Source: Hacker News
Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / Proprietary filesystem vendor Paragon Software seems to feel threatened by the pending inclusion of a Microsoft-sanctioned exFAT in the Linux 5.7 kernel. (credit: MTV / Geffen / Paramount Pictures)
When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it.
Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn't have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer's letterhead in the 1990s.
Paragon described its arguments against open source software—which appeared directly in my inbox—as an "article (available for publication in any form) explaining why the open source model didn't work in 3 cases."
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Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
They always do it. Whenever these leeching, sneaking, pompous, presumptuous, supercilious, weaselly would-be despots we call our government spy a chance to grasp some power that is rightly out of any and every person's reach, they lunge for it.
The chance, this time, is the legitimately unprecedented situation occasioned by the pandemic spread of the novel coronavirus. And the power is the functional abrogation of half our Bill of Rights — Amendments Four through Eight — in the form of indefinite detention without trial during emergencies.
This is utterly unjustified by the COVID-19 outbreak. It is not a misguided good-faith effort to protect public health. It is a transparent charge toward authoritarianism, and it must be crushed.
The Trump administration's plan came to light Saturday afternoon with Politico's report on a Justice Department request to Congress. In the documents, the administration reportedly asks lawmakers to give the attorney general authority to direct chief judges of district courts to suspend court proceedings "whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation." The suspension would override "any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings." It would lift the statute of limitations on criminal and civil proceedings throughout the emergency and for one year after it concluded.
This proposes an expansive grant of power to gut some of our most basic rights. It would effectively nullify habeas corpus, our guarantee of a court hearing in which the state must justify our detention or be compelled to release us. This ancient right, secured in our Sixth Amendment and the Magna Carta before it, is foundational to our justice system. Locking people away without due process is the province of tyrants.
The specification of "civil disobedience" as a reason to shut down our courts is as insulting as it is galling. They didn't even bother to say "violent rioting and looting" or "armed rebellion." No, civil disobedience — by definition, a peaceful protest — is here deemed cause enough to demolish due process rights on the president's whim.
Also deeply worrisome is the inclusion of "pre-arrest" procedures among laws that can be suspended. That could mean no Miranda warning, no lawyer, no phone call, just straight to jail for who knows how long. "I find it absolutely terrifying," Norman L. Reimer, executive director of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told Politico. "Especially in a time of emergency, we should be very careful about granting new powers to the government."
That is particularly so because times of emergency — in the legal sense — are oft-immortal creatures of the government's own making. Pursuant to the National Emergencies Act of 1976, the president can declare a national emergency whenever he likes and thereby activate a host of new powers for himself. Predictably, presidents do this fairly often, motivated more by a desire to bypass Congress than by whether the circumstances at hand fit any reasonable definition of a national emergency. (Recall President Trump's national emergency declaration after Congress refused to fund his border wall folly.) Thus there are dozens of ongoing national emergencies declared by Trump and his predecessors for situations including trade with Sudan, Albanian insurgents in Macedonia, and alleged election fraud in Belarus in 2006.
The COVID-19 outbreak is clearly far more of a national emergency for the United States, in the ordinary sense of the words, than 14-year-old Belarusian election irregularities. But they share the same legal classification, a classification the president can apply at will. If permitted, the seizure of authority proposed in these Justice Department papers will be abused in concert with all manner of national emergency declarations.
And it will not be undone. The novel coronavirus eventually will be contained, but the state's iron grasp of this power, once allowed, will not loosen. "History demonstrates again and again that governments use a crisis to expand power and violate vital constitutional principles," Scott Bullock, president of the Institute for Justice, told Reason of the DOJ proposal. "And when the supposed emergency is over, the expanded powers often become permanent."
The recent history of indefinite detention itself illustrates this well. Civil libertarians warned that its use by the George W. Bush administration in the war on terror was a dangerous encroachment on constitutional rights, but our alarm was brushed aside with insistence that only terrorists had any reason to worry. Then the Obama administration expanded the practice. Now the Trump administration seeks to expand it further, jettisoning the terrorism justification entirely. It's predictable — and despicable.
Democrats' majority in the House of Representatives, bolstered by enough GOP senators to tip the balance against the DOJ request in the upper chamber, will almost certainly keep the Trump administration from getting what it wants here. That's reassuring, but we cannot let it lull us into false security.
The last three administrations have all inched in this direction. Washington is licking its chops over our due process rights. In this and every crisis, it must be firmly muzzled.
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Source: Ars Technica
Enlarge / The Combine are back, but you face them (and other terrors) from a different perspective—in more ways than one. Welcome to Half Life: Alyx. (credit: Valve)
Half-Life: Alyx is not a must-own video game. It is not the PC world's Super Mario 64 equivalent, a comparison I mention because Valve studio head Gabe Newell has heightened expectations this way multiple times over the years. HL:A does not use virtual reality to transform how we interact with games in a way that might be as universally embraced as Super Mario Bros. 1, Doom, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or, of course, the first two Half-Life games.
And yet: Half-Life: Alyx is a must-play video game for anyone in a position to do so. If you already have access to the required technology—a full VR headset system, a robust computer, and a reasonable amount of space to move your arms while otherwise blind to the real world—you are in for a video game that pushes the notion of "full-length VR adventure" to its limits. The 15 hours required to beat HL:A on a first playthrough are dense. They are beautiful. They are full of unique puzzles, immersive combat, bona fide terror, and storytelling beats that all understand what does, and does not, work when translating a "flat-screen" gaming franchise to hand-tracked virtual reality.
Get it? Not universally "must-own," but conditionally "must-play." Comparatively, I'd say the latter praise is higher than, say, most any wild arcade or rhythm-gaming experience that has required additional, bulky hardware. This is not Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. This is bigger. The sheer tingle I feel when I recall HL:A's brilliant and thrilling moments is up there with any video game experience I've had in my 24 years of gaming criticism.
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Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts
On Jan. 24, the same day she attended a private briefing hosted by the Senate Health Committee on the coronavirus outbreak, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) sold between $50,001 and $100,000 worth of stock from Resideo Technologies, The Daily Beast reports. Since then, Resideo's stock price has fallen by more than half.
Records show that between Jan. 24 and Feb. 14, Loeffler and her husband, New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeff Sprecher, sold stock worth between $1.3 million and $3.1 million. Loeffler, who is worth an estimated $500 million, also made two purchases of stock in technology companies. One of those companies, Citrix, offers teleworking software, and she bought stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000.
The 15 stocks Loeffler reported selling during that time period have since lost, on average, more than a third of their value, The Daily Beast reports. As late as March 10, Loeffler was tweeting that "the consumer is strong, the economy is strong, & jobs are growing, which puts us in the best economic position to tackle #COVID19 & keep Americans safe."
Loeffler wasn't the only senator to sell off large stock holdings while learning about the magnitude of the global coronavirus pandemic. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, unloaded between $628,000 and $1.7 million of his stocks on Feb. 13, during a time when he received daily classified briefings on the coronavirus.
Update 12:50 a.m.: Loeffler claimed in response to the Daily Beast article that she doesn't trade her own stocks and was unaware of what her investment advisers had done until Feb. 16.
As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on 02/16/2020 – three weeks after they were made.
— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) March 20, 2020
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Verge - All Posts
Source: Kentucky.com -- State
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday ordered the closure of theaters, gyms, hair salons and many other businesses where people gather, taking new action in a bid to contain the … Click to Continue »
Source: Ars Technica
![Firm wielding Theranos patents asks judge to block coronavirus test [Updated]](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/FilmArraytight-800x533.jpg)
Enlarge (credit: BioFire)
Back in 2018, the disgraced biotech company Theranos sold its patent portfolio to Fortress Investment Group, a division of Softbank. Now two of those patents have wound up in the hands of a little-known firm called Labrador Diagnostics—and Labrador is suing a company called BioFire Diagnostics that makes medical testing equipment.
And not just any medical testing equipment: BioFire recently announced it had developed three tests for COVID-19 using its hardware—tests that are due out later this month. But Labrador is asking a Delaware federal court to block the company from using its technology—presumably including the new coronavirus tests.
As Stanford patent scholar Mark Lemley puts it, "this could be the most tone-deaf IP suit in history."
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Source: Kentucky.com -- Education
A move out date has not been announced, said University of Kentucky spokesman Jay Blanton. But students will get more information on that point Thursday. … Click to Continue »
