ↺ Linux 5.7 Graphics Driver Updates Enable Tiger Lake By Default, OLED Backlight Support

• The Linux 5.7 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates have been submitted as the kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel feature release. As usual, there is a lot of work especially on the Intel and AMD Radeon side while nothing was queued for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Session Performance Impact For Gaming

• In the past using the Wayland-based GNOME Shell session and other Wayland compositors has generally resulted in a performance hit in going through (X)Wayland but that is much less so these days. Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 running various Steam Linux gaming benchmarks both under the default X.Org-based session and then again when using the Wayland session and its (X)Wayland support.

Applications

=> ↺ Telegram Desktop 2.0 Release Adds Chat Folders, New Animated Emoji

• Telegram Desktop 2.0 arrives five months after the 1.9 series and more than three years after the 1.0 milestone. As expected, this is major update and introduces several new features.

• One of the biggest new feature of the Telegram Desktop 2.0 release include the ability to organize your chats into so-called “Chat Folders” whenever you think you have too many chats opened.

• Another interesting feature is support for creating custom folders with flexible settings. In addition, the client now also lets users use default recommendations when creating custom folders.

=> ↺ Kushal Das: Introducing ManualBox project

• One of the major security features of the QubesOS is the file vaults, where access to specific files can only happen via user input in the GUI applet. Same goes to the split-ssh, where the user has to allow access to the ssh key (actually on a different VM).

• I was hoping to have similar access control to important dotfiles with passwords, ssh private keys, and other similar files on my regular desktop system. I am introducing ManualBox which can provide similarly access control on normal Linux Desktops or even on Mac.

=> ↺ OCRFeeder – Where images go to text

• Recently, finding really cool, new, unique Linux software has become a difficult task. A chore. And by recently, I actually meant these past four or five years, even since the slow decline of enthusiasm and innovation in the desktop space started. After all, there’s a limit to how much good stuff can exist in a finite volume of intellect, but let’s not forget the wrong shift of focus to mobile and the shattering of the year-of-the-Linux dream.

• This makes my test of a four-year-old piece of software named OCRFeeder valid, I think. For two reasons. If it’s good, it’s good. Second, I’ve always been interested in the progress of optical character recognition, and whether our tools (read AI) can do a reasonable job here. I wrote about this in detail a while back, and then reviewed YAGF in 2015. Now, let’s have a look at OCRFeeder and what it can do. After me, brave Linux warriors.

=> ↺ Nutty – A network monitoring app for Linux

• After the internet revolution, it’s important to be connected with the cyber world to get things done. Skipping the complicated intricacies of how the internet works, on a personal level, we connect to the internet through various ways, like WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) or Wi-Fi to put it simply, or some kind of a wired connection to a router, or in some cases, cellular networks.

• Whatever the medium be, we almost always require a way to monitor and manage the network connection(s). We are going to suggest a program for the purpose named Nutty.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ Installation failed – boost python error in job “umount”

=> ↺ How to replace a string in files in Linux the simple way

=> ↺ How to install the Labplot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to install KDF on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to build a dedicated syslog server

=> ↺ How to Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 Beta from 18.04 & 19.10

=> ↺ How to Reset Forgotten Root Password in CentOS 8

=> ↺ Easily Install Kolourpaint for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

=> ↺ Fix for lightdm background keeps changing on login or logout

=> ↺ How to Install Kteatime for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ?

=> ↺ Getting started with Jenkins Configuration as Code

=> ↺ Install this Linux App Store on your Chromebook for easy one-click installs

=> ↺ 3 Ways to Create a Network Bridge in RHEL/CentOS 8

=> ↺ Listen to your music with mpd and ncmpcpp

=> ↺ How to Install Odoo 13 in Ubuntu 18.04 ?

=> ↺ Set Up CUPS Print Server on Ubuntu (Bonjour, IPP, Samba, AirPrint)

=> ↺ Set Up CUPS Print Server on CentOS 8/RHEL 8 (Bonjour, IPP, Samba, AirPrint)

=> ↺ 5 ways to level up your Vim skills

=> ↺ 10 ways to use the Chown command with examples

=> ↺ Mounting and mapping shares between Windows and Linux with Samba

=> ↺ Share logs and files quickly from the command line with pastebinit

=> ↺ Running a quick NMAP scan to inventory my network

=> ↺ How to make Gimp look like Adobe Photoshop on Linux

=> ↺ How To Install Dropbox on Linux Mint 19

=> ↺ How To Make Linux System To Run Faster On Intel CPUs

=> ↺ How to Create TXT Template Scripts in BASH

=> ↺ How to Find Out the Processes Running on Linux Using the ps Command

=> ↺ How to Find Which Graphics Card do You Have in Linux?

=> ↺ How to Install Amarok for Linux Ubuntu 19.10/18.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to Install Kmag for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to Install Ktimer for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to Install Mono on Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04

=> ↺ How to Install Multiple Discourse Containers on the Same Server

=> ↺ How to Install Python on Ubuntu 19.10 Step by Step Guide for beginners

=> ↺ How to Install QEMU for Linux Ubuntu 19.10/18.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to Install Stellarium 0.20.0 in Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04

=> ↺ How to Remove Linux User from a Group

=> ↺ How to copy a directory in Linux a Tutorial for beginners 2020

=> ↺ How to install Firefox on LMDE 4

=> ↺ How to install LibreOffice 6.4 on LMDE 4

=> ↺ How to install the Kompare on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS?

=> ↺ How to install the Snow GTK theme on Linux

=> ↺ How to setup EC2 Auto Scaling Group (ASG) on AWS

=> ↺ How to use touch command in Linux

Games

=> ↺ Joachim Breitner: Animations in Kaleidogen

• A while ago I wrote a little game (or toy) called Kaleidogen. It is a relatively contemplative game where, starting from just unicolored disks, you combine abstract circular patterns to breed more interesting patterns. See my FARM 2019 talk for more details, or check out the source repository.

=> ↺ ‘Suits: A Business RPG’, a small indie comedy RPG has been updated with better Linux support

• Suits: A Business RPG is a mysterious comedy game that was released more than four years ago; from time to time it’s being featured as part of Steam’s Weeklong Deals, as it is the case right now (50% discounted), so I’ve been looking into it for some time.

=> ↺ Struggling with regular expressions? Then visit ‘Regex Crossword’, a site to learn them through a Sudoku-like game

• The website features several sections to make the levels as varied as possible. There is also another area which includes levels made by other users, along with a stats page. Also, if you check the Help and FAQ section, you will be recommended other tools and online resources in case you want to learn a bit more about regexs. Don’t forget to use an account so that your progress on the levels can be saved.

• Finally, although this project is “something we do for fun”, you can donate via PayPal or several cryptocurrencies (check the Help and FAQ section to see which ones are available) to help with hosting expenses and to keep ensuring further improvements and levels.

=> ↺ ‘Tilesetter’ is a program for developers that aims to optimize the tileset generation process; demo available

• Judging by the number of followers on their Twitter account and the user reviews on Steam, Tilesetter seems to embody the definition of “obscure”, but at the same time it must be remarked that except one, all of those reviews are positive and endorsed by a lot of other people, so while I’m not the indicated person to recommend you to use it or not (I’m not a developer), there are enough signs that would suggest this may be a particularly useful program to help you save a lot of time when creating your tilesets.

=> ↺ Intel used AMD code to get a 10% frame-rate boost in some Linux games

• This should be another promising step forward for gaming on Linux, then, at least for those who are using an Intel GPU (in other words, integrated graphics – although Intel does have discrete Xe graphics cards in the pipeline for the future at some point, which we’ve been hearing a lot about in recent times).

• Of course, Valve has been pushing hard elsewhere in the Linux gaming arena, most notably with the release of Proton (back in 2018) for allowing Steam (Windows) games to be played on Linux systems with a minimum of overhead and performance loss.

=> ↺ The Humble Conquer COVID-19 Bundle is live with lots of Linux games and all going to charity

• The Humble Conquer COVID-19 Bundle has arrived to help in the fight, with tons of games (and lots for Linux) and 100% of the proceeds of this will go to charity.

=> ↺ You can build you own bundle of Codemasters racing games over on Humble Bundle

• Got the need for speed? Codemasters might possibly be able to help with that, as they have a new bundle over on Humble Bundle where you pick what games you want.

• A good time to complete your racing game collection perhaps, there’s quite a few of them here. The way it works is that if you pick at least three, your discount gets bigger. The same happens if you pick 4 and 5 titles with each again giving you a bigger discount in total. There’s various DiRT games, lots of F1 titles and others.

=> ↺ Legend of Keepers from Goblinz Studio manages to sell over 33K copies in less than a month

• Always nice to see an indie developer doing reasonably well! Goblinz Studio, creator of Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Master, have announced a pretty great start for it.

• Releasing only on March 19, they said on Twitter how they were going to do a special message about it hitting a 30K milestone but they hit over 33K before being able to to do so. It’s important to note that this is across Humble, GOG and Steam together. They also mentioned in another Twitter post about 4 days after release, that it had sold 1.3K copies on GOG alone in that time.

=> ↺ Paradox to give players a lot more guidance in Crusader Kings 3 – new overview video

• Crusader Kings is a complicated grand strategy series and not particularly accessible to new people. Crusader Kings 3 aims to change that as they’ve said before and over this month they gave more detail on what they’re doing.

• Through March they put out new developer diaries focusing on tutorials, governments, war, civil war and more. Paradox is paying particular attention to making the interface of Crusader Kings III much easier to understand, with a full guided tutorial that runs through various parts of the interface and the gameplay mechanics. One of the major differences will be Tooltips, a great many of them and once you get through the guided tutorial you then get special mini-tutorials to follow along so you don’t get overwhelmed.

=> ↺ Fates of Ort is an RPG where time stops until you move – it’s absolutely great and it’s out now

• We’ve got a lot of turn-based RPGs, a few real-time with pausing and a few entirely real-time but Fates of Ort still manages to make it all feel so new and interesting again. Think SUPERHOT as a retro pixel-art RPG and you get the idea. Not some gimmick either, as it works brilliantly. Also making it quite unique is the Magic system, which consumes your own life—as they say “Magic is powerful, but it is not free.”. So you not only need to plan your moves, watching enemies move when you move but also plan how and when to use your magic and not overly so to cause your own death.

=> ↺ Valve’s revamp of Artifact with a 2.0 Beta will start going out to players sometime soon

• Valve recently announced to expect news for their card game Artifact sometime soon, and now they’re saying an Artifact 2.0 Beta will start trickling out to players.

• In the announcement on Steam, they made it clear that they’ve been working on revamping the core mechanics of Artifact. You will now be able to zoom out any time, to see and interact with all three lanes at once. However, the “majority” of effect still only work across one lane so they’re all still important but a player is less likely to get shut out of a lane like they used to.

• Something better is that Valve will no longer sell cards, so there’s no chance of facing an opponent with more money who has a completely stacked deck to steamroll over you. There’s even a new “Hero Draft” mode, “that gives you a taste of constructing decks without all the pressure”.

=> ↺ Imperator: Rome free to play until April 5, plus Archimedes update and Magna Graecia content pack out now

• Imperator: Rome from Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio today had a huge update release along with a new DLC content pack and you can play free until April 5.

=> ↺ Manage the flow of passengers in ‘STATIONflow’ – leaving Early Access on April 15

• STATIONflow is a game about managing a very busy underground train station that’s currently in Early Access with Linux support, which is to officially release on April 15.

• Quite a complex-looking game that has you build 3D layouts, guiding passengers around to their destinations. You drag and drop corridors and platforms around, with a free-form layout system so that the flow of passengers is only as good as your imagination for planning. This also means you can constantly optimise and re-build, when you discover a better layout.

=> ↺ Get ready to play with renaissance paintings as ‘The Procession to Calvary’ releases in April

• The Procession to Calvary has such a brilliant idea with it bringing Renaissance Paintings to life in a point and click style adventure. I am genuinely excited to play this. Just recently announced for released on April 9, it brings together classic pieces from Rembrandt, Botticelli, Michelangelo and many more in a unique way to provide a special new world to explore.

=> ↺ Valve makes auto-update adjustments to help with managing Steam’s bandwidth use

• After multiple streaming services announced they were dropping their quality for a while, to help internet providers cope with so many more at home, Valve have started speaking about their own ways to manage bandwidth too.

• In the blog post on Steam, Valve mentioned how they’ve now adjusted download priorities so that games you’ve not played recently will move from using off-peak timings for auto-updates to spreading them over multiple days. Only games you’ve played in the last three days will update immediately. This doesn’t change you clicking on a game that needs an update, as it will begin to update as normal when you request it. They also said they’re looking into “additional solutions to help on our side” so we might see more download options in the Steam client eventually.

=> ↺ 5 Reasons Why This Linux Gaming OS Is Great For Your Living Room

• Valve’s Steam Machines initiative has been retired and SteamOS is on hiatus, but Steam Big Picture mode is still an awesome way to transform your PC into a living room console experience. For those of us who like the idea of having a computer dedicated to couch gaming (read: not your daily driver OS), a boutique Linux distribution called GamerOS is worth checking out. Especially since it picks up the baton where Valve left off and adds substantial tweaks and improvements.

• In a nutshell, GamerOS is an Arch Linux-based operating system that’s streamlined to do one thing very well: run Steam Big Picture. In fact, that’s all it does. There is no desktop environment. Your first boot places you directly into Steam Big Picture and that’s where you’ll live on GamerOS.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Vs Kubuntu Vs Neon Vs Plasma – What’s the Difference

• If you are a new Linux user and started exploring distros for your own need, you may already have come across KDE. And I am sure you heard of Kubuntu, KDE Plasma and KDE Neon. With so many KDE flavors, it is a little confusing. Well, that’s why this article, to clear things up and the difference between them.

=> ↺ Behind Plasma Bigscreen

• Plasma has been designed from the get go (2006 or so.. it seems at least 2 eternities agoto not make any assumptions on the type of device and to do a clear separation between the core technology/runtime and the various GUI plugins that end up implementing a full desktop experience.

• In an architecture decision informed by previous prototypes we did in KDE4 times for mobile devices UIs, in Plasma 5 we split it further and introduced the concept of a “shell package” which lets further customization between devices than what Plasma in KDE4 times allowed.

• Because of that we could do the Plasma Mobile shell without changes to the architecture that runs both the Desktop shell and the mobile version, despite being a completely different UI.

=> ↺ KDE Plasma 5.18.4 LTS Desktop Environment Brings More Than 40 Fixes

• Coming three weeks after the Plasma 5.18.3 point release, which introduced a bunch of Flatpak improvements and more than 60 fixes, the KDE Plasma 5.18.4 LTS release is here to add more than 40 bug fixes to various of the desktop environments core components.

• Among the changes, there’s improved support for the upcoming Qt 5.15 application framework for Breeze and libksysguard components and better support for the fwupd open-source daemon for installing firmware updates on devices in the Discover package manager.

• Flatpak support in Discover was also improved by fixing two issues. Moreover, XSettingsd was added as a runtime dependency to KDE GTK Config, kwallet-pam now works with pam_fscrypt, and KWin now allow the creation of more than one row on the “Virtual Desktops” settings page.

=> ↺ Qt 5.14.2 Released

• I am happy to inform you we have released Qt 5.14.2.

• As usual this second patch release to Qt 5.14 series doesn’t bring any new features but provide several bug fixes and other improvements. Compared to Qt 5.14.1 there are more than 200 bug fixes included in this release. For details of the most important changes please check the Changes files for Qt 5.14.2.

• At this same time we have also released update to Qt for Python, which can be obtained via pip.

• Qt 5.14.2 can be updated by using the online installer’s maintenance tool. For new installations please download the latest online installer from the Qt Account or from the qt.io download page. Offline packages are available for commercial users via the Qt Account and via the qt.io download page for open-source users.

=> ↺ SMPlayer – A Free Media Player for All Formats

• SMPlayer is a free and open-source media player built with codecs that enable it to play virtually all audio and video formats on Windows and Linux operating systems. It has a beautiful graphical user interface courtesy of the award-winning MPlayer with added features such as the option to download subtitles and play YouTube videos.

• Apart from housing all the features expected in any media player, the most convenient thing about SMPlayer is that once you wouldn’t need to install any codecs for specific audio or video formats because it ships with all of them preinstalled and still manages to maintain a small package size.

=> ↺ Norbert Preining: Fixing the Breeze Dark theme for gtk3 apps

• It has been now about two weeks that I switched to KDE/Plasma on all my desktops, and to my big surprise, that went much more smooth than I thought. There are only a few glitches with respect to the gtk3 part of the Breeze Dark theme I am using, which needed fixup.

=> ↺ Latte Dock development news

• I would like to thank everyone for its love concercing Latte and kde community for its big acceptance. It is no secret that for the last two years I am the single and only Latte developer. For me it is just my fun project that I also share to the community. If anyone wants to participate by contributing code and patches for review can do so easily through kde phabricator page. I also want to thank of course the kde translators and its team that contribute translations to Latte weekly.

• In previous month users had asked when Latte v0.10.~ will become the stable version. So as it appears I do not have time to make this possible until this summer so as a first step it will be delayed for Christmas 2020 and if it is not ready then it will be delayed even more. Of course and I do not want to burn out and I want to keep other aspects of my life healthy.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ Where are the best GNOME communities

• As with all open source projects, GNOME is developed by volunteers as well as employees. These people communicate in many ways to drive the project forward. For development, the old way is mailing lists for discussion and repository sites for the actual code and issue tracking. When you want something that does not exist yet or have a problem you cannot solve, you need to find the communities passionate about GNOME. This takes a bit of effort, so here are some places to start. If you start developing, you need to find a community that talks your programming language. Many will also deal with GNOME, as a side effect if not as their main activity.

=> ↺ API changes in Tracker 3.0

• Lots has happened in the 2 months since my last post, most notably the global coronavirus pandemic … in Spain we’re in week 3 of quarantine lockdown already and noone knows when it is going to end.

• Let’s take our mind off the pandemic and talk about Tracker 3.0. At the start of the year Carlos worked on some key API changes which are now merged. It’s a good opportunity to recap what’s really changing in the new version.

• I made the developer documentation for Tracker 3.0 available online. Thanks to GitLab, this can be updated every time we merge a change in Git. The documentation a work in progress and we appreciate if you can help us to improve it.

• The documentation contains a migration guide, but let’s have a broader look at some common use cases.

=> ↺ Sandboxing WebKitGTK Apps

• When you connect to a Wi-Fi network, that network might block your access to the wider internet until you’ve signed into the network’s captive portal page. An untrusted network can disrupt your connection at any time by blocking secure requests and replacing the content of insecure requests with its login page. (Of course this can be done on wired networks as well, but in practice it mainly happens on Wi-Fi.) To detect a captive portal, NetworkManager sends a request to a special test address (e.g. http://fedoraproject.org/static/hotspot.txt) and checks to see whether it the content has been replaced. If so, GNOME Shell will open a little WebKitGTK browser window to display http://nmcheck.gnome.org, which, due to the captive portal, will be hijacked by your hotel or airport or whatever to display the portal login page.

=> ↺ DevConf.CZ 2020

• Once again, DevConf.CZ, is our meeting-while-freezing winter conference in Brno. For this year I cooked up two talks:

• An hour-long talk about Portals during the first day of the conference. The room was almost full and the questions were very relevant. A few attendees met me after the talk seeking help to make their apps start using Portals and with ideas for new Portals. You can watch the recordings below:

• On the last conference day, I had a quick twenty minutes talk about GNOME Boxes in the virtualization track. The audience wasn’t our known faces from the desktop talks, so I got the chance to show Boxes for the first time for a bunch of people. I did a quick presentation with live demos and Q&A. It was a success IMHO. Check the recordings below:

=> ↺ GNOME’s Mutter Working On Variable Refresh Rate Support (VRR / Adaptive-Sync / FreeSync)

• Sway’s Wayland compositor recently added Variable Refresh Rate / Adaptive-Sync support to help avoid tearing and stuttering while now GNOME’s Mutter is working on similar VRR support on the desktop.

• A work-in-progress patch series was posted over the weekend for adding variable refresh rate support into Mutter for X.Org and Wayland. This includes checking for VRR support from connected monitors using the DRM properties, support for activating VRR, and the ability to toggle the VRR support via a DBus API. The VRR support isn’t advertised to Wayland clients at the moment for the lack of an upstream Wayland protocol around VRR.

Distributions

BSD

=> ↺ GhostBSD 20.03 Now Available

• I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.03. This new build comes with some minor system update and numerous software applications updates.

=> ↺ GhostBSD 20.03 Is Out As The Latest Monthly Update To This Desktop BSD

• If you are looking for a new desktop-friendly BSD with TrueOS being phased out, GhostBSD 20.03 is out as the promising desktop-focused OS based on FreeBSD and using the MATE desktop environment as a decent out-of-the-box experience.

• With GhostBSD 20.03, using pkg for package management now uses GhostBSD package repositories by default rather than upstream FreeBSD, update handling fixes, a WireGuard fix for its network management handling, and other updates.

Screenshots/Screencasts

=> ↺ screenFetch in LMDE4

• Got that Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 installed on my Dell XPS laptop, and it looks and feels amazing!

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ क्या openSUSE Asia Summit 2020 अब भी भारत में होगा ?

=> ↺ Managing Compliance for Linux Systems with SUSE® Manager 4

• SUSE® Manager 4 is a best-in-class open source infrastructure management solution that lowers costs, enhances availability and reduces complexity for lifecycle management of Linux systems in large, complex and dynamic IT landscapes. You can use SUSE® Manager 4 to configure, deploy and administer thousands of Linux systems running on hypervisors, as containers, on bare metal systems, on IoT devices and on third-party cloud platforms. SUSE® Manager 4 also allows you to manage virtual machines and enforce key best practices to ensure compliance through the whole lifecycle of all your Linux systems, from bare metal to containers, for both internal company policies and external regulations.

• [...]

• SUSE® Manager 4 offers a single user interface for managing the complete lifecycle of all your Linux systems, including virtual machines, containers and bare metal systems running in the cloud or on site. You only need to learn one tool to keep watch over deployments, configurations, upgrades and other significant events in the life of your Linux systems.

• The configuration, auditing and automation features of SUSE® Manager 4 make it easy to keep your systems in compliance. You can predefine a complete system configuration and watch for unauthorized changes automatically. SUSE® Manager 4 also checks for vulnerabilities defined through the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list or OpenSCAP (Figure 1).

Oracley

=> ↺ Announcing the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 for Oracle Linux

• Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 for Oracle Linux.

• The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux provides the latest open source innovations and business-critical performance and security optimizations for cloud and on-premise deployment. It is the Linux kernel that powers Oracle Gen 2 Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Oracle Linux with UEK is available on the x86-64 and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) architectures.

=> ↺ Oracle Ships Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 6 – Based On Linux 5.4 + DTrace Over BPF, Etc

• Oracle has announced their newest major release of their “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel” that they continue spinning as an option for users of Oracle Linux and being the default within the Oracle Cloud.

• Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 shifts their code-base from tracking the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel to now being on the Linux 5.4 LTS branch. That big version jump alone is significant with all of the new upstream features introduced since Linux 4.14′s debut in November 2017.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Obarun – An Arch Based Linux Distro Without Systemd

• Today’s Linux distribution review is not just for distro hoppers who love to try something new but it’s for people who have a specific purpose such as a Linux system without systemd. Systemd, as we all know, has always been criticized by a lot of developers and Linux users.

• Obarun is packed with enough utilities to install & start a vanilla Arch Linux without any trouble. I have written an article on how to install Arch step by step and it is a long article. But Obarun does the Arch installation in a very simple way. It comes with obarun-installer, a script that helps install Arch as easily as possible.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Flatpak 1.7 Enters Development with New Features and Improvements

• The Flatpak 1.7 series debuts with a major change, namely simplified installation of the OSTree P2P (Peer-to-peer) support.

• As such, Flatpak 1.7 and later versions will no longer support installing apps from local network peers. Additionally, sideloading from a local USB stick will no longer be automatic and users must enable the feature by configuring a sideload repository.

• The sideload repository can be created by symlinking to it from /var/lib/flatpak/sideload-repos or /run/flatpak/sideload-repos, said Alexander Larsson, who promises that the P2P support will be more efficient due to this change.

• The first release in the Flatpak 1.7 unstable series also introduces new “host-etc” and “host-os” file system permissions to give access to system /usr and /etc.

=> ↺ What can the IBM z/OS core collection for Ansible do for automation on your z/OS systems?

• This blog post takes you through a sample playbook that accompanies the recent release of the IBM z/OS core collection.

=> ↺ Introducing OpenApi Specification to IBM Cloud Functions

• Powered by the Apache OpenWhisk project, IBM Cloud Functions is a serverless, event-driven programming platform designed for developing snippets of code set to perform a specific task. IBM Cloud Function’s ibmcloud fn deploy is a tool for capturing the configuration of a larger IBM Cloud Functions deployment, such as defining a state for all deployed actions, APIs, triggers, rules, and more.

• My colleagues and I have been working hard over the last few months to deliver a new way of defining APIs in OpenAPI Specification format to Apache OpenWhisk, and I am excited to announce it is now available in IBM Cloud Functions!

=> ↺ Powering SAP NetWeaver on RHEL 8

• SAP NetWeaver marks the technical foundation for many of the SAP Business Applications. SAP and Red Hat have worked jointly to deliver timely support of SAP technology stack on Red Hat’s latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SAP officially announced the support for SAP NetWeaver based applications including SAP Business Suite, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 in production environments on February 27th. This adds to the existing SAP support for its major database products on RHEL 8, including SAP MaxDB, SAP ASE on Intel 64, and SAP HANA- on Intel 64, and also IBM’s Power 9 platform.

=> ↺ Avoiding the ragged edge: How open-source must navigate success and conflict to survive

• At the Open Source Summit in San Diego last summer, a representative from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation enthusiastically declared that open-source was entering its “golden age.”

• This raises two questions: What will that “golden age” look like, and how will open-source deal with its success?

• The evidence for open-source popularity is hard to dispute. Whether it’s the purchase of Red Hat Inc. by IBM Corp. for $34 billion in 2018 or surveys that show that at least 85% of businesses are using open-source software in some form, open-source has entered the mainstream enterprise world.

• However, success can also breed conflict with existing business models. In the electrical world, this clash is often called “impedance,” a measure of the opposition to the flow of alternating current through a circuit. For one prominent member of the open-source community, handling “impedance” in the form of conflict between legacy infrastructure and new technologies will be a key part of the open-source future.

=> ↺ Fedora 33 Plans To Default To OpenJDK 11 As The Default Java Version

• To date Fedora has defaulted to Java 1.8 / OpenJDK 8 as the default system JDK version but for Fedora 33 later this year they plan to transition to OpenJDK 11.

• OpenJDK 11 would be the default version for java/javac rather than the aging but still popular OpenJDK 8.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Uyuni 2020.03 released — with enhanced Debian support!

• Uyuni is a configuration and infrastructure management tool that saves you time and headaches when you have to manage and update tens, hundreds or even thousands of machines.

• Uyuni is a fork of Spacewalk that leverages Salt, Cobbler and containers to modernize it. Uyuni is the upstream for SUSE Manager (the main difference is support: with SUSE Manager you get it from SUSE; with Uyuni you get it from the community) and our development and feature discussion is done in the open.

• Last week we released Uyuni 2020.03, with much improved Debian support, coming from the community: we have got client tools (both the Salt stack and the traditional stack) for Debian 9 and 10, and bootstrapping support!

=> ↺ Chris Lamb: Free software activities in March 2020

=> ↺ UBports: Packaging of Lomiri Operating Environment for Debian (part 02)

• Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.

=> ↺ Donald Trump resigns, releases Non-Platform for 2020 election

• Happy April Fool’s Day! We’re sad to report that we didn’t make up anything in the above email forgery. The shocking news is that all of it is fact.

=> ↺ Sparky news 2020/03

• The 3rd monthly #stayhome report of 2020 of the Sparky project:

• • Linux kernel updated up to version 5.6.0 • ChourS2008 translated a few Sparky wiki pages to Russian, thanks a lot • Nemoman keep translating Sparky wiki pages to Hungarian, thanks a lot • I keep translating wiki pages to Polish as well • Sparky 2020.03 & 2020.03.1 of the rolling line released • Sparky 4.12 of the oldstable line released • added to our repos: ClipGrab, CudaText • Sparky repos changed to the named: oldstable-> tyche; stable-> nibiru; testing-> potolo; the old ones work as before alongside to the new ones; see also: sparkylinux.org/sparky-named-repos/ • added Chines (zh_CN) fonts and other stuff to be installed via APTus-> System-> Install Locales tool (v0.4.27)

=> ↺ Jonathan Wiltshire: neuraldak

• We are proud to announce that dak, the Debian Archive Kit, has been replaced by a neural network for processing package uploads and other archive maintenance. All FTP masters and assistants have been re-deployed to concentrate on managing neuraldak.

• neuraldak is an advanced machine learning algorithm which has been taught about appropriate uploads, can write to maintainers about their bugs and can automatically make an evaluation about suitable licenses and code quality. Any uploads which do not meet its standards will be rejected with prejudice.

• [...]

• In terms of licensing , neuraldak has been seeded only with the GPL license. This we consider the gold standard of licenses, and its clauses will be the basis for neuraldak evaluating other licenses as it is exposed to them.

=> ↺ Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities March 2020

• The dh-make-perl feature requests, file bug report, File::Libmagic changes, autoconf-archive change, libpst work and the purple-discord upload were sponsored by my employer. All other work was done on a volunteer basis.

=> ↺ Mike Gabriel: My Work on Debian LTS (March 2020)

• In March 2020, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for 10.25 hours (of 10.25 hours planned).

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ Ubuntu Linux publisher Canonical launches Managed Apps for enterprise DevOps teams

• Ubuntu creator Canonical is launching a new Managed Apps platform, allowing enterprises to have their apps deployed and operated by Canonical as a fully managed service.

• At launch the service will cover ten widely used cloud-native database and LMA (logging, monitoring and alerting) apps on multi-cloud Kubernetes but also on virtual machines across bare-metal, public and private cloud.

=> ↺ Canonical announces Managed Apps to simplify enterprise cloud operations

• Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announces Managed Apps – enabling enterprises to have their apps deployed and operated by Canonical as a fully managed service. At launch, Canonical will cover ten widely used cloud-native database and LMA (logging, monitoring and alerting) apps on multi-cloud Kubernetes but also on virtual machines across bare-metal, public and private cloud. Managed Apps free DevOps teams to focus on delivering business value and away from time-consuming management tasks, at a predictable cost.

• Canonical will manage databases including MySQL, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and ElasticSearch, the NFV management and orchestration application, Open Source Mano, and the event streaming platform, Kafka. App reliability can be assured with Canonical’s Managed apps service covering demand-based scaling, high availability for fault tolerance, security patching and updates. Managed Apps are backed by SLAs for uptime, 24/7 break/fix response, and organisations can monitor their app’s health through an integrated LMA stack and dashboard. This stack includes Grafana, Prometheus and Graylog and is also available as a standalone managed service.

=> ↺ Xubuntu 20.04 Community Wallpaper Contest Winners

• Note that the images listed above are resized for the website. For the full size images, make sure you have the package xubuntu-community-wallpapers installed. The package is installed by default in all new Xubuntu 20.04 installations.

• With Beta Freeze now in effect, these wallpapers may take a little longer than usual to land in the daily images. Keep a look out!

=> ↺ Canonical To Bring New Tools And Ubuntu Linux Support For Raspberry Pi

• With the release of Ubuntu 19.10, Canonical announced the official support roadmap for Raspberry Pi single-board computers. Not just v19.10, Raspberry Pi also supports the long-term release of Ubuntu 18.04.4.

• Along the same lines, Canonical has shared a new Ubuntu Raspberry Pi support roadmap to further strengthen their relationship. They now plan to bring in new tools, services and default official support for the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

=> ↺ Critical Linux Kernel Vulnerability Patched in Ubuntu 19.10 and 18.04.4 LTS

• Discovered by Manfred Paul, the security vulnerability (CVE-2020-8835) was found in Linux kernel’s BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) verifier, which incorrectly calculated register bounds for certain operations.

• This could allow a local attacker to either expose sensitive information (kernel memory) or gain administrative privileges and run programs as root user.

• The security issue affects all Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) and Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (Bionic Beaver) releases running Linux kernel 5.3 on 64-bit, Raspberry Pi, KVM, as well as cloud environments like AWS, Azure, GCP, GKE, and Oracle Cloud.

=> ↺ Canonical Doubles Down on Raspberry Pi Support, Promises New Tools and Services

• After publishing their roadmap last year in November and making it easier to download Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi in early February 2020, Canonical keeps on its promise to fully support Raspberry Pi devices for its Ubuntu Linux operating system with a plethora of upcoming goodies.

• First and foremost, the company behind Ubuntu added support for the latest Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine) release for 32-bit Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 models, as well as Compute Modules, and 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 models.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 Ulyana ISOs will only be available in 64-bit

• Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has announced that Linux Mint 20 will carry the codename Ulyana and that 32-bit ISOs will be dropped. This will see some aging computers lose support. While the 32-bit ISO will be dropped, 32-bit packages, where necessary, will still be available to those with a 64-bit install.

• If you still need a 32-bit Linux Mint ISO, you’ll either have to stay with Linux Mint 19.3 until it loses support in 2023, or you can switch to the newly released LMDE 4 which will receive the latest Linux Mint software such as Cinnamon. The decision to drop 32-bit ISOs in Linux Mint 20 was first revealed last summer when Canonical decided to remove support from Ubuntu 19.10. As Linux Mint uses Ubuntu as a base, it makes sense for Linux Mint 20 to follow suit in dropping support.

=> ↺ The Next Linux Mint Version Will Be Called Ulyana, Launch Only in 64-Bit

• But the biggest change, however, is the migration to 64-bit exclusively, as beginning with this new release, Linux Mint officially drops 32-bit versions.

• Going forward, Linux Mint will continue to be available in 64-bit only.

• The new Linux Mint 20 will be based on Ubuntu 20.04, the team also revealed, and will land in three different versions, namely Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.

• Additionally, there is also important news for those currently running the latest version. LMDE will officially reach the end of support in July, which means that after this date, devices not yet upgraded to version 4 will no longer receive updates – of course, these systems will continue to run normally, but the lack of security updates and bug fixes make them more prone to issues and cyberattacks.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 Release Date & Features

• Well, that’s what this post is here to tell you. We will keep this roundup of Linux Mint 20 features and updates up-to-date as development happens until June, its expected release month.

• What do we about Linux Mint 20 so far?

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 Doing Away With 32-Bit Support

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 Codenamed “Ulyana,” Will Be Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• Announced earlier this year along with the LMDE 4 release, the Linux Mint 20 operating system will be released sometime this summer and will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system, due for release on April 23rd, 2020.

• The Linux Mint project continues the tradition of naming new Linux Mint releases alphabetically, and they revealed today in their monthly newsletter that Linux Mint 20 will be dubbed as “Ulyana.”

• Besides revealing the codename, the team also confirmed the fact that Linux Mint 20 will ship with the same three flavors we’re used until now, namely Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, as well as the fact that it’ll be a 64-bit only release.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 is 64-bit only, based on Ubuntu 20.04, and named ‘Ulyana’

• Linux Mint is great operating system. It is based on the excellent Ubuntu and features three great desktop environment options — Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. While it is a smart choice for Linux beginners, it is also good for experts too.

• Today, we learn some new details about the upcoming Linux Mint 20. While most of the newly revealed information is positive, there is one thing that is sure to upset many Linux Mint users.

=> ↺ Linux Mint 20 Codename “Ulyana”! What’s News in Linux Mint 20?

• Linux Mint 20: The team developers announced that the latest version of Linux Mint 20 going to be released a few months. Linux Mint 20 is officially code-named as “Ulyana“. Linux Mint 20 is developed based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS version. The team also said that the Linux Mint 20 will have many new software tweaks and hardware boost!

=> ↺ Monthly News – March 2020

• Many thanks to all of you for your support and for your donations. LMDE 4 took longer than we anticipated but we managed to add many new features into it and significantly close the gap with the Ubuntu release. Now that it’s released we’re focusing on the new development cycle and the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 package base.

• LMDE 3 EOL

• LMDE 3 will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on July 1st 2020. Past that date the repositories will continue to work but the release will no longer receive bug fixes and security updates from Linux Mint.

• To upgrade LMDE 3 to LMDE 4 read “How to upgrade to LMDE 4“.

• Mint 20, codename Ulyana

• The codename for Linux Mint 20 is Ulyana.

• Linux Mint 20 will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 and feature 3 editions: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.

• Unlike previous releases, it will only be available in 64-bit.

=> ↺ Edge AI in a 5G world – part 1: How ‘smart cell towers’ will change our lives

• In part 1 we will talk about the industrial applications and benefits that 5G and fast compute at the edge in the form of ‘smart cell towers’ will bring to AI products. In part 2 we will go deeper into how you can benefit from this new opportunity. Part 3 will focus on the key technical barriers that 5G and Edge compute remove for AI applications. In part 4 we will summarise the IoT use cases that can benefit from smart cell towers and how they will help businesses focus their efforts on their key differentiating advantage.

=> ↺ Rigado cuts customers’ time-to-market with Ubuntu Core and AWS

• In the fast-paced world of IoT, being able to reduce time-to-market is a priority. Rigado’s core mission is to provide scalable and secure infrastructure for their customers’ commercial IoT deployments.

• It became clear to Rigado that, to achieve the ease of use it was looking for, it needed to redesign its gateway software – and containerisation emerged as the best way. After looking at a number of container options that involved a lot of moving parts, Rigado decided to turn to Ubuntu Core and snaps. Switching to Ubuntu Core has also enabled Rigado to take advantage of Ubuntu Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) to rapidly launch Ubuntu instances in AWS.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 624

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 624 for the week of March 22 – 28, 2020.

=> ↺ Design and Web team summary – 30th March 2020

• Due to the rapidly developing Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation, the entire web team has transitioned to 100% remote for the foreseeable future. Canonical is well set up to remain productive but brings design challenges such as group sketching which we are testing and evaluating solutions.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ This 5G Phone Runs Linux and Doubles as a Tiny Laptop with a Physical Keyboard

• The so-called Astro Slide looks retro but feels modern. Despite the PDA-like appearance, the device is essentially a 5G smartphone that can double as a laptop thanks to a small physical keyboard.

• In terms of hardware, the Astro Slide comes with the essential feature package to let you stay productive on the go. It’s powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 1000 octa-core SoC and obviously comes with a 5G chip specifically optimized for what the parent company says improved signal with reduced power consumption.

=> ↺ Is it a Smartphone? Is it a PDA? It’s Both – and It Supports Linux

• The Astro Slide is an Android-based smartphone with sliding physical keyboard currently crowdfunding its way into existence — but with the added lure of Linux support.

• Now, i’m generally wary of mentioning anything that is crowdfunded. That goes double when it’s a) technology being hawked on b) the oasis of overpromise that is IndieGoGo.

• But Planet Computers, the company angling to animate this ode to early 00s technology, has a track record in this area. Not only have they run successful crowdfunding campaigns before but they’ve also nailed the hard bit: actually shipping products to backers.

=> ↺ Raspberry Pi 4: Chronicling the Desktop Experience – Viewing Photos – Week 23

• This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

• This week, I’m examining photo viewer software on the RPI4. The first thing to point out is that there’s lots of open source photo viewer software available for Linux. I’m not going to attempt any sort of wholesale survey from an RPI4 perspective. And I’ve not looked at the many open source photo managers even if they double as a photo viewer; I’ll cover them in a future edition of the blog.

• Most of the images I work with use PNG and JPEG formats, although I’m also heavily dependent on WebP. PNG offers lossless compression. It supports alpha transparency, palette-based images, grayscale images, and full-color non-palette-based RGB or RGBA images. JPEG is another extremely popular image compression standard in the world, and the most widely used digital image format. Unlike PNG, JPEG uses lossy compression. WebP covers both bases, employing both lossy and lossless compression, and it’s a relatively modern format compared to JPEG and PNG. In a large scale study of 900,000 web images, WebP images were 39.8% smaller than JPEG images of similar quality.

=> ↺ Select a Geiger Counter for your Phone to Survive the next Nuclear Catastrophe

• It’s time to prepare! No, not for that COVID-19 thingie, it’s too late, but since 2020 has not started the best way we should prepare for all eventualities. It all started badly as I fell off my bicycle on New Year’s eve, and it went south from there, from talks of world war three in January, to the thread of a virus pandemic that could kill millions worldwide, to the start of the first global great depression.

• 2020 will be the “year of doom“, and we should expect massive earthquakes, once in a hundred-year megatsunami what will wipe entire cities, gigantic locust swarms in southern Europe, climate change induces, and leading famine, a couple of large asteroids hitting the hearth, and so on. But we should not forget the nuclear threat either via nuclear war or damaged nuclear reactors following natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

=> ↺ Edgeless EAI-Series Dual Arm Cortex-M4 MCU Features a 300 GOPS CNN-NPU

• Microcontrollers will have an important role to play in AIoT (AI + IoT) applications as they provide the lowest cost and power consumption. Performance is limited but we start seeing MCUs with AI accelerators such as GreenWaves GAP9 multi-core RISC-V microcontroller or Kendryte K210 RISC-V MCU with a KPU AI accelerator.

=> ↺ PCIe-enabled Intel 9th Gen computer uses water cooling

• Vecow’s Linux-friendly “RCX-1500W” edge AI computer cools its 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh chips and up to 4x PCIe cards with a water-cooling system.

• We rarely see liquid cooling systems on embedded computers because they tend to be complex, bulky, expensive, and must be carefully installed and maintained to avoid damage to the computer. Yet, embedded computers have never been so powerful and hot as the latest PCIe-enabled edge AI monsters that are in vogue these days. When you’re running high-powered graphics cards with Intel 8th or 9th Gen CPUs, you just may need to get a little wet.

=> ↺ Modular rolling stock computer is loaded with wireless

• Eurotech’s rugged, railway certified “BoltGate 20-31” transportation gateway runs Linux on an Apollo Lake SoC with standard LTE and GNSS, a choice of WiFi/BT or MVB, and optional expansion modules for GbE, storage, serial/CAN, DIO, and odometer.

• Eurotech announced an Intel Apollo Lake based “smart transportation” computer due in the second half of the year that follows its Bay Trail based BoltGATE 20-25 and BoltGATE 20-25 MVB. The new BoltGate 20-31 computer similarly offers modular expansion and EN50155 railway certification and targets rolling stock applications including passenger infotainment and entertainment, train-to-ground communications, and fleet management.

=> ↺ Kontron 3.5″-SBC-WLU Single Board Computer Takes CNVi M.2 WiFi Cards

=> ↺ DSTIKE ESP32 Watch Development Board Comes with OLED or TFT Display

• The watch can be programmed with Arduino core for ESP32 together with either ThingPulse OLED library or Arduino library for the ST7789 IPS SPI display depending on the model, and Adafruit Neopixel library. Also refer to the example sketches for the OLED display and TFT display.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ LG’s bad software is the one thing holding back its great Android phones

=> ↺ How to group your Chrome tabs on your Android phone

=> ↺ How to Turn off System Animations on Android [Tutorial]

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy A6+ Android 10 update has been released

=> ↺ Oppo Find X2 Pro review: Gunning for the Galaxy S20

=> ↺ Reasons Why You Need Reviews For Your Android App

=> ↺ 10 great productivity web apps for your Chromebook and Android phone

=> ↺ Redmi K30 Pro Linux Kernel Souce Code is now live [Download Now]

• Redmi – the sub-brand of Chinese OEM, Xiaomi, started by focusing primarily on budget-centric devices. Now, the brand is all into crafting quality standard premium smartphones and killer mid-rangers. The brand provides some of the most breathtaking and impressive devices out there. The Redmi K series of smartphones are some of the most amazing mid-rangers with amazing specs and a great amount of value for money. The Redmi K30 Pro is the latest iteration to the series and is one of the best killer smartphones we have come across so far. The device was launched back recently on March 24.

=> ↺ How to use a USB mic with Android

=> ↺ Top 5 group video call apps for Android and PC

=> ↺ Google rolling out streamlined settings for Assistant notifications on Android

=> ↺ Reasons Why You Need Reviews For Your Android App

=> ↺ Samsung Galaxy Fold One UI 2.0 (Android 10) update status

=> ↺ Galaxy Fold 5G receiving Android 10 update with One UI 2.1 in the UK

=> ↺ Verizon’s Moto Z4 receives Android 10 update

=> ↺ Get started with video game emulation on Android: apps, ROMs, and everything else you’ll need

=> ↺ Update Your Android’s ‘Carrier Services’ App To See If You Have RCS Messaging

=> ↺ How to make a GIF on an Android phone

=> ↺ How to get started with Zoom’s apps for iOS and Android

=> ↺ Get SiriusXM free for your iOS or Android device through May 15

=> ↺ Top 5 Online Multiplayer Games on Android to Cope With Quarantine

=> ↺ Top 9 Best Telemedicine Android Apps 2020

=> ↺ Nokia 7.2 gets Android 10 update

=> ↺ LG V35 ThinQ February update rolls out while users await Android 10 (LG UX 9.0); LG V40 Android 10 kernel source code goes live

=> ↺ Vivo S6 5G with 48MP quad camera and Android 10 launched

=> ↺ Stable global Android 10 update for the Redmi Note 8 Pro removed Netflix HDR support

=> ↺ LG V40 ThinQ Android 10 kernel source code published ahead of LG UX 9.0 rollout

=> ↺ Android 10 is now rolling out to the Nokia 7.2

=> ↺ Nokia 7.2 mid-ranger receives Android 10 update

=> ↺ LineageOS ROM releases first builds based on Android 10 (Update: More devices)

=> ↺ OnePlus 8 official specifications revealed: Could be among the fastest Android phones this year

=> ↺ Roku adds voice commands, finally rivaling one of Android TV’s best features

=> ↺ Use your Android to join video conferences or friendly video chats

=> ↺ 40 of the best retro games ported to Android

=> ↺ Today’s best Android game/app deals + freebies: Cytus II, SUBURBIA, more

=> ↺ Asus ZenFone 5Z March update with bugfixes for Android 10-swipe up gesture navigation, WiFi hotspot, random restarts & more released

=> ↺ Poco F1/Pocophone F1 Android 10 update doesn’t fix Netflix HD issue

=> ↺ Vivo S5, NEX Funtouch OS 10 (Android 10) beta out for early adopters

=> ↺ Huawei wants to put Google apps in its own app store after US blacklisting blocks access to Android

=> ↺ How to get Instagram dark mode: for iPhone and Android

=> ↺ Covid-19 Impact: YouTube Restricts Streaming Quality To 480p For Both Andorid, iOS Users

=> ↺ Sony launches mid-range 2020 TVs – 4K, Android, AirPlay 2

=> ↺ It’s Looking Like Android Could Be Embracing WireGuard – “A Sane VPN”

=> ↺ Is Android App development is a Worthy Choice for Enterprises?

=> ↺ CameraX Android API by Google ready for third-party camera apps

=> ↺ [Download link inside] After Realme X2, Realme X2 Pro Realme UI (Android 10) stable update officially begins rolling out

=> ↺ Redmi Note 7 Pro Android 10 update (Global) under development, no ETA though

=> ↺ Motorola Moto G8 Plus Android 10 update looks far as February security patch rolls out

=> ↺ Honor Play 9A budget smartphone unveiled with 5,000 mAh battery, Android 10

=> ↺ 10 best workout games and fitness games for Android

=> ↺ More Indian Cable TV Operators Could Offer Android TV STB in 2020

=> ↺ World Health Organization to launch an official app on iOS and Android

=> ↺ Honor Play 9A unveiled with 5,000mAh battery and Android 10

=> ↺ Redmi Note 8 Pro Android 10 Update Reportedly Removes Netflix and Amazon Prime Video HDR Streaming

=> ↺ List Of Realme Smartphones Running Android 10 To Buy In India

=> ↺ How to check and track coronavirus symptoms on Android

=> ↺ Today’s very best Android video game/application discounts + freebies

=> ↺ It’s 2020, why don’t Samsung phones support Android’s seamless updates?

=> ↺ Heres A Fix To Resolve Unable Answer Calls On Android

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ Pixelorama – Open Source Editor for Pixel Art

• Pixelorama is an open-source application designed for creating pixel art. It was built using Godot – an open-source, multi-platform 2d and 3d game engine. Although still in baby stages, Pixelorama already boasts a clean user interface and a long list of features that enable users to get started with pixel art projects.

• The Pixelorama update is version 0.6 and it ships with a handful of exciting features which include support for multiple themes, a splash screen, layer opacity, more localizations, improved brushes, colour palettes, and constrained angles in straight lines.

=> ↺ IEEE Standards Association Launches an Open Source Collaboration Platform

• IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology. The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) is an organization within IEEE that develops global standards in a broad range of industries.

• The IEEE Standards Association (SA) has come up with an open-source collaboration platform i.e IEEE SA Open.

• It is technically a self-hosted GitLab instance combined with Mattermost (a slack alternative) and GitLab Pages. To describe it further, the official blog post mentioned…

=> ↺ Freeware, Free Software and the Corona Virus Crisis – Choose your tools wisely!

• Cheering on doctors and nurses, sewing face-masks, donating gloves and disinfectant gel, building respirators, running errands for elderly neighbours. Everybody wants to contribute to alleviate the dramatic situations brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The software industry is trying to do its part by giving users access to trial versions of proprietary programs. But, before you go ahead and take advantage of this generosity, you may want to read the fine print. What looks like a great relief today, might turn into a burden tomorrow.

• Of course, everybody appreciates all contributions, anything that can help overcome the crisis together. But you should be wary of offers coming from proprietary software vendors. Among self-employed workers, home office programs (word processors, spreadsheets, databases) are in great demand, for example. But be careful with what you choose: Once the crisis is over, you may wake up to a stringent vendor lock-in, with unexpected costs and other problems attached.

• The same goes for companies asking employees to work from home. The solutions they choose to overcome the challenges of remote working can causes problems which will backfire in the future, once the crisis has passed.

• It is understandable that software companies, many of which are under a great pressure themselves, would try to lure new customers in this way. But you must ask yourself if what is in most cases just a marketing strategy, will be helpful for you in the long run. Proprietary software companies are peddling freeware programs, limited both in time and usability. They offer no way of adapting the solutions to your needs, no permissions to modify and improve the tools, and legal penalties if you share them with others. You can only use the tool for limited purposes and you are not allowed to study the code. Freeware grants you none of the four freedoms of Free Software, to use, study, share and improve the software.

• What’s more, your colleagues and employees may get used to this software, build their workflow upon it, and then will find it difficult to switch to another solution in a couple of months time when the crisis is over. The application you choose may also be part of larger suite, forcing you to acquire and license software you don’t need once the offer is rescinded. You may also be stuck with data locked to closed applications, making it difficult to switch vendor later on. What looks helpful today can be expensive and a hassle to deal with tomorrow. We strongly advise you carefully decide which software you choose.

• Because many proprietary programs can be replaced with Free Software solutions that adhere to Open Standards, you can run your software in a way that fits your needs, without having to worry about additional and unpredictable costs down the road. If you need a new solution today, take a solution which is also good for you tomorrow and choose Free Software. Take advantage of your rights to use, study, share and improve the software, at any time, during or after the crisis.

=> ↺ Huawei open-sources MindSpore, a framework for AI app development

• Huawei this week announced that MindSpore, a framework for AI app development the company detailed in August 2019, is now available in open source on GitHub and Gitee. The lightweight suite is akin to Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch, and it scales across devices, edge, and cloud environments, ostensibly lowering the barrier to entry for developers looking to imbue apps with AI.

=> ↺ Open source approach for patients arriving at the clinic with Clinic Arrivals

• Video conferencing is being done through the open source OpenVidu, which means patients simply have to click on a link in the SMS and there are no apps to download.

• The SMS gateway is provided by Twilio, which lets users send and receive text messages using web service APIs.

• Mr Grieve said OpenVidu was deliberately chosen as unlike other free offerings, it does not require patients to sign up or be given an ID, and instead allows them to get straight to the appointment.

• “This is a link that takes them straight to a website and straight into the video call on the website,” he said. “There is zero impact on the patient’s end and that was really important to me. There is no app, no set-up.”

=> ↺ ISTAT (Instituto Nazionale di Statistica) distributes, under the EUPL licence, their RELAIS toolkit.

• RELAIS (REcord Linkage At IStat) is a toolkit for dealing with record linkage projects.

• The purpose of record linkage is to identify the same real world entity that can be differently represented in multiple data sources, even if unique or common identifiers are not available or are affected by errors.

Events

=> ↺ System Hackers meeting – Lyon edition

• For the 4th time, and less than 5 months after the last meeting, the FSFE System Hackers met in person to coordinate their activities, work on complex issues, and exchange know-how. This time, we chose yet another town familiar to one of our team members as venue – Lyon in France. What follows is a report of this gathering that happened shortly before #stayhome became the order of the day.

• For those who do not know this less visible but important team: The System Hackers are responsible for the maintenance and development of a large number of services. From the fsfe.org website’s deployment to the mail servers and blogs, from Git to internal services like DNS and monitoring, all these services, virtual machines and physical servers are handled by this friendly group that is always looking forward to welcoming new members.

• Interestingly, we have gathered in the same constellation as in the hackathon before, so Albert, Florian, Francesco, Thomas, Vincent and me tackled large and small challenges in the FSFE’s systems. But we have also used the time to exchange knowledge about complex tasks and some interconnected systems. The official part was conducted in the fascinating Astech Fablab, but word has it that Ninkasi, an excellent pub in Lyon, was the actual epicentre of this year’s meeting.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

=> ↺ The Mozilla Blog: We’re Fixing the Internet. Join Us.

• For over two decades, Mozilla has worked to build the internet into a global public resource that is open and accessible to all. As the internet has grown, it has brought wonder and utility to our lives, connecting people in times of joy and crisis like the one being faced today.

• But that growth hasn’t come without challenges. In order for the internet and Mozilla to well serve people into the future, we need to keep innovating and making improvements that put the interests of people back at the center of online life.

• To help achieve this, Mozilla is launching the Fix-the-Internet Spring MVP Lab and inviting coders, creators and technologists from around the world to join us in developing the distributed Web 3.0.

• “The health of the internet and online life is why we exist, and this is a first step toward ensuring that Mozilla and the web are here to benefit society for generations to come,” said Mozilla Co-Founder and Interim CEO Mitchell Baker.

=> ↺ The Mozilla Blog: MOSS launches COVID-19 Solutions Fund

• Mozilla is announcing today the creation of a COVID-19 Solutions Fund as part of the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS). Through this fund, we will provide awards of up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects which are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic in some way.

• The MOSS Program, created in 2015, broadens access, increases security, and empowers users by providing catalytic funding to open source technologists. We have already seen inspiring examples of open source technology being used to increase the capacity of the world’s healthcare systems to cope with this crisis. For example, just a few days ago, the University of Florida Center for Safety, Simulation, and Advanced Learning Technologies released an open source ventilator. We believe there are many more life-saving open source technologies in the world.

=> ↺ Innovating on Web Monetization: Coil and Firefox Reality

• In the coming weeks, Mozilla will roll out a web monetization experiment using Coil to support payments to creators in the Firefox Reality ecosystem. Coil is an alternative approach to monetization that doesn’t rely on advertising or stealing your data and attention. We wrote about Coil for game developers back in the autumn, and now we’re excited to invite more of you to participate, first as creators and soon as consumers of all kinds of digital and virtual content.

• [...]

• If you’ve developed a 3D experience, a game, a 360 video, or if you’re thinking of building something new, you’re invited to participate in this experiment. I encourage you as well to contact us directly at creator_payments at mozilla dot com to showcase your work in the Firefox Reality content feed.

• You’ll find details on how to participate below. I will also share answers and observations, from my own perspective as an implementer and investigator on the Mixed Reality team.

=> ↺ Announcing the Mozilla Mixed Reality Merch Store!

• Ever wanted to up your wardrobe game with some stylish Mixed Reality threads, while at the same time supporting Mozilla’s work? Dream no more! The Mozilla Mixed Reality team is pleased to announce that you can now wear your support for our efforts on your literal sleeve!

• The store (powered by Spreadshirt) is available worldwide and has a variety of items including clothing tailored for women, men, kids and babies, and accessories such as bag, caps, mugs, and more. All with a variety of designs to choose from, including our “low poly” Firefox Reality logo, our adorable new mascot, Foxr, and more.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

=> ↺ Your occasional enterprise storage digest, featuring Commvault, Nutanix, HYCU, MariaDB and more

• MariaDB has announced SkySQL database-as-a-service version of its eponymous software.

• SkySQL has a cloud-native architecture and uses Kubernetes for orchestration; ServiceNow for inventory, configuration and workflow management; Prometheus for real-time monitoring; and Grafana for visualization. It offers transaction and analytics support, with row, columnar, and combined row and columnar storage.

=> ↺ DataStax launches Kubernetes operator for open source Cassandra database

• Today, DataStax, the commercial company behind the open source Apache Cassandra project, announced an open source Kubernetes operator developed by the company to run a cloud native version of the database.

=> ↺ Didn’t see that coming: DataStax emits open source Kubernetes operator for Cassandra

• NoSQL slinger DataStax has released an open source Kubernetes operator for Apache Cassandra as it seeks to cosy back up to the community.

• Fresh from snapping up Cassandra consultancy The Last Pickle for an undisclosed amount on 3 March, the veteran NoSQL biz has rounded out the month by opening up the source to its Kubernetes operator, replete with lessons learned from its forever-in-beta hosted Cassandra product, Astra (formerly Apollo.)

• Operators are one way to deal with the complexities of Kubernetes, abstracting (at least in theory) the user from the grungy bits of deploying and operating an application behind familiar Kubernetes tooling. Certainly, deploying and managing something like Cassandra in such an environment can be challenging enough without having to dive elbow-deep into the guts of thing.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

=> ↺ LibreOffice Online Guide translated into Czech

• LibreOffice Online Guide was created as part of the Google Season of Docs programme, and released in December 2019. Today we’re announcing that the Czech LibreOffice community has finished translating the guide, and it can be downloaded here. (See this page for English documentation.)

• It was a team effort, and participants were Petr Kuběj, Zuzana Pitříková, Zdeněk Crhonek, Roman Toman, Tereza Portešová, Petr Valach and Stanislav Horáček. Thanks to all volunteers! The Czech team continues with the translation of the Getting Started Guide, and is always open for new volunteers, translators and correctors. Give them a hand!

=> ↺ Fontwork update

• Jun Nogata help the LibreOffice community with new Fontwork. And now it’s ready to be in use.

=> ↺ Bullet images update

• LibreOffice 7.0 will get new bullet imges. Hope you like them. In general you can use whatever image you like, want or find from the internet, so in the Bullet image dialog there are the following examples…

CMS

=> ↺ WordPress 5.4 “Adderley”

• Here it is! Named “Adderley” in honor of Nat Adderley, the latest and greatest version of WordPress is available for download or update in your dashboard.

FSF

=> ↺ HACKERS and HOSPITALS: How you can help

• Free software activists, as well as many scientists and medical professionals, have long since realized that proprietary medical software and devices are neither ethical nor adequate to our needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated some of these shortcomings to a broader audience — and also given our community a unique opportunity to offer real, material help at a difficult time. We’re putting together a plan to pitch in, and we hope you’ll join us: keep reading to find out what you can do!

• You may already be aware that software and hardware restrictions are actively hampering the ability of hospitals to repair desperately needed ventilators all over the world, and how some Italian volunteers ran into problems when they 3D printed ventilator valves. (As you can see from the link, the stories vary about exactly what their interaction with the manufacturer was, but it’s clear that the company refused to release proprietary design files, forcing the volunteers to reverse-engineer the parts.)

=> ↺ HACKERS and HOSPITALS

• The Free Software Foundation is focusing on the shortage of medical equipment and using 3D printers to make more.

GNU Projects

=> ↺ GNU Taler news: Exchange ready for external security audit

• We received a grant from NLnet foundation to pay for an external security audit of the GNU Taler exchange cryptography, code and documentation. We spent the last four months preparing the code, closing almost all of the known issues, performing static analysis, fixing compiler warnings, improving test code coverage, fuzzing, benchmarking, and reading the code line-by-line. Now, we are now ready to start the external audit. This April, CodeBlau will review the code in the Master branch tagged CodeBlau-NGI-2019 and we will of course make their report available in full once it is complete. Thanks to NLnet and the European Commission’s Horizion 2020 NGI initiative for funding this work.

=> ↺ GNU Taler news: GNU Taler v0.7.0 released

• We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.7.0.

=> ↺ Glimpse, the GIMP ‘fork’ created by misunderstandings about the project name

Health

=> ↺ Medtronic Open-source its Ventilator. Open-source for humanity

• Medtronic Chairman and CEO “Omar Ishrak” has announced releasing Medtronic “PB 560 Ventilator” as an open-source leading to a storm of hope among doctors and engineers in many countries.

• [...]

• As an open-source enthusiast, I am very happy about releasing such a device as an open-source, but as a doctor, I am truly grateful for this intuitive.

• I believe this COVID19 outbreak crisis has created and still creating generous gifts as it takes, people are coming together to help, and doctors and nurses who were under-evaluated and under-appreciated in several countries, are leading the people thru this crisis.

=> ↺ Open source approach for patients arriving at the clinic with Clinic Arrivals

• All of this is done with existing technology that does not require the patient to download an app and that is easily integrated with the PMS through APIs.

• Video conferencing is being done through the open source OpenVidu, which means patients simply have to click on a link in the SMS and there are no apps to download.

• The SMS gateway is provided by Twilio, which lets users send and receive text messages using web service APIs.

=> ↺ Developers take on COVID-19 with open-source projects, hackathons

• In the past few weeks the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold in the United States, and the disease will continue to have a massive impact around the world for the foreseeable future. But even in the midst of panic and uncertainty, communities are coming together to do what they can. People are 3D printing face shields and sewing masks for healthcare workers, offering to buy groceries and household supplies for the elderly or immunocompromised, and even donating their computer’s GPU power to the cause.

• And developers aren’t absent from this list of people trying to do whatever they can to help. A quick glance into the trending section of GitHub shows that a good portion are COVID-19-related, and there are a number more than that living on GitHub. While medical professionals are on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight, developers are fighting the disease from their computers.

=> ↺ MIT Team Develops $100 Ventilator

• The team has open sourced the design of the simple ventilator device that could be built with about just $100 worth of parts.

=> ↺ MIT open sources cheap ventilator design in response to worldwide shortage

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a cheap ventilator and is releasing the design to the open source community in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

• The COVID-19 outbreak, of which there are roughly 724,000 confirmed cases at the time of writing, has exposed a worldwide shortage of ventilators — critical equipment for those that are severely ill.

• While manufacturers are overhauling their assembly lines to produce ventilators, masks, and key protective gear for medical professionals on the front line, demand has far outstripped supply — and ventilators can be very expensive with price tags of up to $30,000 each in the United States.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Racket

• Racket is a general-purpose, object-oriented, multi-paradigm, functional, imperative, logic based programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It’s designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation.

• Racket is also used to refer to the family of Racket programming languages and the set of tools supporting development on and with Racket. It has a powerful cross-platform GUI library built in.

• Racket’s core language includes macros, modules, lexical closures, tail calls, delimited continuations, parameters (fluid variables), software contracts, green and OS threads, and more. The language also comes with primitives, such as eventspaces and custodians, which control resource management and enables the language to act like an operating system for loading and managing other programs.

• Racket is often used for scripting, computer science education, and research. It’s an open-source project (Apache/MIT).

• Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Racket.

=> ↺ Pangeo with Dask Gateway

• Over the past few weeks, we have made some exciting changes to Pangeo’s cloud deployments. These changes will make using Pangeo’s clusters easier for users while making the deployments more secure and maintainable for administrators.

• Going all the way back to the initial prototype, Pangeo’s cloud deployments have combined a user interface like Jupyterlab with scalable computing. Until recently, Pangeo used Dask Kubernetes to start Dask clusters on a Kubernetes cluster. This worked well for several years, but there were a few drawbacks.

=> ↺ We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 4.

• We are happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 4.

• Jaybird 4 is – compared to Jaybird 3 – an incremental release that builds on the foundations of Jaybird 3. The focus of this release has been on further improving JDBC support and adding support for the new data types and features of Firebird 4.

=> ↺ How failure-driven development makes you successful

• My job title is senior software engineer, but that’s not what my closest co-workers call me. They call me “Cherrybomb” because of all the things I blow up. My regularly scheduled failures have been tracked down to our quarterly earnings and outage times. Literally, I am the production disaster you read about that says, “what not to do ever, in any case, at any time.”

• I started my career at a helpdesk where I wrote loops that wrecked servers in high-end companies. I have taken production applications down for up to eight hours without warning, and I have destroyed endless numbers of clusters in an attempt to make things better—and a couple just because I mistyped something.

• I am the reason we have disaster recovery (DR) clusters in Kubernetes. I am the chaos engineer that, without warning, teaches people how to act and troubleshoot quickly when we have an application that has never been tested for an outage recovery plan. I exist as the best example of failure possible, and it’s actually the coolest thing ever.

=> ↺ Digital Making at Home: Making games

=> ↺ Code Hyper Sports’ shooting minigame | Wireframe #35

=> ↺ If you’ve ever wished Visual Studio Code could be more open source, the Eclipse Foundation would like a word

• The Eclipse Foundation has pulled back the curtains on version 1.0 of Theia, an alternative to Microsoft’s developer darling of the hour, Visual Studio Code.

• Except it isn’t just yet. Those hoping to ditch a Microsoft-branded IDE for something more vendor-neutral might have a while to wait for something to drop from Eclipse itself, although a hop to somewhere like Gitpod will give those interested a look at the cloudy version.

• Eclipse Theia is a framework on which organisations can build and brand their own products, on the desktop or online, rather than a standalone editor.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ 2020.13 NoConf Reached

• It’s a sad moment in time when you realize that basically all conferences have been cancelled for the foreseeable future: the Perl and Raku Conference in Houston, Perl & Raku Con in Amsterdam to name but a few. Some organizers even came to the conclusion that organizing “in person” events is no longer a viable business model (/r/perl comments).

Python

=> ↺ Wing Python IDE 7.2.2 – March 30, 2020

• Wing 7.2.2 introduces a How-To for using Wing with AWS, adds support for Python 3 enums, allows constraining Find Uses of imported symbols to only the current file, and makes a number of usability and stability improvements.

=> ↺ Wesley Chun: Authorized Google API access from Python (part 2 of 2)

• Listing your files with the Google Drive API

=> ↺ Lists in python example3

• This is the final chapter of the lists in python topic, in this chapter we will create an example that will remove the duplicate student names within a student list with the help of the python loop.

=> ↺ Python 101 – Learning About Dictionaries

• Dictionaries are another fundamental data type in Python. A dictionary is a key, value pair. Some programming languages refer to them as hash tables. They are described as a mapping object that maps hashable values to arbitrary objects.

• A dictionary’s keys must be immutable, that is, unable to change. Starting in Python 3.7, dictionaries are ordered. What that means is that when you add a new key, value pair to a dictionary, it remembers what order they were added. Prior to Python 3.7, this was not the case and you could not rely on insertion order.

=> ↺ Python main function

• In this tutorial, we will learn how to use a Python program’s name attribute to run it dynamically in different contexts.

=> ↺ Using data from spreadsheets in Fedora with Python

• Python is one of the most popular and powerful programming languages available. Because it’s free and open source, it’s available to everyone — and most Fedora systems come with the language already installed. Python is useful for a wide variety of tasks, but among them is processing comma-separated value (CSV) data. CSV files often start off life as tables or spreadsheets. This article shows how to get started working with CSV data in Python 3.

• CSV data is precisely what it sounds like. A CSV file includes one row of data at a time, with data values separated by commas. Each row is defined by the same fields. Short CSV files are often easily read and understood. But longer data files, or those with more fields, may be harder to parse with the naked eye, so computers work better in those cases.

=> ↺ PSF’s Projected 2020 Financial Outcome

• The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to the Python community and programming language, as well as running PyCon US. Since PyCon US 2020 was cancelled, the community has asked how the PSF’s finances will be affected. Let us take a look at the projected 2020 financial outcome.

=> ↺ EuroPython 2020: Online conference from July 23-26

• In the last two weeks, we have discussed and investigated concepts around running this year’s EuroPython conference as an online conference. We have looked at conference tools, your feedback, drafted up ideas on what we can do to make the event interesting and what we can accomplish given our limited resources.

=> ↺ Introduction to the Python HTTP header

• You can create your own custom headers for the HTTP destination using the Python HTTP header plugin of syslog-ng and Python scripts. The included example configuration just adds a simple counter to the headers but with a bit of coding you can resolve authentication problems or fine tune how data is handled at cloud-based logging and SIEM platforms, like Sumologic.

=> ↺ Comparing Python Objects the Right Way: “is” vs “==”

• There’s a subtle difference between the Python identity operator (is) and the equality operator (==). Your code can run fine when you use the Python is operator to compare numbers, until it suddenly doesn’t. You might have heard somewhere that the Python is operator is faster than the == operator, or you may feel that it looks more Pythonic. However, it’s crucial to keep in mind that these operators don’t behave quite the same.

• The == operator compares the value or equality of two objects, whereas the Python is operator checks whether two variables point to the same object in memory. In the vast majority of cases, this means you should use the equality operators == and !=, except when you’re comparing to None.

=> ↺ Michael Kennedy almost learned Python in the 90s… and other things I learned recording his DevJourney

• This week, I published Michael Kennedy’s #DevJourney story on my eponym Podcast: Software developer’s Journey.

=> ↺ PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #414 (March 31, 2020)

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

=> ↺ 40 Practical and Useful awk Command in Linux and BSD

• AWK is a powerful data-driven programming language that dates its origin back to the early days of Unix. It was initially developed for writing ‘one-liner’ programs but has since evolved into a full-fledged programming language. AWK gets its name from the initials of its authors – Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan. The awk command in Linux and other Unix systems invokes the interpreter that runs AWK scripts. Several implementations of awk exist in recent systems such as gawk (GNU awk), mawk (Minimal awk), and nawk (New awk), among others. Check out the below examples if you want to master awk.

=> ↺ More mojibake fun

• The names contain reconstructable replos. A 2-byte, UTF-8 encoded character was read by a Windows program byte-by-byte to produce 2 new 1-byte characters, and those 2 1-byte characters were converted back to UTF-8 as 2-byte ones.

=> ↺ D is for Devilish Place Names

• The downloaded file is a format called CSV (“Comma Separated Values”, though in this case they’re separated by the pipe character, “|”), typically used in spreadsheets. I’m not really a spreadsheet person, and CSV files are just as easy to analyze using basic shell tools. Most Linux users are familiar with the power of the command line, but don’t feel left out if you’re not using Linux: the commands I’ll show work fine on a Mac, and they probably work on Windows too if you use the Linux Subsystem for Windows.

• I started with a basic count. I’d seen already, on the website’s search page, that a lot of the names didn’t actually have “Devil” in the name even though that’s what I searched for, so that 1883 number is bogus. So I ran a grep -i devil to pick out the place names that actually do have “devil” in the name (-i means “ignore case”, so it will find devil as well as Devil). Then I piped the result through wc, word count, using -l to count the number of matching lines:

• grep -i devil GNIS_Devil.csv | wc -l

Leftovers

Education

=> ↺ Online Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus

• I’ve been spending a lot of the past week looking at different options for transitioning my teaching online for the rest of the term. There are certainly people far more expert at online instruction than I am, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts and what I’ve found.

=> ↺ Indian Students Commit Suicide after Failing Exams

• The Board of Intermediate Education claimed that almost half the students who committed suicide already had poor academic records, so they should not have been surprised by their poor marks. Ten of the students had failed more than one subject. Moreover, the board said, these students likely were depressed or troubled already, hence their grade troubles.

=> ↺ Improving Visibility and Resources for Student Who Are Parents

• Her report drew on her own experiences as a student parent at William & Mary College and as director of a nonprofit that aids student parents, and on studies of student parents. This research indicates that less than two percent of teen mothers earn their college degrees before the age of thirty, and they are ten times less likely to complete a bachelor’s degree in five years—even though, on average, student parents post higher GPAs than their non-parenting peers.

=> ↺ Apocalyptic and Revolutionary Education in Times of Pandemic

• After the crash of 2009 came the uprisings beginning a so-called “Arab Spring”, the city square occupations of the Indignados, and the Occupy movement. What would Wayne Gretzky[1] do today, facing the currently unknown aftermath of the historic Covid-19 pandemic crash? What should popular movements do under the historically unprecedented circumstances we face today? How should we move from historic crisis of the system to revolutionary transformation now?

=> ↺ How to administer the digital migration

• Each institution’s circumstances are slightly different, but there are some wider lessons in the contingency planning that Hong Kong universities have had to undertake in response to both the coronavirus and last year’s anti-government protests. These twin disruptions, one coming close on the heels of the other, have resulted in face-to-face teaching being cut to just one-third of the original schedule.

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ India Bans Colistin for Livestock in Response to Antibiotic Resistance

• The Bureau reported that the world’s largest animal pharmaceutical company, Zoetis, has been supplying India with antibiotics for the purpose of fattening livestock, despite bans on its use in the European Union and the United States, and calls by the World Health Organization for a global ban.

=> ↺ Why is the U.S. so Exceptionally Vulnerable to Covid-19?

• The United States has become the new center of the global coronavirus pandemic, with over 80,000 cases, more than China or Italy. More than a thousand Americans have already died, but this is surely only the very beginning of this deadly collision between the U.S.’s exceptionally inadequate public healthcare system and a real pandemic.

=> ↺ Coronavirus Means Tough Decision Time for Seniors

• There is little time in this moment to think about “what might have been,” but for seniors like us there are now profound questions about what we do next.

=> ↺ COVID-19 in Germany: Explaining a Low Death Rate

• On 31st March 2020, www.worldometers.info calculated the global death toll from Corona tallied 38,000. Among comparable European countries, Italy (population 60 million) had 11,600 Corona deaths, Spain (46,6 million) registered 7,700, France (67 million) 3,000, the UK (67 million) noted 1,400 deaths, the Netherlands (17 million) 740, the USA (330 million) 3,000, and Germany (83 million) just 645 deaths. In other words, despite Germany’s relative high population, it registered a surprisingly low number of Corona deaths. Seen as death per one million people, Italy had 192 deaths per million and Germany just 8.

=> ↺ ‘Massachusetts Is Not Happy’: Warren Condemns Trump for Outbidding States, Seizing Key Medical Supplies

• Accusing president of “dereliction of responsibility,” the Democratic senator said, “Health workers’ lives are at risk and people are dying.”

=> ↺ Out of the Coronavirus Crisis Can Come Efficient Historic Changes for Justice

• Many of us have heard that the Chinese character for “crisis” is also the character for “opportunity.” During the coronavirus crisis, we have a duty to apply political solutions and emerge much superior than before the pandemic struck an unready country. The time for serious civic reforms is now! Here are five fundamental opportunities for structural reforms and transformations:

=> ↺ With 500 new confirmed cases, Russia’s total number of known coronavirus infections hits 2,337

• On March 31, Russia recorded another 500 new cases of coronavirus in the past day, raising the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 infections to 2,337. Health officials reported no new deaths, leaving the coronavirus fatality count at 17 people, while 55 new recoveries brought the total number of recovered patients to 121 people.

=> ↺ Hitting back against quarantine breakers Russian lawmakers adopt strict new penalties, including criminal punishment, for offenses against the national effort to curb the spread of coronavirus

• On March 31, lawmakers in Russia’s State Duma adopted the revised and final drafts of legislation that imposes new administrative penalties on violations of quarantine and the dissemination of false information about coronavirus, as well as criminal sanctions for spreading fake news and violating sanitary-epidemiological rules. The Federation Council is expected to pass the legislation later in the day.

=> ↺ Chief doctor of Moscow’s main COVID-19 hospital tests positive for coronavirus

• Denis Protsenko, the lead doctor for Moscow’s City Hospital No. 40, has tested positive for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the state television channel Rossiya 24 reported.

=> ↺ “I Haven’t Heard About Testing in Weeks”: In Leaked Audio, Trump Dismisses Governors’ Concerns About Lack of Coronavirus Equipment

• “It would be shocking to me that… anyone who has had access to any newspaper, radio, social networks, or any other communication would not be knowledgeable about the need for test kits.”

=> ↺ Taxpayers Paid Millions to Design a Low-Cost Ventilator for a Pandemic. Instead, the Company Is Selling Versions of It Overseas.

• Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies.

• This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of the ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.

=> ↺ Hospitals Have Left Many COVID-19 Patients Who Don’t Speak English Alone, Confused and Without Proper Care

• When a woman who didn’t speak English arrived at the overrun emergency room of a Brooklyn hospital last week, she was initially placed in a unit for patients who didn’t have the coronavirus.

• But on Thursday, a doctor realized she had a cough and fever and should be treated for COVID-19. The doctor brought her over to the coronavirus unit with a warning: “Good luck. She speaks Hungarian.”

=> ↺ ‘There’s a shortage of absolutely everything’ Russian doctors describe the beginning of their coronavirus pandemic from the front lines

• On March 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a televised nationwide address on the coronavirus pandemic. He explicitly recognized the contributions of Russian doctors, saying, “You are now on the front lines of defense for our country. My heartfelt thanks to all of you for your self-sacrificing work.” A week beforehand, Russia’s Health Ministry issued Order No. 198, titled “On a temporary workflow for medical organizations to fulfill prevention and risk reduction measures against the spread of the new coronavirus infection COVID-19.” The order listed specific steps that both clinic directors and health directors at regional governments are expected to take as the pandemic escalates across Russia. Among other things, the Health Ministry expects medical facilities to be prepared for an influx of patients with acute respiratory symptoms and ready to test them immediately for the new coronavirus, all while protecting workers using personal protective equipment (PPE) and disposable laboratory equipment. The order suspends routine health examinations and tells clinical staff to look into the possibility of rescheduling pre-planned treatment, including inpatient treatment.

=> ↺ Trump Is Using the COVID-19 Pandemic to Wage a Partisan Civil War

• The number of deaths in the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. will soon exceed the number killed in the 9/11 attacks, and we’re just past 10 weeks since the nation’s first confirmed case of the new virus. This deadly pathogen is one of the gravest national threats in a century, and it is now clear that Donald Trump is not only ill-equipped to handle the crisis — he’s gone out of his way to exacerbate its devastation.

=> ↺ Right-Wing Media Joined Trump in Enabling Health Disaster

• The downplaying of the coronavirus by the right-wing press in the United States was preceded decades ago by the media owned by William Randolph Hearst enabling a different sort of toxicity by promoting a positive image of Nazism in the US.

=> ↺ Green Party calls for better data sharing to tackle Covid-19 pandemic

• While current confirmed cases are collated only through test results at hospital, earlier data of those with symptoms is collected through the use of NHS 111 phone and online services.

=> ↺ In This Time of Crisis, We Need to Keep Our Eyes Open

=> ↺ No, the flu vaccine does not increase your chance of getting coronavirus by 36% due to viral interference

• So I’m finally back, and in the 11 days that I’ve been gone the world has changed. The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a virus dubbed SARS-CoV-2, has accelerated. Worse, it’s come to my neck of the woods, with the Detroit area currently being one of the COVID-19 hotspots in the US. It’s eerie at the hospital now. The outpatient clinics are slow because nonessential patient visits have been deferred. I’m not operating because elective surgeries have been canceled. We are even deferring some cancer operations in patients with low-risk cancers who can be given other treatments for several weeks until after the crisis passes. Meanwhile, hospitals are being inundated with COVID-19 patients. So I’ll start slow. There’s an antivaccine take on the COVID-19 pandemic going around, because, of course there is. What is that take? Well, take a look at this Tweet promoting an antivaccine lie about coronavirus and viral interference:

=> ↺ ‘Insulting’ Frontline Health Workers, Trump—Without Evidence—Accuses Hospital Staff in New York of Stealing Protective Gear

• “This man is a serious danger to the health and safety of every health care worker in the nation.”

=> ↺ The New World of Coronavirus

• The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and the coronavirus pandemic have one thing in common: both caused a seismic change in the world. And that change, in general, is for the worse. The present pandemic has, and will have, negative effects on how people work, live, and use their free time. This huge public health crisis will affect each and every one of the 7.8 billion inhabitants of the planet.

=> ↺ Media Silent as Poll Workers Contract Covid-19 at Primaries That DNC, Biden Campaign Claimed Were Safe

• Why have media that have rightly taken Trump and his administration to task for their fatal failures not done the same with Democratic leadership?

=> ↺ My Dead French Grandfather Helped Me with COVID-19

• After my mother died on February 7th I gathered her valuables and photo albums drove home to New York. But there wasn’t enough room in the car for everything I wanted to keep.

=> ↺ What My Father Taught Me About Living Through Coronavirus Hard Times

• Having it easy in the beginning, tough in the end

=> ↺ In Fighting the Coronavirus Pandemic in the US, Nothing Beats Traditional Medicare

• The argument has always been that establishing a public health insurance system would cost too much and cause too much disruption. Now, look around.

=> ↺ ‘Seize It’: Progressives Urge Philadelphia City Govt. to Take Hahnemann Hospital After Owner Demands $1 Million a Month in Rent

• “The city should reopen Hahnemann hospital immediately,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

=> ↺ The Virus is Our Teacher

• Last Sunday at 11 a.m. I went for a walk. Even if it’s nothing special, a walk isn’t a normal thing to do these days. But this brief walk — around the block, consuming maybe 10 minutes of my time — had a transcendent dimension to it that continues to awe me, and I’m going to do it again.

=> ↺ COVID-19 Proves It: We Need Medicare-for-All

• For decades, critics of single-payer health care have raised the menace of rationed care, long waits, and “death panels.”

=> ↺ ‘We Are Beyond Staggering,’ Warns Gov. Cuomo as Coronavirus Overwhelms New York

• “Situation is painfully clear,” said the New York governor, who warns that what his state is experiencing now should be a warning to the entire nation.

=> ↺ WTF Hospital Administrators? Now Is NOT The Time To Silence Doctors & Nurses From Commenting On COVID-19 Shortages

• What is it with people who should know better immediately resorting to censorship and gag orders in the face of important information sharing? With more and more reports directly from doctors and nurses about shortages of necessary protective supplies in the midst of a pandemic, there are also disturbing reports of hospital administrators trying to silence them, and threatening retaliation…

=> ↺ Voluntary Virus Tracking Apps Seek To Get A Grip On The Coronavirus Problem

• Be the surveillance you don’t necessarily want to see in the world. That’s the plan detailed in this report by Thomas Brewster for Forbes. Dozens of countries are kicking around large-scale privacy violations to track the spread of the coronavirus. A handful of other countries are already doing this, including China, India, and Hong Kong.

=> ↺ For National Doctors’ Day, Forget the Donuts. Can We Get Some Damn Masks?

• The inadequate supply of personal protective equipment has already killed patients and providers. This is not only dangerous, it is shameful.

=> ↺ Corporate Media Ignores How Privatization of US Hospitals Explains Lack of Beds, Ventilators

• The politics of healthcare and Covid19 provide ample reasons for anger—toward corporate healthcare and the corporate media so oblivious to their exploitation.

=> ↺ Government Needs Critics—Now More Than Ever

• In late December, only a few hundred people knew of COVID-19. Now it’s March—just 90 days later—and much of the world has had to learn about and adapt and respond to the deadly disease. Though the highly contagious virus seems impossible to ignore today, it’s in part thanks to whistleblowers and critics around the world sharing warnings and information that some governments responded to the pandemic when they did.

• Even dissenting voices are critical when the literal health of millions is at stake.

=> ↺ Go hard or go home How Chechnya went from a ‘coronavirus haven for tourists’ to beating locals with pipes for violating self-isolation

• There are only nine confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Chechnya, but the local authorities have already closed the republic’s borders and reportedly started using violence against people who violate the government’s self-isolation orders. On March 30, the website Mediazona reviewed what measures Chechnya has taken to curb the spread of coronavirus.

=> ↺ On Loaves and Fishes and Toilet Paper: Crackpot Trumpian Pastor Arrested For Packing In Congregants Because COVID-19 Is A Jesus-Hating Liberal Plot

=> ↺ Jerry Brown: Zen and the Art of Pandemic Response

• When “small is beautiful” becomes a deadly mantra.

=> ↺ Under new coronavirus rules, Moscow’s makeshift memorial to Boris Nemtsov is now unguarded for the first time in five years

• For the first time in five years, there are now no volunteers guarding Boris Nemtsov’s makeshift memorial at the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, where the former first deputy prime minister was assassinated in February 2015. Because of the self-isolation requirements now in place across the city, it’s no longer possible to maintain the site’s around-the-clock sentry.

=> ↺ Which regions of Russia are sheltering in place? A running list

• On the evening of March 29, the governments of the city of Moscow and the Moscow region announced that both areas would fall under shelter-in-place orders the following day to suppress the coronavirus epidemic. All of the city’s residents may now leave their homes only for “essential” purposes: going to the pharmacy or the grocery store, receiving emergency medical care, walking their dogs, taking out the trash, or going to work. On March 30, as Muscovites deserted the city’s streets, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin called on the rest of Russia’s federal subjects to follow the capital’s example. The following is a regularly updated list of the regions that have followed Mishustin’s recommendations and taken severe measures to keep public spaces empty.

=> ↺ As Coronavirus Exposes Deep Flaws of For-Profit System, Biden Doubles Down on Opposition to Medicare for All

• “This is a losing politics.”

=> ↺ How My Dad Predicted the Decline of America

• My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

=> ↺ Reclaiming Vacant Homes in the COVID-19 Pandemic

• There are homes without people. More visible are the people without homes. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March, homeless and housing insecure folks in the Los Angeles area moved into publicly owned vacant homes as politicians and public health experts told people to take precautions to avoid infection.

=> ↺ Racial Profiling Disorder: the All-American Pandemic

• A Journal of the Plague Years

=> ↺ Dying Planet and a Virus Unleashed

• If the coronavirus is life-threatening, and the whole of the USA is in lockdown, the speed of its arrival and impact should at least remind us of the fragility of life — not just for our own species but on the planet itself. Of course, Donald Trump disbanded the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Set up after the Ebola scare, its job was to deal exactly with the type of threat we are facing; that is, to prepare for, lead and coordinate resources to deal quickly and effectively with the emergency — its absence is yet another reason for the White House’s lackluster response.

=> ↺ Russia’s coronavirus numbers jump almost 20 percent in the past day to 1,836 confirmed cases nationwide

• In the past day, Russia recorded 302 new cases of coronavirus in 35 regions of the country, raising the national total to 1,836 confirmed cases across 71 different regions. Officially, COVID-19 has now killed nine people in Russia and 66 people have fully recovered.

=> ↺ Pandemic Be Damned, The Business of America Is Business!

• Trump tap dances at the Masque of the Red Death.

=> ↺ As Sanders Demands End to Iran Sanctions to Save Lives Amid Coronavirus Pandemic, Biden Says He Needs ‘More Information’

• “Iran is facing a catastrophic toll from the coronavirus pandemic,” said Sanders. “U.S. sanctions should not be contributing to this humanitarian disaster.”

=> ↺ ‘Abolish For-Profit Health Insurance’: Analysis Warns Companies Could Hike Premiums by 40% Amid Pandemic

• “Corporate-run health insurance isn’t about saving lives. It’s about making as much money as possible. With Medicare for All we can finally put an end to this international disgrace,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

=> ↺ After Repeatedly Downplaying Threat, Trump Now Says Keeping US Coronavirus Deaths to 100,000 Would Be a ‘Good Job’

• “There really are no words for this level of insensitivity and inhumanity. A serial killer would be jealous.”

=> ↺ Jared Kushner’s Coronavirus Task Force Is Using Private Email Accounts To Conduct Official Business

• If you’re a public official, your communications and documents are supposed to be accessible by the public. That’s not me being an absolutist on open government. That’s the law. And yet, here we are, watching an administration that rode into office on chants of “Lock her up!” once again conducting government business off the grid, using the same sort of private email accounts Trump repeatedly declared should have landed Hillary Clinton in the slammer.

=> ↺ “Please Take This, Because I Love You and I Might Die”: A COVID Tale

• Walking sticks are a big thing for my daughter these days, because of our Mighty Adventures. I write it like that, with the capital letters, because that’s how we say it. “Come, my dear, we must embark upon one of our Mighty Adventures,” I announce in portentous tones, one hand gesturing toward the great beyond on the far side of the front door. All of her seven years leap to their feet, graceful as water in her enthusiasm — “Mighty Adventure, yay!” — and off we go. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this is how we mark the time.

=> ↺ Moscow under self-isolation Russia’s capital becomes a ghost town as residents begin to shelter in place

• Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin ordered a citywide self-isolation regime to begin in Russia’s capital on March 30. The measure is intended to slow the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. City residents will only be permitted to leave their homes in order to go to work, visit the nearest grocery stores or pharmacies, walk their pets near their buildings, or receive urgent medical care. When the shelter-in-place order will lift is not yet clear.

=> ↺ St. Petersburg announces shelter-in-place recommendations, makes self-isolation mandatory for those over 65

• The government of St. Petersburg has issued a general self-isolation recommendation, according to a document posted on the city’s website.

=> ↺ Limiting US COVID-19 Deaths to 100,000 Is Trump’s Idea of Doing a “Good Job”

• Just over a month after proclaiming that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States would soon “be down to close to zero,” President Donald Trump said during a press briefing on the White House lawn Sunday that limiting U.S. deaths from the pandemic to between 100,000 and 200,000 people would mean his administration and the country as a whole did “a very good job.”

=> ↺ ACTION ALERT: Dangerous Misinformation From AP

• There’s a boilerplate passage that the Associated Press likes to insert into its stories on the coronavirus (e.g., 3/28/20, 3/29/20, 3/30/20). Under the headline “What You Need to Know About the Virus Outbreak” (3/30/20), it’s the first language after the heading “What You Need to Know.”

=> ↺ A Numbers Game: Could The COVID19 Cure Be Worse Than The Disease?

• Planning on how to best tackle the COVID19 crisis ultimately comes down to numbers. Geoff Russell crunches them for you.

=> ↺ Life on a Block With an Emergency Morgue Truck: “We Hear the Hum of the Refrigerator Going All Night Long”

• Across New York City, there are unthinkable scenes everywhere. Empty public spaces. Teeming emergency rooms. Shuttered churches.

• For Marc Kozlow, the unthinkable played out on Stanhope Street in Brooklyn this weekend. He lives on the block with his fiancee and dog, a rescue named Hank.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ WinRAR 5.90 Final Released For Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android

• WinRAR 5.90 Final has been released with numerous performance improvements and bug fixes for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

• For those not familiar with WinRar, it is an archiving software from RARLAB that supports the ARJ, BZIP2, CAB, GZ, ISO, JAR, LHA, RAR, TAR, UUE, XZ, Z, ZIP, ZIPX, 7z, 001 (split) archive formats.

• WinRAR is distributed as trialware, which means that anyone can use it as a full-featured product before purchasing it.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

=> ↺ GitLab is open sourcing 18 features for the DevOps lifecycle

• The DevOps tool GitLab offers paid and free versions, and now 18 additional features will be moved to the open source editions Core/Free. The developer community can contribute to the according issues and speed up the process—so now is the time to take a look and see which of the features you find most important.

Privatisation/Privateering

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ HPE, Intel and Linux Foundation team up for open source software for 5G core

• HPE announced on Tuesday it’s working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites.

• The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE’s move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM’s Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology.

• HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.

=> ↺ What Value Does Alluxio Brings To The Presto Foundation?

• Steven Mih: The Presto Foundation is a project hosted under the Linux Foundation. It was created last year by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba and Uber. Alluxio is an open source project that is commonly used with Presto, the open source distributed SQL query engine, as well as other projects like Spark and TensorFlow. We support all these different frameworks. And since this was a foundation that was open to all, we decided to join it as one of the companies involved in that foundation.

Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

=> ↺ Automating our Vanilla releases with GitHub actions

• Vanilla framework version 2.7.1 published at the end of February was the first fully automated release. Since then we have released two more and plan to release regular updates at least after every two-week iteration.

• The automated release process is not only smoother and takes less time, but also much less prone to human error.

• But there are still areas for possible improvements.

• With every major release, we are sending a newsletter describing the latest changes and additions to the Vanilla framework. This is still a very manual process that involves editing an email campaign template on MailChimp. Because the content of the email is loosely based on the release notes (that are already automated with Release Drafter), we could think of pre-populating the newsletter content with release notes.

• Instead of triggering the release manually using GitHub UI, we could automatically release (and publish) whenever the Vanilla version is updated in the package.json file. We already have similar workflows in place for our python packages.

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Tuesday

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (tinyproxy), Fedora (okular), Gentoo (ffmpeg, libxls, and qemu), openSUSE (GraphicsMagick), Red Hat (qemu-kvm-rhev), SUSE (cloud-init and spamassassin), and Ubuntu (bluez, libpam-krb5, linux-raspi2, linux-raspi2-5.3, and Timeshift).

=> ↺ Why Understanding CVEs Is Critical for Data Scientists

• CVEs are Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures found in software components. Because modern software is complex with its many layers, interdependencies, data input, and libraries, vulnerabilities tend to emerge over time. Ignoring a high CVE score can result in security breaches and unstable applications.

• Because data scientists work with vast stores of data, they need to take responsibility for the software components they use to minimize risk and protect customer data. A golden rule in security is, wherever valuable data can be found, hackers will go.

• Software developers refer to CVE databases and scores on a regular basis to minimize the risk of using vulnerable components (packages and binaries) in their applications or web pages. They also monitor for vulnerabilities in components they currently use. To reduce the risk of a security breach from open-source packages, data science teams need to take this page from the software developer’s playbook and apply it to their data science and machine learning pipeline.

=> ↺ pam-krb5 4.9

• This is a security release fixing a one-byte buffer overflow when relaying prompts from the underlying Kerberos library. All users of my pam-krb5 module should upgrade as soon as possible. See the security advisory for more information.

• There are also a couple more minor security improvements in this release: The module now rejects passwords as long or longer than PAM_MAX_RESP_SIZE (normally 512 octets) since they can be a denial of service attack via the Kerberos string-to-key function, and uses explicit_bzero where available to clear passwords before releasing memory.

=> ↺ rethinking openbsd security

• OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure.

=> ↺ Watering-Holes Target Asian Ethnic Victims with Flash Update Decoy

• While the Uighurs – an ethnic and religious minority in China – have been the targets of multiple cyberattacks and surveillance in the past, the firm said that it couldn’t reveal the identity of the target group.

• [...]

• Kaspersky said that these include an installer package that includes a decoy, legitimate Flash update and a stager. However, the Flash update is no longer valid, so it will fail with a message stating that the installer is outdated or renamed, and will direct the user to the Adobe website, according to the analysis.

• The second file is a module called “Godlike12,” which is a backdoor written in the Go language that sets up a command-and-control (C2) channel and proceeds with host fingerprinting upon startup (hostname, IP address, MAC address, Windows version, current time, Kaspersky researchers wrote). It also regularly checks for a remote [ID]-cs.txt, which contains encrypted commands for it to carry out. The most interesting thing about the implant is the fact that it exchanges files with a Google Drive space in order to communicate.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Leaked materials suggest that Muscovites will soon need QR-codes to step outside, even to walk their dogs or commute to work

• Moscow residents now under citywide self-isolation will soon need QR-codes generated by city officials for each trip they make outside their own homes — even for so much as throwing out the garbage. Citing a presentation made to the Mayor’s Office (confirmed by two of the newspaper’s sources in the city government), Kommersant says Muscovites will need the city’s QR-codes to commute to work, go to health clinics, visit the countryside, go to the grocery store, walk their dogs within 110 yards of their homes, and so on.

=> ↺ Orange recycles its geolocation service for the global pandemic

• For years, Orange has been trying to market the gold mine that is our geolocation data (the list of relay antennas to which our phones connect during the day). The pandemic appears to be a good opportunity for the company to open its market.

=> ↺ Researchers Say Kids’ Android Apps Are Still Riddled With Malware

• While numerous vendors and tech giants have cooked up lower-cost Android phones with marketing focused on helping the poor, a recent study by advocacy group Privacy International found that the privacy trade offs of these devices are… potent. Not only do they usually come with outdated OS’ opening the door to hackers, the phones have locked down user control to such a degree they’re unable to remove apps that may also pose security risks. In this way, the researchers argued, we’ve made privacy a luxury option that’s only available to those who can actually afford it.

=> ↺ Moscow says a new ‘system’ to control residents’ movements will be deployed by the end of the week

• By the end of the week. That’s how soon Moscow officials say they plan to roll out a new system to control the movements of local residents under Mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s new self-isolation orders. “With every day, we’ll be exerting more control over this situation. By the end of the week, I hope we’ll have information systems that will allow us to control residents’ movements almost completely and prevent violations that could occur,” says Mayor Sobyanin, as reported by the news agency Interfax. “We’re also waiting on a federal law that will allow us to work more actively on this issue,” he added.

=> ↺ UK’s National Health Service Plans To Use Big Data Analysis To Fight COVID-19 — With The Help Of Palantir

• It’s clear that digital technology will play a key role in helping to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, whether as a way of disseminating information, telecommuting, or of keeping people entertained during lockdowns. Less welcome is the use of advanced surveillance and tracking techniques to monitor the movements of people to see if they are obeying quarantine restrictions. Another obvious way to apply technology is to manage the key resources being used to tackle it. That’s what the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) is doing…

=> ↺ Vallejo Must Suspend Cell-Site Simulator Purchase

• As Bay Area residents sheltered at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Vallejo City Council assembled via teleconference last week to vote on the purchase of one of the most controversial pieces of surveillance equipment—a cell-site simulator. What’s worse is that the city council approved the purchase in violation of state law regulating the acquisition of such technology. 

• Any decision to acquire this technology must happen in broad daylight, not at a time when civic engagement faces the greatest barriers in modern history due to a global pandemic. EFF has submitted a letter to the Vallejo mayor and city council asking the city to suspend the purchase and hold a fresh hearing once the COVID-19 emergency has passed and state and local officials lift the shelter-at-home restrictions. 

=> ↺ EFF to Supreme Court: Losing Your Phone Shouldn’t Mean You Lose Your Fourth Amendment Rights

• You probably know the feeling: you reach for your phone only to realize it’s not where you thought it was. Total panic quickly sets in. If you’re like me (us), you don’t stop in the moment to think about why losing a phone is so scary. But the answer is clear: In addition to being an expensive gadget, all your private stuff is on there.  

• Now imagine that the police find your phone. Should they be able to look through all that private stuff without a warrant? What if they believe you intentionally “abandoned” it? Last week, EFF filed an amicus brief in Small v. United States asking the Supreme Court to take on these questions.

=> ↺ Nest outages prove that the smart home needs a local fallback

• Google’s Nest service has been down once, twice, thrice, four times, no, scratch that, at least five times in five months, four of which were in the last few weeks. A similar thing happened toward the end of 2018. After each failure, a fix, an apology, more disgruntled users, and hours lost without any security recording for owners of the brand’s cameras. Seeing the same headline with the same story every day proves that we can’t solely rely on remote servers for the smart home, and local fallbacks need to be the first feature baked in, not an afterthought or a bonus.

• [...]

• While most of these down times will be harmless for the majority of users, they’ll still be detrimental to a small number of people. If the server is down and your smart camera doesn’t catch a hit-and-run outside your house, or your alarm doesn’t alert you of a burglary, the system has absolutely, irrefutably failed you. You’ll never trust it again, will you?

=> ↺ Videoconferencing with #privacy

• Videoconferencing is on the rise worldwide with the COVID-19 crisis. But did you know that most videoconferencing software is NOT offering any guarantee about your privacy?

• Even some nice open source software such as Jitsi is relying on some Google services.

=> ↺ Zoom Is Leaking Emails And Photos Of Users

• It has reported that the popular video-conferencing app Zoom is leaking email addresses and photos of its users to the unknown people and Zoom is giving strangers the ability to attempt to start a video call with those users.

• Zoom Is Leaking Emails And Photos Of Users

• Zoom meetings are not end-to-end (E2E) encrypted. Zoom’s spokesperson told The Intercept, “It is not possible to enable E2E encryption for Zoom video meetings.”

• In E2E encryption, no one can read your conversation, not even the company.

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ Alternatives to Policing—Putting the Power and Money Back Into Our Communities

• To understand why excessive policing can perpetuate cycles of violence, examine the institutional pressures that drive so much of what we see today. Since the 1960s, governments have extended the discourse of war beyond its traditional context. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson announced the “war on poverty” as he attempted to lay the foundations for a welfare state. In 1971, Richard Nixon called drug abuse “public enemy number one” and declared a “war on drugs.” With each declaration, the presumed “enemy” becomes less visible, with no end in sight.

=> ↺ MSNBC Contributor Catches Heat for Claiming George W. Bush Didn’t Politicize 9/11 ‘In Any Way’

• “There is 9/11 whitewashing and memory-holing happening right now, and it’s dangerous.”

=> ↺ We’ve Met the Enemy and It’s a Tiny Virus

• Over the course of just a couple of days last week, the backbone of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet has just been shut down for the next month. The enemy that managed to cause this sudden surprise unilateral disarmament of the mighty US Navy’s Pacific Fleet was not Russian or Chinese cyber hackers or a sneak attack by some foreign enemy. Rather, it was just a tiny virus, COVID-19, that infected one crew member on each of two $13-billion Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers.

=> ↺ Has America Reached Its Endgame in Afghanistan?

• In an extraordinary statement titled “On the Political Impasse in Afghanistan,” Washington has admitted to the failure of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s mission to Kabul on March 23, which was taken up to heal the political rift among Afghan politicians and to urge them to form an inclusive government so as to implement the peace agreement signed in Doha on February 29.

=> ↺ Beyond Chutzpah: US Charges Venezuela With Nacro-Terrorism

• According to the parable, the ungrateful son takes out a life insurance policy on his parents, murders them to collect, and is caught and found guilty. At his sentencing, the judge asks if he has anything to say on his behalf. The son replies: “Have mercy upon me because I am an orphan.” That’s chutzpah.

=> ↺ Growing Xenophobia Against China in the Midst of CoronaShock

• On March 25, the foreign ministers of the G7 states failed to release a statement. The United States—the president of the G7 at this time—had the responsibility for drafting the statement, which was seen to be unacceptable by several other members. In the draft, the United States used the phrase “Wuhan Virus” and asserted that the global pandemic was the responsibility of the Chinese government. Earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump had used the phrase “Chinese Virus” (which he said he would stop using) and a member of his staff was reportedly heard using the slur “Kung Flu.” On Fox News, anchor Jesse Watters explained in his unfiltered racist way “why [the virus] started in China. Because they have these markets where they eat raw bats and snakes.” Violent attacks against Asians in the United States has spiked as a consequence of the stigma driven by the Trump administration.

=> ↺ US Plans to Create an Autonomous Sunni Region in Shia Iraq

• Americans are the primary beneficiaries of the plan. The United States would retain its presence in Western Asia after Iraq demanded American troops remove themselves following President Donald Trump’s January 3, 2020 order to assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani on Iranian soil.

=> ↺ Trump’s Chernobyl Moment: the US May Lose Its Status as World Superpower and Not Recover

• The US may be reaching its “Chernobyl moment” as it fails to lead in combating the coronavirus epidemic. As with the nuclear accident in the Soviet Union in 1986, a cataclysm is exposing systemic failings that have already weakened US hegemony in the world. Whatever the outcome of the pandemic, nobody is today looking to Washington for a solution to the crisis.

=> ↺ ‘Pandemics Know No Borders’: Democrats Call on Trump Admin to Suspend Sanctions on Iran During Coronavirus Outbreak

• “We need to cancel all economic sanctions during this crisis.”

=> ↺ An Employee at an Illinois School We Reported On Has Been Charged With Battering a 7-Year-Old Boy

• A Gages Lake School worker has been arrested and charged with battering a 7-year-old student in the school’s seclusion room space, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office said Monday.

• The aide was assigned to work in an area called “office intervention,” where workers take students who have been removed from class for disruptive behavior. Records show that Justin Cole, 35, of Kenosha, Wisconsin, had been working as a paraprofessional for about three weeks when, on Feb. 27, school administrators notified police about an incident earlier in the day.

=> ↺ We Know The FBI Can’t Count Phones. A New Report Shows It Can’t Count Guns And Ammo Either.

• We know the FBI can’t accurately track how many encrypted devices it has in its possession. Two consecutive directors have pushed a “going dark” narrative using an inflated number of uncracked phones. At one point the FBI claimed it had nearly 8,000 phones in its possession, each one presumably full of evidence. When pressed for information by members of Congress, the FBI suddenly realized it had overstated this number by at least 6,000 phones. It discovered its error in May of 2018. It has yet to release an updated number.

=> ↺ Amnesty Slams Trump for Classifying Gun Stores as ‘Essential Businesses’ During Pandemic

• “With hospitals at critically low capacity due to the pandemic, we cannot afford more injuries or deaths from gun violence.”

=> ↺ As the World Tackles the COVID-19 Pandemic, the U.S. Raises the Pressure on Venezuela

• In a press conference on March 26, it was almost comical how little evidence the U.S. Department of Justice provided when it accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and several of the leaders of his government of narco-trafficking. The U.S. offered $15 million for the arrest of Maduro and $10 million for the others. Maduro, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said dramatically, “very deliberately deployed cocaine as a weapon.” Evidence for this? Not presented at all.

=> ↺ Yet Another Court Says Suing Twitter For Terrorist Acts Is A Waste Of Everyone’s Time

• Every tragedy should be exploited. That’s the theory behind a string of Excolo Law and 1-800-LAW-FIRM lawsuits that seek to hold social media companies responsible for acts of terrorism. So far, not a single court has been willing to ignore Section 230 of the CDA or the First Amendment to give these opportunists any satisfaction. Notwithstanding some very bizarre arguments from one Ninth Circuit judge, it’s been a long run of shutouts for lawyers I fucking hope are working on contingency.

=> ↺ Going After Maduro

• The recent indictments of Nicolas Maduro and other Venezuelan government officials on drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges is a sham. It is a politically motivated and hypocritical attack on the elected government of Venezuela. Obviously, it is another front in the ongoing US low-intensity war on the majority of Venezuelans. It is cynical in that Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia has been literally governed by drug traffickers for most of the past thirty years, if not longer.

=> ↺ It’s Time to Rethink US Militarism in the Midst of COVID-19

• My dad was born in 1917. Somehow, he survived the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1919, but an outbreak of whooping cough in 1923 claimed his baby sister, Clementina. One of my dad’s first memories was seeing his sister’s tiny white casket. Another sister was permanently marked by scarlet fever. In 1923, my dad was hit by a car and spent two weeks in a hospital with a fractured skull as well as a lacerated thumb. His immigrant parents had no medical insurance, but the driver of the car gave his father $50 toward the medical bills. The only lasting effect was the scar my father carried for the rest of his life on his right thumb.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

=> ↺ Barbaric Decisions: Coronavirus, Refusing Bail and Julian Assange

• “To expose another human being to serious illness, and to the threat of losing their life, is grotesque and quite unnecessary.  This is not justice, it is a barbaric decision.”

Environment

=> ↺ Environmentalism’s Next Frontier: Granting Legal Rights to Nature

• It’s all part of the nascent “rights of nature” movement that recognizes what indigenous people have always known: the natural cycle of life belongs to all living systems, not just humans.  Instead of viewing nature as property to be owned, nature has its own inalienable rights including: The right of restoration, to allow natural processes/ecosystem functioning without interference, and the right of advocacy with laws that appoint a guardian for a particular ecosystem, like a parent who represents a child’s interests in court. The guardian can sue on the ecosystem’s behalf; if awarded damages, the money can go into a trust dedicated to funding its restoration.

=> ↺ Navy Quietly Shut Down Climate Change Task Force

• Since it started, the TFCC released several reports on the strategic challenges that climate change poses, including assessments of what the melting Arctic means for strategic planning and the dangers that sea-level rise and extreme weather pose to many naval installations.

=> ↺ More Than 700 Activists Arrested During Extinction Rebellion Climate Protests

• Nearly 300 of the arrests took place in London after people there shut down busy streets and took over eleven public sites. In New York City, 90 activists were arrested after demonstrators poured fake blood on the iconic bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange. Dozens more were also arrested in Amsterdam, Vienna, and Madrid. The Extinction Rebellion events mark the first time that a global movement addressing climate change has begun to gain traction.

Energy

=> ↺ TC Energy Natural Gas Pipeline Invades Indigenous Lands

• In December 2019, a court injunction required removal of the blockades, leading to conflicts between Royal Canadian Mounted Police and protestors, resulting in the arrest of 14 protestors, part of what The Conversation reported as the RCMP’s deep-rooted violence against indigenous peoples.

=> ↺ ‘A Shameful New Low’: Amid COVID-19 Crisis, Alberta Govt. Ponies Up $1 Billion for Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

• “We need billions of public dollars invested directly in vulnerable communities dying from COVID-19, not spent propping up massive oil companies and unneeded projects that would trample Indigenous rights and exacerbate the climate crisis.”

=> ↺ Trump Administration Finalizes Car Rule Which Will Worsen Economy, Public Health

• This policy is bad for consumers, bad for public health, and bad for the environment.

=> ↺ With Air Pollution on the Rise Under Trump, People at Risk of Severe Illness From Coronavirus

• On Tuesday, the Trump administration released its final rule rolling back President Obama’s fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, which will allow cars and light trucks to cumulatively emit nearly 1 billion more tons of lung-damaging carbon dioxide over the lifetime of the vehicle fleet than under the standards put in place during the Obama administration.

=> ↺ Blue energy revolution comes of age

• With green energy from wind and solar out-competing fossil fuels, governments now hope for another boost − blue energy from the oceans.

=> ↺ Trump Admin Weakens Clean Car Standards Despite Its Analyses Showing Rule Favors Big Oil Over Health, Climate

• Experts also warn it will result in litigation and global market inconsistency to the detriment of automakers.

=> ↺ Trump to Kneecap Obama-Era Fuel Efficiency Standards, Hurtling Nation ‘Toward a More Dangerous Climate’

• “Of all the bad things President Trump has done to the environment, this is the worst.”

=> ↺ Could COVID-19 Spell the End of the Fracking Industry as We Know It?

• It has always been known that the oil and gas industry only survives by way of debt financing. Fracking is capital intensive, and very few companies involved ever actually even turn a profit in excess of the cost of capital.

=> ↺ Oil Refineries Face Shutdowns as Demand Collapses

• Oil prices have fallen precipitously to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. Typically, falling oil prices are a good thing for refiners because they buy crude oil on the cheap and process it into gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel, selling those products at higher prices. The end consumer also tends to consume more when fuel is less expensive. As a result, the profit margin for refiners tends to widen when crude oil becomes oversupplied.

=> ↺ Coal exit will benefit health, wealth and nature

• Human economies still depend on hydrocarbon fuels. But there are ways to achieve a coal exit, cut emissions and protect health.

=> ↺ Chamber of Commerce’s Energy Members Silent After Group Opposed Using Wartime Law to Produce Medical Supplies

• Major electric utilities and fossil fuel producers that are members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce remained silent when asked whether they supported the lobbying group’s controversial opposition to using the Defense Production Act to address a shortage of medical supplies and equipment crucial to fighting the coronavirus. 

Wildlife/Nature

=> ↺ Save Salmon, Save Ourselves

=> ↺ Alliance for the Wild Rockies Sues Trump’s Bureau of Reclamation for Bull Trout Fatalities in Saint Mary-Milk River Irrigation Project on the east Side of Glacier National Park

• Bull trout are one of the largest native salmonids in Montana, capable of reaching three feet long and 25 pounds or more.  A spectacularly beautiful fish, they once occupied an enormous range from the Rockies to the Pacific coast to the Yukon.  But due to habitat destruction, dams, and irrigation dewatering, they were listed as ‘Threatened’ under the Endangered Species Act in 1998 and remain far from recovered and more threatened than ever 22 years later.

Finance

=> ↺ New Partnerships, Changes in State Provisions Address Education Challenges Faced by Families of Migrant Farmworkers in California

• Under the Office of Migrant Services, the state of California operates 24 Migrant Family Housing Centers for families who migrate for seasonal harvest work. These apartments are highly desired by the families as rents are subsidized and living conditions are much better than in most other available housing options. However, one major requirement to maintain residence is that the migrant family must move at least fifty miles away for three to six months each year.

=> ↺ The Fault Lines of a Failed Society Begin to Open Up Into Chasms

• The area from which I write and live is a tourist area. It’s located in the Berkshire Hills (foothills of the Appalachian Mountain chain) of Massachusetts. Signs on roadways leading to the area read: “America’s Premier Cultural Resort.”  There are lots of live entertainment venues here including theater, music, and dance. The demographics here point to an aging population increasingly made up of a significant number of people coming here to live in second homes and to retire. Tourism means a tourist economy with many low-paying jobs and few opportunities for younger people and young families. There is a small professional class and many successful tradespeople. Small farms are also numerous. Young people, and especially young people with families, have left the area in high numbers as reflected in the 2010 US Census, and school enrollment continues a precipitous decline. House prices have skyrocketed, leaving first-time home buyers with no way to finance a home. The towns here are commonly referred to as hill towns.

=> ↺ As Thousands of Las Vegas Hotel Rooms Sit Empty, City Paints ‘Social Distancing Boxes’ in Parking Lot for Homeless People

• “This is America.”

=> ↺ Fed Economists Warn US Unemployment Rate Could Soon Reach 32%—During Great Depression It Peaked at 25%

• “These are very large numbers by historical standards, but this is a rather unique shock that is unlike any other experienced by the U.S. economy in the last 100 years.”

=> ↺ Removing the Profit from Our Pills: The Case for a Public Pharma System

• Public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution in the US would combat the destructive impacts of Big Pharma—including…

=> ↺ Congress “CARES” for Wealthy With COVID-19 Tax Giveaways

• At a time when record numbers of Americans are facing unemployment, state and local governments are facing a perfect storm of growing public investment needs and vanishing tax revenues, and small business owners are struggling to avoid even more layoffs, lavishing tax breaks on the top 1 percent in this way shouldn’t be in anyone’s top 20 list of needed tax changes.

=> ↺ In the Name of Profit and Greed, Billionaire Class Declares: ‘Back to Work!’

• We must put public health over all other concerns.

=> ↺ With Bills Due April 1, More Than 400,000 Demand Congress Freeze All Rent, Mortgage, and Utility Payments

• “Millions are wondering how they’ll pay their rent or mortgage by tomorrow. We need additional emergency action suspending rent, mortgage and utility payments for the duration of this crisis.”

=> ↺ “Pelosi’s Terrible Idea”: Critics Denounce Proposal to Give Wealthy a Tax Cut in Next Stimulus Package

• “This is almost unbelieveable.”

=> ↺ Children of Single Federal Employees Get Half the Benefit from New Parental-Leave Law

• Several states have passed similar laws. As of 2018, paid family leave was available to 25 percent of state and local government workers, and ninety-three percent had access to unpaid leave, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

=> ↺ The US’s Wave of Hospital Closures Left Us Ill-Equipped for COVID-19

• A couple of weeks ago, as countries scrambled to protect their citizens from the COVID-19 pandemic by closing borders and quarantining travelers, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, upon the “recommendation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” took the unprecedented step of urging all students who are studying abroad to return home. In the announcement, they emphasized the need to return home if students are living in a country with “poorly developed health services and infrastructure … for example the USA.” The word spread quickly on social media that the United States had been singled out as an example of a country with poor health care infrastructure, with many people in the U.S. agreeing that we lack the capacity to handle the pandemic.

=> ↺ We Must Cancel Rent Nationwide and Demand Safe Housing for All

• As the coronavirus outbreak spreads rapidly across the United States, hitting densely populated cities like New York, New Orleans, and L.A. particularly hard, the twin public health and economic crises — and the measures the ruling class is taking to combat them — are taking their toll on working people. Now, with the end of the month coming up quickly, working people are facing yet another hurdle: how to pay rent.

=> ↺ A Major Medical Staffing Company Just Slashed Benefits for Doctors and Nurses Fighting Coronavirus

• Emergency room doctors and nurses many of whom are dealing with an onslaught of coronavirus patients and shortages of protective equipment — are now finding out that their compensation is getting cut.

• Most ER providers in the U.S. work for staffing companies that have contracts with hospitals. Those staffing companies are losing revenue as hospitals postpone elective procedures and non-coronavirus patients avoid emergency rooms. Health insurers are processing claims more slowly as they adapt to a remote workforce.

=> ↺ Trump’s Pro-Business Labor Board Deals Major Setback to Gig Workers

• Under Trump, the generally business-friendly NLRB has become even more devoted to protecting employers’ interests than was the case in previous administrations. As Bobbi Murray  explained in a September 2, 2019 American Prospect essay , the five-person board is currently operating with a vacant seat and consists of three Republicans and the lone remaining Obama appointee, Lauren McFerran, who is set to term out in December.  Murray reports that “conservative interests have urged President Trump to wait until McFerran leaves and then to fill the two empty seats to lock in a unanimous pro-employer majority.”

=> ↺ Well Hyped Satellite Broadband Provider OneWeb Files For Bankruptcy

• For years, we’ve been promised repeatedly that new broadband technologies would soon arrive to disrupt the broken, cable broadband versus telco DSL duopoly in the states. And for just as long, these emergent technologies, for a wide variety of reasons, have failed to materialize.

=> ↺ After Securing Corporate Bailout, Trump and GOP Largely Oppose New Stimulus

• Having secured a multi-trillion-dollar bailout fund for large corporations and minimal relief for the public as the U.S. economy reels from the coronavirus crisis, the White House and Republican leaders in Congress are already throwing cold water on the prospect of a fourth stimulus bill that progressives say is necessary to address the deep flaws and gaping holes in the measure President Donald Trump signed into law last week.

=> ↺ Erik Olin Wright and the Anti-Capitalist Economy

=> ↺ ‘No More Spending’: After Securing $4.5 Trillion Corporate Bailout, Trump White House and GOP Cast Doubt on New Stimulus

• “Trillions for big business. Bare minimum for you.”

=> ↺ How to Prepare for the Trump Recession

• Unlike public assistance, SNAP responded well during the Great Recession. Its requirements are designed to expand during economic downturns or recessions. Waiving work requirements during the Great Recession made thousands of people in need eligible for the program who otherwise wouldn’t have been. Between December 2007 and December 2009, the number of SNAP participants rose by 45%. The program helped keep an estimated 3.8 million families out of poverty in 2009.But that might not be an option this time around, as SNAP has come under attack from the Trump administration, which is trying to enact a draconian rule change that would kick an estimated 700,000 of our most vulnerable citizens off of the program. Luckily, a judge blocked the rule from going into effect, but the administration is still fighting to enforce it — even in the middle of a global pandemic. We need to make sure SNAP’s flexibility and ability to respond to economic downturns is protected before the next recession hits.Stronger safety nets are not only good for individuals and families in need. They will also prevent the looming recession from becoming an even deeper and longer economic crisis. 

=> ↺ When Economists Try to Solve Health Crises, the Results Can Often be Disastrous

• I’m writing this at 585,000 worldwide active cases, 26,000 deaths, and with only China and Korea seemingly under some sort of control (using a social metric tool, Worldometer). The stimulus package announced by the U.S. government is at $2 trillion, but without job protections, rent freezes, or meaningful income support for most people. Where to reach for analogies to help us understand the moment? The AIDS crisis? The 2008 economic crisis? SARS?

=> ↺ Facing Layoffs, General Electric Workers Demand Company Put Them to Work Producing Ventilators Instead

• “Real leadership from the working class.”

=> ↺ “Now I Can Afford My Meds.” After Months of Appeals, Retiree’s Medicaid Benefits Are Restored.

• Almost two years after Judith Persutti first applied for Medicaid in South Carolina, the 64-year-old retiree who gets by on Social Security and food stamps had her health insurance restored Friday.

• Her benefits were reinstated after ProPublica examined a little-used appeals and hearing process that allows people receiving public assistance to challenge adverse decisions made by government agencies. The Trump administration has called the right to appeal a “guardrail” that protects citizens as states try to apply more stringent requirements for Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled.

=> ↺ $3 Billion ‘Bailout’ for Oil Producers Dropped From Economic Stimulus Package

• With oil prices crashing, Trump announced a few weeks ago he planned to have the government purchase “large quantities” of crude oil to add to the emergency stockpile. “We’re going to fill it right up to the top,” he said. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was created in the 1970s to reduce disruptions in oil supply and it currently holds 635 million barrels of crude.

=> ↺ Will Pandemic Relief Become a Petroleum Industry Slush Fund?

• Recently, President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin both made clear their intentions to include some sort of bailout for the oil and gas industry as part of the federal government’s emergency economic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

=> ↺ Washington Uses the Pandemic to Create a $2 Trillion Slush Fund for Its Cronies

• When historians look back on our current government’s response to a public health emergency and resultant economic depression, there won’t be many paeans to profiles in courage. It may seem impressive that Congress has approved legislation worth $2 trillion to help sustain the American economy, but it’s no New Deal. Rather it’s a massive economic slush fund that does its utmost to preserve the old ways of doing things under the guise of masquerading as a response to a public health emergency. In reality, the relief provisions are barely adequate.

=> ↺ The Chicago Housing Authority Was Slow to Protect Residents During the Coronavirus Outbreak

• As is her way, Brenda Perry got right to the point when I reached her on the phone. “They’re not doing anything right at the CHA,” she said.

• Perry is 73 years old and lives in a Chicago Housing Authority high-rise for seniors, the Lincoln Perry apartments, in the South Side’s Douglas community. She’s long been outspoken about conditions in her building and other CHA policies; during public testimony at a meeting last fall, she reminded the CHA board that she had been telling them for three years that the building’s private management company hadn’t been keeping it clean.

=> ↺ Public Health First

• Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, whose net worth is $1.1bn, recommends “those with a lower risk of the diseases return to work” within a “very few weeks”.

=> ↺ Insurance Companies Could Hike Premiums by 40 Percent Amid Pandemic

• A new analysis warning that U.S. health insurance companies could hike already exorbitant premiums by 40 percent or more next year amid the coronavirus pandemic was received by Medicare for All advocates as further confirmation that America’s healthcare system — driven first and foremost by the profit motive — is ill-equipped to provide necessary care for all, particularly in a time of nationwide crisis.

=> ↺ Neoliberal Austerity and Private Health Care Has Worsened US Pandemic

=> ↺ Amid Pandemic, Homeless New Yorkers Demand Refuge in Vacant Apartments, Hotels

• More than 100 million people across the United States have been ordered to stay home to prevent the spread of coronavirus, but what about people who are homeless? Tens of thousands of homeless people in New York City shelters and on the streets have been left with no way to safely shelter in place. We hear from people who are homeless, and speak with Kiana Davis, advocate and policy analyst with the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center.

=> ↺ DOJ Investigating Lawmakers’ Stock Dumps Ahead of Coronavirus Market Crash

• At least one lawmaker affected by the probe is Republican Sen. Richard Bur, who unloaded up to $1.7 million in stocks.

=> ↺ Sen. Burr Faces DOJ Investigation for Selling a Fortune in Stocks Right Before the Market Crashed

• Federal authorities are scrutinizing Sen. Richard Burr’s stock sell-off before the market crash triggered by the coronavirus outbreak, CNN reported on Sunday.

• The news comes less than two weeks after ProPublica and the Center for Responsive Politics reported that Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, unloaded between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions, a significant portion of his total portfolio. The sales came soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ The Deep State’s Demolition of Democracy

• “Thank God for the Deep State,” declared former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin while appearing on a panel at the National Press Club last October. In 2018, the New York Times asserted that Trump’s use of the term “Deep State” and similar rhetoric “fanned fears that he is eroding public trust in institutions, undermining the idea of objective truth and sowing widespread suspicions about the government and news media.”

=> ↺ Face Off: the Problem With Social Distancing

• In the twelfth chapter of The Sixth Extinction Elizabeth Colbert turns her attention to Neanderthal Man. There seems no doubt that we, our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, drove the Neanderthals and other “archaic human” species to extinction. In an interesting twist it turns out that our ancestors had sex with Neanderthals and that as much as 4% of the DNA of modern man is Neanderthal.

=> ↺ The Politics of COVID-19

• The far right thrives on fear. It’s no surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda.

=> ↺ Trump’s Cure and Our Disease

• The surgeon-general said so. The federal reserve chairman said so. Epidemiologists across the US said so. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most credible member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, said so. Numerous other medical specialists said so, governors and mayors said so.

=> ↺ How a Yale Academic Trolls the Liberals on Trump’s Looming Reelection

• Walter Russell Mead writes Trump campaign propaganda disguised as analysis.

=> ↺ Netanyahu Uses Coronavirus to Lure Rival Gantz into ‘Emergency’ Government

• Benny Gantz, the former Israeli general turned party leader, agreed late last week to join his rival Benjamin Netanyahu in an “emergency government” to deal with the coronavirus epidemic.

=> ↺ As Fashion Lines Are Praised for Making Face Masks, Don’t Ignore Garment Workers

• Fashion labels from Christian Siriano, H&M and Zara to luxury firms like LVMH, Kering and Prada have recently pledged to redirect their resources to making medical masks and (non-medical-grade) face mask covers. If all goes according to plan, fashion firms will donate many tens of millions of masks to the battle against COVID-19 in the hardest-hit places in the U.S. and Europe.

=> ↺ Bad bosses ‘Vedomosti’ fights for its independence as editors appeal to future owners, demanding a new editor-in-chief

• Vedomosti’s senior editors sent their letter (Meduza obtained a copy) to the two men who will soon become the newspaper’s new owners: tabloid publisher Nasha Versiya (Our Take) president Nikolai Zyatkov and Arbat Capital managing director Alexey Golubovich.

=> ↺ Limiting Trump’s Screen Time Isn’t ‘Censorship,’ It’s Journalism

• Last week, some news outlets—including CNN and MSNBC —made the decision to stop airing the entirety of Donald Trump’s daily press conferences on the new coronavirus. With the president’s statements veering more and more into fiction (“Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion”—3/18/20), conspiracy theories (“Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000?”—3/29/20) and miracle cures (“The hydroxychloroquine and the Z-Pak, I think as a combination, probably, is looking very, very good”—3/23/20), a growing number of journalists, including Rachel Maddow and Ted Koppel (New York Times, 3/25/20), had called for news outlets to, as James Fallows wrote in the Atlantic (3/20/20), “stop airing these as live spectacles and instead report, afterwards, with clips of things Trump and others said, and whether they were true.”

=> ↺ Daily Record Investigates My Home and Finances

• The day after I publish my article accusing the corporate media of being an active part of the conspiracy against Alex Salmond, and of giving disgracefully selective, slanted and biased coverage of the evidence of his trial, the Daily Record has decided to investigate my home and personal finances. Is not life full of little coincidences?

=> ↺ A Citizens’ Call to Invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment

=> ↺ ‘Poor Omen’: Just 24% of Biden’s Supporters ‘Very Enthusiastic’—Less Than Half of Trump’s 53%

• “While Republican voters vote for what they believe, no matter how extreme, Democratic voters are perennially playing themselves, voting for what they think other people want.”

=> ↺ Trump’s Mass Negligent Homicide Doesn’t Let Democratic Leaders Off the Hook

• If leadership is the metric, what is the measure?

=> ↺ COVID-19 Pandemic Shows That We Don’t Need Return to Normalcy—We Need President Bernie Sanders

• Middle America: What happened to the revolution?

=> ↺ Are You Prepared to Needlessly Die for Your Country?

• When I was a young boy, I used to play war, and watch movies that celebrated violence. Rambo showed the awesome potential for a single devoted patriot to turn the tables on evil. I had a glamorous account of war, and as an 8-year-old I did not understand why my father cried when we went to see the award-winning movie “Platoon.”

=> ↺ What’s Wrong with Ranked Choice Voting

• An electoral reform popular with many political activists and commentators is ranked choice voting, also called cumulative or preferential voting.

=> ↺ Why Has the Media Ignored Sexual Assault and Misbehaviour Allegations Against Biden?

• Conservatives who didn’t care about the multiple sexual assault allegations against Trump have seized on the accusations while liberals turn a blind eye.

=> ↺ Saying Quiet Part Very Loud, Trump Admits “You’d Never Have a Republican Elected in This Country Again” If Voting Access Expanded

• “This morning on live television, the president of the United States admitted he is opposed to laws that would make it easier for Americans to vote because that would hurt Republicans.”

=> ↺ How to Fight Fascism While Surviving a Plague

• How can we fight fascism as public health restrictions tighten? Kelly talks with Shane Burley about organizing for survival and the analysis of state power we need right now.

=> ↺ Undemocratic Elections Have Citizens Reinventing Self-Governance Worldwide

• One of the problems that the coronavirus pandemic is exposing in the U.S. is a decades-long erosion of trust in civil society. The effect is like a loss of the civic antibodies that keep self-governance healthy. In the political vacuum, the work of containing the outbreak falls nearly 100 percent on elected leaders and corporations with minimal popular credibility. As journalist David M. Shribman notes, “[T]he cost to capitalism shrinks in comparison to the cost in social capital.”

=> ↺ Tom Perez Put Corporate Lobbyists in Charge of the DNC’s Budget

• Last week, Mike Bloomberg transferred the leftover $18 million from his presidential campaign to the Democratic National Committee to use in the general election — over 23 times the maximum amount that an individual could give to a national party using all available channels.

=> ↺ Wisconsin Is Holding A Pandemic Primary On April 7 That Will Disenfranchise Voters

• Wisconsin Democratic Governor Tony Evers has declined to invoke emergency powers and reschedule the state’s April 7 primary, even though a majority of Wisconsin residents support changing the date. A number of federal lawsuits have been filed in Wisconsin, including by groups committed to get-out-the-vote efforts. The lawsuits request an expansion of mail-in voting and/or postponement of in-person voting.Thirteen states, including New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, have rescheduled their primaries.While Alaska and Wyoming are still holding their primaries in April, the states canceled in-person voting and everyone who wants to participate will vote by mail. The irrational commitment by Evers, the Republican-controlled state legislature, and the Elections Commission to holding a primary in the middle of an intensifying pandemic flouts statewide and nationwide orders issued to protect the public’s health. It forces communities to give up their right to vote if they want to make certain they do not contract the virus.COVID-19 cases in Wisconsin surpassed 1,200 on March 30. Twenty-three people have died, and Evers has said the severity of this disease in the African American community in Milwaukee is a crisis within a crisis.”

=> ↺ J’Accuse

• A 22 person team from Police Scotland worked for over a year identifying and interviewing almost 400 hoped-for complainants and witnesses against Alex Salmond. This resulted in nil charges and nil witnesses. Nil. The accusations in court were all fabricated and presented on a government platter to the police by a two prong process. The first prong was the civil service witch hunt presided over by Leslie Evans and already condemned by Scotland’s highest civil court as “unlawful, unfair and tainted by apparent bias”. The second prong was the internal SNP process orchestrated by a group at the very top in SNP HQ and the First Minister’s Private Office. A key figure in the latter was directly accused in court by Alex Salmond himself of having encouraged a significant number of the accusers to fabricate incidents.

=> ↺ Media Need to Scrutinize Andrew Cuomo’s Record, Not Crush on His Words

• As Donald Trump emits streams of false statements about the Covid-19 crisis and makes decisions that will lead to a tremendous number of unnecessary deaths in this country, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo has emerged as something of a national media darling.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand Censor Social Media to Counter “Fake News”

• In April 2019, for example, Singapore’s government introduced a bill banning fake news. This bill would obligate social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to remove or modify posts that the Singapore government considers false. Additionally, individuals spreading misinformation online could be hit with steep punishment, including jail time or a fine. What constitutes “misinformation,” in the eyes of Singapore’s rulers, is demonstrated by the bill’s language, which would give ministers the ability to limit posts that disrupt “public tranquility” and “friendly relations of Singapore with other countries,” or that fail to promote or express “public confidence in the performance of … the government.”

=> ↺ Lee Camp and Craig Aaron Join the Show – The Project Censored Show

• For the first half of the show, Mickey’s guest is investigative comic, Lee Camp, host of “Redacted Tonight” on RT Television, and author of the new book, “Bullet Points and Punch Lines.” They talk about the state of our free press with a touch of dark humor. Then Craig Aaron of FreePress.net returns to the show and explains his proposal that Congress fund a fiscal stimulus plan for journalism in the US, to begin restoring the nation’s depleted corps of local reporters. Aaron says we need nothing short of a robust, multi-billion dollar stimulus for a public interest free press and we need it now.

=> ↺ Journalist Abby Martin Sues Georgia over Anti-boycott Oath to Israel

• Signed into law in 2016, the law specifically targets the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement, which began organizing on college campuses in 2005. The movement aims to put economic pressure on Israel by boycotting companies with direct connections to the Israeli government, divesting from Israeli companies, and supporting sanctions on the country.

=> ↺ Speaking Freely: Sandra Ordoñez

• Sandra (Sandy) Ordoñez is dedicated to protecting women being harassed online. Sandra is an experienced community engagement specialist, a proud NYC Latina resident of Sunset Park Brooklyn, and a recipient of Fundación Carolina’s Hispanic Leadership Award. She is also a long-time diversity and inclusion advocate, with extensive experience incubating and creating FLOSS and Internet Freedom community tools.These commitments and principles drive Sandra’s work as the co-founder and Director of the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) at Article19. Even before launching the Internet Freedom Festival, Sandra was helping to grow and diversify the global Internet Freedom community. As their inaugural Director of Community and Outreach, Sandra led the creation of Open Technology Fund’s (OTF) Community Lab. Before her time at OTF, Sandra was Head of Communications and Outreach at OpenITP where she supported the community behind FLOSS anti-surveillance and anti-censorship tools. She also served as the first Communications Director for the Wikimedia Foundation. As a researcher Sandra has conducted over 400 expert interviews on the future of journalism, and conducted some of the first research on how Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reinforces stereotypes. She also provides consultation on privacy-respecting community marketing, community building, organizational communication, event management, program design, and digital strategy. All while serving on the board of the Open Technology Fund, Trollbusters, and Equality Labs. In recent months Facebook, and others, have proposed the creation of oversight boards to set content moderation policies internationally. In the US, the fight to protect free expression has taken on a new urgency with Senators Graham and Blumenthal introducing the EARN IT Act. A bill that, if enacted, would erode critical free speech protections and create a government commission with the power to codify best practices, with criminal and civil liability on platforms that failed to meet them. With these committees in mind, I was eager to speak with Sandy about how these proposals would impact communities that are often the most directly affected, and the last consulted.

• Nathan “nash” Sheard: What does free speech mean to you?

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

=> ↺ Will Coronavirus Kill Off the News Business Just When America Realized We Actually Need It?

• Journalists providing accurate, real-time information are a critical part of that web.

=> ↺ Lee Camp and Craig Aaron Join the Show – The Project Censored Show

• For the first half of the show, Mickey’s guest is comedian Lee Camp, host of “Redacted Tonight” on RT Television, and author of the new book, “Bullet Points and Punch Lines.” Then Craig Aaron of FreePress.net returns to the show and explains his proposal that Congress fund a fiscal-stimulus plan for US journalism, to begin restoring the nation’s depleted corps of local reporters.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ A Global, Comparative Perspective on US Detention of Immigrant Children

• Border Patrol stations in places like El Paso and Clint, Texas, are not equipped to hold children, especially not for as long as they are currently being detained. As other news outlets have reported, children in diapers are caged and left without adequate caret. Bochenek stated that as a country with considerable resources, holding the children in better conditions than their previous state should not be that much of a challenge for this country.

=> ↺ Major Sporting Events and Human Trafficking? The Unfortunate Debate

• Law enforcement works with affected industries before each event, training, for example, hotel staff on how to spot the warning signs of trafficking, while the US Department of Homeland Security distributes stickers to be placed in restrooms with the phone number of the trafficking hotline.

=> ↺ Cuba: An Example of Solidarity In a Time of Crisis

• The most frequent qualifier used to describe the global experience of the pandemic we are currently witnessing or affected by, is “crisis”. And I am reminded of political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s words: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

=> ↺ Native American Women Are Disappearing, and No One Is Watching

• Campaigners say the largest contributors to the problem are systemic racism, issues with law enforcement, and a lack of data. The missing women are often victims of sexual violence, police brutality, or domestic violence. Perpetrators continue to engage in this activity because they can get away with it, largely due to late missing-persons reports and racial misclassification, the data collection being ruined, and the cases being ignored. Bills are being written to tackle the issue, including fixing the gaps in data collection to address the public mistrust of the police. A bill signed by Washington’s democratic governor, Jay Inslee, “will create two liaison positions within the Washington state patrol, the state’s police agency, whose job will be to build a relationship between governmental agencies and Native communities.” However, any large scale solution is bound to take time, especially given the lack of public attention shown to these cases.

=> ↺ Organizing for Reproductive Justice in the Southern US

• As the New Yorker reported,  in 2014, Georgia was one of twenty-five states that enacted laws restricting insurance coverage of abortion under the Affordable Care Act, legislation that especially impacted low-income women who struggle with the cost of the procedure. In response, national organizations such as the National Abortion Federation and local organizations, including the Magnolia Fund, provided funds to help women who wanted abortions but could not afford them to pay for their procedures. (As the New Yorker reported, the Magnolia Fund closed in 2019.)

=> ↺ ‘Critical Victory’ for Reproductive Rights as Federal Judges Block Three States From Exploiting Coronavirus to Ban Abortion Care

• “This is an important recognition of what we know to be true—abortion care is essential healthcare.”

=> ↺ Report Finds Serious Faults with US Migrant Protection Protocols

• First, as Cuffe wrote, violence in both migrants’ home countries and in Mexico is “a key precipitating factor in alarming levels of symptoms of mental illness among migrants and asylum seekers from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.” According to the MSF survey, 61.9 percent of migrants had experienced a violent event within two years of leaving their home country, including the death (42.5 percent) or a disappearance (16.9 percent) of a relative. In health consultations, these migrants displayed symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that were deemed to be “moderate” or “severe” on the Clinical Global Impression scale, an internationally recognized measure for the severity of psychological problems or mental illness. “The violence suffered by people living in [Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador] is comparable to that in a war zones,” according to the MSF report (p.4).

=> ↺ Coronavirus Makes It More Clear Than Ever: Health Care Is a Human Right

• We shouldn’t be satisfied with single-payer coverage just during a massive pandemic. This crisis exposes dramatically the foolishness of pretending that health care is a private marketplace. We need Medicare for All now.

=> ↺ Holding Our Breath, Together and Apart

• Crises illuminate our dependency on one another, and on remote chains of production and distribution—but also highlight a resiliency and capacity to live within limits.

=> ↺ The Future May Be Female, But the Pandemic Is Patriarchal

• Feminism in the time of Coronavirus

=> ↺ The US Decries Political Persecution of Nicaraguans But Won’t Grant Them Asylum

• The second time around, John Martínez-Picado knew what awaited him inside “El Chipote.” It had been almost a year but the spiral-shaped prison with its overcrowded underground cells and concrete beds on the floor still haunted him. He hadn’t forgotten the suffocating feeling — “as if you were going to have a heart attack,” Martínez-Picado said. He also hadn’t fully recovered from the trauma of being forced to witness guards torture his cellmates, pulling out their fingernails and cutting off their ears until they became unconscious. Martínez-Picado had known then that if he was lucky enough to get out, only to be caught again, it would be worse than the first time.

=> ↺ Corporate America Is on Offense—Local Communities Can Be Too

• This crisis calls for us to challenge the government system that is failing us. Now is an opportunity for radical collective action.

=> ↺ He Was Ordered to Self-Isolate. He Didn’t. Now He’s Facing Criminal Charges.

• In what may be the first case of its kind in Illinois, a man who walked into a busy gas station store after posting on Facebook that he had been ordered to self-isolate because of coronavirus symptoms now faces criminal charges of reckless conduct.

• The 36-year-old man, who had stopped in the store so his 4-year-old son could use the bathroom, was recognized by an employee who had gone to high school with him and saw his social media post. After the man left, the employee alerted her supervisor, who then called authorities.

=> ↺ 33 Years After Dubious Evidence Helped Convict Him, Joe Bryan Has Been Released on Parole

• On Tuesday, Joe Bryan was released from prison after 33 years behind bars. “Thank you, Father, for taking care of me,” he said, extending his hand toward the sky, his voice choking with emotion. “Hallelujah, praise Jesus!”

• Bryan’s attorneys and a large group of family members had waited outside the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville for hours in cold, gloomy weather, craning for a view of the 79-year-old. Shortly before 11 a.m., as the sun burst through the clouds, parolees began to emerge from the prison, filing past the monolithic, red-brick structure that is home to the state’s execution chamber. Bryan looked uncertainly ahead of him until he spotted familiar faces, then broke into a wide grin. A small bag, which a younger parolee carried for him, held all of his possessions.

=> ↺ Legislation allowing prime minister’s cabinet to declare state of emergency rockets through Russian legislative system

• Russia’s Federation Council held an emergency meeting on March 31 to approve a new law that will allow the country’s executive cabinet to declare states of high alert and states of emergency.

=> ↺ FOIA’ed DOJ Report Points Out The Downsides Of Relying On ‘Predictive Policing’ To Fight Crime

• The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has obtained a DOJ report on predictive policing via a FOIA lawsuit. The document dates back to 2014 but it shows the DOJ had concerns about the negative side effects of predicting where crime may occur by using data that details where crime has happened.

=> ↺ Interview With Brad Schreiber On ‘Music Is Power’: Part 1—Dixie Chicks, Marvin Gaye

• Covering around a century Music Is Power is a book by Brad Schreiber that takes readers on a tour of music that challenged social injustice and spoke to the masses during uncertain times.

• Schreiber is an award-winning author, journalist, and screenwriter, whose past books include Death In Paradise, Becoming Jimi Hendrix, and Revolution’s End.

=> ↺ New York AG Denounces ‘Immoral and Inhumane’ Firing of Amazon Worker Who Led Protest Over Lack of Coronavirus Protections

• “Taking action cost me my job,” said Chris Smalls. “Because I tried to stand up for something that’s right, the company decided to retaliate against me.”

=> ↺ Covid-19: Our Health Crisis is Born of Bigotry

• “A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part.” Former slave turned educator Anna Julia Cooper uttered those very contemporary-sounding words back in 1892. The US didn’t heed them then; we haven’t heeded them yet. The big question, brought home to us one more time by the Covid-19 crisis, is why not? What does American society so love about having weak parts that we refuse—year after year and epidemic after epidemic—to shore up?

=> ↺ COVID-19 and the Neoliberal State of Exception

• How do neoliberal governments act in emergency situations when the interests of the private sector top their agenda?

=> ↺ The World’s Major Military and Economic Powers Find Happiness Elusive

• Long before the advent of the coronavirus pandemic left people around the world desperate for survival, a popular assumption emerged that national governments are also supposed to promote the happiness and well-being of their citizens. This idea was expressed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that governments are instituted to secure humanity’s “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

=> ↺ Stay Home, Stay Angry

• Social distancing is hard, and it’s not fun.

=> ↺ ‘The Strike Wave Is in Full Swing’: Amazon, Whole Foods Workers Walk Off Job to Protest Unjust and Unsafe Labor Practices

• “One of the best ways to thank essential workers is to support the fight to improve their lives.”

=> ↺ ‘A Harrowing Warning’ to All as Hungary Hands Far-Right Leader Dictatorial Powers Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

• “We could have a parallel epidemic of authoritarian and repressive measures following close if not on the heels of a health epidemic.”

=> ↺ Court To Cops: No Expectation Of Privacy In A ‘Beer-Drinking, Nap-Taking Hideout’

• Everyone has rights, even the people who often disrespect the rights of others. But those rights can only be violated in certain, specific ways and the two cops, who sued over alleged rights violations, didn’t actually have their rights violated.

=> ↺ Decarceration: COVID-19 is Opportunity Knocking

• On March 23, 14 US Senators from both major political parties asked US Attorney General William Barr and Michael Carvajal, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, to “transfer non-violent offenders who are at high risk for suffering complications from COVID-19 to home confinement.”

=> ↺ Keeping Each Other Safe When Virtually Organizing Mutual Aid

• Communities across the country are stepping up to self-organize mutual aid groups, uniting virtually to offer and coordinate support to those who are in need. In solidarity with the need for physical distancing, many people are organizing online using Google spreadsheets, Google forms, public posts on Twitter and Facebook, and private messages on social media platforms. 

• There is great beauty and power in this support, but it also puts security concerns in the spotlight: overlooked privacy settings and overbroad collection of personal data can lead to the unintended disclosure of private information that can be used to harm the very people seeking help. Though these efforts may seem like they have equal benefit in helping connect people in need to people with resources, the privacy and security implications for these mediums vary widely. 

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Tone Deaf: Using COVID-19 As A Prop To Celebrate The Death Of Net Neutrality

• So we’ve noted a few times now how the FCC’s decision to kill net neutrality did a hell of a lot more than just kill “net neutrality.” It obliterated much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority, making it harder than ever to hold U.S. telecom monopolies accountable for bad behavior like rampant privacy violations, ripping you off with bullshit fees, or refusing to upgrade or repair long-neglected taxpayer subsidized networks. And this was a problem even before America began staring down the barrel of a brutal pandemic while stuck at home telecommuting.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

=> ↺ EFF Joins Locast Defense Team to Fight for TV Viewers’ Right to Use Free, Legal Streaming Service

• San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today joined the legal team defending Sports Fans Coalition NY, Inc. (SFCNY), the nonprofit organization that runs Locast, a free, local TV streaming service facing bogus copyright infringement claims by broadcast giants ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.Locast enables TV viewers to receive local over-the-air programming—which broadcasters must by law make available for free—using set-top boxes, smartphones, or other devices of their choice. Locast is available in 17 metro areas and has more than one million users, including people who can’t get local channels through an antenna or can’t afford a pay-TV subscription.The four broadcast giants filed suit against Locast last year, a year and a half after Locast launched, claiming it violates their copyrights in programming. But Locast is protected by an exemption to copyright law, put in place by Congress, that allows nonprofits to retransmit broadcast TV so communities can access independent, local stations offering news, foreign-language programming, and local sports. There’s no infringement if nonprofits make noncommercial transmission of copyrighted works, using donations to cover their costs.“Broadcast TV is a vital source of local news and cultural programming for millions of people, which matters now more than ever because of COVID-19,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mitch Stoltz.  “But some broadcasters want to use copyright law to control when, where, and how people can receive their local TV broadcasts, and force people to buy expensive pay-TV services just to get their local news and sports.”EFF joins the case as co-counsel alongside law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. EFF has a long history fighting copyright abuse and defending innovation that benefits the public. Broadcast giants, which already reap billions from charging users for programming, are attempting to use their copyrights to maintain market power and force consumers to pay for programming that’s supposed to be free.“EFF has worked for many years to defend people’s right to access and use content with the devices and technologies of their choice,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “Defending Locast’s ability to stream local TV broadcasts using the Copyright Act’s nonprofit provision is part of that goal.”“I am grateful beyond words to EFF for representing our nonprofit and the consumers who rely on Locast,” said SFCNY Chairman and Locast founder David Goodfriend. “Especially during the COVID-19 crisis, when Americans need emergency news and information from their local broadcasters, and when so many of our fellow Americans are suffering economically, Locast provides a critical public service.”

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Chinese Companies Set Pace In Europe Patent Filings

• Chinese companies witnessed the highest growth last year among leading patent filing countries at the European Patent Office (EPO), according to a report released on March 12.

• The EPO Patent Index 2019 showed that patent applications originated from China at the EPO grew by 29.2 percent in 2019 to a total of 12,247, setting a record high.

• In the past decade, patent applications filed by Chinese companies with the EPO have increased sixfold.

• China moved up one place from 2018 to become the fourth-largest patent filing country at the EPO in 2019, trailing the United States, Germany and Japan.

• In all, the EPO received more than 181,000 patent applications in 2019, an increase of 4 percent from 2018 and a new all-time high. The US accounted for 25 percent of the total applications, while Germany made up of 15 percent and Japan took 12 percent. China accounted for 7 percent.

=> ↺ Judge McMahon’s Motions in Limine Rulings Clear Way for Ferring v. Serenity Trial

• The years-long dispute may finally be headed for trial between Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and its affiliates, Serenity Pharmaceuticals, LLC, and Reprise Biopharmaceutics, LLC over patents claiming a sublingual application of desmopressin, a drug used to treat symptoms of diabetes insipidus, including frequent nighttime urination (“nocturia”). On March 11, 2020, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon (S.D.N.Y.) ruled on three motions in limine filed by defendants and counterclaimants Serenity and Reprise.

• Reprise owns patents covering applications of desmopressin—U.S. Patent Nos. 7,405,203, 7,579,321, and 7,799,761—which it had exclusively licensed to Serenity to market Noctiva, a drug that treats nocturia. Ferring, which developed a rival product, Nocdurna, first filed this suit in April 2017 against Serenity and Reprise, seeking a declaratory judgment that Reprise’s patents were invalid and unenforceable, and were not infringed by Ferring’s Nocdurna product, which also treats nocturia. Serenity and Reprise asserted counterclaims against Ferring, alleging infringement of the ’203 and ’321 Patents by Ferring’s Nocdurna.

• First, Judge McMahon granted Serenity and Reprise’s motion to exclude Ferring’s theory of indefiniteness of the term “about” in the patents’ claims. Ferring had not included the theory in either its initial or final invalidity contentions, and only disclosed it after Serenity and Reprise’s expert testified regarding the “about” limitations. Judge McMahon rejected Ferring’s argument that expert testimony “created” a new indefiniteness argument, holding that because indefiniteness is an objective standard, Ferring could have, but did not, raise the argument earlier.

Software Patents

=> ↺ [Joke] Unified Patent Court halt sales of ventilators across Europe

• The Unified Patent Court (UPC) has issued an pan-European injunction to halt the sales of ventilators across Europe. The Court ruled that ventilators used by hospitals in the current pandemic of COVID-19 were violating an EPO patent on graphical user interfaces using tabs, granted to Bully Diagnostics LLC. Despite the lockdown, crowds started assembling around EPO offices, and the protests quickly escalated into violent riots. Protesters said that patent law cannot live in its own bubble, that lives were more important than profit.

• [...]

• An EPO spokesmen said: “The exclusion of patentability for ‘presentation of information’ has to be interpreted ‘as such’. The caselaw of the Boards of Appeal says that graphical user interfaces are patentable if they produce a technical effect in the brain of the nurses and doctors. We are happy that this specialized patent court has adopted our doctrine, installing a jurisprudence for Computer Implemented Inventions (CIIs) in Europe without a debate in parliaments.”

• FFII President, Peter Highness, finishes: “After ventilators, this patent troll will go after Apple and its iPhones, so Millenials and GenZs, be prepared and make your stock! Empty stocks of toilet paper was just the beginning, who can survive in those pandemic times without an iPhone and an internet connection?”

Trademarks

=> ↺ Florida Atlantic University Suddenly Decides Owl Tutoring’s Name Is Trademark Infringement After Over A Decade

• As some of you may be aware, Florida Atlantic University’s sports teams and mascots are the Owls. As some of you may also be aware, the southeast is home to Owl Tutoring, a college tutoring service with a fairly good reputation. Owl Tutoring has existed for over a decade and has even promoted itself by advertising in FAU publications. That’s probably why it took the folks at the company by such surprise to suddenly get a C&D letter from FAU’s legal team accusing it of committing trademark infringement.

Copyrights

=> ↺ Affordable Legal Options Are the Best Anti-Piracy Tool, US Senators Are Told

• As a former Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, Julia Reda has a wealth of experience with copyright legislation. This is recognized by the U.S. Senate, which invited Reda to share her knowledge with the Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Answering follow-up questions from several senators, she stresses that affordable legal options are the best anti-piracy tool.

=> ↺ Anime Fans Find ‘Pirate’ Subtitles in Netflix Streams of City Hunter

• Netflix subscribers in France shared a wry smile over the weekend when a screenshot from the anime movie City Hunter was shared on Twitter. The screenshot revealed that the subtitles hadn’t been obtained from an official supplier. Instead, they were apparently culled from a ‘pirate’ file distributed by an IRC channel specializing in anime content, one that could’ve been dead for some time.

=> ↺ Permission Culture Gone Mad: Worries About Proper License For ‘Balcony Singing’ Lead Collection Society To Say It’s Okay, You Can Sing

• Yet another reminder that copyright is really, really broken. As you may have seen, there have been a few viral videos making the rounds of people locked down in apartment buildings deciding to hold impromptu music performances from balconies. When the first of these came out, I had joked that it would only be a matter of time until some music collection society called these an unlicensed public performance and demanded royalty payments. Thankfully, that has not happened, though in Spain, a copyright professor did tell a journalist that those singing from the balconies should first get a license (relying on Google translate here…):

=> ↺ RIAA Denies ‘False Takedown’ Allegations, Asks Court to Dismiss Case

• The RIAA denies that it willingly sent false takedown notices to the mixtape service Spinrilla. In a new filing at a federal court in Atlanta, the music group refutes claims that it abused the DMCA takedown process. On the contrary, it believes that it had the right to remove a file which, according to Spinrilla, is clearly not infringing.

=> ↺ Publishers And Authors Misguided Freakout Over Internet Archive’s Decision To Enable More Digital Book Checkouts During A Pandemic

• It’s been said many times over that if libraries did not currently exist, there’s no way that publishers would allow them to come into existence today. Libraries are, in fact, a lovely and important artifact of a pre-copyright time when we actually valued knowledge sharing, rather than locking up knowledge behind a paywall. Last week, the Internet Archive announced what it’s calling a National Emergency Library — a very useful and sensible offering, as we’ll explain below. However, publishers and their various organizations freaked out (leading some authors to freak out as well). The freak out is not intellectually honest or consistent, but we’ll get there.

=> ↺ Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library is “Vile” Says Copyright Alliance

• Last week the Internet Archive responded to the coronavirus outbreak by offering a new service to “displaced learners”. Combining scanned books from three libraries, the Archive offered unlimited borrowing of 1.4 million books, so that people can continue reading while in quarantine. What followed was a huge backlash from publishing and pro-copyright groups, with the Copyright Alliance decribing the actions of IA’s operator as “particularly vile.”

=> ↺ Education in Times of Crisis and Beyond: Maximizing Copyright Flexibilities

• Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials, in any medium, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, adaptation and redistribution by others.

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