Microsoft makes its Fluid Framework open source, the TypeScript library for creating web applications with real-time collaboration – Explica

After promising last May that the Fluid Framework would become open source, Microsoft has finally released the code and posted it on GitHub. This library was very well received at Build 2019, Microsofts developer conference.

The idea behind Fluid Framework is to offer developers a platform to create collaborative low-latency experiences around documents, in the same way that Microsoft itself is using it within Office applications.

The idea is to offer applications that allow a user to make changes in the browser, such as adding comments, or editing the text, or pressing a button, and the rest of the users who collaborate can see it almost instantly.

It is something like offering a framework for developers to create applications in the style of Google Docs with collaboration in near real time, but with even more features.

Additionally, this Microsoft technology enables the developer to leverage a customer-centric application model with persistent data that do not require writing custom server-side code.

All documentation is available at fluidframework.com, although due to the huge traffic the site is experiencing, it has been working intermittently. In addition to this there are some demos available at fluidframework.com/playground among which are a small puzzle game in which thousands of people made changes to the puzzle in real time, and each user could see the thousands of edits and updates that the others did.

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Microsoft makes its Fluid Framework open source, the TypeScript library for creating web applications with real-time collaboration - Explica

Remote Work Doesn’t Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls – Harvard Business Review

The Covid-19 crisis has distanced people from the workplace, and employers have generally, if sometimes reluctantly, accepted that people can work effectively from home. As if to compensate for this distancing and keep the workplace alive in a virtual sense, employers have also encouraged people to stick closely to the conventional workday. The message is that working from home is fine and can even be very efficient as long as people join video calls along with everyone else all through the day.

But employees often struggle with the workday when working from home, because many have to deal with the competing requests coming from their family, also housebound. So how effective really is working from home if everyone is still working to the clock? Is it possible to ditch the clock?

The answer seems to be that it is. Since before the pandemic weve been studying the remote work practices of the tech companyGitLab to explore what it might look like if companies to break their employees chronological chains as well as their ties to the physical workplace.

From its foundation in 2014, GitLab has maintained an all-remote staff that now comprises more than 1,300 employees spread across over 65 countries. The git way of working uses tools that let employees work on ongoing projects wherever they are in the world and at their preferred time. The idea is that because its always 9 to 5 somewhere on the planet, work can continue around the clock, increasing aggregate productivity. That sounds good, but a workforce staggered in both time and space presents unique coordination challenges with wide-ranging organizational implications.

The most natural way to distribute work across locations is to make it modular and independent, so that there is little need for direct coordination workers can be effectively without knowing how their colleagues are progressing. This is why distributed work can be so effective for call centers and in patents evaluation. But this approach has its limits in development and innovation related activities, where the interdependencies between components of work are not always easy to see ahead of time.

For this kind of complex work, co-location with ongoing communication is often a better approach because it offers two virtues: synchronicity and media richness. The time lag in the interaction between two or more individuals is almost zero when they are co-located, and, although the content of the conversation may be the same in both face-to-face and in virtual environments, the technology may not be fully able to convey soft social and background contextual cues how easy is it to sense other peoples reactions in a group zoom meeting?

All this implies that simply attempting to replicate online (through video or voice chat) what happened naturally in co-located settings is unlikely to be a winning or complete strategy. Yet this approach of seeing the face is the one that people seem to default to when forced to work remotely, as our survey of remote working practices in the immediate aftermath of lockdowns around the world has revealed.

There is a way through this dilemma. Our earlierresearchon offshoring of software development showed that drawing on tacit coordination mechanisms, such as a shared understanding of work norms and context, allows for coordination without direct communication.

Coordination in this case happens through the observation of the action of other employees and being able to predict what they will do and need based on shared norms. It can occur either synchronously (where, for instance, two people might work on the same Google doc during the same time period), or asynchronously (when people make clear hand-offs of the document, and do not work on it when the other is).

Software development organizations often opt for this solution and tend to rely extensively on shared repositories and document authoring tools, with systems for coordinating contributions (e.g., continuous integration and version control tools). But GitLab is quite unique in the for-profit sector in how extensively it relies on this third path not only for its coding but for how the organization itself functions. It leans particularly on asynchronous working because its employees are distributed across multiple time zones. As a result, although the company does use videoconferencing, almost no employee ever faces a day full of video meetings.

At the heart of the engineering work that drives GitLabs product development is the git workflow process invented by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. In this process, a programmer making a contribution to a code forks (copies) the code, so that it is not blocked to other users, works on it, and then makes a merge request to have the edited version replace the original, and this new version becomes available for other contributions.

The process combines the possibility of distributed asynchronous work with a structure that checks for potential coordination failures and ensures clarity on decision rights. Completely electronic (which makes remote work feasible) and fully documented, it has become an important framework for distributed software development in both for-profit and open source contexts.

GitLab has taken the git a step further, applying it also to managerial work that involves ambiguity and uncertainty. For instance, GitLabs chief marketer recently outlined a vision for integrating video into the companys year-ahead strategy. He requested asynchronous feedback from across the company within a fixed time window, and then scheduled a single synchronous meeting to agree on a final version of the vision. This vision triggered asynchronously input changes from multiple contributors to the companys handbook pages relating to marketing objectives and key results that were merged on completion.

GitLabs high degree of reliance on asynchronous working is made possible by respecting the following three rules right down to the task level:

1. Separate responsibility for doing the task from the responsibility for declaring it done.

In co-located settings, where employees are in the same office, easy communication and social cues allow them to efficiently resolve ambiguities and manage conflict around work responsibilities and remits. In remote settings, however, this can be difficult. In GitLab, therefore, every task is expected to have a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI), who is responsible for the completion of the task and has freedom in how it should be performed.

The DRI, however, does not get to decide whether the task has been completed. That function is the responsibility of a Maintainer, who has the authority to accept or reject the DRIs merge requests. Clarity on these roles for every task helps reduce confusions and delays and enables multiple DRIs to work in parallel in any way they want on different parts of a code by making local copies (forking). It is the Maintainers role to avoid unnecessary changes and maintain consistency in the working version of the document or code.

In a non-software context, say in developing the GitLab handbook page on expenses policies, individual DRIs, who could be anyone in the company, would write specific policies in any way they choose, and their contributions would be accepted or rejected by the CFO acting in the capacity of Maintainer, who could also offer feedback (but not direction) to the DRIs. Once live, the merged page serves as the single source of truth on expenses policies unless or until someone else makes a new proposal. Once more, the Maintainer would approve, reject, or offer feedback on the new proposal. In contexts like this, we would expect people in traditional management positions to serve as Maintainers.

2. Respect the minimum viable change principle.

When coordination is asynchronous, there is a risk that coordination failures may go undetected for too long for instance, two individuals may be working in parallel on the same problem, making one of their efforts redundant, or one person may be making changes that that are incompatible with the efforts of another. To minimize this risk, employees are urged to submit the minimum viable change an early stage, imperfect version of their suggested changes to code or documents. This makes it more likely that people will pick up on whether work is incompatible or being duplicated. Obviously, a policy of minimum viable changes should come with a no shame policy on delivering a temporarily imperfect output. In remote settings, the value of knowing what the other is doing as soon as possible is greater than getting the perfect product.

3. Always communicate publicly.

As GitLab team members are prone to say, we do not send internal email here. Instead, employees post all questions and share all information on the Slack channels of their teams, and later the team leaders decide what information needs to be permanently visible to others. If so, it gets stored in a place available to everyone in the company, in an issue document or on a page in the companys online handbook, which is accessible to anyone, in or outside the company. This rule means that people dont run the risk of duplicating, or even inadvertently destroying the work of their colleagues. Managers devote a lot of time to curating the information generated through the work of employees they supervise and are expected to know better than others what information may be either broadly needed by a future team or that would be useful for people outside the company.

However well implemented, asynchronous remote working of this kind cannot supply much in the way of social interaction. Thats a major failing, because social interaction is not only a source of pleasure and motivation for most, it is also where the random encounters, the serendipitous exchanges by the coffee machines and lift lobbies, create opportunities for ideas and information to flow and recombine.

To minimize this limitation, GitLab provides occasions for non-task related interaction. Each day, team members may attend one of three optional social calls staggered to be inclusive of time zones. The calls consist of groups of 8-10 people in a video chatroom, where they are free to discuss whatever they want (GitLab provides a daily starting question as icebreaker in case needed, such as: What did you do over the weekend? or Where is the coolest place you ever traveled and why?).

In addition, GitLab has social slack groups: thematic chat rooms that employees with similar interests can participate in (such as: #cat, #dogs, #cooking, #mental_health_aware, #daily_gratitude, #gaming) and a #donut_be_strangers channel that allows strangers that have a mutual interest to have a coffee chat to get together.

Of course, GitLab managers are under no illusion that these groups substitute perfectly for the kinds of rich social interactions outside work that people find rewarding. But they do help to keep employees connected, and, at a time when many employees have been working under confinement rules, this has proved very helpful in sustaining morale.

***

Working from home in an effective way goes beyond just giving employees a laptop and a Zoom account. It encompasses practices intended to compensate or avoid the core limitations of working remotely, as well as fully leverage the flexibility that remote can offer working not only from anywhere but at any desired time. We have focused on GitLab because it not only has extensive experience in remote working but also because it pursues an unusual mode of solving the intrinsic challenges of remote work. While some of GitLabs core processes (like its long, remote onboarding process for new hires) and advantages (like the possibility of hiring across the world) cannot be fully reproduced in the short run in companies that will be just temporarily remote, there are others that any company can easily implement.

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Remote Work Doesn't Have to Mean All-Day Video Calls - Harvard Business Review

Bitcoin (BTC) has come to an end, sell everything. – IdahoReporter.com

Eleven years since Mr. Nakamoto created Bitcoin we are witnessing the history. The crypto as we know it is dying. Slowly but surely. No, BTC price will not recuperate from here. These are probably the last above $10K weeks.

Back in January 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto released an open-source code which marks the start of Bitcoin life. Nakamoto mined the starting block of the chain, known as the genesis block.

But you know the rest of the story, ups and down and more ups and downs. Millions invested in crypto currencies and price for one Bitcoin peaked at $20K in 2017and now we are here. BTC investors thought that things are heating up again and that we will see another $20K price tag this year, but everything went backwards.

BTC shed $1,000 off of its value in less than a month. Even though the BTC chart shows that this is actually just a small correction I am pretty sure that BTC has come to a brick wall. In my opinion the main reason for this is the huge rally we saw at Nasdaq and NYSE.

On a year-to-date basis BTC gained a measly 30% reward for its long term holders. If you are now laughing at me and asking yourself how could 30% be low, I will explain this now. Being preached as an alternative to fiat currencies BTC failed to prove that during the COVID-19 outbreak in March . Dragged down by a fear BTC went below $5K mark and gradually recovered from there, but it did so because all markets recovered.

NASDAQ, NYSE and Gold, they all recovered from the huge sell-off in March. Gold even went all-time-high on us. And pretty much all markets offered similar rewards to investors. From March bottom to the August peaks all numbers went up almost 100%. So, why invest in crypto when you can invest in real companies with tangible products and SaaS companies with huge profits? This is what is pushing investors away from crypto.

And not to talk about a wave of SPACs (even crypto big boys now are using this scheme to enter NASDAQ)where investors saw some massive (over 300%) gains in a matter of days/weeks. And not to talk about new and emerging markets such as online betting apps (LCA, DKNG) or hydrogen future (NKLA,SHLL) and finally Apple of China (Xiaomi) or Tesla of China (Nio and Xpev). These companies still offer a tremendous growth opportunity. While these are hand-picked stocks there are still hundreds of other companies with 100%+ upside from here.

Blockchain tech will stay with us but the golden days of crypto coins are finished. The sooner you realize that the better for you.

I ask you now. Why invest in shit(alt)-coins when you can get better ROI on technologies of the future? Seems like many investors are asking the same question.

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Bitcoin (BTC) has come to an end, sell everything. - IdahoReporter.com

A hundred academics demand more transparency from the Government with the Radar Covid app | Technology – Explica

More than 110 renowned Spanish academics, most of them technology experts, published a manifesto this Saturday calling for more transparency from the Government in the development of such sensitive software as Radar Covid, the public app for notification of exposures. In the text, they ask that the promised publication of the app code be exhaustive, well documented and encompass all stages of the apps development, from its inception to future changes. Throughout its almost three pages, the signatories applaud the innovative milestone for Spanish public health of this tool, but regret that the Secretary of State for Digitization and Artificial Intelligence, the head of the application, to date there is no published any documentation on the design of Radar Covid, on its implementation or on the integration process of the Autonomous Communities .

The Secretary of State, after constant criticism for not fulfilling the commitment to bring open source to light, has promised to publish the open source code next Wednesday. But it is not yet clear how deep and constant the governments gesture will be: The opening of the code must be accompanied by complete documentation and information, so that the scientific community and civil society have the necessary scrutiny capacity to identify points to improve and contribute to developing and deploying Covid Radar according to the highest standards , the manifesto indicates.

Among the signers of the manifesto are Daniel Innenarity, Professor of Political and Social Philosophy; Carme Torras, professor at the Robotics Institute of the CSIC and member of the National Council of Artificial Intelligence of the Government; Itziar de Lecuona, Unesco Professor of Bioethics at the University of Barcelona and member of the multidisciplinary working group of the Ministry of Science; Carmela Troncoso, promoter of the DP-3T protocol, who uses the Radar Covid app, and recently named by Fortune magazine as one of the most promising figures under 40 years old; Ricardo Baeza-Yates, professor of Data Sciences and member of the National Council of Artificial Intelligence of the Government; Miguel Luengo-Oroz, head of data for the United Nations Global Pulse; Maribel Gonzlez Vasco, professor of Applied Mathematics at the Rey Juan Carlos University; Lorenzo Cotino, Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Valencia; Josep-Domingo Ferrer, Unesco Chair in Data Privacy; Juan Tapiador, professor of Computer Science at the Carlos III University, or Jos Molina Molina, president of the Transparency Council of the Region of Murcia.

To questions from EL PAS, sources from the Secretary of State insist on their commitment to publish the code on September 9: We will comply with the commitment to publish on the day and faster than expected. It is something unprecedented in the Spanish public administration and an exercise in transparency , they say, adding: Lets hope that when the code is released, whoever looks at it, fiddles around and helps to verify and improve the tool.

The manifesto praises the achievement of the Spanish Administration in launching an app like Radar Covid, but a tool with such penetration (more than 3.4 million downloads), so sensitive and that should generate trust, needs an exemplary and flawless process and to serve as a precedent for future software developments: There is no technology without flaws and therefore multidisciplinary scrutiny is necessary to achieve the best result, they say in the text. Only an open and joint work, they continue, can efficiently identify potential biases and errors in the conceptualization and implementation of the application that may lead to undesired effects in terms of discrimination and violation of rights. Nothing in the text implies that there are errors or problems with the app, but the only way to know is with public scrutiny. To make it possible, and after waiting for weeks for the insides of the application to be known, they establish a series of essential elements that the Government must publish.

One of the most relevant points is to know the code that allows analyzing all the elements of the tracking system, including the servers, governance and the app itself, which has already been downloaded by more than 3.4 million Spaniards. Where are they, who manages them and what security measures have been adopted both for the deployment at the national level and relative to the autonomous communities, ask the academics along with the evolution of the code since the beginning of the initiative. The revision of previous versions is necessary because not all users periodically update their mobiles, they add.

The transparency required to release Radar Covid does not only respond to technical aspects. Building the application in a certain way depends on another series of decisions, such as the adoption of the decentralized communication protocol in order to preserve the anonymity of the users. For this reason, they understand that it is vital to have the system design report: detailing the analyzes that have led to deciding the configuration parameters and use of the Google and Apple notification exposure API, the implemented mechanisms and the libraries and services used to evaluate the security and privacy of the data, as well as the evaluation of the inclusion and accessibility of the design .

Privacy has aroused a certain suspicion among society. The Government and numerous experts have defended that Radar Covid respects it at all times. The use of bluetooth and built-in protocols, such as the generation of random alphanumeric codes that track phones against each other, prevent individual identification. To verify this, the signatories want a detailed report that contains, as required, the application monitoring mechanisms and associated mechanisms to ensure privacy and compliance with data protection regulations, referring to the data collected both during the pilot as in the production phase .

With the intention of settling any doubts and democratizing a process as novel in Spain as the construction of a useful app against a pandemic, they also require an impact assessment on data protection based on the design report and associated risk analysis to the application , as well as identifying the responsibilities and role played in the project by private entities.

In the absence of the Secretary of State releasing the code, the manifesto recalls that Radar Covid is simply a complementary measure. It does not replace manual trackers or exclude the need to maintain a safety distance or use masks. In order to guarantee the impact of the application, it is necessary to adopt legal and budgetary measures of social support that allow users to follow the recommendations of the app without suffering economic, labor or social damage, the academics say.

Under the idea of tackling the health emergency on all fronts, the signatories go beyond the technological issue. In his opinion, to all the effort made must be added a supervision that identifies potential discriminatory abuses in areas such as housing, the labor market and education. Only a joint interdisciplinary effort and with civil society can efficiently identify potential biases and errors in the conceptualization and implementation of the application that can lead to undesired effects, they reason.

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Information about the coronavirus

Here you can follow the last hour on the evolution of the pandemic

This is how the coronavirus curve evolves in Spain and in each autonomy

Download the tracking application for Spain

Search engine: The new normal by municipalities

Guide to action against the disease

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A hundred academics demand more transparency from the Government with the Radar Covid app | Technology - Explica

What’s the point: Red Hat Marketplace, JDK version control, and Visual Studio Codespaces DEVCLASS – DevClass

After keeping its business under its hat for a couple of months, the IBM acquisition and venerable open source software purveyor has now made its open cloud marketplace, Red Hat Marketplace, generally available. The service is operated by parent company Big Blue and is supposed to offer one curated repository of tools and services for hybrid cloud computing.

In Red Hats case, the latter is another way of saying OpenShift, since the service really provides a variety of charged software certified to run on the companys container application platform. At the time of writing, the Marketplace contains 62 products from categories ranging from security and monitoring, to logging, tracing, and machine learning.

Organisations who are interested in a more bespoke offer can choose to set up a private marketplace with Red Hat Marketplace Select. Those can then be made to only include pre-approved services, giving admins a way of creating a sort of self-service portal for development teams with options to track usage and spending across cloud environments.

Developers looking to help move the OpenJDK forward, no longer need to learn about version control system Mercurial to participate in the project. The transition of the Java implementations jdk/jdk and jdk/sandbox repositories to Git, GitHub, and Skara was completed last weekend, with a getting started guide available for those who need help to get going again.

Users working with the JDK Updates project need to be aware that the associated repositories still use Mercurial, so a quick glance at the Wiki might be helpful. To make things not too complicated, the Skara CLI tooling is promised to be backward compatible with Mercurial, and help is meant to be available via the skara-dev mailing list or IRC.

Microsoft is ending its Visual Studio Codespaces experiment and looks to consolidate the in-browser IDE formerly known as Visual Studio Online with GitHub Codespaces. VS Codespaces will be retired in February 2021, though current users still can create new plans and codespaces until 20 November.

Self-hosting, which some organisations saw as a major selling point of VSC, isnt in the cards for GitHub Codespaces, and neither is a way to migrate codespaces set up with the VS flavour to GitHub, meaning that they have to be recreated from scratch. However, GitHub Codespaces is still in limited public beta, which means VSC users might have to wait a while until they are added to the club and are really able to access the alternative offering anyway.

The move to axe the Visual Studio product is the result of confusion amongst users, who found the distinct experiences tricky to handle. Since GitHub also belongs to the Microsoft family, the merger will help save resources that potentially could be used to address customer woes quicker.

Visual Studio Code has gotten a new extension: in-memory data store Azure Cache for Redis is now available as a preview. The addition can be found in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace or via the extension tab and is useful to view, test, and debug caches.

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What's the point: Red Hat Marketplace, JDK version control, and Visual Studio Codespaces DEVCLASS - DevClass

12-Year-Old Figures Out Netflix Lock Code With This "Genius" Trick – NDTV

A 12-year-old figured out the parental lock on Netflix (Representative Image)

Irish-Canadian author Ed O'Loughlin was left "both frightened and impressed" with the way his youngest daughter figured out a way to hack their Netflix parental code.

To allow parents a degree of control over what their children are watching, the streaming giant gives parents the option of using a PIN code to lock certain content. It turns out that Mr O'Loughlin's 12-year-old really wanted to watch 'The Umbrella Academy' on Netflix - but instead of asking her parents for permission, she simply devised a "genius" way to guess their lock code.

Her father took to Twitter on Sunday to explain how she did it using just a bit of grease and some clever thinking. "My youngest hacked our Netflix parental code. She put light grease on the remote and got me to input the code when she wasn't looking. Then she noted the numbers I'd pressed and went through the combinations later," wrote Ed O'Loughlin, adding that her trick left him impressed as well as frightened.

In a follow-up tweet, he explained that his daughter, aged 12, went into all the trouble to watch 'The Umbrella Academy'.

Mr O'Loughlin's tweet has gone viral with over 3.5 lakh 'likes' and more than 32,000 'retweets'.

Many in the comments section shared tales of their own children tricking them, while others said that the 12-year-old's guessing trick was "genius".

"Cut from the same cloth as my devious youngest daughter. She handed me the controls when I sat with my back to the window at night so she could see the reflection. I think she was about 7 at the time. Now she's 16 I sleep with one eye open," wrote one Twitter user.

"Very, very impressive. My son ran two school planners - one with all of his good comments and one with his bad ones," said another.

"The child is a genius," a Twitter user remarked.

In May this year, Netflix itself was left impressed with the way a woman managed to use her ex-boyfriend's account secretly.

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12-Year-Old Figures Out Netflix Lock Code With This "Genius" Trick - NDTV

Trump targeting WikiLeaks’ Assange as ‘political enemy’, UK court told – Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted by the United States because he is a political enemy of President Donald Trump, his London extradition hearing was told on Wednesday.

A supporter of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange protests outside the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court ahead of a hearing to decide whether Assange should be extradited to the United States, in London, Britain September 9, 2020. REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

Australian-born Assange, 49, is fighting against being sent to the United States, where he is charged with conspiring to hack government computers and violating an espionage law over the release of confidential cables by WikiLeaks in 2010-2011.

Paul Rogers, a professor of peace studies at Britains Bradford University, told Londons Old Bailey court that the timing of the U.S. prosecution was connected to Assanges political views and Trumps hostility toward him.

The evidence does support very strongly ... this does appear to be a political trial, Rogers said.

Assange and WikiLeaks enraged the U.S. government a decade ago by publishing thousands of secret American documents, but he was not charged with any criminal offense at the time.

His supporters see him as a champion of free speech exposing abuses of power and hypocrisy by Washington and regard his prosecution as threat to journalism. U.S. authorities say he recklessly endangered the lives of sources with his releases.

Rogers said the Trump administration viewed Assange as a political enemy because of his opinions. Assanges defense team are arguing the U.S. case is politically-motivated, something which would bar his extradition.

The opinions and views of Mr Assange, demonstrated in his words and actions with the organization WikiLeaks over many years, can be seen as very clearly placing him in the crosshairs of dispute with the philosophy of the Trump administration, Rogers said in his statement to the court.

James Lewis, the lawyer representing the United States, challenged the assertion the case was politically-motivated, saying U.S. federal prosecutors were forbidden to consider political opinion in making their decisions.

Im not saying they are acting in bad faith, Rogers said. Im saying that at a different level, a political decision was taken to investigate this further after it had lapsed for eight years.

Assange was warned by the judge on Tuesday he would be removed from the courtroom and tried in his absence if he interrupted proceedings after Assange shouting nonsense at Lewis.

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Trump targeting WikiLeaks' Assange as 'political enemy', UK court told - Reuters

‘Absolute And Arbitrary Power’: Killing Extinction Rebellion And Julian Assange – Scoop.co.nz

Thursday, 10 September 2020, 4:05 pmArticle: Media Lens

Theuse and misuse of George Orwells truth-telling is sowidespread that we can easily miss his intended meaning. Forexample, with perfect (Orwellian) irony, the BBC has astatue of Orwell outside Broadcasting House, bearing the inscription:

Ifliberty means anything at all, it means the right to tellpeople what they do not want tohear.

Fine words, but suitablyambiguous: the BBC might argue that it is merely exercisingits liberty in endlessly channelling the worldview ofpowerful interests crass propaganda that many peoplecertainly do not want to hear.

Orwells realintention is made clearer in this secondcomment:

Journalism is printing whatsomeone else does not want printed: everything else ispublic relations.

In this line attributedto him (although there is some debateabout where it originated), Orwell was talking about power real journalism challenges the powerful. And thisis the essential difference between the vital work ofWikiLeaks and the propaganda role performed bystate-corporate media like the BBC every day on virtuallyevery issue.

On September 6, the Mail on Sunday ran twoeditorials, side by side. The first was titled, Asinister, shameful attack on free speech. It decried theExtinction Rebellion action last Friday to blockadethree newspaper printing presses owned by Rupert MurdochsUK News. The second editorial, as we will see below, was afeeble call not to send Julian Assange to the US, on the eveof his crucial extradition hearing inLondon.

Extinction Rebellions protest, lasting justa few hours, temporarily prevented the distribution ofMurdoch newspapers, such as the Sun and The Times, as wellas other titles printed by Murdochs presses, includingthe Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and the DailyTelegraph.

The Mail on Sunday editorial predictablycondemned the protesters supposed attempt atcensorship, declaring it:

athrowback to the very worst years of trade union militancy,which came close to strangling a free press and which wasonly defeated by the determined action of RupertMurdoch.

The paperfumed:

The newspaper blockade was ashameful and dangerous attempt to crush free speech, and itshould never be repeated.

This was thepropaganda message that was repeated across much of themainstream media, epitomised by the emptyrhetoric of Prime Minister Boris Johnson:

Afree press is vital in holding the government and otherpowerful institutions to account on issues critical for thefuture of our country, including the fight against climatechange. It is completely unacceptable to seek to limit thepublics access to news in this way.

Johnsonscomments could have been pure satire penned by Chris Morris,Mark Steel or the late Jeremy Hardy. Closer to the grubbytruth, a different Johnson Samuel describedthe free press as Scribbling on the backs ofadvertisements.

As Media Lens has repeatedlydemonstrated over the past 20 years, it is thestate-corporate media, including BBC News, that hasendlessly limited the publics access to news bydenying the public the full truth about climate breakdown,UK/US warmongering, including wars on Iraq, Afghanistan andLibya, the arming of Saudi Arabia and complicity in thatbrutal regimes destruction of Yemen, UK governmentsupport for the apartheid state of Israel even as it crushesthe Palestinian people, the insidious prising open of theNHS to private interests, and numerous other issues ofpublic importance.

When has the mythical freepress ever fully and properly held to account BorisJohnson or any of his predecessors in 10 Downing Street? Whocan forget that Tony Blair, steeped in the blood of so manyIraqis, is still held in esteem as an elder statesman whoseviews are sought out by mainstream news outlets,including BBC News and the Guardian? As John Pilger saidrecently:

Always contrast JulianAssange with Tony Blair. One will be fighting for his lifein court on 7 Sept for the crime of exposing warcrimes while the other evades justice for the paramountcrime of Iraq.

Health Secretary MattHancock, who has presided over a national public healthdisaster with soaring rates of mortality during thecoronavirus pandemic, had the affront to tweeta photograph of himself with a clutch of right-wing papersunder his arm, declaring:

Totallyoutrageous that Extinction Rebellion are trying to suppressfree speech by blockading newspapers. They must be dealtwith by the full force of the law.

Itis Hancock himself, together with government colleagues andadvisers not least Johnson and his protector, DominicCummings who should be dealt with by the full forceof the law. As Richard Horton, editor of The Lancetmedical journal, saidof Boris Johnson in May:

you droppedthe ball, Prime Minister. That was criminal. And you knowit.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) explainedsuccinctly via Twitter their reason for their totallyoutrageous action:

Dear Newsagents,we are sorry for disruption caused to your business thismorning. Dear Mr. Murdoch, we are absolutely not sorry forcontinuing to disrupt your agenda this morning. @rupertmurdoch#FreeTheTruth#ExtinctionRebellion#TellTheTruth

Anarticleon the XR website, simply titled, We do not have a freepress, said:

We are in an emergencyof unprecedented scale and the papers we have targeted arenot reflecting the scale and urgency of what is happening toour planet.

One of the XR protesterswas Steve, a former journalist for 25 years who hadworked for the Sun, Daily Mail, the Telegraph and The Times.He was filmed on location during the protest. He explainedthat he was participating, in part, because he is worriedabout the lack of a future for his children. And a majorreason for how we got to this point is that journalistsare:

stuck inside a toxic system wherethey dont have any choice but to tell the stories thatthese newspapers want to be told.

Hecontinued:

Every person who works onNews International or a Mail newspaper knows what story isor isnt acceptable for their bosses. And their bossesknow that because they know whats acceptable to Murdochor Rothermere or the other billionaires that run 70 per centof our media.

Steve said he left thatsystem because he couldnt bear the way itworked.

The most recent reportby the independent MediaReform Coalition on UK media ownership, published in2019, revealed the scale of the problem of extremelyconcentrated media ownership. Just three companies Rupert Murdochs News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach(publisher of the Mirror titles) dominate 83 per centof the national newspaper market (up from 71 per cent in2015). When online readers are included, just five companies News UK, Daily Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph dominate nearly 80 per cent of the market.

As wenotedof XRs worthy action:

Before anyonedenounces this as an attack on the free press there is no free press. There is a billionaire-owned,profit-maximising, ad-dependent corporate press that hasknowingly suppressed the truth of climate collapse and theneed for action to protect corporateprofits.

Zarah Sultana, Labour MP forCoventry South, indicatedher support too:

A tiny number ofbillionaires own vast swathes of our press. Their papersrelentlessly campaign for right-wing politics, promoting theinterests of the ruling class and scapegoating minorities. Afree press is vital to democracy, but too much of our pressisnt free at all.

By contrast,Labour leader Keir Starmer once again demonstrated hisestablishment credentials as a safe pair of hands bycondemning XRs protest. Craig Murray commented:

Ata time when the government is mooting designating ExtinctionRebellion as Serious Organised Crime, right wing bequiffedmuppet Keir Starmer was piously condemning the group,stating: The free press is the cornerstone of democracyand we must do all we can to protectit.

Starmer had also commented:

Denyingpeople the chance to read what they choose is wrong and doesnothing to tackle climate change.

Butdenying people the chance to read what they would choose the corporate-unfriendly truth on climate change isexactly what the corporate media, misleadingly termedmainstream media, is all about.

Media activistand lecturer Justin Schlosberg made a number of cogentobservations on press freedom in a Twitter thread(beginning here):

9times out of 10 when people in Britain talk about protectingpress freedom what they really mean is protecting presspower.

He pointed out the giantmyth promulgated by corporate media, forever trying toresist any attempt to curb their power; namelythat:

Britains mainstream [sic]press is a vital pillar of our democracy, covering adiversity of perspectives and upholding professionalstandards of journalismthe reality is closer to the exactinverse of such claims. More than 10 million people votedfor a socialist party at the last election (13 million in2017) and polls have consistently shown that majority ofBritish public opposeausterity.

Schlosbergcontinued:

The diversity of ournational press [ ] covers the political spectrum fromliberal/centre to hard right and has overwhelmingly backedausterity economics for the best part of the last 4decades [moreover] the UK press enjoys an unrivalledinternational reputation for producing a diatribe of fake,racist and misogynistic hate speech over anything that canbe called journalism.

He rightlyconcluded:

ironically one of thegreatest threats to democracy is a press that continues toweave myths in support of its vested interests, and a BBCthat continues to uncritically absorbthem.

Alongside the Mail on Sundaysbillionaire-owned, extremist right-wing attack on climateactivists highlighting a non-existent free press, thepaper had an editorialthat touched briefly on the danger to all journalists shouldWikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange be extradited from theUK to the US:

the charges against MrAssange, using the American Espionage Act, might be usedagainst legitimate journalists in thiscountry.

The implication was thatAssange is not to be regarded as a legitimatejournalist. Indeed, the billionaire Rothermere-ownedviewspaper a more accurate description thannewspaper made clear its antipathy towardshim:

Mr Assanges revelations ofleaked material caused grave embarrassment to Washington andare alleged to have done material damagetoo.

The term embarrassmentrefers to the exposure of US criminal actions threateningthe great rogue states ability to commit similar crimesin future: not embarrassing (Washington is without shame),but potentially limiting.

The Mail on Sundaycontinued:

Mr Assange has been aspectacular nuisance during his time in this country,lawlessly jumping bail and wasting police time by takingrefuge in embassy of Ecuador. The Mail on Sunday disapprovesof much of what he has done, but we must also ask if hiscurrent treatment is fair, right orjust.

The insinuations and subtlesmears embedded in these few lines have been repeatedlydemolished (see this extensive analysis,for example). And there was no mention that Nils Melzer, theUNSpecial Rapporteur on Torture, as well as numerous doctors, healthexperts and humanrights organisations, have strongly condemned the UKsappalling abuse of Assange and demanded his immediaterelease.

Melzer has accusedthe British government of torturingAssange:

the primary purpose of tortureis not necessarily interrogation, but very often torture isused to intimidate others, as a show to the public whathappens if you dont comply with the government. That isthe purpose of what has been done to Julian Assange. It isnot to punish or coerce him, but to silence him and to do soin broad daylight, making visible to the entire world thatthose who expose the misconduct of the powerful no longerenjoy the protection of the law, but essentially will beannihilated. It is a show of absolute and arbitrarypower.

Melzer also spoke about theprice he will pay for challenging thepowerful:

I am under no illusions thatmy UN career is probably over. Having openly confronted twoP5-States (UN security council members) the way I have, I amvery unlikely to be approved by them for another high-levelposition. I have been told, that my uncompromisingengagement in this case comes at a politicalprice.

This is the reality of theincreasingly authoritarian world we are living in.

Theweak defence of Assange now being seen in even right-wingmedia, such as the Mail on Sunday, indicates a real fearthat any journalist could in future be targeted bythe US government for publishing material that might angerWashington.

In an interviewthis week, Barry Pollack, Julian Assanges US lawyer,warned of the very dangerous precedent that could beset in motion with Assanges extradition to theUS:

The position that the U.S. istaking is a very dangerous one. The position the U.S. istaking is that they have jurisdiction all over the world andcan pursue criminal charges against any journalist anywhereon the planet, whether theyre a U.S. citizen or not. Butif theyre not a U.S. citizen, not only can the U.S.pursue charges against them but that person has no defenseunder the First Amendment.

In starkcontrast to the weak protestations of the Mail on Sunday andthe rest of the establishment media, Noam Chomsky pointedout the simple truth in a recent interviewon RT (note the dearth of Chomsky interviews on BBC News,and consider why his views are not soughtafter):

Julian Assange committed thecrime of letting the general population know things thatthey have a right to know and that powerful states dontwant them to know.

Likewise, JohnPilger issueda strong warning:

This week, one of themost important struggles for freedom in my lifetime nearsits end. Julian Assange who exposed the crimes of greatpower faces burial alive in Trumps America unless he winshis extradition case. Whose side are youon?

Pilger recommended an excellent in-depthpiece by Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian/Observerjournalist, in which Cook observed:

Foryears, journalists cheered Assanges abuse. Now theyvepaved his path to a US gulag.

PeterOborne is a rare example of a right-leaning journalist whohas spoken out strongly in defence of Assange. Oborne wrotelast week in Press Gazettethat:

Future generations of journalistswill not forgive us if we do not fightextradition.

He set out the followingscenario:

Lets imagine a foreigndissident was being held in Londons Belmarsh Prisoncharged with supposed espionage offences by the Chineseauthorities.

And that his real offence wasrevealing crimes committed by the Chinese Communist Party including publishing video footage of atrocities carriedout by Chinese troops.

To put it another way, thathis real offence was committing the crime ofjournalism.

Let us further suppose the UN SpecialRapporteur on Torture said this dissident showed all thesymptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychologicaltorture and that the Chinese were putting pressure on theUK authorities to extradite this individual where he couldface up to 175 years in prison.

The outrage fromthe British press would bedeafening.

Obornecontinued:

There is one crucialdifference. It is the US trying to extradite the co-founderof Wikileaks.

Yet there has been scarcely a word inthe mainstream British media in hisdefence.

In fact, as we haverepeatedly highlighted,Assange has been the subject of a propagandablitz by the UK media, attackingand smearinghim, over and over again, often in the pages of theliberal Guardian.

At the time of writing,neither ITV political editor Robert Peston nor BBCNews political editor LauraKuenssberg appear to have reported the Assangeextradition case. They have not even tweeted about it once,even though they are both very active on Twitter. In fact,the last time Peston so much as mentioned Assange on hisTwitter feed was 2017.Kuenssbergs record is even worse; her Twitter silenceextends all the way back to 2014.These high-profile journalists are supposedly primeexemplars of the very best high-quality UK newsbroadcasters, maintaining the values of a free press,holding politicians to account and keeping the publicinformed.

On September 7, John Pilger gave an addressoutside the Old Bailey in London, just before JulianAssanges extradition hearing began there. His words werea powerful rebuke to those so-called journalists thathave maintained a cowardly silence, or worse. Theofficial truth-tellers of the media thestenographers who collaborate with those in power, helpingto sell their wars are, Pilger says, Vichyjournalists.

He continued:

Itis said that whatever happens to Julian Assange in the nextthree weeks will diminish if not destroy freedom of thepress in the West. But which press? The Guardian? TheBBC, The New York Times, the Jeff Bezos WashingtonPost?

No, the journalists in theseorganizations can breathe freely. The Judases on theGuardian who flirted with Julian, exploited hislandmark work, made their pile then betrayed him, havenothing to fear. They are safe because they areneeded.

Freedom of the press now rests with thehonorable few: the exceptions, the dissidents on theinternet who belong to no club, who are neither rich norladen with Pulitzers, but produce fine, disobedient,moral journalism those like JulianAssange.

DC &DE

Scoop Media

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'Absolute And Arbitrary Power': Killing Extinction Rebellion And Julian Assange - Scoop.co.nz

Tips and Murmurs: Bob Carr whistles a different tune on Julian Assange – Crikey

Bob Carr whistles a new tune on Julian Assange (if only he'd done anything about it?) while Qantas seems to be reaping the pandemic rewards. Plus other tips from the Crikey bunker.

That was then, this is now Ah, the luxury of being a former politician, when you finally have the platform and influence to really make a difference. Just days after former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop lamented the cuts in the foreign aid budget -- a process she had overseen and defended in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 -- we have Bob Carr, who continues his newfound interest in the case of Julian Assange:

"He faces the prospect of a living death inside an American prison, in very cruel conditions, because he let the world know about an American war crime," he told Nine News. Not much to quarrel with that.

So why, back in 2012 (when Carr held the obscure post of Australian foreign affairs minister), did he say of Assange: "Theres an amorality about whats been at work here; secrets being released for the sake of being released without inherent justification.

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Tips and Murmurs: Bob Carr whistles a different tune on Julian Assange - Crikey

Combatting COVID-19 misinformation with machine learning (VB Live) – VentureBeat

Presented by AWS Machine Learning

As machine learning has evolved, so have best practices, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Join this VB Live event to learn from experts about how machine learning solutions are helping companies respond in these uncertain times and the lessons learned along the way.

Register here for free.

Misinformation around COVID-19 is driving human behavior across the world. Here in the information age, sensationalized clickbait headlines are crowding out actual fact-based content, and, as a result misinformation spreads virally. Conversations within small communities become the epicenter of false information, and that misinformation spreads as people talk, both online and off. As the number of misinformed people grow, this infodemic grows.

The spread of misinformation around COVID-19 is especially problematic, because it could overshadow the key messaging around safety measures from public health and government officials.

In an effort to counter misinformed narratives in central and west Africa, Novetta Mission Analytics (NMA) is working with Africa CDC (Center for Disease Control) to discover and identify narratives and behavior patterns around the disease, says David Cyprian, product owner at Novetta. And machine learning is key.

They supply data that measures the acceptability, impact, and effectiveness of public health and social measures. In turn, the Africa CDC analysis of the data enables them to generate tailored guidelines for each country.

With all these different narratives out there, we can use machine learning to quantify which ones are really affecting the largest population, Cyprian explains. We uncover how quickly these things are spreading, how many people are talking about the issues, and whether anyone is actually criticizing the misinformation itself.

NMA uncovered trending phrases that indicate worry around the disease, mistrust about official messaging, and criticisms of local measures to combat the disease. They found that herbal remedies are becoming popular, as is the idea of herd immunity.

We know all of these different narratives are changing behavior, Cyprian says. Theyre causing people to make decisions that make it more difficult for the COVID-19 response community to be effective and implement countermeasures that are going to mitigate the effects of the virus.

To identify these narrative threads, Novetta ingests publicly-available social media at scale and pairs it with a collection of domestic and international news media. They process and analyze that raw social and traditional media content in their ML platform built on AWS to identify where people are talking about these things, and where events are happening that drive the conversations. They also use natural language processing for directed sentiment analysis to discover whether narratives are being driven by mistrust of a local government entity, the west, or international organizations, as well as identifying influencers that are engendering a lot of positive sentiment among users and building trust.

Pieces of content are tagged as positive or negative to local and global pandemic measures and public entities, creating small human-labeled data sets about specific micronarratives for specific populations that might be trading in misinformation.

By fusing rapid ingestion with a human labeling process of just a few hundred artifacts, theyre able to kick off machine learning and apply it to the scale of social media. This allows them to have more than one learning model that is used for all the problem sets.

We dont have a one-size-fits-all approach, says Cyprian. Were always tuning and researching accuracy for specific narratives, and then were able to provide large, near-real-time insights into how these narratives are propagating or spreading in the field.

Built on AWS, their machine learning architecture allows their development team to focus on what they do well, which is develop new applications and new widgets to be able to analyze this data.

They dont need to worry about any server management, or scaling, since thats taken care of for them with Amazon EC2 and S3. Their microservices architecture uses some additional features that Amazon offers, particularly Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), to orchestrate their services, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), to store images and run vulnerability testing before they deploy.

Novettas approach is cross-disciplinary, bringing in domain experts from the health field, media analysts, machine learning research engineers, and software developers. They work in small teams to solve problems together.

In my experience, thats been the best way for machine learning to make a practical difference, he says. I would just urge folks who are facing these similar difficult problems to enable their people to do what people do well, and then have the machine learning engineers help to harden, verify, and scale those efforts so you can bring countermeasures to bear quickly.

To learn more about the impact machine learning solutions can deliver and lessons learned along the way, dont miss this round table with leaders from Kabbage and Novetta, as well as Michelle K. Lee, VP of the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab.

Dont miss out!

Register here for free.

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Combatting COVID-19 misinformation with machine learning (VB Live) - VentureBeat