For as long as I've used Linux, I've heard, and thought, that XFCE was a "bad looking desktop". While my first contact with it didn't really change my mind, it's time to take a look at how to change its look and feel, and hopefully get rid of that preconceived notion. We'll start with a few examples of changes applied to XFCE by some distros, and then we'll try to build our own look and feel.
Probably one of the most common Vim/Emacs questions that I get is "Why would I choose Emacs over Vim?" Or "what does Emacs have to offer that Vim doesn't?" You see this question all the time from Vim users on message boards and support forums.
Whether it's Linus flipping off the camera or Arch users letting you know they think they're better than you, we have a Linux meme for every walk of life and every style. Come, let's laugh at silly internet pictures of a Linux nature.
Intel's Linux engineers continue squaring away the next-generation Alder Lake hybrid processor support. In addition to continued graphics driver work and other platform device IDs being added for the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel, it looks like ADL's Thunderbolt/USB4 support will be merged too.
Queued today into thunderbolt.git's "next" tree is support for Thunderbolt on Intel Alder Lake.
The actual patch isn't all that exciting as it confirms Alder Lake has the same integrated Thunderbolt/USB4 controller as used already by Intel's Tiger Lake platform. So given the same controller, just some new device IDs are needed for Alder Lake.
Last year Intel's updated ISA extensions reference guide was updated with references to Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" having High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) given new HBM-related error codes. Now it's even more clear there are Xeon CPUs coming to market with onboard HBM memory as Intel has begun submitting Linux kernel driver changes.
The i20nm EDAC driver for error detection and correction reporting has been extended for supporting future Xeon CPUs with onboard HBM memory.
The patches do spell out quite clearly, "On package memory is coming (in the future)...A future Xeon processor will include in-package HBM (high bandwidth memory). The in-package HBM memory controller shares the same architecture with the regular DDR memory controller. Add the HBM memory controller devices for EDAC support."
A programming enthusiast who began writing Python code during high school, recent computer engineering graduate YiFei Zhu (BS CE '21) has parlayed his knowledge and skills into impactful contributions to Linux, arguably the most widely used system software in the world.
The Linux operating system runs on millions of hardware devices. Ninety percent of all cloud infrastructure is powered by Linux, including supercomputers and cloud providers, 74% of smartphones globally are Linux-based, and even NASA's Mars helicopter runs Linux. The Linux kernel, as the core of the operating system, manages the hardware resources like CPU, memory, and peripheral devices and provides programming interfaces to user applications.
Recently the mainline Linux kernel has seen a lot of improvements to its feature set when compiling it under LLVM's Clang rather than GCC as traditionally the only supported compiler. The most recent feature being brought to the Linux kernel when using Clang is finally allowing the use of compiler profile guided optimizations (PGO) for squeezing even greater performance out of the system by letting the compiler leverage the real-world profiles/metrics collected to make more informed code generation / optimization decisions.
When Clang'ing the Linux kernel there has recently been support introduced for link-time optimizations (LTO) as another performance win. In turn this also allowed Clang Control Flow Integrity (CFI) support to also land in the mainline kernel. In the past there were patches to the Linux kernel to support GCC's LTO and PGO functionality but they hadn't been mainlined.
The Linux kernel's RISC-V support continues picking up remaining features not yet wired up beyond the base architecture support. The latest is transparent hugepages (THP) to be supported for RISC-V with Linux 5.14.
Following recent RISC-V kernel additions like XIP for execute in place, support for KProbes and other features, and hardware specific work like SiFive FU740 SoC support, the latest RISC-V kernel action is transparent hugepages now being ready.
A big patch series out of Red Hat is now queued into the XFS file-system development Git branch that is part of the new material for the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle.
The big set of patches that was queued this week into the xfs-5.14 for-next code focuses on CIL (Committed Item List) and log scalability improvements.
There are good performance numbers being seen out of this scalability work for the XFS file-system. The big numbers are seeing the transaction rate go up from around 700k to 1.7M commits per second and a reduction in flush operations by 2~x orders of magnitude less for metadata heavy workloads that don't enforce fsync.
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) saw queued into its "dev" tree this week the new compress_cache mount option ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.14 cycle.
Enabling the compress_cache mount option allows for using the address space of an inner inode to cache the compressed block. In turn doing so should improve the cache hit ratio for random reads with this flash-optimized file-system.
Last month we reported on CUDA documentation pointing to the NVIDIA 470 driver series to be the last supporting GeForce GTX 600/700 Kepler GPUs and that has now been summed up more formally with new guidance out of NVIDIA.
Recently I was doing some work decoding the new Galileo High Accuracy Service data. In short, this new ‘HAS’ data will allow Galileo (“European GPS”) users to achieve decimeter-level accuracy, which is nice. This HAS data is transmitted highly redundantly by making good use of Reed-Solomon encoding.
To work with this data, I attempted to learn more about Reed-Solomon and I found almost all explanations were useless to me - oodles of advanced math, but no guidance of how to use R-S in practice. And in fact, quite a lot of the math-heavy pages turned out to get practical details wrong.
The math behind Reed-Solomon is indeed very pretty, and I can understand why many explanations start with telling users about lovely Galois fields. This page meanwhile will focus on things you really need to know.
The other day, I had a little realization:
Today I realized that the growing enabling of HTTP/3 means that we need to allow UDP 443 through our firewalls (at least outbound), not just TCP 443. Although in the mean time, blocking it shields our users from any HTTP/3 issues. (Which happen.)
One thing that I do a lot is run virtual machines. Some of these stick around, a lot of them are very ephemeral. I also like being able to get into these VMs quickly if I want to mess around with a given distribution or OS. Normally I'd run these on my gaming tower, however this makes my tower very load-bearing. I also want to play games sometimes on my tower, and even though there have been many strides in getting games to run well on Linux it's still not as good as I'd like it to be.
GeForce Now (stylized as GeForce NOW) is the brand used by Nvidia for its cloud gaming service. The Nvidia Shield version of GeForce Now, formerly known as Nvidia Grid, launched in beta in 2013, with Nvidia officially unveiling its name on September 30, 2015. The subscription service provided users with unlimited access to a library of games hosted on Nvidia servers for the life of the subscription, being delivered to subscribers through streaming video. Certain titles were also available via a “Buy & Play” model. This version was discontinued in 2019, and transitioned to a new version of the service that enabled Shield users to play their own games.
In January 2017, Nvidia unveiled GeForce Now clients for Windows and Macintosh computers, available in North America and Europe as a free beta. GeForce NOW lets users access a virtual computer, where they can install their existing games from existing digital distribution platforms, and play them remotely. As with the original Shield version, the virtual desktop is also streamed from Nvidia servers. An Android client was also introduced in 2019.
The service exited Beta and launched to the general public on February 4, 2020. It is available on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Shield TV and Chromebook devices. GeForce support for LG TVs running WebOS will be made available sometime in 2021.
By default snap is disabled on Linux Mint, however, we can enable and install a graphical app store to get various SNAP packages with just one click.
Snap is a universal package manager that allows users to install software available in the Snapcraft repository on all popular Linux regardless of their codebase. This means the same app package for Ubuntu can be installed on RedHat.
This guide explains what are storage pools and volumes in Libvirt and how to change KVM libvirt default storage pool location using Virsh program, Virt-manager and Cockpit in Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Elasticsearch on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Elasticsearch is an open-source full-text search and analytics engine tool used to store, search, and analyze big volumes of data in near real-time. The search engine works very quickly, can be used to search large amounts of data (big data), and supports distributed architectures for high availability. Together with Kibana and Logstash, Elasticsearch forms the Elastic Stack.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Elasticsearch on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VeraCrypt on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. In case an attacker forces you to reveal the password, VeraCrypt provides plausible deniability. In contrast, to file encryption, data encryption performed by VeraCrypt is real-time (on-the-fly), automatic, transparent, needs very little memory and does not involve temporary unencrypted files.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of VeraCrypt open source encryption on a CentOS 8.
In this article, you will learn how to configure a recursive DNS server using BIND. If you haven’t checked our article on how to install the BIND DNS server in FreeBSD yet, you can find the article here. Please note that in this article, the term recursive DNS server might also be referred to as DNS Caching server or just Caching server. The term DNS server might also be referred to as Nameserver or just name server.
The CouchDB is an open-source database system, managed by the Apache Software Foundation. It is fault-tolerant, and schema-free NoSQL database management system.
CouchDB store data in document or files with JSON data structure. Each document contains fields and attachments, where fields have text, numbers, lists, Booleans, and more data. The data of this database accessed by using RESTful HTTP/JSON API that use to read, create, edit, and delete database files or documents.
Today, In this tutorial, we will learn how to install CouchDB on Ubuntu 21.04 machine.
Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program for Linux based operating systems such as Ubuntu. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window. Shutter is free, open-source, and licensed under GPL v3.
The sudoers file is used by Linux and Unix administrators in general in order to to allocate specific system rights to new and existing system users. This enables the system administrator to control what every user does in order to ensure they would not interfere with the system files or processes. Since most Linux distros are built with security in mind, when a user wants to run a command in the terminal that requires root privileges, the system will check the username against the sudoers file.
We are very well acquainted with Linux, however, when it comes to UNIX based operating system then most don’t know from where to download it. Just like Linux Distros Unix is also available under different names such as Oracle Solaris, OpenSolaris (Discontinued), FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD. There is quite a confusion between Unix and open source Unix-like operating systems such as Linux. Unix like OS also refer as UN*X or *nix OS are those behaved like UNIX OS following its standardization, basically, they derived from UNIX and sometimes developed as free and open source or proprietary. UNIX was developed at Bell Labs in Manhattan.
Cron is a scheduling daemon that executes cron jobs at specified intervals. Cron jobs automate system maintenance, repetitive or administration tasks such as database or data backup, system updates, checking the disk space usage, sending emails, and so on.
You can schedule cron jobs to run by the minute, hour, day of the week, day of the month, month, or any combination of these.
The brave browser is one of the new entries in the browser battles, with its first release (Version 1.0) being 13 November 2019. By comparison, Google Chrome had its initial release on 2 September 2008 and Microsoft Edge being July 2015. Brave browser is much more focused on privacy, faster browsing speeds, security, and efficient performance.
Brave is based on the Chromium opensource project, which also powers other browsers like Google Chrome. Among the developers includes Brendan Eich, who happens to be the creator of the Javascript programming language and a co-founder of Mozilla – the company behind Mozilla Firefox.
An interesting feature that puts brave in the limelight is their unusual business model. Brave removes all ads on a website and replaces them with its own ads. Additionally, it provides users with a platform to send money to their favorite sites. That hasn’t gone well with content publishers. In 2016, lawyers representing 17 newspaper publishers wrote a cease-and-desist letter to Brave with the message, “Your plan to use our content to sell your advertising is indistinguishable from a plan to steal our content to publish on your own website.”
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' CG5 Edition on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is an Open Source, collaborative platform for email servers, developed in two editions, Open Source edition (Free) and Network Edition (Paid), which provides services such as LDAP, SMTP, POP and IMAP, webmail client, calendaring, tasks, antivirus, antispam and others.
This tutorial describes how to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite Open Source Edition on a CentOS/RHEL 8 server.
Computers are incomplete without memory. Primary and secondary are two types of memory that a computer needs to function. Primary memory includes RAM and ROM, whereas secondary includes hard drives, DVDs, etc. Both types of memory are crucial parts of a computer because one stores your app data temporarily, and the other stores your operating systems, applications, and media. So what is a startup disk? A startup disk, also known as a boot disk, is a storage device that contains an operating system; it can be a CD, DVD, USB, or even a hard drive. Startup disks are typically internal hard drives or SSDs of the computer if the operating system is installed on them, and they come into the category of secondary memory. The startup disk contains files required for boot sequence, where boot sequence is the initialization of key processes needed for a user to interact with a computer. Therefore, every computer needs a startup disk. Likewise, in VirtualBox, we also need to assign a startup disk of the guest operating system.
Many users use VirtualBox, Oracle’s cross-platform app for x86 virtualization to boot other operating systems right from the host operating system. The operating systems run through VirtualBox is called a guest operating system, and the machine it is running on is called a virtual machine that emulates the real machine.
As you transition from Windows or Mac to Linux, you will spend a lot of time working on the Linux terminal. The terminal is a console that accepts commands typed in by a user and executes a task on the system. Running commands on the terminal is an essential skill that any Linux user needs to administer efficiently.
Linux provides tons of commands, but we will keep it simple in this guide and shed light on the basic Linux commands you really ought to know as you get started.
When Linux server administrators spend a lot of time over the terminal managing and doing administrative tasks, they become bored watching the same terminal screen and fonts. Individuals work excellently in an environment of their preference. For resolving this purpose, Ubuntu provides some preference settings to customize the terminal settings. This post consists of how to change terminal settings and customize them according to our desire.
In this post, we will go through a step-by-step guide on changing the terminal font size, and along with that, we will also learn how to change some other preferences of a terminal to customize it according to our taste. The steps for customizing the font of the terminal are as follows.
MySQL version 8.0 introduced the MySQL window functions, allowing you to perform queries in an easier and organized method. Thereby, increasing the processing and performance. Such functions include: RANK(), ROW_RANK(), LAST_VALUE(), and many more. In this tutorial, we shall focus on using one of the MySQL functions: LAG(). It is a window function that allows you to access and fetch the value of previous rows from the current row within the same result set.
Suppose your laptop or computer has WiFi or Bluetooth hardware installed. In that case, there is a chance that Debian won’t recognize it automatically after you’ve installed Debian on your computer, as many other Linux distributions do. It’s because Debian does not include these drivers by default. But, you can easily install the required drivers from the official Debian non-free repository and get them to work on Debian.
In this article, I will show you how to enable and configure Bluetooth on Debian 10. So, let’s get started.
Kubuntu 21.04 was released in April 2021 and it ships with the KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series by default. As expected, those who have installed the Ubuntu flavor on their PCs would want to upgrade to the recently release KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment series, and now they can.
The Kubuntu team announced today that the KDE Plasma 5.22 packages are now available in the Kubuntu Backports PPA repository, along with newer versions of the KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear software suites, and you can enjoy them all if you follow the next instructions.
Renaming files is not a particularly advanced operation; as long as it’s done on a small number of files, it usually doesn’t require special tools. However, when there’s an entire folder of photos from last year’s vacation waiting to be renamed, it may be wise to consider some timesaving tricks or apps.
There are two general approaches when you rename files in Linux: via the command-line interface or a standalone application. Linux users already know how powerful the CLI can be, so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are several commands for file renaming.
LXD is a next generation container manager that provides additional features that are similar to virtual machines, such as snapshots, storage pools, and more. Using Linux containers (LXC) as the container type, LXD gives you the best of two worlds. In this video, I’ll go over the basics of LXD. You’ll learn how to set it up and launch containers. For this particular video, we’ll focus on LXC commands – but a follow-up that dives more into LXD’s more advanced features is a possibility if there’s enough interest.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Spigot on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Spigot is a modification of the Minecraft server software, CraftBukkit. Spigot optimizes server resource usage, ensuring your players have the best experience and is also backward compatible with most CraftBukkit.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Spigot on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Google changed the landscape of affordable computing with the advent of Chromebooks. These affordable laptops running Chrome OS are ubiquitous throughout the education sector. Many users also prefer to use a Chromebook at home for personal computing. Of course, a large percentage of those people also use an iPhone as their daily mobile device. It’s certainly natural to wonder how well your favorite Chromebook pairs with your iPhone. For many iPhone users, iTunes is still an integral part of their music management routine. So, can you run iTunes on your Chromebook? Let’s clear things up.
The more you know about how Linux works, the better you'll be able do some good troubleshooting when you run into a problem. In this post, we're going to dive into a problem that a contact of mine, Chris Husted, recently ran into and what he did to determine what was happening on his system, stop the problem in its tracks, and make sure that it was never going to happen again.
Subnautica is an open-world survival/action-adventure game developed and published by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. In the game, the player is free to explore the ocean of an alien world and is encouraged to survive in it. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play Subnautica on Linux.
One of the tasks nearly any sysadmin frequently encounters is the care and feeding of the MySQL database server. You can build an entire career around nothing but this topic—making you a DB admin, not a humble sysadmin like yours truly—but for today, we're just going to cover the basics.
For this guide, we're going to be using Ubuntu Linux as the underlying operating system—but most of these steps and tips will be either the same, or broadly similar, across nearly any OS or distribution you might install MySQL on.
People keep telling me to look at Lugaru on these streams so here we are, it's about a rabbit that does kung-fu and it might have one of the weirdest and jankiest combat systems I've ever seen but it's so much fun.
A mixture between factory sims like Factorio and puzzle elements like something Zachtronics would make, Warp Factory could be your next purchase.
"Unleash your inner engineer and build factories to produce objects of every shape and size! Use a powerful system of portals to reconfigure the very nature of space itself to conform to your desires! Warp Factory is an automation puzzle game consisting of many varied challenges - produce intricate shapes one block at a time, build intelligent systems that process randomized input, carefully assemble strange pieces into larger segments."
Little Nightmares is a puzzle-platform/horror adventure game developed by Tarsier Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The game follows Six, a hungry little girl who must escape the Maw, a vessel packed with enemies. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play it on Linux.
Want to try another quality free and open source game? Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. Developed in the fancy Rust coding language, Veloren has grown massively over this last year and it's steadily turning into what could potentially be the next truly big FOSS game.
During IGN's Summer of Gaming recently, it was announced that SkateBIRD shall be launching across various different platforms together on August 12.
Skating in a miniature world, every small object can be something to help with a trick. You, after all, a tiny little bird. Grind, flip, and spin through stages while completing challenges to unlock fancy new gear, fresh fits, and secret mixtapes jammed with lo-fi beats for the birb boarders to chill and skate to.
Want to play more of the classic The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? OpenMW is your friend. This free and open source game engine reimplementation has a new build that needs testing.
OpenMW 0.47.0 RC2 is out now with downloads available for Linux, macOS and Windows!
MangoHud, the all in one solution to show off various performance metrics for Linux gaming, has a brand new version out now with more options.
If you've never heard of it, this is the same piece of open source software we use in some videos for showing off FPS, frame timings, VRAM and RAM use and more. Here's a quick example using GLXGears so you can see what to expect from the tool
Need another game? How about a free copy of the colony building game Surviving Mars? You can get it free for 72 hours from Humble Bundle as of today. What's the catch? They want you to get their newsletter, so they will send you all the latest deals. A small price to pay for a free game, and nothing stops you removing yourself from it later if you don't like their emails.
From 1940 to 2099, Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy is now ready for public testing. Take the role of private investigator Joshua Reev in this cyberpunk-themed adventure released in 1998 by Trecision, featuring pre-rendered environments and 3D software rendering. Uncover the conspiracy, and all the bugs!
Thanks to the original developers for providing us the source code, and to SupSuper, Strangerke, bluegr and madmoose for porting it to ScummVM.
Worried if that $60 you worked hard for would be a waste, only to find out Guilty Gear: Strive — a hybrid 2D/3D anime fighting game — doesn’t work with Proton? Well, I burned that $60 for you and, fortunately, the game works out of the box! Both my DualSense and Series X controllers were picked up and working just fine.
We are pleased to announce that Plasma 5.22.0, is now available in our backports PPA for Kubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo.
The release announcement detailing the new features and improvements in Plasma 5.22 can be found here.
KDE Plasma 5.23 promises to offer users a more beautiful Plasma desktop experience by including an updated Breeze theme with a new, beautiful style for buttons, radio buttons, checkboxes, menu items, sliders, etc.
Not only that it will provide a more beautiful Plasma experience, but also a more bug-free one since the new Breeze theme style addresses some old styling issue like the Breeze sliders becoming invisible when selecting the parent widget or a dialog’s default button color not being more visually obvious.
KDE developers didn't spend much time basking over their Plasma 5.22 release this week as they have already begun lining up changes for the first point release, new feature work for Plasma 5.23, and other improvements to this open-source desktop environment.
[...]
- The Kate text editor's Language Server Protocol (LSP) now supports the Dart programming language.
- The SDDM log-in/display manager can now be run as native Wayland without relying on X11.
- Plasma 5.22.1 with Wayland will now detect additional screens when using a multi-GPU setup.
This week Plasma 5.22 was released! Overall our focus on stability has paid off, and so far there are no major regressions reported; only a few medium-severity ones which have all already been fixed in Plasma 5.21.1 . You can read the release announcement, or check out KDE developer Niccolò Venerandi’s lovely video about it...
But something much bigger happened as well: the next phase of the Breeze Evolution initiative was merged, providing a new style for buttons, menu items, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders, and more! It’s beautiful...
The KDE team enabled the backports PPA which you can use to install and upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.22 in Kubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo. Here's how.
In just six days, on Friday next week, KDE Akademy will start, bringing us eight days packed with presentations, workshops, meetings, BoFs and hanging out with friends.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.83.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
You might realise with the help of the sidebar that there's something inappropriate in your chat.
Now, Tok will allow you to properly delete others' messages if you have the correct permissions.
After years of using and maintaining Qt there was a piece of the SDK that I never got to use as a developer: QML. Thanks to ICS I've took the free (in the sense of cost) QML Programming — Fundamentals and Beyond.
It consists of seven sessions, which can be easily done in a few days. I did them all in 4 days, but with enough time available you can do them even faster. Of course some previous knowledge of Qt is of course useful.
One of the most promising BSD-based desktop distributions in recent times has been helloSystem that wants to be the macOS of BSDs with a polished desktop experience. helloSystem has been making good progress towards their goals in recent months and this weekend now issued version 0.5.
The helloSystem 0.5 release is powered by FreeBSD 12.2 - they have not yet moved over to the recently launched FreeBSD 13.0. The helloSystem 0.5 release features changes to yield a smaller ISO system, their macOS-inspired desktop has seen various improvements, adding of the MTP Android File Transfer utility, and a lot of other desktop-related enhancements. There are also many fixes like "sudo su" now working. The helloDesktop stack also supports making use of KWin rather than Openbox but the latter remains the default.
I have attempted to consolidate the home lab before, but not with this level of success. There was the time I tried deploying a single-node Kubernetes cluster, which worked for a time until some upgrade caused the software-defined networking to break in a way I wasn’t interested in debugging in my free time. Following that I tried to go “old school” and started spinning up libvirt-based virtual machines which worked well for a long time. The major downside of that approach is that I simply wasn’t able to get much density because of the significant overhead for each virtual machine. At some point you run out of memory to commit to each VM.
Converting virtual machines to FreeBSD Jails took a few hours over a weekend, and since then the quantity of what is running has jumped dramatically. Originally I was running: [...]
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
Today, the weekly review reaches you a little bit late: I was out early yesterday to enjoy the weather. Here, the sun is finally coming out for more than just a few minutes. But, back to the important things that are the openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots. Namely, we have released 6 snapshots (0603, 0604, 0605, 0606, 0609, and 0610) in the last week.
Last year RedHat announced the ending of Long term support for CentOS 8, which was really a shock to the Linux community, especially for those relying on it for their server applications. Since then other developers started to compensate for this void by trying to provide the best alternative to CentOS, a leading server OS on cloud and hosting services, free of cost. AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux are the best examples of that. I don’t think taking a U-turn for CentOS was a wise idea because it doesn’t only give birth to two new Redhat Linux clones that can be counted on but also more are underway. And one of them is VzLinux.
“Thanks in part to cloud, Moderna was able to deliver the first clinical batch of its vaccine candidate (mRNA-1273) to the US National Institute of Health for phase one trials just 42 days after the initial sequencing of the virus,” wrote the authors of a recent McKinsey article, - Cloud’s trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, “The company was well positioned to quickly design research experiments and to harness its automated laboratory and manufacturing processes and enhanced drug-discovery pipeline.”
Over the past year, a number of articles have pointed out that, in response to the pandemic, digital adoption by business and consumers has already reached levels that weren’t expected for many years. “More companies are starting to see the real benefits of cloud, which has been long heralded as a catalyst for innovation and digital transformation, thanks to its ability to increase development speed and provide near-limitless scale,” adds the McKinsey article. “While Moderna’s success illustrates the business opportunities that cloud makes possible, it only scratches the surface of the potential value at stake. A detailed review of cloud cost-optimization levers and value-oriented business use cases foresees more than $1 trillion in run-rate EBITDA [an accounting measure of a company’s overall financial performance] across Fortune 500 companies as up for grabs in 2030.”
Please note that a release candidate is not suitable for production use. You can report any bugs or issues here. The upgrade from Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 to Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1 is not supported, meaning it will not be tested nor documented.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Don’t forget to take the Annual Fedora Survey and claim your badge!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Today, fabre.debian.net has moved to Debian.net Team Infrastructure
So far, fabre.debian.net was sponsored by FOSSHOST which provides us a VPS instance since Jan, 2021. It was located at OSU Open Source Lab. It worked pretty well, Thanks FOSSHOST sponsorship since ever!
OK, this is not an easy post. I have been maintaining Cinnamon in Debian for quite some time, since around the times version 4 came out. The soon (hahaha) to be released Bullseye will carry the last release of the 4-track, but version 5 is already waiting, After Bullseye, the future of Cinnamon in Debian currently looks bleak.
Since my switch to KDE/Plasma, I haven’t used Cinnamon in months. Only occasionally I tested new releases, but never gave them a real-world test. Having left Gnome3 for it’s complete lack of usability for pro-users, I escaped to Cinnamon and found a good home there for quite some time – using modern technology but keeping user interface changes conservative. For long time I haven’t even contemplated using KDE, having been burned during the bad days of KDE3/4 when bloat-as-bloat-can-be was the best description.
Today, Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been contracted for packaging Kurento Media Server for Debian. This packaging project will be funded by GUUG e.V. (the German Unix User Group e.V.). A big thanks to the people from GUUG e.V. for making this packaging project possible.
It sounds strange, but it’s something Pine64’s entry into the smartphone space, the Linux-driven PinePhone, is built for.
Would you want to use it? I spent a few weeks with one recently, and here’s what I learned.
[...]
Now, to be clear, there’s a difference between workable and cutting-edge. Unlike the Pinebook Pro, which offered relatively up-to-date hardware (such as the ability to add an NVMe drive) even if the chip itself was a bit pokey compared to, say, an M1, the PinePhone effectively is knowingly running outdated hardware out of the gate.
Its CPU, an Allwinner A64 with a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, first came out six years ago and is the same chip the original Pine64 single-board computer used. (It’s also older than the NXP i.MX 8M System-On-Module that the other primary Linux phone on the market, the Purism Librem 5, comes with—though to be fair, this phone sells for $149, less than a fifth of the price of the $800 Librem 5.)
Despite 802.11ac being in wide use for more than half a decade, the Wi-Fi tops out at 802.11n on the PinePhone—a bit frustrating, given that a lot of folks are probably not going to be throwing a SIM card into this and are going to be futzing around with it on Wi-Fi alone.
Is this the perfect phone for cheapskates? Well, to offer a point of comparison: The Teracube 2e, a sustainable low-end Android device that I reviewed a few months ago whose sub-$200 price point is very similar to that of the PinePhone, runs circles around this thing (and isn’t that far off from the Librem 5) on a pure spec level, with better cameras, a somewhat better screen, and a fingerprint sensor for a roughly similar price point (and a four-year warranty, compared to the single month you get from Pine64). If you’re looking for a cheap phone rather than an adventure, stay away.
And the PinePhone can be fairly temperamental in my experience, chewing through battery life when idle and reporting inconsistent charge levels when in use, no matter what OS is loaded.
Portwell’s Linux-ready “PCOM-B645VG” Compact Type 6 module offers Intel Elkhart Lake E and RE CPUs plus up to 32GB ECC RAM, triple 4K displays, 2.5GbE, 2x USB 3.1 Gen2, 6x PCIe 3.0, and -40 to 85€°C support.
RasPad tablet kit for Raspberry Pi 3B+ and other SBC’s was introduced in 2018, but Sunfounder has recently introduced an update, RasPad 3 that supports the more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 SBC.
After seeing my review of CrowPi2 Raspberry Pi 4 education laptop, the company asked me whether I’d be interested in reviewing Raspad 3 as well. So here we are, and I’ve received a sample of the tablet kit.
As usual, I’ll do a two-part review, with unboxing and assembly of the kit. Since I previously missed the RasPad 3 announcement, I’ll start by listing some of the specifications.
Intel offered more than $2bn to acquire RISC-V chip designer SiFive, it was reported today.
The approach by the x86 processor giant was among a number of takeover offers made to the semiconductor startup, according to Bloomberg, which cited unnamed sources.
It's said these discussions are in an early stage, no deal may ever be reached, and SiFive may prefer to take an investment round from interested parties rather than sell out. It raised $61m last year in a series-E round, and has been valued at an estimated $500m. SiFive has Qualcomm, Western Digital, and SK Hynix among its backers, and is said to have tapped up potential advisers to deal with this outside interest.
RISC-V International, the nonprofit at the helm of the free and open-source CPU instruction set architecture, says it is writing a high-performance computing (HPC) roadmap of "new features and capabilities."
For an architecture which only began life at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, RISC-V has enjoyed considerable success.
A wealth of products based on RISC-V are already in the market, with more arriving regularly, but the majority of these, like Seagate's storage processor designs and the OpenTitan root-of-trust (RoT), target embedded or otherwise less performance-critical applications.
The latest generation of devices is the Raspberry Pi 4 series, with a significantly upgraded processor and up to 8GB of RAM. The Pi 4 still has the same set of 40 GPIO pins for working with your own or third-party hardware, as well as a set of USB 2 and USB 3 ports and a pair of micro-HDMI video outputs. Power is from USB-C, and there's 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Gigabit Ethernet for connectivity. Raspberry Pi has recently delivered a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) option, which is ideal for IoT projects where a Pi can be dropped at the end of an Ethernet cable.
DC Motors are the most common and used components in robotics. With L293D chip you can drive many of these motors from Raspberry PI Pico with MicroPyton
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how this dual H-bridge motor driver integrated circuit works and how to setup an L293D with Raspberry PI Pico using MicroPython.
Wiretrustee's SATA Board integrates a SATA controller and data and power for up to four SATA drives with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
And their entire solution makes for a great little Raspberry Pi-based NAS, using software like OpenMediaVault.
While some prefer iced coffee, few like a cup of Joe that’s been sitting out for too long and has simply stabilized to room temperature. To ensure his beverage is up to snuff, YouTuber Make Fun Stuff has created his own non-contact temperature display for his desk.
The device features a brass rod circuit sculpture that holds an IR sensor over the drink, transferring signals to an Arduino Nano in the assembly’s base. The Nano is turned on via a small switch, which is activated by the weight of the mug when in place. Five LEDs are used to indicate how hot the coffee is, embedded inside almost-drilled-through holes in the wood. This allows the lights to shine visibly when active and disappear when off, preserving an understated look for the unit.
Mastodon is a free and open source microblogging platform similar to Twitter, but with user privacy and decentralization in mind. It’s one of many protocols that interacts with the Fediverse of protocols like Pleroma, GNU Social, and others. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon is not one social network.
Getting started with Mastodon can be confusing for newcomers. Mastodon is a federated service. This means its similar to email. You can create an email account with many different providers. And that’s the same with Mastodon. The service lets you sign up to one of many sites that run Mastodon software, called instances. A user can communicate with other Mastodon users on different instances.
Eligible devices that migrate to HarmonyOS 2.0 will retain apps and data (the exception being apps that rely on Google Play Services). With backwards compatibility covered, Huawei is looking forward to the future when HarmonyOS will run its own apps instead ones designed for Android.
Huawei announced that over 4 million developers have signed on to build on the Harmony platform and that there are already 134,000 apps using HMS Core. HMS Core itself keeps evolving and yesterday’s event saw the launch of version 6.0 with extended support for Huawei’s cloud services.
RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives.
Since 2008, I've ripped every DVD and Blu-Ray I bought to my Mac, with a collection of SD and HD media totaling around 2 TB today. To make that library accessible, I've always used iTunes and the iTunes Shared Library functionality that—while it still exists today—seems to be on life support, in kind of a "we still support it because the code is there" state.
The writing's been on the wall for a few years, especially after the split from iTunes to "Music" and "TV" apps, and while I tested out Plex a few years back, I never really considered switching to another home media library system, mostly due to laziness.
Whew! They’re just getting started but after all that, it’s time for a Micro Brew! Not much doesn’t go nicely with a crisp Micro Brew, and Trilio is demonstrating that with their upcoming webinar, Cloud Native Craft Beer Tasting, so you’ve got to love that.
GridGain€® Systems, provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions powered by the Apache€® Ignite€® distributed database, today discussed the success of the first virtual Ignite Summit, which took place on May 25, 2021. Twenty-five speakers from industry-leading companies including finance, biotech, health & fitness, construction and cloud computing led 15 hours of discussion about how Apache Ignite delivers the performance and scale required to address the world's most challenging computational and hybrid transactional/analytical processing requirements. The global virtual conference had hundreds of participants from North America, Latin America, EMEA and APAC, with an average of five hours of attendance per participant.
Proxy servers provide security and privacy between you and your internet activities. Accessing the internet plays a key role for education purposes, social interaction, and facilitating business activities. However, governments, hackers, and advertisers can see most of your internet activities.
The information under risk includes your location, the kind of computer you are using, and your browser history.
To mitigate risks in accessing the internet, you can use a web proxy server to protect your online privacy and help you to avoid geographical restrictions. Most of these restrictions are imposed by education institutions, governments, or your workplace.
I'm sure I noticed this subconsciously before, but actually creating site style after site style in Stylus has rubbed my nose in just how many of the sites I wanted to fix use the standard black, white, and blue colour scheme. It's also made me aware of how common a basic scheme of black, white, and underlined links is (it's probably the second most common one I alter).
Tor Browser 10.5a16 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
Over on the Mozilla blog, Eric Rescorla looks into some of the privacy implications of the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is a Google effort to replace third-party cookies with a different type of identifier that is less trackable. But less tracking does not equal no tracking.
Over the years, a number of projects at Mozilla had to handle the collection of sensitive data users explicitly decided to share with us (think, just as an example, things as sensitive as full URLs). Most of the time projects were designed and built over our legacy telemetry systems, leaving developers with the daunting task of validating their implementations, asking for security reviews and re-inventing their APIs.
With the advent of Glean, Mozilla’s Data Org took the opportunity to improve this area, allowing our internal customers to build better data products.
[...]
As discussed, ping encryption is not a feature required by all products using Glean. From a client standpoint, it is also a feature that has the potential to significantly increase the size of the final Glean SDK because, in most environments, external dependencies are necessary to encrypt the ping payload. Ideally, we should find a way to make it an opt-in feature i.e. only users that actually need it pay the (size) price for it. And so we did.
Ping encryption was the perfect use case to implement a new and long discussed feature in the Glean SDKs: plugins. By implementing the ping encryption as a plugin and not a core feature, we achieve the goal of making it an opt-in feature. This strategy also has the added bonus of keeping the encryption initialization parameters out of the Glean configuration object, win/win.
Since the ping encryption plugin would be the first ever Glean SDK plugin, we needed to figure out our plugin architecture. In a nutshell, the concept we settled for is: plugins are classes that define an action to be performed when a specific Glean event happens. Each event might provide extra context for the action performed by the plugin and might require that the plugin return a modified version of said context. Plugin instances are passed to Glean as initialization parameters.
In this post, I'll walk through the various ways that you might determine if injections are possible, focusing primarily on the most popular NoSQL database, Mongo. From simplest to hardest: [...]
It works by exploiting the fact that DNS resolvers do not perform actual resolution for every query they get, instead they all rely on one or several caches, allowing them to remember the responses they have recently received for a certain time, up to the “TTL” value of the response. So if we can determine that a given domain is in the cache, we know that it was queried at most “TTL” seconds ago.
Over the last year and half, perhaps you had the “opportunity” to participate in an on-line conference, or even to organize one. If so, chances are that you already know BigBlueButton (BBB), the free software video conferencing suite initially designed for on-line teaching. In a nutshell, it allows participants to chat (audio, video, and keyboard), and speakers can share their screen or a PDF slide deck. Organizers can also record the session.
BBB then creates a link to recorded sessions with a custom JavaScript player that replays everything: typed chat, audio and video (webcams), shared screens, and slide decks. This BBB replay a bit too rough though and often not the thing you’d like to publish after the conference. Instead, you’d rather do a bit of editing: adjusting the start and end time of each talk, removing live chat from what’s displayed (which allows you to remove info that personally identifies participants, too!), and so forth. Turns out this kind of post-processing is a bit of work, primarily because BBB does “the right thing” of recording each stream separately, in the most appropriate form: webcam and screen shares are recorded as separate videos, chat is recorded as text with timings, slide decks is recorded as a bunch of PNGs plus timings, and then there’s a bunch of XML files with metadata putting it all together.
Anyway, with a bit of searching, we quickly found the handy bbb-render tool, which can first download all these files and then assemble them using the Python interface to the GStreamer Editing Services (GES). Good thing: we don’t have to figure out all these things; we “just” have to run these two scripts in an environment with the right dependencies. And guess what: we know of a great tool to control execution environments!
The latest version of the Linux boot loader Grub 2.06 promises two major innovations: The software now supports boot partitions that are encrypted with LUKS2. The update also contains several bug fixes and security enhancements. It’s the first new version of Grub in almost two years. It was originally supposed to appear in the summer of 2020, when a nasty security hole got in the way of the developers.
A bug called BootHole allowed attackers to hook themselves into the boot process and execute malicious code (). Initially, Linux distributors sealed their own Grub packages themselves. Unfortunately BootHole patches blocked Red Hat, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu Grub2. Only with the now released version 2.06 Grub officially stuffs the BootHole and its colleague BootHole2.
On Friday afternoon Intel released a new version of their ISPC compiler, the Implicit SPMD Program Compiler, that supports a variant of the C programming language with extensions around single-program, multiple-data programming for CPU and GPU execution. Not only does this release prepare support for upcoming Intel CPUs but also adds support now for Apple's Arm processors.
While this C-based SPMD programming language and compiler are tailored to Intel's architecture and exploiting the performance especially with SSE and AVX vectorization, the new ISPC 1.16 release adds support for Apple's Arm chips. There are CPU definitions added for Apple's Arm chips going back to the A7. Additionally, support for macOS ARM targets were added to this build as well. With the ISPC compiler being based on the LLVM compiler stack, adding Arm support isn't much of a challenge but will be interesting to see how well this SPMD programming compiler can perform for Arm.
Wrote a quick hack to open chroot in emacs tramp. I wrote a mode for cros_sdk and it was relatively simple. I figured that chroot must be easier. I could write one in about 30 minutes. I need to mount proc and home inside the chroot to make it useful, but here goes. chroot-tramp.el
In my own understanding, the Elm compiler is able to apply tail-call optimization only when a recursive call (1) is a simple function application and (2) is the last operation that the function does in a branch.
On computers, you can quickly compute the integer logarithm in base 2, and it follows that you can move from one to the other rather quickly. You just need a correction which you can implement with a table. A very good solution found in references such as Hacker’s Delight is as follows: [...]
I've been wanting to learn more about compilers and toolchains in general for a while now. In June 2016, I asked about recommended readings on lexers and parsers on Twitter. However, I have to confess that I didn't go forward with reading the Dragon Book.
Instead, I got involved as a developer in the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects, and witnessing the evolution of toolchains within those systems played a big role in maintaining my interest and fascination in the topic. In retrospective, it now becomes apparent that the work I did on porting and packaging software for those systems really helped to put in perspective how the different parts of the toolchains interact together to produce binaries.
Today I cut the first release of 8088ify, a program that translates Intel 8080 CP/M assembly language to Intel 8086 (8088) MS-DOS assembly language.
Almost a year ago we had a push at Element to convert the remaining instances of Twisted’s inlineCallbacks to use native async/await syntax from Python [1]. Eventually this work got covered by issue #7988 (which is the original basis for this blogpost).
Note that Twisted itself gained some support for async functions in 16.4.
[...]
As part of this I threw together an “Are We Async Yet?” site. It is pretty basic, but tracks the amount of code using defer.inlineCallbacks vs. async. As a side-effect you can see how the code has grown over time (with a few instances of major shrinking). [4]
And last, but not least, I definitely did not convert all of Synapse myself! It was done incrementally by the entire team over years! My coworkers mostly laid the groundwork and I did much of the mechanical changes. And…we’re still not quite done, although the remaining places heavily interact with Twisted APIs or manually generate a Deferred and use addCallback (so they’re not straightforward to convert).
Skyve is an open-source Low-code tool that let you build and deploy application easily. Skyve perfectly for developers and Software providers to build and provide SaaS and Cloud-based products. It focused on the capability (rather than functionality).
[...]
Skyve is released under LGPL-2.1License.
It is well known to every corporate house that many jobs will soon end up being automated and performed by robots and AI in the near future, so it is a smart move to know the best career choices which include in the domains of data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technologies related to them.
Though there is a bright and secure possibility in the above-mentioned careers, the marketplace for jobs remains unbalanced and there are still many more jobs open and available than there are qualified applicants to fill those jobs. If you are just about to start your IT career and searching for the best new skills to learn, there are chances that you might get confused about what are the best skills to emphasize in the next courses you choose.
Don’t worry we have brought you the best programming languages for machine learning which will most likely secure your future, you may already have one or more of these skills and if you think we have missed out on something then don’t forget to comment on it down below.
After a long and tough year, I've been looking forward to once again sharing my love of Python and open source software with other people, especially middle and high school students. Before the pandemic, I co-wrote a grant to teach Python programming to middle school students using Raspberry Pi computers. Like many other plans, COVID-19 put mine on hold for over a year. Fortunately, vaccines and the improved health in my state, New York, have changed the dynamic.
A couple of months ago, once I became fully vaccinated, I offered to self-fund a Raspberry Pi and Python programming course in our local public library system. The Chautauqua-Cattaraugus Library system accepted my proposal, and the co-central library in Olean, N.Y., offered to fund my program. The library purchased five Raspberry Pi 400 units, Micro-HDMI-to-VGA adapters, and inline power adapters, and the library system's IT department loaned us five VGA monitors.
Speech recognition is a technique that converts the human voice to text. This is a very important concept in the Artificial Intelligence world where we have to give commands to a machine like a driverless car, etc.
Just like a regular manual dictionary, a Python dictionary also works in the same way. The dictionary helps the user in storing and manipulating data in different data structures. Items of the dictionary are changeable, ordered, and concurrent. In this article, we will elaborate on the working of Python dictionaries.
The zip() method in Python builds an iterator that combines items from several iterables. The iterator that results may be used to handle basic programming challenges such as constructing dictionaries. The zip() method accepts a list of iterables, which might be zero or maybe more, and returns a tuple. But when you give it a tuple, you must convert the resultant list into a tuple first. You will learn how to utilize the Python zip() method to tackle real-world situations in this article using Ubuntu 20.04 Linux System. First of all, we need to log in from the Ubuntu Login panel after starting it.
After the login, you have to make sure that your system and its apt package are updated to the current date to work efficiently on Python. Then, launch the Ubuntu 20.04 command-line terminal to work on the console. You can open it from the shortcut key “Ctrl+Alt+T” or otherwise open it from the activity search bar from the applications provided in the corner. After opening the terminal, we need to update the apt package from the mentioned below query.
Python comes with an inbuilt module called collections, which provides various classes and functions as an alternative to Python inbuilt data structures such as dict, list, set, and tuple.
This Python tutorial will discuss namedtuple, one of the factory functions of the collections’ module. We will go through all the important concepts of Python namedtuple with examples and syntax.
This article will explain how to use the “Counter” module that comes by default with the Python programming language. All code samples in this article are tested with Python version 3.9.5 on Ubuntu 21.04.
Born in Dublin, resident in Mexico City, Holloway is best known as a movement thinker who has grappled with the theory of state in capitalism and has gone on help us understand the meaning and potential of global movements to transcend the rule of capital. Meyer, a resident of Brooklyn, is a lifelong activist, author and educator working within the black liberation and global peace movements. South African-born Moodliar is managing editor of Socialism and Democracy and Boston-based activist.[2]
Suren Moodliar: We’ll have several detours in the conversation along the way to hope, but our starting point has to be Change the World Without Taking Power.[3] It is no exaggeration to call it “a seminal text.” It inspired activists, provoked whole seminar series, generated counter books, and prompted many repetitions of the phrase, “change the world without…” Can you take us back to the context in which you wrote that book?
When I was a grade-schooler in the mid-late 1960s my parents used to rent a lake cottage in the Indiana Dunes for a month or so each summer. Somewhere in the woods behind the lakeshore there lived a bitter old white guy and property owner named, literally, Miser. Miser liked to patrol the beach with two German Shepherds and a shotgun, saying gruff, hard to understand things to people as his dogs ran menacingly off leash. He wore dark clothes, long black boots, and a gray overcoat in the summer heat.
I knew about this bastard from stories kids told. I remember his snarling animals running through the front yard of our cottage one early evening while he laughed in his pick-up truck.
The response of the press to Naomi Osaka’s announcement that she would not be attending press conferences during the French Open only illustrates why athletes dread such media events in the first place.
The hyperbole in the Gendelman-Kaldveer article goes over the top nearly from the get-go. After starting with a nod to Pacifica’s history of radical anti-establishment programming, the fear-mongering begins in the third paragraph with the claim “odds are it will be acquired by rightwing extremist groups or evangelical Christian stations.” What better way to strike fear in the hearts of progressives. The fascists are coming! The fascists are coming! Wait a minute. Doesn’t the rightwing already control most radio stations? Why would they care about one more frequency – on FM at that?
The authors go on to claim “Pacifica’s decline began when a series of well-meaning but failed reforms were instituted in the late 1990s and early 2000s.” Doesn’t that have a familiar ring to it? Shades of Samuel P. Huntington: “some of the problems of the governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy.” Kaldveer and Gendelman seem to long for the good old days of autocratic Executive Directors (EDs) and General Managers (GMs) that permeated the 1990s and attempted to take Pacifica corporate. Gendelman was part of that struggle – actually fighting against the Mary Francis Berry take over bid – but apparently not for democratic reasons. A friend of mine told me that, at that time, Gendelman told her that listeners would elect the board members ‘over her dead body.’ Has anyone checked her pulse? Perhaps this is an attempt to revive the dead — a first step to bring back those good old days of centralized control by elites and professionals – only with Gendelman and New Day elites in charge. This theme of “well-meaning but failed [democratic] reforms” seems to be a theme of neoliberal media nowadays — “too much democracy” as argued in these articles in Politico, The Atlantic, and the American Enterprise Institute.
During my job search, I looked at Browning and Associates, a paid job search company, and declined to make use of them. IMO there is more than enough online from people who did pay to convince you to take another path. Today I got an email from them presenting a potential employee. I just wanted to present it here, so that people would know what they get. IMO, I can spam people myself, and don’t need to pay for the service. ALL CAPS content was anonymized by me. John Seraichyk and his wife are principals in the company, so he hasn’t been anonymized.
But there is another, less predictable but potentially equally devastating threat to our modern dependence on electricity. It goes by the name of coronal mass ejection (CME) and occurs sporadically as the sun burns its hydrogen into helium and heavier elements. A CME consists mostly of masses of ionized protons in a plasma that are ejected at high speed from the sun's corona and propagated outward by the solar wind. These ionized ejections create power magnetic fields, which themselves can induce large currents in electrical conductors. One of the best documented CMEs occurred on Sept. 1, 1859 and is known as the Carrington Event after the English astronomer, R.C. Carrington who, along with R. Hodgson, observed and reported the event. Telegraph equipment and wires were overheated and damaged over a wide area. Not all CMEs threaten the Earth; they must intercept Earth in its orbit to do damage.
Blockchain is essentially a database technology with attributes that, taken alone, are not unique to it, but which collectively produce a technological breakthrough in how digital information is stored, verified and exchanged.
Exerting too much control is terrible for your team’s morale. Here’s how building trust can resolve that.
It would be brill if there were a simple set of rules that you could follow to detect scams and frauds. Any time there was doubt, you could retreat deep into your bunker of pure logic, get out your scam detection algorithm and set to work with it.
The reason why there can never be any such algorithm is that logical inference already takes as read that you have correctly perceived reality - you need to already have the facts right in order to run through your algorithm. Most scams are attempts to inhibit your ability to percieve reality, first by tricking you into a logical fallacy and then by doubly hiding that fact with sleight of hand. With a good deceit it's very hard to know how to wrap your mind around it - it doesn't look like anything that you've seen before.
The planet has become a toxic soup of tested, untested, and inadequately tested chemicals that includes deadly toxins. Within only a couple of generations, and largely unnoticed, this startling episode is unique to our generation. Far and away, it exceeds global warming emissions. Yet, it’s a pressing issue that’s not publicly recognized as such.
Earth Detox is an eye-opening exposure of unintentional toxic chemical warfare lodged against humanity virtually everywhere, all over the planet. Throughout this challenging subject matter, Cribb’s work is supported by extensive scientific data, for example: “Americans are a walking cocktail of contaminants.” That statement alone is provocative enough to demand more facts, a whole lot more. For example, why and how has American life been reduced to such a degenerative status? More on this to follow.
But the news from around the world makes it clear that this pandemic is far from over, and a story from Vietnam highlights the nature of the danger.
Vietnam is a COVID success story, with one of the lowest rates of infection and death in the world. Vietnam’s excellent community-based public health system prevented the virus from spreading beyond isolated cases and localized outbreaks, without a nationwide lockdown. With a population of 98 million people, Vietnam has had only 8,883 cases and 53 deaths.
As world leaders gather for the first in-person G7 summit in two years, talks are set to focus heavily on ending the pandemic and the climate crisis, and climate activists are calling on them for more immediate action. “It’s not just one crisis,” says Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and spokesperson for the COP26 Climate Coalition. “What we’ve seen is simply rich countries doing too little too late and not taking up their responsibility, and unfortunately this G7 has not changed that at all.”
The celebrants greeted each other with hugs on the patio. After an outdoor barbeque dinner, we stood shoulder to shoulder around the island in the kitchen, eating cake from small paper plates. We sang “Happy Birthday.”
Ordinarily, an event like that wouldn’t be worth noting, but these aren’t exactly ordinary times. In this twilight world of ours, half-in and half-out of a pandemic, hanging around without masks and within spitting distance of vaccinated friends should be considered just this side of miraculous — a combination of luck, privilege, and a stunning series of events on a national scale that would strain credibility in a work of fiction.
Backlash over the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's controversial approval of a new Alzheimer's drug grew Thursday with a third member of an agency advisory panel resigning in protest.
The latest resignation to hit the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee, as STAT first reported, came from Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez on Thursday accused the U.S.-backed international financial system of blocking the country's access to Covid-19 vaccines under the COVAX program, even though Venezuela has paid all but $10 million of the $120 million it owes.
"The COVAX system owes a debt to Venezuela. We made a deposit in April and are waiting for the vaccines." —Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro
A pledge by seven of the world's wealthiest nations to donate a total of one billion coronavirus vaccine doses to developing countries would be enough to inoculate just 11% of the world's unvaccinated population, leading public health campaigners to slam the initiative as badly inadequate and "little more than a PR gimmick."
"If the best G7 leaders can manage is to donate one billion vaccine doses, then this summit will have been a failure."—Anna Marriott, Oxfam
The European Pirates Delegation in the Greens/EFA group supported a TRIPS waiver for Covid-19 vaccine patents in yesterday’s vote. The MEPs have decided that the EU should now ask the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines. According to Pirates, the European Commission must now start working together with the Member States to speed up the provision of vaccines.
This isn’t a direct quote, so I’ll assume that Khun BREEN said something less wrong. Because the fact of the matter is, that local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities (and the resulting capabilities) are more numerous than remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities for a given system. As a general rule of thumb this is true, although there are doubtless exceptions.
Prosecutors in the U.S. Justice Department under former president Donald Trump seized data from Apple from two Democratic lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee, as well as that of their staff and family members, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Subpoenas for the communications metadata targeted congressman Adam Schiff of California, a Trump foe who was then the panel's top Democrat and now its chairman, the paper said.
Congressman Eric Swalwell told CNN on Thursday he was the second Democratic lawmaker on the committee who was targeted.
Significant cyberattacks against critical targets in Europe have doubled in the past year, according to new EU figures obtained by CNN, as the pandemic pushed lives indoors and online.
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, ENISA, told CNN there were 304 significant, malicious attacks against "critical sectors" in 2020, more than double the 146 recorded the year before.
The agency also reported a 47% rise in attacks on hospitals and health care networks in the same period, as the same criminal networks sought to cash in on the pandemic's most vital services.
The figures show the growing global impact of cyberattacks, often in the form of ransomware, which has recently caused havoc in the United States when the Darkside group targeted the Colonial Pipeline network causing gas station queues because of a fear of shortages.
Founded out of San Francisco in 2019, RudderStack has always been a developer-centric CDP — it’s open source, for starters. This is a major differentiator over rivals in the space, one that affords companies more flexibility in terms of how they deploy their CDP.
Coming at the data-sharing problem from a different angle again earlier this month, Databricks launched an open-source project called Delta Sharing, which will be donated to the Linux Foundation. Databricks said the open protocol would support secure sharing of data across organisations in real time, crucially independent of the platform on which the data resides. The initiative is supported by AWS, Google Cloud, and BI and visualisation firm Tableau.
Unprivileged attackers can get a root shell by exploiting an authentication bypass vulnerability in the polkit auth system service installed by default on many modern Linux distributions.
The polkit local privilege escalation bug (tracked as CVE-2021-3560) was publicly disclosed, and a fix was released on June 3, 2021.
Spear phishing attacks are social engineering based attacks known for targeting a specific individual. Commonly phishing attacks target massive random victims, on the other hand, spear phishing attacks are the opposite. The term spear phishing refers to phishing with a spear, aiming against a single target.
Spear phishing attacks have almost unique characteristics only shared with Whale phishing or whaling attacks.
High-profile ransomware attacks -- some the FBI have tentatively attributed to Russian hackers -- have provoked the kind of response none of us should be in any hurry to welcome. But it's been coming to this point for years.
Clone phishing attacks consist of forging a genuine service or application login form, making the victim believe he is logging in a legitimate form to grab his credentials. Clone phishing is possibly the most known technique in social engineering-based hacking attacks. One of the most known examples of this type of attack is the massive mail delivery of messages pretending to be a service or social network. The message encourages the victim to press a link pointing to a fake login form, a visual clone of the real login page.
The victim of this type of attack clicks on the link and usually opens a fake login page and fills the form with his credentials. The attacker harvests the credentials and redirects the victim to the real service or social network page without the victim knowing that he has been hacked.
This type of attack used to be effective for attackers who launched massive campaigns in collecting big amounts of credentials from negligent users.
Luckily, two-step verification systems are neutralizing clone phishing threats but many users remain unaware and unprotected.
Digitalcourage presented again the BigBrotherAward for ââ¬Å¾data sinners“ in business and politics
At the heart of the sting lies an encrypted communications platform called Anom. The devices seemed to run just one app: a calculator. But entering a code turned it into a messaging system for text and images that was encrypted end-to-end. The Anom device was designed to allow criminals to communicate in the securest manner possible, and it proved popular: in three years, over 12,000 were sold to over 300 criminal syndicates around the world. But what the Anom’s users did not know until very recently, was that the system had a built-in backdoor that allowed police authorities to gather and read all the messages in real time. When the police took advantage of the knowledge gained from these communications, the Anom database held over 27 million messages.
We also looked at the privacy implications of “competitive compatibility” (comcom, AKA adversarial interoperability), where new services are able to interoperate with existing incumbents without their permission, by using reverse-engineering, bots, scraping, and other€ improvised techniques common to unsanctioned innovation.
Our analysis concluded that while interoperability created new privacy risks (for example, that a new firm might misappropriate user data under cover of helping users move from a dominant service to a new rival), these risks can largely be mitigated with thoughtful regulation and strong enforcement. More importantly, interoperability also had new privacy benefits, both because it made it easier to leave a service with unsuitable privacy policies, and because this created real costs for dominant firms that did not respect their users’ privacy: namely, an easy way for those users to make their displeasure known by leaving the service.
Critics of interoperability (including the dominant firms targeted by interoperability proposals) emphasize the fact that weakening a tech platform’s ability to control its users weakens its power to defend its users.
In today's digital society, the Tor network has become an indispensable tool for individuals to protect their privacy on the Internet. Operated by volunteers, relay servers constitute the core component of Tor and are used to geographically escape surveillance. It is therefore essential to have a large, yet diverse set of relays. In this work, we analyze the contribution of educational institutions to the Tor network and report on our experience of operating exit relays at a university. Taking Germany as an example (but arguing that the global situation is similar), we carry out a quantitative study and find that universities contribute negligible amounts of relays and bandwidth. Since many universities all over the world have excellent conditions that render them perfect places to host Tor (exit) relays, we encourage other interested people and institutions to join. To this end, we discuss and resolve common concerns and provide lessons learned.
Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) announced yesterday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law by using Clearview AI facial-recognition software.
An OPC investigation launched in July 2020 concluded in February this year that Clearview AI violated the country’s federal private sector privacy law when it created a three-billion-image databank by scraping social media accounts without user consent. Now the OPC has decided the RCMP’s use of the database to match images violated the country’s Privacy Act.
Android 12 Beta 2 is here and contains many of the features that were teased during May's Google I/O shindig including an overhauled control panel and additional privacy tools.
The company's feted Privacy Dashboard has made an appearance: designed to give end users an overview of how apps interact with the more sensitive components on their device, such as the microphone and camera, this tool provides a breakdown of app permissions, as well as the exact times when they are accessed.
Many mobile application developers are deliberately disabling secure HTTPS protections when sending data from a user's browser to the server, often leaving sensitive data open to interception and compromise by attackers in the process.
One reason appears to be to facilitate the delivery of ads via the applications, a new study by Symantec reveals.
Symantec recently analyzed hundreds of thousands of iOS and Android mobile apps released over the past five years to Apple's App Store and Google Play. The exercise showed some 7% of iOS apps and 3.4% of Android apps intentionally break the green padlock that indicates a secure communication channel between the user's browser and the server. Symantec found such apps to be actively sending data to insecure network servers and disabling SSL validation.
Recently, I wanted to show my wife a picture, so I opened the photos app on my phone and promptly panicked when I saw what was there.
Germany has apologized for its role in the first genocide of the 20th century, which took place in Namibia, a former colony then known as German South West Africa. Between 1904 and 1908, German colonizers killed tens of thousands of Ovaherero and Nama people in Namibia. German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas officially described the massacre as genocide and outlined an offer of more than $1.34 billion in development aid to the Namibian government. The offer was not negotiated with survivors of the genocide, and critics have described it as a pittance. We speak with Nyoko Muvangua, born of the Ovaherero people who were targeted for ethnic cleansing by the German government, and Namibian researcher Emsie Erastus.
It’s not what you think.
A lot of people are worried about what’s lurking on their smartphones. Compromising photos. Illicit text messages. Embarrassing contacts. Porn.
The laboratory, in Albuquerque, is an arm of both the new U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Air Force. Colonel Felt heads the “Space Vehicles Directorate” of the laboratory and made the comments in what was described as a “keynote speech” at a “ribbon-cutting ceremony” at it.
The $12.8 million facility “is dedicated to the research and development of space military technology,” notes executivegov.com, a site which reports on U.S. government activities.
What they might not know is that the United States government (the President and the State Department) approved the sale of the bomb that killed their children, in the process enriching Lockheed Martin, which makes millions in profits from arms sales every year.
While Lockheed Martin profited from the death of forty Yemeni children that day, top United States weapons companies continue to sell weapons to repressive regimes around the world, killing countless more people in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and more.€ And in many cases, the United States public has no idea this is being done in our name to benefit the largest private companies in the world.
On June 25, the Pentagon’s UAP Task Force will release a declassified report to Congress that will do little to shift ground or alter debate on the nature of such phenomena.€ For those exercised about green creatures, ancient aliens and that roguish charlatan Erich von Däniken, nothing would have changed. For sceptics, it will be a case of tired yawn before returning to work.€ There will be many “I told you so” moments and no one will be any wiser.
Since 2017, various eyewitness accounts and videos have been circulating in such measure as to worry members of Congress.€ This came a decade after Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) first began tooting the horn on the subject, a measure that led to the creation of the $22 million Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program.€ That program, along with the even lesser known Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program, saw the involvement of such proponents of extra-terrestrial life as billionaire Robert Bigelow.
Wood’s execution was supposed to take 10 minutes and require one injection. Instead, he tried and failed more than 600 times to acquire air over the course of about two hours. He was injected over 15 times before he finally died.
Witnesses say Wood looked like a fish on land. Like a piston, his chest would pump while his mouth opened and closed as his body searched for oxygen.
On May 22, the Nyiragongo volcano erupted in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, sending half a million Congolese people fleeing to safety. Many of the refugees carried their mattresses on their backs, often for more than 10 miles. Why?
Asking respondents directly whether they believe in or support QAnon avoids picking up unrelated conspiracy theorists, but it also runs the risk of another polling pitfall: social desirability bias, which is when survey respondents give the answer they think is more socially acceptable, rather than what they honestly believe. Jackson said that some Q believers may be skeptical of pollsters to begin with, and that they’re less likely to admit affiliation when asked directly. Not mentioning QAnon directly can soften this effect. Uscinski, for his part, thinks the risk of a social desirability bias with QAnon is minimal, given the unabashed zeal with which proponents seem to demonstrate their support.
The United Nations warns more than 350,000 people in Tigray are facing near famine-like conditions, and many will not survive without immediate humanitarian assistance.
Here, in war-torn Tigray, more than 350,000 people already face famine, according to the U.N. and other humanitarian groups. It is not just that people are starving; it is that many are being starved, The Associated Press found. In farming areas in Tigray to which the AP got rare access, farmers, aid workers and local officials confirmed that food had been turned into a weapon of war.
Gunmen killed 10 people and wounded 14 others in an attack on the HALO Trust de-mining organization in Afghanistan, an Afghan interior ministry official said Wednesday.
The HALO Trust Global Media Manager, Louise Vaughan, in response to the AP, said that 110 de-mining local personnel of the organization were on camp after finishing their work on a minefield nearby when the "unknown armed group" opened fire at them.
The statement says that 16 of their personnel are wounded.
The Islamic state affiliate has claimed a horrific attack this week that killed 10 workers of the HALO Trust de-mining organization and wounded 16 others in Afghanistan's northern Baghlan province.
The statement issued late on Wednesday said IS operatives killed and wounded 60 workers “firing on them with their machine guns.”
According to reports from survivors the gunmen were looking for ethnic Hazaras, who in most parts of Afghanistan are Shiite Muslims in mostly Sunni Afghanistan. However in northern Afghanistan many of the Hazaras are Sunni Muslim. It was not clear whether the IS gunmen were aware that the Hazaras among the deminers were Sunni Muslims.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that a refugee camp set up to shelter women and children after the defeat of Islamic State has instead turned into a mini-caliphate itself, where female leaders nurture the group’s violent ideology and run moneymaking schemes that help keep the insurgency alive outside the razor wire.
Authorities have recorded more than 40 murders, at least 10 of them beheadings, in the 736-acre camp since the start of the year. Most of the victims were accused by ISIS of collaborating with camp authorities, according to the Rojava Information Center, an independent volunteer-staffed research organization based in northeast Syria.
The U.S. State Department is pushing to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from Britain, where Biden is now meeting with leaders during the G7 summit. A U.K. judge blocked Assange’s extradition in January, citing serious mental health concerns. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison if brought to the U.S., where he was indicted for violations of the Espionage Act related to the publication of classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes. We speak with Assange’s father and half-brother, who are on a tour of the United States to advocate for his release. “The G7 meeting is based upon values, and yet they have, just a few kilometers down the road, a foremost journalist in jail,” says John Shipton. Assange is a victim of “an abusive process” meant to punish him for his journalism, adds Gabriel Shipton. “The situation there is really dire, and Julian is suffering inside that prison.”
John McDonnell MP who was present at the debate via video link added his concern about Assange’s current state inside a British prison: “It’s a continuing stain on the reputation of this country that Julian Assange remains in Belmarsh prison. There are no justifiable grounds for keeping imprisoned a journalist who had the courage to expose war crimes and abuse of human rights.”
A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.
Yesterday the House of Commons was debating “safety of journalists”. After reams of MP waffle about evil foreigners, the Alba Party was allocated 60 seconds and tried to use it to raise my case.
The report, which aims to dispel the long-running myth "that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most," claims that through a series of legal loopholes – namely the fact that intangible assets, like stock earnings and increases in property value, are not taxable – some of America's richest business people have been paying much less than what some say they should to Uncle Sam. While ProPublica has stayed tight-lipped on how, exactly, they obtained these documents illustrating this phenomenon, which they claimed they received in “raw form, with no conditions or conclusions," the information included seemingly passed a reportedly rigorous fact-checking process. "In every instance we were able to check — involving tax filings by more than 50 separate people — the details provided to ProPublica matched the information from other sources," they explained.
That said, as tax information is usually meant to stay confidential, the individuals who provided the documents to the news outlet could face “criminal liability,” CNBC noted.
So remember, folks -- Evading taxes through legal loopholes? Right on! Leaking tax information allegedly depicting billionaires doing allegedly shady things? Shame on you!
In the fight against fake news, markpainting news photos would mean that anyone trying to manipulate them would risk visible artefacts. So bad actors would have to check and retouch photos manually, rather than trying use inpainting tools to automate forgery at scale.
Some 4,350 rockets were launched by Hamas and other terrorist factions in Gaza at cities and towns in Israel. Of these, about 1,400 were intercepted by Iron Dome. 680 of them fell short, and landed in Gaza.
Noise pollution from drilling for oil and gas offshore devastates marine life, affecting not only food sources but oxygen levels. But neither the federal government nor NOPSEMA, which has environmental responsibility for approving offshore projects, takes such damage into account. Suzanne Arnold reports.
Leaders of the seven richest countries per capita are meeting at the Group of 7's annual summit this weekend—and climate justice is explicitly on the agenda. That has never happened. How the G7 leaders respond to the climate justice challenge this weekend will shape the chances of success at November's global climate summit that United Nations Secretary General António Guterres calls "our last opportunity" to defuse the climate emergency.
Leaders of the seven richest countries per capita are meeting at the Group of 7’s annual summit this weekend—and climate justice is explicitly on the agenda. That has never happened. How the G7 leaders respond to the climate justice challenge this weekend will shape the chances of success at November’s global climate summit that United Nations Secretary General António Guterres calls “our last opportunity” to defuse the climate emergency.
The progressive rallying cry of "no climate, no deal" continued to gain steam Friday in response to the emerging details of a bipartisan infrastructure proposal that calls for just $580 billion in new spending, a sum that climate leaders in Congress and at the grassroots rejected as woefully inadequate.
"No way that I'm supporting an infrastructure package that doesn't invest in fighting the climate crisis."—Rep. Pramila Jayapal
Sink or swim as one, says science. Solve nature and climate together, or neither of the twin crises will be soluble.
A recent study conducted by a team of international researchers from several institutions, including NASA, the World Resources Institute, California Institute of Technology, Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the Center for International Forestry Research in Indonesia, integrated ground data and satellite imagery to map the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the world’s forests. They found that between 2001 and 2019, the world’s forests stored about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted. “[F]orests provide a ‘carbon sink’ that absorbs a net 7.6 billion metric tonnes of CO2 per year, 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually,” write two of the report’s authors, Nancy Harris and David Gibbs of the World Resources Institute. “Overall, the data show that keeping existing forests standing remains our best hope for maintaining the vast amount of carbon forests store and continuing the carbon sequestration that, if halted, will worsen the effects of climate change.”
“[T]ropical forests alone absorb up to 1.8 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere every year,” according to WWF, an international nongovernmental organization based in Switzerland working to preserve the Earth’s wilderness. “However, agriculture, forestry and other land uses are responsible for nearly a quarter of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions… Ending forest conversion, preserving the forest carbon sink, and restoring forests [have] the potential to avoid more than one-third of global emissions.”
In the wake of the final demise of the Keystone XL pipeline earlier this week, Indigenous leaders and climate activists on Friday implored President Joe Biden to use his executive authority to pull the plug on other destructive fossil fuel transport projects advanced during the Trump administration—from Line 3 to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
"This is about our life and our wildlife and our water."—Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth
Alabama is a beautiful place filled with contradictions and complexities, but there are a few things that my time there has taught me that this state holds sacred. God, football, and barbecue top the list, of course (Roll Tide!), but for a group of coal miners in Tuscaloosa County, there’s another hallowed institution perched up on that pedestal: the union.
Line 3 is being replaced to transport nearly 800,000 barrels of dirty tar sands crude oil per day from Alberta, Canada to Superior, Wisconsin. The pipeline cuts across northern Minnesota, where the Anishinaabe people have treaty rights to hunt, fish, and harvest wild rice and maple syrup.
The United States has more pipelines, both existing and planned, than any other nation on earth. Some of these — like the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines — have become major sources of protest.
In April, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by former investors in the shale oil company Alta Mesa could proceed. Their case alleges multiple instances of fraud and reveals that not only did engineers in the company warn executives that they were lying to investors about oil production estimates but that executives went on to ignore those warnings.
Alta Mesa is among a string of oil and gas companies that in recent years have either been accused or found guilty of fraud, including ExxonMobil and Miller Energy.€
Indigenous€ rights and climate action groups on Friday welcomed the Biden administration's announcement that the Department of Agriculture will "repeal or replace" former President Donald Trump's assault on Alaska's Tongass National Forest, in which€ a 20-year-old rule protecting wild lands was revoked three months before Trump left office.
Trump's rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule was made final last October and sparked fury among conservation groups including Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council, which€ noted that the protection of the Tongass National Forest is vital for biodiversity as well as absorbing carbon emissions.€
Founder Josh Cliffords created FreeWater after volunteering with refugees who had revealed the water scarcity issues they had faced.
Regardless of what any of the economists or pundits on TV tell you, the reality is that the price of houses has very, very little to do with the value of those houses or even the land they sit on, in any kind of objective sense.€ The value of the houses and the land they are on is based on what people collectively accept is somehow real.€ It’s based on all kinds of assumptions about the future being similar to or better than the present — house prices will continue to rise, which will increase the value of a homeowner’s home, and this will happen because people will continue to move to the city, because it’s on the west coast or the east coast or there are jobs here or there are allegedly good schools, lots of parks, etc.
In a democracy, theoretically we can control the costs, put caps on prices and that sort of thing.€ In the absence of such practices, any astute grade school student can tell you that when as the population increases in a city or country, the cost of land and housing will tend to rise, as it is inevitably a finite resource, and not one that can easily be traded, like with goods or services.
Confirming recent reports, financial technology startup Klarna Bank AB today announced that it has raised $639 million from a group of investors led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund 2.
The round boosts the startup’s valuation from $31 billion in March to $45.6 billion. Including the new funding, Klarna has raised more than $2 billion in the past 12 months alone.
China’s crackdown on cryptocurrencies has reached a new crescendo, with the nation’s Ministry of Public Security on Wednesday proclaiming it has arrested over 1000 people and shut down 170 gangs that provided crypto-linked money-laundering services.
The Ministry’s announcement says it detected, and dismantled, gangs that provided money-laundering services to criminal organisations.
Some of those organisations allegedly laundered ill-gotten gains from other ventures by building coin-mining farms.
Others are what China calls “two cards” scammers, who funnel their ill-gotten gains to acquire phone cards that are shipped outside China, then use call credit stored in the cards to make scam calls back into the Middle Kingdom. The proceeds of those scams are laundered using cryptocurrencies.
Twitter is swelling with rumors of a master plan coming from the Ryan Cohen-led GameStop (NYSE:GME) board. Holders and retail trading conspiracy theorists are piecing together a thought-provoking puzzle.
Laments over America's political polarization mount. "Actions of the president and his party are pulling us further apart," argued Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) responding to President Biden's address in late April. "Polarization is the story of American politics today," observes Fareed Zakaria of CNN.
My colleague then added, “But not in Georgia yesterday,” and for a few hours, there was an illusion of hope. But leaving aside the catastrophe that was going to be the main story of this particular day, and of nearly every day since, I thought something else was being communicated to the small world that is psychoanalysis—that my colleague had chosen Broonzy’s words, now some 75 years old, because they would resonate with a psychoanalytic audience and that there were some important reasons why, some reasons I resolved to articulate at first for this shared community and now, in this piece, for a larger one concerned, as is the world of psychoanalysis, with social marginality and social inclusion.
It would be no understatement to say that Big Bill Broonzy was not a mainstream musical taste in 1951, when my colleague, as a university student, saw him in concert, just as my musical tastes, approximately 30 years later, were similarly unusual. But in 1980, having spent my 22nd birthday in a bar to see a later bluesman, Son Seals, for the second time, I quickly surmised that the artist in question might be different but that the sociopsychological dynamic was the same. In 1951, as in 1980, obscure bluesmen were the taste of Jewish male intellectuals who were somewhat marginal, who were interested in things outside the traditional American Jewish narrative of assimilation, and therefore might also be interested in psychoanalysis as well. Nowadays, this taste might be for obscure aspects of hip hop, but regardless, on January 6, I suddenly knew I had to write something about Big Bill Broonzy and “Black, Brown, and White.” I choose to write about art in these troubled times because art, from a psychoanalytic perspective, helps to bind psychological wounds and traumas, and these are definitely wounded, traumatized times.
A black SUV, part of a€ Cubans for Trump caravan, rams into Jonathan Gartrelle, a€ Black Lives Matter activist at a€ small protest in downtown Miami on July 18, 2020. Video shows Gartrelle landing hard on the hood of the vehicle, then sliding off. The SUV speeds€ away.€
Former president Trump made plenty of noise about the Deep State being out to get him. But he apparently didn't see anything wrong with sending the Deep State after his enemies.
Even after the Iván Duque government backed off its proposal to tax the “basic family basket,” the demonstrations quickly expanded to include demands by the Colombian people addressing a host of grievances, including the lack of education, employment and health services; constant violence, whether governmental, paramilitary, criminal, patriarchal or racist; government sabotage of the peace process; ongoing executions of rights defenders and social leaders; military occupation of indigenous territories; and, most recently, repression of protesters. Millions risk their lives by participating in the demonstrations, most notably young people, because, as a group of young protesters in the city of Cali told the popular journalist Angélica Peñuela, “Hunger brought us here; we no longer have anything to lose.”
Jhoe Sauca, of the Traditional Authority of the Kokonuco People and the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca, explains that the tax reform was unacceptable to the Colombian people and became the aggravating factor that finally mobilized millions. “We can’t take it anymore,” he says. “With the pandemic we have been enduring hunger, and our businesses have gone bankrupt, while the government supports the banks and large companies.”€ He says that the peoples of Colombia have been fighting for 50 years under the principle of unity, and that the reform “has tipped the balance in favor of€ the message that we have been transmitting to Colombian society — that we must fight for rights.”
Progressive pro-democracy forces worldwide "sounded the alarm" Friday as backers of right-wing Peruvian presidential candidate and former dictator's daughter Keiko Fujimori alleged election fraud—despite lack of evidence—as she challenged an apparent win by leftist Pedro Castillo, who ran on a platform to lift up the poor and redistribute the nation's wealth.
Fujimori, the daughter ex-President Alberto Fujimori—currently in jail for his role in civil massacres and corruption—has made what critics and experts warn are baseless allegations of electoral fraud, especially as independent observers have reported no irregularities.
Honoré de Balzac said, "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Apparently there are multiple great crimes behind the Trump fortune, stretching all the way back to his stealing most of his initial wealth from other members of his family, as his niece Mary Trump is alleging in a lawsuit.
In early 2020, a coronavirus from Wuhan, China quickly spread across the world, overwhelming health care systems, shutting down economies.€ € The pandemic cracked the global economy in a way previously envisioned by only a few public health experts.€ € Suddenly, it was no longer business as usual. The plunge into Great Depression conditions that took four years from 1929 to 1933 was compressed into a few months, throwing tens of millions out of work.€ € By spring, hectic downtowns became boarded-up ghost towns. Crowded freeways turned into empty concrete ribbons.
Then in May, cellphone video of a particularly gruesome and cruel killing appeared showing a White Minneapolis cop asphyxiating a Black man to death.€ € Across the U.S. and around the world, streets that had been empty swiftly filled again with protestors.€ € Six years before, after another police execution of a Black man, that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, only a relative few took to the streets there and in other U.S. cities.€ € Now the cry born in Ferguson, Black Lives Matter!, echoed across the land.€ € The killing of George Floyd sparked an uprising only hinted in the earlier protests. Far more White people joined, and in smaller towns and cities where such actions had not been seen before.
This week, Kamala Harris embarked on her first international trip as Vice President. The two-day trip to Latin America was also Harris's first major effort at diplomacy after being put in charge of Central American immigration policy by President Joe Biden in late March.€
Letter To The Book Review
Joe Klein is someone who ekes out a living by dissing Black people. He gets more space to write about Black issues than any two hundred Black scholars and intellectuals, In New York Magazine, Klein blamed Black people collectively for the Central Park Rape. He never apologized. to the Central Park Five, who spent their youth in prison. He once asserted that Black people should be turned over to churches, coming from a man who lied about his authorship of “Primary Colors.” His hero, Daniel Moynihan, accused Black women of “Speciation,” which is how a new plant or animal species is created. Does Klein believe that Black children are members of a new species?
But victory appears to be sprouting from the freshly plowed fields of defeat. There is reason to believe that throughout Latin America the next hemisphere-wide revolution could be happening soon, or has already begun.
As of June 9, it appears that Pedro Castillo will be President of Peru, joining Chile and Colombia among the leading nations pushing Latin America sharply Left, while several other countries appear well on their way. Because of a mostly-shared language and common history of imperialist victimhood, Latin American social movements regularly spill over borders, and the stage is being set for a flood.
Fujimori is challenging the election’s results, alleging widespread fraud. Her campaign has only presented evidence of isolated irregularities, and so far there is nothing to suggest a tainted vote. However, she can challenge some of the votes to delay the final results, and much like in the U.S., even an allegation of fraud by the losing candidate will cause uncertainty and raise tensions in the country.
Castillo’s victory will be remarkable not only because he is a leftist teacher who is the son of illiterate peasants and his campaign was grossly outspent by Fujimori, but there was a relentless propaganda attack against him that touched on historical fears of Peru’s middle class and elites. It was similar to what happened recently to progressive candidate Andrés Arauz who narrowly lost Ecuador’s elections, but even more intense. Grupo El Comercio, a media conglomerate that controls 80% of Peru’s newspapers, led the charge against Castillo. They accused him of being a terrorist with links to the Shining Path, a guerrilla group whose conflict with the state between 1980 and 2002 led to tens of thousands of deaths and left the population traumatized. Castillo’s link to the Shining Path link is flimsy: While a leader with Sutep, an education worker’s union, Castillo is said to have been friendly with Movadef, the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights, a group alleged to have been the political wing of the Shining Path. In reality, Castillo himself was a rondero when the insurgency was most active. Ronderos were peasant self-defense groups that protected their communities from the guerrillas and continue to provide security against crime and violence.
Manchin didn’t rise into a pivotal position on the Hill. He fell into it. I’ve watched him for 20 years or so and have yet to detect any particular skill set. He’s not a gifted orator. He’s not a tactician or strategist. He doesn’t come up with new ideas or even repackaged old ones. Unlike his predecessors Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller, Manchin hasn’t been able to redirect stream of federal money and infrastructure projects into his destitute state. € Mainly, he’s perfected the role (let’s refrain from calling it an “art”) of being a loud-mouthed impediment to progressive policies and exploiting that position for his personal advantage, which means more and more airtime. Lately, he’s been booked on more FoxNews shows than Glenn Greenwald.
Manchin is, it must be said, one of the vainest members in an institution renowned for its vanity. He delivers populist rhetoric with freshly manicured nails. Like most politicians, Manchin has contempt for the people who elected him and whose interests he must pretend to represent. But he doesn’t try to conceal his disdain. He can openly act as an agent of austerity in front of the very people in most desperate need of federal assistance, without a quiver in his voice. Most politicians blame people for their own suffering. But only a few, like Manchin, see their role in the prolongation of human suffering as a badge of honor.
Sure, China is having a good pandemic. Life since the initial COVID outbreak in Wuhan is pretty much back to normal. Few restrictions are in place in Beijing or Shanghai. But globally? China is the new bogeyman. In corporate speak its brand image has been damaged. The crackdown in Xinjiang and its far from convincing protestations that COVID did not leak from a Wuhan lab has holed its credibility beneath the water line.
The trouble with the China rising to global dominance scenario is it is nonsense but it does suit certain factions in Washington and Beijing. It allows the US to have an enemy, and maintain defense spending. Beijing can pander to nationalist sentiment, otherwise known as “wolf-warrior diplomacy”. You know the story… stumbling America hampered by global commitments will give way to the more disciplined, regimented and innovative challenger. China’s president, Xi Jinping is not taken in by this. He knows, and has stated publically, that excessive growth and the corruption it inevitably brings will damage the party. Hisraison d’etre€ for wanting to become leader, back in 2012, was to save the party from itself, ensure its survival. Better to have a little growth and unquestioned party supremacy, he warned, than a booming economy with the party haemorrhaging power and authority.€ € Has he succeeded? As Zhou Enlai, the late Chinese premier, is often credited with saying about the success of the French revolution “it’s too early to say’’.€ € Zhou was actually referring to the student revolt in Paris in 1968.
Reddit is one of the world’s most influential news and social media platforms. The website attracted over 1.2 billion visits in April 2021 alone, making it the United States’ eighth most visited site, ahead of other leviathans like Twitter, Instagram and eBay. Now majority-owned by a much larger corporate publishing empire, Reddit is also far ahead of more established news sites, garnering three times the numbers of Fox News and five times those of The New York Times.
She’s said it before. Now she’s said it again.
To illustrate this point, as both fact and metaphor, the trajectory of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change appears to be exponential (graph below). In plain language, these emissions are growing at an increasing rate. What this means is that mathematically speaking, stumbling toward catastrophe can cause more environmental harm in one period than hurtling towards it does in another. This clearly doesn’t make hurtling the preferred strategy. But it does make time the enemy of solving climate change. The failure to act substantively converts stumbling into hurtling.
To understand how this metaphor works, how stumbling is transmogrified into hurtling, the graph below of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases shows a long history of cyclical stability followed by a sudden, large, jump higher. While the metaphor isn’t perfect— the time scales are wildly different, the environmental logic holds. One day the cyclical variability breaks. The ‘telos of becoming’ as the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey put it, the logic of industrialism that has always been embedded in environmental destruction, is realized. Environmental catastrophe is its product.
Biden and the Dems may figure they can abandon workers, because who will they turn to? Ignominious Trump? The would-be Republican Reich devoted to worker destruction? Not likely. But they could stay home during the mid-terms and, even more devastatingly for Dems, in 2024. Then we’ll have a one-party autocracy, as one twitter wag put it, with giant bronze statues of Trump everywhere. Remember: Obama’s betrayal of tens of millions of workers to bail out bankers ultimately gave us Trump. And that demagogue waits in the wings. Biden’s broken promises may just give him the opening he needs.
Blaming Joe “I Just Don’t Give a Shit” Manchin for Biden’s broken promises is lame. A president like LBJ would have beaten Manchin into shape within his first few weeks of office. LBJ’s DNC would have defunded the renegade senator tout de suite. Even more pathetic is Biden hiding behind the Senate parliamentarian. When confronted with decisions from this person that they didn’t like, GOP senators earlier in the century just fired him.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting jointly introduced the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 20211 on the 25th February 2021 to put restrictions on digital platforms in India. The rules provided a window of three months to allow major social media companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube & WhatsApp to comply with the special provisions.
The new rules came into effect on the 26th May 2021.
But the main reason for the sharp increase in García’s popularity was undoubtedly his wife’s indefatigable promotion of him – mainly on the photo and video social networking service Instagram, on which Mariana Rodríguez currently boasts 1.7 million followers.
García is no social media slouch himself – he has about 2.5 million followers across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – but his wife’s somewhat offbeat, sometimes humorous and less-political Instagram posts and stories were credited as having greater “cut-through” with voters.
The spat did not come out of the blue. With a bulging, ultra-connected youth population, Nigeria has some of the most engaged Twitter users in Africa. Amid increasing insecurity and unemployment, the country’s youth have wielded the platform as an accountability weapon, calling out politicians in scathing tweets – and making government officials jittery about the sheer power of the social media site.
This year is different. New York Democrats aren’t nominating their candidate according to the old rules of 1977, or 1989. The ranked-choice voting system that was adopted in a 2019 referendum allows primary voters to rank up to five candidates. If a voter’s first choice doesn’t get traction, her votes transfer to the second choice, and the process of redistribution continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the votes.
The meme became a movement, the Milk Tea Alliance. Its members swap tips about dodging internet firewalls and avoiding arrest. The group includes Hong Kongers and Taiwanese worried about the looming shadow of the Chinese Communist Party (China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province that will one day be reclaimed). It also unites Thais critical of the country’s military government and protesters in Myanmar opposed to the junta’s coup in February.
Network data show that access to the Twitter platform and backend servers is now restricted on leading networks MTN, Globacom, Airtel and 9mobile.
As predicted, Monday’s post about how the “lab leak” hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19, is becoming a conspiracy theory attracted trolls, although it did not go viral. This latter happening is probably fortunate for me. Given the volume of comments that this post got from just 50% or so more traffic than a typical post was more than enough for me to deal with. (Also, because I don’t have advertising, any increase in traffic that boosts my server costs comes straight out of my own pocket.) Be that as it may, given the protean nature of conspiracy theories and their unrelenting nature, it should surprise no one that, on the very same day I published my post on the “lab leak” hypothesis, elsewhere a new wrinkle to the conspiracy theory hit the press in the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail. (How appropriate.) The WSJ published an op-ed by Steven Quay and Richard Muller entitled The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak, while a headline blared from The Daily Mail, all touting how, supposedly, the presence of a “double CGG” sequence (CGGCGG) in the nucleotide sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was supposedly incontrovertible evidence that this coronavirus could not have arisen naturally and had to have been “engineered” in a laboratory (in Wuhan, wink, wink, nudge, nudge):
Despite wearing a press vest and holding a government press card, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Givara Budeiri was violently assaulted and arrested by Israeli police on June 5.
The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office has been using a quasi-"pre-crime" program for years, supposedly as part of its overall "public safety" efforts. But it hasn't done much more than give officers an excuse to hassle people. It may publicly claim it's a smarter form of law enforcement that makes better use of limited resources to target problem areas and people. But it isn't. And the Sheriff's Office knows it.
Writing in the Israeli daily, Haaretz (September 27, 2011), Israeli Martin Buber scholar Yael Stemhell, wrote: “We, the Jews who live in Israel, participate each day, each hour, in the denial of basic rights to Palestinian citizens, in the perpetration of the settlements and the occupation.” She likens the Israeli resistance to giving a state to the Palestinians (which means, essentially, granting them the full range of human rights guaranteed by the UN Declaration of Human Rights and codes of human decency) to those Southern US whites who resisted granting the vote to American Blacks. She alludes to the “chains of hatred, fear and the racism that grips the state of Israel” and the “paranoia that paralyzes us, that blocks all possibility of realizing a solution.”
It is also distressing and dispiriting to listen to the pontifications of the American religious right who twist themselves into pretzels by trying to identify the “kingdom of God” with an ethnic state for Jews alone, completely forgetting the suffering and agony of Christian Palestinians. How’s that for a bitter paradox? The American religious right imagines that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was the Big Move in God’s Grand Chess Game. They think they know precisely how God is working in history—and claim that they have received directions to support Israel-no-questions-asked because they know how the end times will unfold, square by square, move by move.
For the Liberals, NDP and Bloc to adopt secret new provisions that will not be revealed until after the committee has concluded its work forever taints Bill C-10 as the product of an illegitimate process. If the bill makes its way to the Senate, it will be incumbent on the Senators to conduct the democratic, public hearings that the Liberals rejected and ensure that the dozens of amendments that were never part of a proper Parliamentary process are fully revisited and properly vetted.
A detailed new report by Amnesty International finds that the Biden administration is abusing an anti-trafficking law to forcibly expel thousands of unaccompanied Mexican children seeking asylum at the United States' southern border, often sending them back to dangerous conditions without adequately screening for threats to their safety.
Titled Pushed Into Harm's Way, the 50-page report (pdf) released Friday documents the Biden administration's effective continuation of its predecessor's policy of rejecting nearly all asylum-seekers at official ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In recognition of this reality, the House Judiciary Committee has released a number of proposed laws which would reign in the largest players in the tech space in€ order to make€ a healthier, more competitive internet ecosystem. We’ll have more in-depth analysis of all of them in the coming weeks, but our initial thoughts focus on the proposal which would make using a service on your own terms, or moving between services, much easier: the ACCESS Act.
The “Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act”—or ACCESS Act—helps accomplish a goal we’ve long promoted as central to breaking the hold large tech companies have on our data and our business: interoperability.
Today too many tech companies are “roach motels” where our data enters but can never leave, or be back under our control. They€ run services where we only get the features that serve their shareholders’ interests, not our needs. This stymies other innovators, especially those who could move beyond today's surveillance business models. The ACCESS Act creates a solid framework for change.
News this week that police had deployed the LRAD (Long-Range Acoustic Device) against protesters resisting the Line 3 pipeline in northern Minnesota reminded us again of the potential of sound as weapon. “Device” is a euphemism: a gun, by this formulation, is merely a bullet-delivery-device. The manufacturer’s own descriptions of its range of LRAD products stresses the contraptions capacity for “communication.”
A year ago this sound cannon was used quell protests in Portland. On the local CBS station news on June 6, 2020 the city’s police explain that the weapon, used to combat protesters the previous night, is only dangerous when used improperly. Trust the authorities with tools of sounding warfare at your peril.
Darnella Frazier, the Minnesota teen whose cellphone video recording of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd's neck last May was key piece of prosecution evidence in the trial the ended with the former Minneapolis police officer's murder conviction, received an honorary Pulitzer Prize on Friday.
Frazier, who was 17 years old when she shot the harrowing footage, was awarded this year's Special Citation from the Pulitzer Board "for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice."
For more than two years, the aftermath of the police killing of Kawaski Trawick in New York has mostly been defined by what hasn’t happened.
Last summer, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office concluded it didn’t have evidence to charge the two officers involved in the fatal confrontation. This year, the Police Department determined “no wrongdoing was found” and said no officers would face discipline.
All wars have casualties. The war on drugs is no exception. From the impoverished farmers in Afghanistan who faced the choice of defying either the Taliban or the U.S. military, to those who will die in federal prison for non-violent drug offenses, many have been caught in the crossfire.
The war on drugs has impacted a myriad of domestic institutions within the United States. Nowhere is this more apparent than in analyzing the evolution of U.S. domestic policing.
Years ago, before he was mayor, Bill de Blasio laid out the essence of any effort to reform the country’s largest police department. New York City needed true civilian oversight.
Describing the city agency tasked with investigating police misconduct as “more of a lapdog than a watchdog,” he proposed in 2009 to give it more independence, authority, and guaranteed funding. A few months later, he again pledged change, saying in a statement, “the NYPD cannot oversee itself.”
A groundbreaking linguist, Chomsky has done more to live up to this maxim than almost any other contemporary intellectual. His political writings have laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism, the injustices of endless war, and the propaganda of the corporate media, earning him a place on Richard Nixon’s “Enemies List” and in the surveillance files of the CIA. At ninety-two, Chomsky remains an essential voice in the anti-capitalist movements his ideas helped inspire.
Ana Kasparian and Nando Vila interviewed Chomsky for Jacobin’s Weekends YouTube show earlier this year. In their conversation, Chomsky reminds us that history is a process of continuous struggle, and that the working-class politics needed to secure universal health care, climate justice, and denuclearization are out there — if we’re willing to fight for them.
But the size and scope of Amazon’s efforts — and who was coordinating them — wasn’t fully visible to the public or to employees partaking in the election, because the Trump administration scrapped a rule that would have required disclosure of certain union-busting expenditures by corporations. The so-called persuader rule was designed to spotlight an industry that rakes in nearly $340 million a year advising corporations on how to prevent their employees from unionizing.
Why does Senator Roger Wicker from Mississippi hate the internet? Wicker, who has a close relationship with big telcos, who have long made it their mission to destroy the open internet, was already a co-sponsor of an awful "Section 230 reform" bill last session, and is back now with what he's ridiculously calling the "PRO-SPEECH" Act. It stands for "Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer is Heard Act." But, in reality, it is a blatant (and unconstitutional) attack on free speech.
As we've made clear by now, the FCC under Trump spent four straight years kissing monopoly ass. From eliminating decades-old rules protecting consumers and competitors from the harms of media consolidation to gutting the FCC's consumer protection authority simply because AT&T and Comcast wanted it done, the agency under Pai was a textbook example of regulatory capture. There were a few high points (like the creation of a national suicide hotline), but by and large the FCC under Pai was just a mindless rubber stamp for the industry's wealthiest players.
Californians far and wide have spent the pandemic either tethered to their high-speed broadband connections (if they’re lucky), or desperately trying to find ways to make their internet ends meet. School children are using the wifi in parking lots, shared from fast food restaurants. Mobile broadband isn’t cutting it, as anyone who’s been outside of a major city and tried to make a video call on their phone can tell you. Experts everywhere insist€ we need€ a bold plan that gives communities, organizations, and nonprofits the ability and the funds to build fiber infrastructure that will serve those individuals who aren’t on the radar of the big telecommunications companies.€
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Google is building a new subsea cable to shuttle your megabits between between the eastern US, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. The fiber optic line, called Firmina after a Brazilian abolitionist, is due to start operations in 2023.
"Internet infrastructure is not in the cloud, it's under the ocean," said Bikash Koley, vice president of global networking at Google. Firmina is the 16th submarine cable Google has built or invested in. "The internet is still growing steadily year over year. I expect that train to continue," he said.
2021 marks a full ten years since World IPv6 Day, the coordinated test event that led to the IPv6 launch event on 6 June 2012. We’re all aware that IPv6 deployment is, so far, a mixed story: depending on your network, it might either be the dominant network protocol, or it might be an item kicked into the long-grass of a planning document years into the future, or (more likely) it’s somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
So as usual, let’s ask ourselves: where are we now, globally, and what’s changed?
It should go without saying that anyone should be able to freely choose and use a router and modem of their choice for Internet connection, like one does with smartphones and other devices. This so-called Router Freedom refers to the right for consumers to choose and use a private modem and router instead of the devices supplied by the Internet service provider (ISP). The right to use terminal equipment of one’s own choice is guaranteed in the EU by the Net Neutrality Regulation. However, as part of a major reform of the telecommunications sector in Europe (the EECC directive), new rules are being introduced that may have a negative impact on Router Freedom, because they affect the status of routers being considered as terminal equipment.
On Friday, as has been widely expected for a while, a bunch of House lawmakers led by David Cicilline introduced five new antitrust bills that would, if they become law, completely reshape how antitrust works in the US. At least for tech companies. Somewhat notably, many of the bills seem written specifically to target just one industry and to avoid having to deal with other industries. The text of the bills has been floating around all week as the Democrats who are pushing them hoped to find some Republican co-sponsors. And, based on Friday's press release, it appears they found at least one Republican to sponsor each bill (though only four Republicans in total, as they got Lance Gooden to agree to sponsor two of the bills).
One night last month, police crowded into the lobby of Twitter's offices in India's capital New Delhi. They were from an elite squad that normally investigates terrorism and organized crime, and said they were trying to deliver a notice alerting Twitter to misinformation allegedly tweeted by opposition politicians. But they arrived at 8 p.m. And Twitter's offices were closed anyway, under a coronavirus lockdown. It's unclear if they ever managed to deliver their notice. They released video of their raid afterward to Indian TV channels and footage shows them negotiating with security guards in the lobby. The May 24 police raid — which Twitter later called an "intimidation tactic" — was one of the latest salvos in a confrontation between the Indian government and social media companies over what online content gets investigated or blocked, and who gets to decide. While the Indian constitution includes the right to freedom of speech, it also bans expression or publication of anything that risks India's security, public order or "decency." But the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced a long list of new IT rules going beyond this. They require social media platforms to warn users not to post anything that's defamatory, obscene, invasive of someone else's privacy, encouraging of gambling, harmful to a child or "patently false or misleading" — among other things. If the government orders it, platforms are required to take down such material. The rules also require platforms to identify the original source of information that's shared online or, in the case of messaging apps, forwarded among users. Company executives can be held criminally liable if the platforms don't comply. Many tech companies are aghast. They say these rules violate their users' freedom of expression and privacy, and amount to censorship. Free speech advocates warn that such rules are prone to politicization and could be used to target government critics.
Immutep Limited (ASX: IMM; NASDAQ: IMMP) ("Immutep“ or “the Company“), a biotechnology company developing novel immunotherapy treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease, is pleased to announce the grant of patent number EP3473263 entitled “Combined Preparations for the Treatment of Cancer” by the European Patent Office.
This European patent was filed as a divisional application and follows the grant of the European parent patent announced in November 2018, and the corresponding United States patents announced in December 2020 and March 2021.
No, whilst there have been discussions regarding a Unitary European Patent for a number of years it is unlikely that this will be available anytime soon.
Following an overnight session, the German parliament (Bundestag) adopted reforms to its patent law early this morning. Core to the amendments are specifications on the provision of the automatic injunction. This always follows in German patent proceedings, if the court rules on a patent infringement.
The reform enables courts to apply the principle of proportionality in cases where injunctive relief would represent a disproportionate hardship to an alleged infringer or third parties. It also makes provisions to substitute compensatory payments for injunctive relief, instead of courts automatically handing out injunctions.
Thus, an express reference to the requirements of good faith now supplements section 139, sentence 3 of the German Patent Law. Judges must therefore also take into account the legitimate interests of the patent owner when assessing whether there is unjustified hardship precluding the right to injunctive relief.
On June 3, 2021, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination against U.S. Patent 8,719,165, owned by Xylon Licensing, LLC, an NPE and IP Edge entity. The ‘165 patent relates to completing secure transactions using a mobile device and a secure computer. It has been asserted in 13 district court litigations against companies such as Plains Capital, Texas State Bankshares, Mastercard, Shopkeep, Global Payments, and others.
Maybe it's something about being in a beverage industry that makes people treat trademark law as though it were something it most definitely is not. For years, we've discussed the trademark problem that the exploding craft beer industry has faced. Oatly, the Swedish company that produces that well known non-dairy milk product, is most certainly not in the alcohol business, but they appear to be aping the most aggressive members of that unrelated industry in a recent lawsuit filed overseas against a very small competitor, which makes a product called PureOaty.
Wormhole is a browser-based tool that allows people to instantly share files with end-to-end encryption. The service uses WebTorrent under the hood and is free to use. BitTorrent will speed up transfers but people are not required to keep their browser windows open if files are smaller than five gigabytes.
In 2019, BREIN, MPA, and ACE shut down Moonwalk, a huge ‘pirate CDN’ that provided thousands of movies and TV shows to hundreds of pirate sites. That content was stored at hosts in the Netherlands, which are now facing legal pressure to hand over details of their customers. Two of the hosts rejected BREIN's standing but a court has now sided with the anti-piracy outfit.
A huge and potentially important copyright lawsuit was filed this week by basically all of the big music publishers against the immensely popular kids' gaming platform Roblox. Although the publishers trade association, the NMPA, put out a press release claiming the lawsuit, it doesn't appear that NMPA is actually a party. The lawsuit is, in many ways, yet another full frontal assault on the DMCA's safe harbors by the legacy music industry. There's a lot in this lawsuit and no single article is going to cover it all, but we'll hit on a few high points.
