Report from virtual FreeBSD DevSummit 2021, another promising release by FreeBSD Based helloSystem, GearBSD, OpenBGPD release, Let’s Encrypt on OpenBSD, FreeBSD 13 on the Panasonic Let’s Note, and more
fastly, 3d printing, jingos, pizza
Big Tech's punishment train has been en route for years, but now that it's almost arrived, are we getting onboard?
Plus Mike's recent tech woes and Chris' special surprise waiting for him in the studio.
With the KVM code set to be merged in the coming weeks for the Linux 5.14 kernel, support for fast XMM hypercalls is coming for its Hyper-V guest support in allowing for some performance benefits.
Microsoft Hyper-V's hypercall interface - for the calling mechanism into guests - supports the notion of XMM fast hypercalls. The XMM fast hypercall support allows for some calls to enjoy improved performance. This fast hypercalls interface makes use of six XMM registers compared to otherwise the maximum of two general purpose registers for hypercalls.
Extended BPF (eBPF), the general-purpose execution engine inside of the Linux kernel, has proved helpful for tracing and monitoring the system, for processing network packets, or generally for extending the behavior of the kernel. So helpful, in fact, that developers working on other operating systems have been watching it. Dave Thaler and Poorna Gaddehosur, on behalf of Microsoft, recently published an implementation of eBPF for Windows. A Linux feature making its way to Windows, in itself, deserves attention. Even more so when that feature has brought new degrees of programmability to the Linux kernel over the last few years. This makes it especially interesting to look at what the new project can do, and to ponder how the current ecosystem might evolve as eBPF begins its journey toward Windows.
Free-software development is meant to be fun, at least some of the time. Even developers of database-management systems seem to think that it is fun; there is no accounting for taste, it seems. Part of having fun is certainly allowing the occasional exercise of one's sense of humor while working on the code. But, as some recent "fix" attempts show, humor does not always carry through to developers all over the planet. Balancing humor and inclusiveness is always going to be a challenge for our community.
There is a function in the kernel scheduler that will, if things go badly wrong, inform users that a bug is present, describing it as "arch topology borken". The message is, of course, breathtaking in its clarity; users will immediately know what to do when they see it. Recently, though, a well-intentioned developer sent a patch changing the message to read "broken" instead. This patch was not accepted, but it did result in a brief discussion explaining the nature of the intended joke to the submitter.
The following day, somebody else attempted to fix another scheduler function containing a comment that cites "histerical raisins". This time, the poster was instructed to search for "humour", which is rather less illuminating. Other examples abound; one of the more amusing such attempts came last year, when a developer concluded that the title of this document required a spelling correction; the response this time politely declined the patch, but encouraged the poster by saying "rest assured that you did get [the] point!".
Anybody who has spent any amount of time trying to function in a non-native language understands that humor can be difficult. It is deeply tied to both the language it is expressed in and the specific context where it is found. Words that fluent speakers find funny can simply fly over the head of those who are less proficient, and attempts to be funny in a non-native language do not always go well. Your editor has a hard time getting a laugh from native English speakers; he has learned that it's better not to even try in other settings.
The quotactl() system call is used to manipulate disk quotas on a filesystem; it can be used to turn quota enforcement on or off, change quotas, retrieve current usage information, and more. The 5.13 merge window brought in a new variant of that system call that was subsequently disabled due to API concerns; its replacement is now taking form.
Alibaba engineers are looking to mainline an x86_64 tuned version of the SM4 cipher that with making use of AVX and AES-NI can allow for a dramatic performance speed-up.
For those required to make use of China's SM4 block cipher or in use-cases such as supporting the country's WAPI wireless standard, an x86_64/AVX/AES-NI tuned version of SM4 is looking to get mainlined for the Linux kernel. There has already been an AArch64 tuned version of the SM4 code within the Linux kernel while now from Alibaba is the x86_64 accelerated version. The x86_64 tuning is based on existing work by libgcrypt and sm4ni.
While most Linux distributions come with a GUI-based file manager, you may not be comfortable using them. As with most other things in Linux, if you don’t like what you get with a Distro, you can always download and use an alternative.
Here is a list of the five best Linux file managers.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 247 and Cockpit Machines version 246.
Now, a URL is not something that's only used in the context of a web browser and web server. RFC3986 gives us all the details, leading us to draw a more accurate URL breakdown as: [...]
With WireGuard, you can have logical connections that you turn on or off in your configuration system of choice, but this is purely a user interface issue. The underlying protocol is connection-less and there's no session to break. If the underlying network path is interrupted for a while, neither end of the WireGuard connection will get upset. Packets will get lost for a while, then start getting delivered again, and any long-running TCP connections that break will break for natural reasons that the connection itself timed out. How WireGuard works even lets you move one end between networks without having things explode (I've gone through this).
Out of these recurring patterns we’ve extracted lessons that we intend to take into our own engineering teams; and so, we’ve compiled five of those lessons below for the benefit of any interested readers, with the hope that you, too, will find them useful to learn from and to prepare for. As we go, we’ll include links to the outages and episodes where each theme occurred.
Linux system administrators generally list disks to check the whole disk space and its usage. Listing disks also helps see the attached disks to the system, partitions and filesystem the disks using.
In a Linux system, there are several ways to list all the hard drives. In this tutorial, we learn how to list disks in Linux using the command line.
I recently installed a full bitcoin node on our home network, and lucky for me, I got everything up and running quickly without bumping into some issues. Before I will show you the steps on how to install a full bitcoin node, allow me to explain some of my reasons why I ended up doing this.
As some of you may already know, bitcoin is a network composed of thousands of nodes. A record of every bitcoin transaction is verified and maintained inside a node. So if you are running one, you will essentially be hosting and sharing a copy of the bitcoin blockchain and you will help maintain the network decentralized.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kitematic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Kitematic is an open-source project that makes it easier to start, stop or delete containers by offering a graphical user interface that further makes it relatively easy to select and use containers from the Docker Hub registry.
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 Kitematic Docker GUI tool 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.
PWD could mean two things in Linux, so first confirm what you’re trying to achieve here.
I like to play classic DOS games, and sometimes I'll bring up a favorite DOS application. I teach a Management Information Systems (MIS) class where I talk about the history of computing, and I'll sometimes record a demonstration using FreeDOS and a legacy DOS application, such as As-Easy-As (my favorite DOS spreadsheet—once released as "shareware" but now available for free from TRIUS, Inc).
But using FreeDOS this way means I need to transfer files between my FreeDOS virtual machine and my Linux desktop system. Let me show you how I do that.
In today world, data privacy is very important as most of our personal data is stored and shared online. Individuals and businesses are both equally concerned when it comes to their data privacy. For individuals, data like social security numbers, credit card numbers, medical records etc. are very sensitive. In the same way, data like research data, financial records, etc are very crucial. People and businesses are thus very worried when sharing their information online using third-party messaging apps, emails etc. In recent times, Signal has emerged as the top-grossing messaging application. It is widely used for its privacy conservative feature that has made many people abandoned WhatsApp.
Since Signal is an open-source instant messaging app. The source code for client and server-side applications can be seen on GitHub. Furthermore, the use of Signal by popular personalities like Edward Snowden and other privacy-conscious people has boosted its presence all over the world.
If you are looking to install Signal on Ubuntu 20.04, you have arrived at the right place. In this guide, we will walk you through the process of installing Signal on Ubuntu 20.04. Let's get started with it right now.
Rocky Linux 8 is one to one RHEL binary compatible Linux OS, its latest stable release 8.4 has been released. Thus, if you want to migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux, then here is the tutorial using the official migrate2rocky script.
After the RedHat announcement to end the life of the Long term supported CentOS 8 version, multiple developers came forward with the best CentOS alternative options, and one of them is Rocky Linux. Recently, the developers behind and the founder Mr.Gregory Kurtzer, who was also the founder and behind the CentOS project released the stable 8.4 version of the OS.
When it comes to what’s new, Rocky Linux 8.4 follows in the footsteps of its upstream Linux (Redhat) and comes with Python 3.9, GCC 10, Rust 1.49, LLVM 11, Go 1.15.7, SWIG 4.0, and Subversion 1.14 for programming and Redis 6 topics. , PostgreSQL 13 and MariaDB 10.5 as database technologies.
It is every developer’s dream to create or work on a web page or web project that promises top-notch security features and meets every user’s privacy concerns. However, before you can create and host a website on a server, you need to adhere to the best coding practices.
Just because you want to create a secure web page does not mean that your code should only be understandable to the eyes of a rocket scientist. Simplicity is key in developing awesome code.
A simple code is not a weak code but an understandable one. Simplicity applies to code refactoring and the continuous use of comments. Furthermore, it helps you to gauge and edit your code later when you need to reuse it on other projects. Since this article seeks to give you a walk-through on creating a secure login page in PHP and MySQL, we first need to consider the benefits of this approach.
This quick tip shows you how to export traffic analytics from your Red Hat 3scale API Management environment to a third-party data visualization tool. For this example, we will use Datawrapper, which is provided free for personal use without any trial basis at the time of this writing.
With Ansible, users have the flexibility to accept external input while executing their Ansible playbooks without changing the Ansible playbook content. This can be done via the ability to pass extra variables to an Ansible playbook. This feature is available when using the Ansible CLI or Ansible Tower.
On Linux, package managers help you handle updates, uninstalls, troubleshooting, and more for the software on your computer. Seth Kenlon wrote about dnf, the command-line package management tool for installing software in RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Mageia, OpenMandriva, and other Linux distros.
Debian and Debian-based distros such as MX Linux, Deepin, Ubuntu—and distros based on Ubuntu, such as Linux Mint and Pop!_OS—have apt, a "similar but different" tool. In this article, I'll follow Seth's examples—but with apt—to show you how to use it.
Space Chef from developer Blue Goo Games is planned to be supported on Linux thanks to the Unity game engine, and it looks like it could be quite fun.
You will be exploring different alien planets to hunt down strange alien life, then cook 'em up and serve them across the galaxy on a star scooter. The game is thoroughly quirky but very charming too. A good mixture of exploration, action, cooking and building.
This might not technically be Linux gaming but Tilt Five is something you're going to want to keep an eye on.
What is the Tilt Five? It's a new way to play games inspired by board games but very high-tech. Using a powered game board, along with special glasses, you get to experience Augmented Reality (AR) with holograms. It's seriously cool and it was a massive hit on Kickstarter back in October 2019.
Valve have updated Dota 2 with a major new release featuring not only a brand new Battle Pass and a big new event, they also added in AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution.
The new Battle Pass is available at a minimum $7.49 / €£5.49 spend, although you don't need it to access the Nemestice Event Game as it's available to everyone. In this new game mode every three minutes a Nemestice Storm will cause a giant meteorite strike in the centre of the map. You need to channel them to collect Nemestice Embers while also dodging them so they don't hit you. These Embers will power you up boosting attack damage, spells and movement speed and if you have enough you shock nearby enemies. It puts a little twist on towers too, with each falling giving the remaining a power boost - destroy all enemy towers to claim the area and win.
Anger Foot, a prototype developed by Robbie Fraser, Luc Wolthers and Jason Sutherland of Free Lives (Broforce, Terra Nil) is a furious fast-paced action game about kicking-down doors and causing a big mess. It's absolutely brilliant and it's currently free since it's not finished and it was originally a 7DFPS entry. Seems they're still experimenting with expanding it into perhaps a full game with a fresh update out now.
[...]
The Linux version appears to continue working well, although the mouse cursor is a bit on the large side in menus but in-game all is actually fine. The cursor issue is an odd one that we've seen with other Unity games before. Hopefully they will be able to fix it easily.
Amongst other things, Blobs are about to become more menacing in the latest Valheim update that's out now. While we're waiting on the major Hearth & Home update, which is now delayed until Q3 2021, the team at Iron Gate seem to keep trickling out smaller fixes and improvements to keep us all going.
Patch 0.155.7 went up June 23, mostly focusing on AI issues to make monsters a bit more aggressive and attack your buildings when they can't get to you - oh no. You can also, for a limited time, build the Maypole as the team in Sweden are celebrating midsummer.
The KDE conference Akademy is in full swing and the KMyMoney development team today announces the immediate availability of version 5.1.2 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.
This is a maintenance release as part of the ongoing effort to support our users and fix bugs and annoyances. If you think you can support the project with some code changes or your artistic or writing talent, please take a look at the some low hanging fruits at the KMyMoney junior job list. Any contribution is welcome.
Despite the ongoing permanent testing we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.
With the ending of CentOS 8, Long term support branch by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has spurted the increase in the appearance of other clones such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and VzLinux. And recently, Rocky Linux has also released its stable latest version i.e 8.4 in parallel to RHEL.
Rocky Linux is also an RHEL clone that came into the Linux world right after Red Hat decided to end CentOS Long term support. The project meant to target enterprises to replace CentOS, the interesting thing is the Rocky Linux is the idea of Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of CentOS.
RHEL clones generally try to stay close to their parent distribution, so as with AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux, their version is already 8.4 (although VzLinux has remained at version 8.3). However, after few months finally, the Rocky Linux officials say it is “a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. ”
Sparky 2021.06, the semi-rolling release which is based on Debian testing “Bullseye” is out. Debian Bullseye is hard frozen now, and is going to Full Freeze soon, so it is perfect time to give Sparky 6 a try before become stable.
Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
SiFive might sound familiar. That’s because Intel has reportedly offered to acquire the company for $2 billion, said it will make SiFive’s chips, and revealed plans to incorporate the new SiFive P550 processors into its 7nm Horse Creek platforms.
The HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched preceded those announcements. The HiFive Unleashed has actually been discontinued, so curious enthusiasts who haven’t already purchased one will have to opt for the HiFive Unmatched instead.
Avnet AVT9152 is an IoT module and development kit that combines two Nordic Semi wireless solutions, namely nRF52840 Bluetooth 5.2/LE multiprotocol SoC and nRF91 IoT cellular system-on-module with NB-IoT, LTE-M, and GPS connectivity.
The module supports Avnet’s enterprise-ready IoTConnect Platform, and the development kit combines with IoT module with a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, as well as pressure, temperature, relative humidity, ambient light, and motion (PIR) sensors to help with the development of IoT applications such as tracking devices, vending machines, points-of-sale, smart buildings, industrial IoT, and more.
Pimoroni is known for its development boards with a small form factor. PGA2040 is another compact breakout board featuring the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller. The board comes in the form of a Pin Grid Array (PGA) with RP2040 at its center. The PGA allows the accommodation of 48 pins around the perimeter of SoC on such a small footprint.
After seeing some of the advanced RP2040 boards featuring wireless functionalities in the past few months, such as the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect board, Pico Wireless Carrier board, and Wio RP2040 Mini development board, the PGA2040 is a simple board with only necessary components, thus making it suitable for compact, simple applications. However, this increases the complexity and efforts from users for interfacing additional components to implement advanced applications.
As you probably already know, you can easily share sketches that you’ve created in your Arduino Cloud. This includes auto generated IoT Cloud sketches as you add new devices and variables.
It’s a great feature that gives you a lot of options for working directly from your Arduino Cloud. The community is all about open-source, and sharing is a big part of that.
You might want to let other developers use and improve on your sketches. Or Maybe you want to make it public so you can get support or advice.
You could download the sketch’s .ino file and share the it manually. But then it’s in danger of becoming a versioning headache. Which one is the current version, and which one had which change in it? Suddenly you’re tripping over email chains and getting pulled into the event horizon of versioning black holes.
But Spectrum's "gigabit" Internet is 930 megabits down—in ideal conditions—but only 40 megabits up. And that's the highest plan that costs about $150 a month!
Some would die for those speeds (see the map above), but much of the world is better off. And are you really getting the speeds you pay for? You probably don't know.
While Raptor has no known plans to ship liquid-cooled machines, Vikings has your back (note that their store is down as of this writing for "spring cleaning"). The key with the IBM HSFs is that they get good, high-pressure contact between the heat spreader and the fan heatsink such that you can run 4 and 8-core parts without thermal compound or indium pads. While the custom mount Vikings developed doesn't achieve that level presently, with MX5 thermal compound they demonstrated over a 10 degree C reduction in core temperatures under load compared to the stock HSFs on a single 22-core POWER9. The custom CPU fitting then connects to an off-the-shelf Laing DC pump and a 120mm radiator.
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.)
The Audacity multi-track audio editor and recorder got its start in the previous century; it is a popular application that is available for multiple platforms, and it is licensed under the GPLv2 or later. But Audacity has been acquired by a newly formed organization called Muse Group; that event has caused something of an uproar in its community. The problem, at least in part, is the new Contributor License Agreement (CLA) required to contribute to Audacity.
The acquisition of the project was announced in an early-May YouTube video posted by Martin Keary ("Tantacrul"); that news was subsequently confirmed on the Audacity web site.
Starting today, online users have a new independent option for search which gives them unmatched privacy. Whether they are already Brave browser users, looking to expand their online privacy protection with the all-in-one, integrated Brave Search in the Brave browser, or users of other browsers looking for the best-in-breed privacy-preserving search engine, they can all use the newly released Brave Search beta that puts users first, and fully in control of their online experience. Brave Search is built on top of a completely independent index, and doesn’t track users, their searches, or their clicks.
Since my last in-depth comparison review of search engines in 2020, there are two new and very promising options: Whoogle, designed as an anonymous proxy to Google, and Brave Search, which is a new and independent search engine that we’ll review in this article.
I’m genuinely excited about Brave Search. As mentioned in previous articles on this site, I am a pragmatist, not a privacy pundit. However, I have become increasingly frustrated with Google’s search performance, and its commercial focus is increasingly imposing and overt. I can’t shake the feeling that Google is wielding its massive trove of personal information and its artificial intelligence prowess with a view to taking advantage of me instead of offering me better service. Unfortunately, the alternatives up until now have been sadly lacking, and Google continues to be the defacto search engine by a massive margin. Even a company as large as Microsoft with its deep pockets and massive human and technical resources has failed to turn its Bing product into a compelling alternative search engine. And unfortunately, Bing’s limited search index and mediocre query logic serve as the basis for most other alternative search engines, including the darling of privacy zealots, DuckDuckGo. My previous tests have shown that DuckDuckGo and most other smaller search engines simply regurgitate Bing’s poor search results, offering mainly privacy and/or anonymity as their main selling point. Simply put, creating a good search engine is extremely hard. So Google continues to rein supreme, not by virtue of its excellence, but rather due to the lack of viable alternatives.
Brave Search is an ambitious initiative by Brave Software based on the open-source project Tailcat, which tries to take on the big tech by introducing the ability to search anonymously. Brave Search itself is not open source at the moment.
Of course, there are various other private search engines available out there trying to offer a privacy-focused experience. Even though not every service proves to be better than Google (regarding features), Brave Search seems to be a compelling choice when considering Brave Browser as a successful open-source replacement to Google Chrome.
Here, let me highlight a few features in Brave Search that makes it an interesting alternative to Google Search.
One year ago, we made a set of commitments to make diversity and inclusion more than a catchphrase or hot button topic. We decided to roll up our sleeves and get busy establishing significant goals, putting resources behind them and making sure that everyone, including our company leadership, was taking action to create a more diverse and equitable place at Mozilla and in society.
We have taken steps to address the issue of anti-Black racism and the lack of diversity and inclusion in our company, and hopefully, in society, through programming and people initiatives. We have seen a significant increase in participation in diversity and inclusion initiatives, and perhaps, equally important, in our engagement survey results and in particular the increased scores on diversity and inclusion questions by people of color and women. While we have made strides on many of the goals established on June 18, 2020, we recognize this progress is the “First Step Toward Lasting Change.” We continue to be committed through our actions and resources to improve Mozilla as a place to work for people of color and the internet for all.
A configuration management database (CMDB) is a repository of information related to the various components of an information system detailing an organisation’s IT services and the relationships between those components. The purpose of a CMDB is to catalog and track all of the information that an IT department needs to keep.
The term CMDB stems from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best practices which include specifications for configuration management. These specifications detail four main tasks of configuration management. These consist of the identification of configuration items to be included in the CMDB, control of data, status maintenance, and verification (from audits and reviews of the data). The processes of configuration management seek to specify, control, and track configuration items and any changes made to them in a comprehensive and systematic fashion.
The OASIS standards organization has now officially approved of the ODF 1.3 revision of the OpenDocument Format as their newest ratified standard.
Succeeding their ODF 1.2 standardization from 2015 is now ODF 1.3 that has been approved in full. The committee specification has been available for nearly two years while now has received unanimous approval. ODF is most notably used by LibreOffice but many other office suites and other applications also support making use of this open standard for office documents.
DejaGnu 1.6.3 was released on 16 June 2021. Many bugs are fixed in this release and active development is resuming, though perhaps at a slow pace.
Release 0.3.9 of the RcppGSL package arrived at CRAN today, pretty much exactly one year since the last upload. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package.
This release brings some small documentation and CI polish, and enables builds on the newer (and still experimental) windows ‘UCRT’ flavor (which will bring native utf-8 chars to Windows, see this and this write-up) thanks to a PR by Jeroen.
This addition is helpful, but what if you want to know the same information about projects in your local repository? That's where Tokei comes in handy. It's a tool that tells you code statistics about a project, which is especially useful when you want to build a project with people who are proficient in different languages.
Approaching my 10-year moz-iversary in July, I’ve decided it’s time to take a bit of a mini-sabbatical: I’ll be out (and trying as hard as possible not to check bugmail) from Friday, June 25th until August 9th. During this time, I’ll be doing a batch at the Recurse Centre (something like a writer’s retreat for programmers), exploring some of my interests around data visualization and analysis that don’t quite fit into my role as a Data Engineer here at Mozilla.
In particular, I’m planning to work a bunch on a project tentatively called “Irydium”, which pursues some of the ideas I sketched out last year in my Iodide retrospective and a few more besides. I’ve been steadily working on it in my off hours, but it’s become clear that some of the things I want to pursue would benefit from more dedicated attention and the broader perspective that I’m hoping the Recurse community will be able to provide.
I describe a number of new attacks and defences that we’ve discovered in the past three years, including the Taboo Trap, sponge attacks, data ordering attacks and markpainting. I argue that we will usualsly have to think of defences at the system level, rather than at the level of individual components; and that situational awareness is likely to play an important role.
Here now is the video of my talk.
The concept is this: There are two main ways we learn—passively and actively. Or as I put it before, via osmosis or via algorithm.
Here’s another way to look at it.
Business automation today is a constant and critical task for organizations that seek to formalize policies and ensure that they can be executed, maintained, monitored, and applied during daily operations. This article demonstrates how to use the Kogito engine to automate business rules by implementing them in the Drools Rules Language (DRL).
DRL is common in Drools-based projects. To start using it with Kogito, you need to understand the concept of rule units. You'll learn how to work with rule units in practice by writing a Java service that automates a piece of business logic with rule units and minimal coding. These capabilities are now part of Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.11.x, released on June 17.
Published 60 years ago in 1961€ The Wretched of the Earth€ was one of the seminal works of the Sixties, in part because it came with an introduction by the French philosopher, novelist and Third World defender Jean-Paul Sartre. Like the names Marx and Engels, or Malcolm X and Alex Haley—the Black journalist who wrote Malcolm’s autobiography, and whose name is on the cover of Malcolm’s book—Fanon and Sartre have been linked in the pages of revolutionary history and legend for the last six decades.
The Wretched of the Earth€ was republished in paperback in 2004. That edition has Sartre’s original introduction, plus a new foreword by the Indian scholar Homi K. Bhabha. It’s also in a new translation by Richard Philcox. In a fiery essay at the back of the book, Philcox explains how and why he translated some of Fanon’s words, like “nègre,” which he calls “that word dreaded by all translators of French texts.
The Texans illegally recruited soldiers and money from the United States, but were highly disorganized, divided by the fierce racism of the Anglos toward the Latinos among them, and hampered by the predominance of drunks, nuts, and criminals who had fled to Texas from jams they’d gotten into back in the United States. This crowd of buffoons, ready to fight for slavery, profits, political ambition, and the lack of anything else to do, loaded up a little fort in San Antonio called the Alamo with nearly 200 of themselves, bitterly divided even there between two leaders until one of them drank himself into illness.
As a well-trained Mexican army of a couple of thousand steadily approached, the defenders of slavery and white supremacy tried to recruit larger numbers for their side but failed miserably due to lack of support and lack of belief from people who had come to know some of this crowd’s leaders as habitual liars and trouble makers. The slavery-fighters failed to either destroy or abandon the Alamo until it was too late. They became hopelessly trapped. They tried to surrender and be spared, but the proposal was rejected. Some died fighting. Some surrendered and were killed. Some fled, were captured, and were killed. They almost all ended up dead.
Sunset Park, Brooklyn—Who hasn’t come to terms with their own mortality over the past year and a half? So many people had life-changing realizations. Like others, I made a decision based purely on impulse. I went back to school. I hated the idea, in a way. Don’t get me wrong; I left undergrad with a deep appreciation for learning but understood that education can’t be bounded within an academic institution. The pandemic shifted my perspective. I needed a safe space to learn. My job with the New York Fire Department allowed me to stay home with my family for longer stints as I attended school virtually. Most important, I had something to do besides worry. I entered the screenwriting track at CUNY’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. I was processing what was happening in the world, and what was happening with me, and my family. And though communications about our works in progress were remote, I wasn’t alone.1
In 2009, comedian Aziz Ansari closed his first stand-up special, Intimate Moments for a Sensual Evening, with a story about attending an R. Kelly concert. The five-minute bit folds in anecdotes about the R&B singer’s onstage antics and concludes with an impression that electrifies the crowd. But the part of the joke I remember most is when he talks about walking through the concert with his friend and collaborator Jason Woliner. Jason tells him, “Hey Aziz, me and you are the only two white people at this concert.” Aziz responds, “First of all, Jason, I’m not white. Second of all, you’re the only white guy at this concert. We might kill you, Jason!”
Tibetan rappers walk a tightrope unfamiliar to their peers overseas, with some cautiously exploring local pride and Buddhist identity in coded lyrics to avoid the unwanted attention of Chinese authorities.
Most, however -- MC Tenzin included -- give politics a wide berth to be able to continue creating their music.
But if Prime Day means deals for consumers, it has a different valence for the hundreds of thousands of people who work in Amazon’s warehouses. For those people, Prime Day means mandatory overtime, with shifts extended from ten to twelve hours, or extra shifts added to their schedule. One worker recently told me he’ll be mandated to work fifty-five hours this week. He’s in pain and a doctor told him it’s carpal tunnel syndrome, but he hasn’t filed paperwork with Amazon because that requires him to go to another doctor to get diagnosed, and he doesn’t have time to do that. Another person, who has since left the company, told me she was pressured to work for over twenty-four hours straight on Prime Day.
Amazon is notoriously secretive about its data, but recent reporting shows the extent of the holiday pressure, and the danger that accompanies it. In a report in 2019, as well as a follow-up in 2020, journalist Will Evans got his hands on internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers, publishing his findings with Reveal News.
John McAfee, the outlandish security software pioneer who tried to live life as a hedonistic outsider while running from a host of legal troubles, was found dead in his jail cell near Barcelona on Wednesday.
His death came just hours after a Spanish court announced that it had approved his extradition to the United States to face tax charges punishable by decades in prison, authorities said.
Anti-virus pioneer John McAfee has died in Spain in what is an apparent suicide following a court decision to extradite him back to the US, but conspiracies are swirling that McAfee was assassinated, brought on by McAfee's own warnings any suicide wouldn't be by his own hands. Whatever the truth, may McAfee rest in peace.
Finding blocks of time like this is something that I treasure. From now onwards, I expect them to once more become the norm in my life and not a special occasion. This is the second day that I managed to get out like this, I hope that every week has at least two days like this.
Every so often, I get asked how people can enter into information security, what they should study or what certifications they should pursue. I don't have a good answer to this question. Or rather, I don't have an easy answer to this question.
I don't find much value in any specific certification program, and I know that everybody's path is different, so I'm hesitant to give any more specific advice but a broad recommendation to work with your organization's security team on practical projects to gain experience and an understanding of how the team functions.
However, at the same time, there are a number of things that I regard as, well, a common body of knowledge in the field, a set of core competencies.
The deadly coronavirus pandemic laid bare many inequalities in American society—and perhaps no inequality more devastating than disparities in healthcare. As workers had their hours slashed and millions were laid off entirely, we saw that the chasm between who has health coverage and who doesn’t remains one of the most harmful in America today.€
In the race between infection and injection, injection has lost.
The White House says it will miss its goal of getting 70% of adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4. Vaccinations are available for anyone age 12 and up in the U.S., but just 45% of people in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, and only 16 states have fully vaccinated more than half of their populations. Epidemiologist Dr. Ali Khan says despite more than 150 million people in the U.S. now being vaccinated against the coronavirus, the highly contagious Delta variant is quickly becoming a concern. “Our expectation should be, by July, this will be the dominant variant,” he says.
Later today, the CDC will convene a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to discuss, among other things, reports of myocarditis in young people after COVID-19 vaccination. This meeting was originally scheduled for June 18, but was delayed after President Biden signed a bill into law making Juneteenth a federal holiday. Because June 19 was Saturday, June 18 became the observed holiday this year.
In January, AstraZeneca announced that it would not be able to deliver the promised doses on time as outlined in their August 2020 contact with the EU.€ On March 19, with no discernable change, the European Commission commenced a dispute resolution process with the company.€ As the Commission explained, the company’s failure “to develop a credible strategy to ensure compliance with its contractual commitment” left it “no other choice than to start legal proceedings.”
First came the application for an emergency injunction to convince the court that the deliveries be made to the countries in need as a matter of urgency.€ The second part of the legal process entailed the Commission’s pursuit of the case on its merits in terms of mutual rights and obligations as understood by the contract.
The highly contagious Delta variant could soon account for 90 percent of new coronavirus cases in the EU, the bloc's disease control agency said Wednesday, urging members to spur vaccination drives.
Average life expectancy in the United States plummeted in 2020, widening the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and other high-income countries. The decline was particularly sharp among Hispanic and Black Americans, a new study found.
Health experts anticipated life expectancy would drop during the pandemic, but how much it did came as a surprise.
In 2015, police departments worldwide started finding ATMs compromised with advanced new “shimming” devices made to steal data from chip card transactions. Authorities in the United States and abroad had seized many of these shimmers, but for years couldn’t decrypt the data on the devices. This is a story of ingenuity and happenstance, and how one former Secret Service agent helped crack a code that revealed the contours of a global organized crime ring.
On YouTube the changes will affect any videos that are public, but marked as “Unlisted.” As described in a blog post and five-minute video, any Unlisted videos that were uploaded prior to 2017 will have their status changed to Private starting on July 23rd. The way Private videos work now, that will kill any old links or embeds, plus it limits sharing to a maximum of 50 people — all of whom will need a Google account to view it.
After all my hard work and almost a year of waiting, I didn’t get what I deserved because of Apple’s unfair judgement. So I refused to receive the bounty and told them it is unfair. I asked them to reconsider the bounty decision or let me publish the report with all the information. There wasn’t any response to my emails. So I have decided to publish my article without waiting for their response indefinitely.
Wray noted that the FBI is currently investigating over 100 types of ransomware variations, each of which he said had “scores and scores of victims,” and that enhancing the FBI’s ability to address ransomware attacks is a top priority.
The specter of more events like the SolarWinds supply-chain attacks is something that concerns many in our communities—and beyond. Linux distributions provide a supply chain that obviously needs to be protected against attackers injecting malicious code into the update stream. This problem recently came up on the Fedora devel mailing list, which led to a discussion covering a few different topics. For the most part, Fedora users are protected against such attacks, which is not to say there is nothing more to be done, of course.
The SolarWinds attacks subverted the normal update mechanism of various tools to install malware on systems throughout much of the US government; the malware then exploited other flaws to get access to email and other data. Huzaifa Sidhpurwala posted a message to the mailing list on June 11 wondering whether the rekor tool might be useful in helping to prevent similar attacks against Fedora. Rekor comes from the sigstore project that was announced by the Linux Foundation back in March.
Sigstore is meant as a mechanism to securely record cryptographic signatures of binaries, packages, container images, and similar build artifacts in a tamper-proof ledger. The project was founded by Red Hat, Google, Purdue University, and the Linux Foundation.
The Linux Foundation has joined hands with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) to announce the immediate availability of two new, online training courses focused on GitOps, or operation by pull request, a powerful developer workflow that enables organizations to unlock the promise of cloud native continuous delivery.
Introduction to GitOps (LFS169) is a free introductory course providing foundational knowledge about key GitOps principles, tools and practices, to help build an operational framework for cloud native applications primarily running on Kubernetes. The course explains how to set up and automate a continuous delivery pipeline to Kubernetes, leading to increased productivity and efficiency for tech roles.
DMCA reform has long been part of EFF’s agenda, to protect security researchers and others from its often troublesome consequences. We’ve sued to overturn the€ onerous provisions of Section 1201€ that violate the First Amendment, we’ve advocated for exemptions in every€ triennial rule-making process, and€ the Coders Rights Project helps advise security researchers about the legal risks they face in conducting and disclosing research.
Today, we are honored to stand with€ a group of security companies and organizations that are showing their public support for good faith cybersecurity research, standing up against use of Section 1201 of the DMCA to suppress the software and tools necessary for that research. In the statement below, the signers have united to urge policymakers and legislators to reform Section 1201 to allow security research tools to be provided and used for good faith security research, and to urge companies and prosecutors to refrain from using Section 1201 to unnecessarily target tools used for security research.
The statement in full...
When last we checked in with Texas utility customers, they were literally freezing to death thanks to repeated underinvestment in the state's utility grid. The Texas utility grid is a unique mish-mash of competitors on its own grid resulting from a massive deregulation effort that didn't really deliver what was promised. The convoluted mess is overseen by state regulators -- detached from federal authority -- which have spent a decade ignoring reports calling for a hardening of the grid in the face of climate catastrophe.
The security researcher Fabian Bräunlein from Positive Security has discovered a previously unfixed cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Pling-based Linux app stores, which is also said to affect the native Pling-Store application. The vulnerability could be misused to manipulate listings, i.e. apps available for download, in affected stores and, for example, add malicious code to them. According to the researcher, the Pling Store app can also be used to execute any program code remotely (Remote Code Execution, RCE) on Linux systems under certain conditions.
The Pling platform is part of the opendesktop.org portal from hive 01 GmbH. It serves as an alternative download source for themes, icons, desktop backgrounds, software and more for Linux. Several well-known app stores, such as the KDE Store on. Positive Security mentions other examples appimagehub.com, gnome-look.org and xfce-look.org. The application based on the Electron framework Pling-Store (also “PlingStore”, formerly OCS-Store), on the other hand, is intended to facilitate the installation and management of Pling content and is advertised for this purpose by Pling-based app stores.
This is something repeatedly said here on Make Tech Easier, as we report the news: every time the scammers and bad actors develop a new attack, the tech industry finds a way to fight back and close that vulnerability.
We haven't seen a lot of legal challenges to so-called "reverse warrants." This is likely due to their relative novelty. It's probably also due to the fact that no one "targeted" by these warrants knows about them until well after an investigation has been closed.
Pretty much everywhere in the United States it's accepted that if the public has access, law enforcement has access. This is the legal theory behind things like automatic license plate readers (anyone can see a license plate), utility pole-mounted cameras (anyone can see someone's front yard), and (to our benefit) recordings of public officials (if they're performing their public duties).
Because of certain provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), healthcare organizations are able to put that treasure trove to work. As long as they de-identify the records — removing information like patient names, locations, and phone numbers — they can give or sell the data to partners for research. They don’t need to get consent from patients to do it or even tell them about it.
More and more healthcare groups are taking advantage of those partnerships. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is working with startups to develop algorithms to diagnose and manage conditions based on health data. Fourteen US health systems formed a company to aggregate and sell de-identified data earlier this year. The healthcare company HCA announced a new data deal with Google in May.
It was common knowledge that a U.S. failure to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA) before Iran's June presidential election would help conservative hard-liners to win the election. Indeed, on Saturday, June 19, the conservative Ebrahim Raisi was elected as the new President of Iran.€ €
A new U.S. military training document obtained exclusively by The Intercept places socialists in the same "terrorist ideological category" as neo-nazis, worsening long-standing€ progressive fears that a federal crackdown on "domestic terrorism"€ would just as likely be used to target leftists who want a truly democratic society as to thwart far-right extremists who favor racist authoritarianism.
"Whoever is directing the Navy anti-terror curriculum would rather vilify the left than actually protect anything. Despite the fact that the most prominent threat is domestic, right-wing terror."—Unnamed military official
A bipartisan group of 21 lawmakers on Tuesday called on President Joe Biden to swiftly reinstate constraints on the use of landmines tossed out by the Trump administration and put the U.S. on a "definitive path" to joining an international treaty banning the use and stockpiling of the weapons.
"It is the right thing to do for our country, for the world, and for our men and women in uniform," the signatories, members of both the House and Senate, wrote (pdf) to Biden.
Marine mammal experts this week expressed deep concern over the potentially devastating effects of the U.S. Navy's recent detonation of 40,000 pounds of explosives off the Atlantic coast of Florida on sea life, while progressive observers blasted what they called the government's misplaced spending priorities.
"Some smaller species of marine mammals would be expected to die within one to two kilometers of the blast, and... [others] would suffer injury including hearing loss out to 10 kilometers."—Michael Jasny, NRDC
Documents obtained by the New York Times show that four Saudi operatives known to have taken part in the gruesome murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 received paramilitary training from an Arkansas-based private security firm under a contract approved by the U.S. State Department.
"When the U.S. approves training for a dictator's soldiers and guards, the U.S. is investing in the violent henchmen of a brutal leader."—Sunjeev Bery, Freedom Forward
Concerning the Finders cult — the elusive Washington, D.C.-based outfit whose antics and ties we began examining in Part 1 of this series — one set of documents in particular held the most explosive allegations made against the group and against the CIA for allegedly covering the story up. Despite their contents, almost no corporate press ever quoted from these documents or addressed the concerns they raise. This article will attempt to remedy that deficit of coverage by fully exploring what the documents have to say.
Sometimes it is worth stating the obvious. The United Kingdom does not have a coast in the Black Sea. British warships are not infesting the Black Sea out of a peaceful intent, and there is no cause for them to be entering disputed waters close to anybody’s coast. This is not a question of freedom of navigation under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. There is nowhere that a British warship can be heading from the UK under the right of innocent passage that would require it to pass through coastal waters by Crimea. The Black Sea is famously a cul-de-sac.
Eritrea sent troops to Tigray after the Ethiopian military launched an offensive in November in response to attacks on federal government bases by regional forces. Eritrea denied for months that its troops were in Tigray, but later acknowledged their presence while denying they were responsible for abuses.
Their sons moved from Cologne to the war in Syria. They kept slaves and rose up the ranks of Islamic State leadership. Their parents would send them care packages with popcorn and Kalashnikov magazines.
The listing is no longer available on the FPDS. Hadnagy did not respond to an emailed question asking if he requested the removal.
Another FBI contract has disappeared from FPDS recently. This one involves cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which also sells an analytics product. While Motherboard previously viewed the relevant listing on the FPDS, it is no longer available.
But the band of [Internet] sleuths and hardcore supporters, once generally dismissed as fringe conspiracists, have nonetheless dedicated much of their lives to their cause of "freeing" her, spreading their concerns online under the ever-present #FreeBritney hashtag and winning over a number of celebrities and public figures. A New York Times documentary highlighted their cause earlier this year, drawing attention to the movement from beyond the avid Spears fanbase.
So for many of the campaigners, Wednesday -- when Spears is expected to speak at a California court hearing, potentially ending a years-long silence on the matter -- feels like a day of reckoning.
World leaders have pledged to limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius this century, but their current policies will heat the world by almost 3 C, according to Germany-based research group Climate Action Tracker. A study published in the journal Nature in May found that a global temperature rise of 3 C would lead to an "abrupt jump" in the pace of Antarctic ice loss that would, in turn, trigger "rapid and unstoppable" sea-level rise.
A second study, published in June in the journal Science Advances, found that an ice shelf that supports the 175,000-square-kilometer (68,000-square-mile) Pine Island Glacier is breaking up into the water faster and faster. The glacier is responsible for more than a quarter of Antarctica's contribution to global sea level rise and will melt faster if it collapses into warm waters.
As the oceans grow increasingly acidic — a particularly dangerous side effect of greenhouse gas emissions — the global food web could collapse and humanity could face utter devastation within just a few decades, according to an alarming new paper.
The paper, penned by two entrepreneurs and researchers working to provide access to clean water who are affiliated with Edinburgh University, argues that even a slight increase in acidity will cause profound changes to the ocean’s ecosystems — changes that will then have global ramifications down the line.
The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in a draft report seen exclusively by AFP.
But dangerous thresholds are closer than once thought, and dire consequences stemming from decades of unbridled carbon pollution are unavoidable in the short term.
The Netherlands-based Stop Ecocide Foundation, along with a coalition of environmentalists, lawyers and human rights advocates, has been pushing since 2017 to make ecocide a crime prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. The court currently prosecutes just four offenses: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and war crimes.
If the campaign to criminalize ecocide succeeds, the international court would be able to hold accountable those most responsible for major ecological harms, including business and government leaders.
The country has suffered a series of successive droughts since 2014, leading to poor harvests. Last year, swarms of desert locusts swept through East Africa. Earlier this year two tropical storms appeared to bring some drought relief, but the rainfall, combined with warm temperatures, created ideal conditions for an infestation of fall armyworms, which destroy maize.
“There is no conflict driving these hunger numbers in the south,” Beasley said, referring to the main cause of severe food insecurity affecting other countries. “It is strictly climate change; it is strictly drought upon drought upon drought.”
It just takes common sense to see that the climate change math of the Biden administration is not adding up: You cannot approve massive oil drilling projects if you want to swiftly reach net-zero emissions.
Agence France-Presse reported Monday on the contents of a leaked draft of a United Nations intergovernmental climate panel report which warned that devastating effects of a warming world are set to hit far sooner than previously thought, with impacts including an additional tens of millions of people facing hunger by 2050.
"This is a warning of existential risk. Of survival. Of collapse," said climate movement Extinction Rebellion in response to AFP's reporting on what the draft contained.
Erratic rainfall, locusts and cyclones are causing havoc in desperate Madagascar. Now the climate crisis adds to the misery.
A team of international lawyers has unveiled a definition of “ecocide” that, if adopted, would treat environmental destruction on a par with crimes against humanity.
After six months of deliberation, a panel of experts yesterday published the core text of a legal document that would criminalise “ecocide” if taken on by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Over 320 advocacy organizations on Wednesday sent President Joe Biden a letter about his upcoming selection of a key federal regulatory official, which could be among the most monumental decisions he makes to address the climate emergency.
"We need a strong climate advocate on FERC helping to steer the commission away from its past as a rubber stamp for the fossil fuel industry."—Mitch Jones, Food & Water Watch
Climate action campaigners on Wednesday demanded that the U.K. government reject plans by two fossil fuel giants to develop a large new oil field in the North€ Sea off the coast of Scotland's Shetland Islands—which have been announced as officials prepare for a global conference on the need to end fossil fuel extraction to mitigate the climate crisis.
"A managed phase out of oil and gas is necessary to protect people who work in this industry, their communities, and the climate."€ —Caroline Rance, FOE Scotland
The Global North: Normalcy Returns
In the United States new daily infections, which peaked in early January, had plummeted 96% by June 16th. The daily death toll also dropped — by 92% — and the consequences were apparent. Big-city streets were bustling again, as shops and restaurants became ever busier. Americans were shedding their reluctance to travel by plane or train, as schools and universities prepared to resume “live instruction” in the fall. Zoom catch-ups were yielding to socializing the old-fashioned way.
As can be seen the number of people reporting that they were on layoffs soared during the shutdown last spring. It peaked at over 18 million in April of last year and then fell sharply through the summer. It was down to 4.6 million by September. It continued to fall through the rest of the year, but it was still at 2.7 million in January. Since then it has dropped by roughly one-third to just over 1.8 million in May.
This is still considerably higher than what we would see in a healthy economy, the figure had been around 1.0 million in 2014 and 2015, and had been under 800,000 just before the pandemic hit. But the figure is not extraordinary for a recession. The number of people reporting they were on temporary layoffs in the Great Recession peaked at just over 1.9 million in September of 2009.
It is a familiar benefit of the doubt: Billionaires may give a lot of cash to politicians, but they are hardly ever reported on as if they are explicitly corrupt. They may leverage their philanthropic empires to boost their business interests, but they are almost never depicted as crooked. They may pay a lower tax rate than everyone else, but they are rarely depicted by the media as outright scofflaws. Instead, we get a lot of talk about this being “just the way things work.”
Please understand that I am not accusing Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, or anyone else of actually committing crimes — if I was, an army of attorneys and PR flacks would already be knocking down the Daily Poster’s door.
I am simply pointing out that in the same political arena where the indigent are regularly tried and convicted in the press, few are daring to even consider that anything slightly shady might go down on billionaires’ tax returns. Few are daring to ask how many of these schemes existed in the gray area between legal tax avoidance and impermissible tax evasion. Even fewer are suggesting the findings should prompt any kind of government probe of sophisticated tax shelters and circumvention tactics.
China accounted for roughly 65 percent of global Bitcoin production last year, per the BBC, with a crackdown on cryptocurrency mining causing the token to stumble in recent months.
On Monday, China's central bank said it had recently summoned several major banks and payments companies to call on them to take tougher action over the trading of cryptocurrencies.
Banks were told to not provide products or services such as trading, clearing and settlement for cryptocurrency transactions, the People's Bank of China said in a statement.
For 15 years political parties have blocked action on stopping money laundering through Australia. Labor is planning to bring on a vote today for a parliamentary inquiry that could finally end the stalemate and ensure the nation is no longer a haven for the proceeds of foreign crime and corruption. Nathan Lynch reports.
At its peak, White Square had $440 million in assets under management, but suffered double digit percent losses on its positions shorting Gamestop. The Financial Times reported the fund insisted its closure was unrelated to the rally, and a person close to the fund told the paper that it had earned back "a fair share" of the losses. Thanks to a short squeeze orchestrated in part by Wall Street Bets and hordes of online retail investors, firms shorting Gamestop in anticipation of the stock’s fall suffered collective billions of dollars in losses as the price shot from $20 to nearly $500 early this year. Other big funds that suffered major losses on bets against GameStop include Melvin Capital, Light Street Capital, and short seller Citron.
Hours after election results delivered India Walton a solid lead in her Democratic primary bid for mayor of New York state’s second-largest city, the candidate was asked by a Buffalo television anchor to explain her ideology.
And this un-American backdrop as the country celebrated freedom with the declaration of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. It’s a commemoration of June 19, 1865 when slaves in Galveston, Texas, were told they had been freed more than two years earlier by President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Oh, the shame of it.
Republicans in Congress, but for 14 in the House, extended a hand toward Blacks by voting overwhelmingly for the new holiday. But they stabbed them in the back with the other hand by restricting their ability to express their freedom by voting without constraint.
Take the latest bipartisan establishment disciplining of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), the U.S. House’s most courageous and eloquent member, for saying this: “We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.”
Omar dared, in the words of The New York Times, “to compare Israel and the United States to Hamas and the Taliban.”
As with the G7, Joe Biden, seeking to restore alliances that had been undermined by Trump, was the centre of attention, while BoJo was again the side show.
BoJo’s visit to Brussels peaked immediately and went downhill instantly after his arrival.
We look at the early results from New York’s highly anticipated primary election Tuesday. In the heated mayoral race, Brooklyn borough president and former New York police officer Eric Adams is leading, but it will likely take several weeks to announce a winner with the new ranked-choice voting system. Civil rights attorney Maya Wiley is currently in second place, followed closely by former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia. 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang has conceded after receiving less than 12% of the tallied vote even after the media covered him as a front-runner. “My sense is that Adams will probably prevail,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who adds it has been largely overlooked that Adams and his billionaire backers are big supporters of charter schools, which could shape the city’s public school system.
After Senate Republicans unanimously blocked debate on a far-reaching and popular voting rights bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont late Tuesday joined the chorus demanding an end to the 60-vote legislative filibuster and slammed the GOP for remaining "loyal to the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election."
"Now is the time for majority rule in the Senate. We must end the filibuster, pass sweeping voting rights legislation, and protect our democracy."—Sen. Bernie Sanders
Not that you asked, but I’m fine, thanks, how are you? Elated, energized, depressed or indifferent? Lately, it feels as if the country is going through a lengthy bout of bipolar disorder. Each highlight of our glorious post-Trump, semi-post-pandemic lives is countered by moments so dismal it sometimes feels as if we may never come out of the hole of anger, despair, and bigotry he and his followers created. But we can.
New York's second-largest city is poised next year to have its first socialist mayor after community activist and healthcare worker India Walton upset Byron Brown, the establishment Democratic leader who has run Buffalo for four terms.€
Walton did not hesitate to embrace the label of socialist in the early morning hours Wednesday as election results showed her with 52% of the vote compared to Brown's 45%, with 92% of precincts reporting.€
The American political system is complicated, but fixing it doesn’t have to be.
As Senate Republicans use the filibuster to block debate on the most sweeping voting rights bill considered by Congress in decades, we look at what is in the bill and the next steps forward. Elizabeth Hira, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Democracy Program, describes the For the People Act as “a massive democracy reform package” that seeks to address systemic flaws in U.S. elections. “This bill creates a wholesale opportunity for us to fix all of the things that have been wrong in our democracy.” We also speak with Reverend William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, who says Republican opposition to the bill exposes their cruelty. “They are committed to keeping alive voter suppression that started with the Southern strategy. They are today’s Strom Thurmond,” says Barber.
Peace and human rights advocates joined the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday in their annual condemnation of the United States' disastrous economic embargo against Cuba.
For the 29th straight year, the members of the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the 60-year U.S. economic blockade on Cuba. This year, 184 nations voted in favor of the resolution, while the U.S. and Israel voted against it. Three nations—Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine—abstained.
Last week, an overwhelming majority of Congress voted to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Just days later, many of the same politicians voted to block the For the People Act and continue to uphold the filibuster and resist other legislative actions to protect our democracy, lift up poor rural and urban areas, raise wages, and expand social programs for the poor. They are happy to "honor" freedom on paper, while continuing to shackle the possibility of a democracy that works for all people, especially people of color and the poor. When we see such transparent political cynicism on display, we must call it out.
Imagine being released from prison to serve the rest of your sentence at home. You begin your reintegration back to society. You get a job, rent an apartment, maybe even go back to school. You reconnect with your family. You fully abide by every single regulation related to your home confinement.
What the hell happened during yesterday’s daylong Senate voting rights drama, in which the outcome was almost entirely predictable? Anything we didn’t know going in?
Activists with the national Poor People's Campaign were arrested Wednesday after blocking a street in front of the Hart Senate building in Washington, D.C. to demand passage of the For the People Act, a popular voting rights expansion bill that Republicans successfully filibustered just 24 hours earlier.
"We don't need compromise and capitulation. Pass the bill! Break the filibuster!"—Rev. William Barber
Why did President Biden place Cesar Chavez’s bronze bust in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day—27 years after his passing? Why did 17 million Americans support his boycott of California table grapes in 1975? Is it because the genesis of Chavez’s activism was community organizing and voter engagement? He was a civil rights leader before becoming a farm worker leader, and he embraced a transformational vision of trade unionism. With Republican lawmakers in many red states enacting laws to thwart voting by people of color, this is a good time to examine Chavez’s roots.
West Virginia, a state first established in defiance of slavery, has recently become ground zero in the fight for voting rights. In an early June op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Democratic Senator Joe Manchin vowed to maintain the Senate filibuster, while opposing the For the People Act, a bill to expand voting rights. Last week, after mounting pressure and a leaked Zoom recording with billionaire donors, he showed potential willingness to move on the filibuster and proposed a “compromise” on voting rights. Nonetheless, his claim that the filibuster had been critical to protecting the “rights of Democrats in the past” and his pushback on important voting-rights protections requires scrutiny.
Janine Jackson interviewed Clean Creatives’ Duncan Meisel about oil industry greenwashing for the June 11, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
These wealthy billionaire families are less focused on starting businesses and more on “dynasty-building” and rent extraction — passing wealth on over multiple generations in a neo-feudal way. With this system being solidified, today’s billionaires will be tomorrow’s dynastic families. If the pattern persists for twenty years on the current trajectory, we will have even greater concentrations of hereditary wealth and power dominating our politics, economy, media, and philanthropy. Looks like feudalism, smells like feudalism.
In his book, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop,” Mr. Drutman proposes increasing the number of major political parties in the U.S. The two-party system “turns politics from a forum where we resolve disagreements into a battlefield where we must win and they must lose,” he writes.
The history of the Black community in Canada is, for many reasons, unique from the Black legacy in the United States. While less than 10 per cent of the Black American collective is foreign-born, Statistics Canada reports that less than 10 per cent of Black Canadians were born to parents also born in Canada (compared to 58.4 per cent of Canada's total population).
As of 2016, around half of Canada's Black population identified as immigrants, with the single largest period of Black immigration being 2001 to 2010. These Black immigrants come mostly from countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria and Ethiopia — nations with their own unique cultures, faiths and traditions. This does not in any way make the Black Canadian experience less than the African American experience, but it does make it different.
According to a Department of Justice press release, “the United States seized 33 websites used by the Iranian Islamic Radio and Television Union (IRTVU) and three websites operated by Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), in violation of U.S. sanctions.”
A U.S. military training document describes the political philosophy of socialism – a relatively mainstream term in politics around the world – as a “terrorist ideology” akin to neo-Nazism.
The document, obtained by The Intercept news website, was used by the U.S. navy. It was entitled: Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations, and aimed at some members of the navy’s internal police, the outlet reported.
In Miller-Idriss's work as the director of American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, she has found that one way to combat conspiracy theories is to reach people through a process called attitudinal inoculation. With this technique, researchers strive to teach people how propaganda, misinformation, and conspiracy theories function so that when they come across suspicious claims from dubious sources, they’re appropriately skeptical.
Below Teen Vogue takes a look at some of the most popular conspiracy theories of the past 50 years.
Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.
A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.
As you may have heard, tons of politicians are rushing to introduce new and different bills to undermine or repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- a bill that is rightly credited for enabling a more open internet for freedom of speech. As you may recall, in early 2018 we had the first actual reform to Section 230 in decades -- FOSTA. It was signed into law on April 11th, with tons of politicians insisting it was critical to protecting people online. We had so many quotes from politicians (and a whole campaign from Hollywood stars like Amy Schumer) claiming (falsely) that without FOSTA, children could be "bought and sold" online.
The city had just unveiled the mural two days before the incident, according to law enforcement, and paid north of $16,000 for its creation.
Jerich could now be subject to heightened penalties imposed by Florida's new GOP-backed "anti-riot" law signed back in April. As WPEC's Sam Kerrigan noted: "When it comes to this case, the key here is that this new anti-riot law also stops someone from damaging historic property or a memorial. And under the law, this new Pride mural in Delray Beach, here, qualifies as a memorial because it's dedicated to the lives lost in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando."
In a landmark ruling for student free speech in the digital era, the United State Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a Pennsylvania high school violated a cheerleader's First Amendment right to freedom of speech when it disciplined her following a profanity-laden social media post.
"The school went too far, and I'm glad that the Supreme Court agrees."—Brandi Levy, student
Justice Stephen Breyer delivered the majority opinion this morning, upholding an appeals court decision from the Third Circuit. He said that student Brandi Levy — identified as B.L. in court documents — shouldn’t have been suspended from her cheerleading team for a vulgar post about school sports. “While public schools may have a special interest in regulating some off-campus student speech, the special interests offered by the school are not sufficient to overcome B. L.’s interest in free expression in this case,” he wrote.
MPs and anti-censorship campaigners have warned that the British government's Online Safety Bill "mistakes the medium for the message" and will result in algorithms censoring anyone who posts something on social media that could get a Silicon Valley company into trouble.
The newly formed group, under the slogan "legal to type, legal to say", is made up of David Davis MP, campaign group Index on Censorship, media law barrister Gavin Millar QC, and others.
They warn that the Online Safety Bill's "duty of care" approach to tech platform regulation will crush the rights of Britons to speak freely and safely online.
The Senate has passed a new bill which gives the e-safety commissioner sweeping new powers to force platforms to remove abusive or violent content and block sites that refuse.
Under the bill, Ofcom will be given the power to block access to sites and fine companies which do not protect users from harmful content up to €£18m, or 10% of annual global turnover, whichever is the greater.
The nation's public schools have no general power to punish students for what they say off campus, the Supreme Court said Wednesday.
The 8-1 ruling broadened First Amendment protections in an era when school children are in nearly constant contact with each other through social media and text messages. The decision did not protect all off-campus expression, but the court suggested the exceptions, to be worked out in future cases, would be limited.
When the Turkish government asked Wikipedia to take down references to reports that Turkey was supporting militants in Syria, the online encyclopedia refused—and had its reach to more than eighty million Turkish residents cut off. While that would have been a major hit for many online media platforms, Wikipedia was uniquely positioned to weather the storm, battling in court for nearly three years until Turkey’s highest court ruled in January 2020 that the government’s ban violated free-expression rights.
Wikipedia’s success was thanks to a series of intentional organizational decisions, said Katherine Maher, who stepped down in April from her post as the Wikimedia Foundation’s CEO and executive director and who is now a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s newly established Democracy & Tech Initiative. At a time when major digital platforms from Facebook and Twitter to TikTok are facing censorship around the world—particularly in countries like India, Russia, and China—Maher believes for-profit media companies can learn from Wikipedia’s example.
By any accounting, the number of innocent people Stalin caused to be murdered, particularly in the decade after the war, dwarfs that of Hitler’s victims, military or civilian. And as so many books have done before it, “Stalin’s War” makes abundantly clear that the dictator was, if anything, even more coldly reptilian than Hitler. Stalin's duplicity and rapacity were exercised on a scale not seen in the world since Genghis Khan, and yet for an entire generation subsisting on Western-produced wartime propaganda, he was stern-but-kindly “Uncle Joe,” sending millions of his people to the fight.
But over its 26 years in print, Hong Kong's Apple Daily became something rarer - a newspaper unafraid to be openly critical of the Chinese state and a standard bearer for the pro-democracy movement.
Its role as one of Hong Kong's most vocal defenders won fans, but also contributed to its eventual demise.
Last year, its outspoken founder Jimmy Lai was arrested and jailed under a string of charges just months after the imposition of a new national security law.
The first person to be charged under Hong Kong's controversial national security law pleaded not guilty as he stood trial on Wednesday.
Tong Ying-kit was arrested on July 1, 2020, hours after the law came into effect, for allegedly driving his motorbike into a crowd of police officers while holding a pro-Hong Kong independence flag.
The 24-year-old was refused bail and was assigned a panel of three judges rather than a jury, a staple of Hong Kong's common law practices prior to the security law.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) deplores the shutdown, announced on Wednesday, June 23rd, of Apple Daily, one of the last major Chinese-language media critical of the Beijing regime, which follows the freezing of its financial assets imposed by the Hong Kong government.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) submitted an urgent appeal to the United Nations (UN) concerning the alarming raid of the headquarters of Hong Kong media outlet, Apple Daily by the police, the arrests of five senior staff and the freezing of the media outlet’s assets last Thursday.
Hong Kong's pro-democracy tabloid Apple Daily said it will print its last edition on Thursday, after a tumultuous year in which it was raided by police and its tycoon owner and other staff were arrested under a new national security law.
The end of the popular 26-year-old tabloid, which mixes pro-democracy discourse with racy celebrity gossip and investigations of those in power, has escalated alarm over media freedom and other rights in the Chinese-ruled city.
Hundreds of police had raided Apple Daily last week in a national security probe in which senior executives of the newspaper were arrested over allegations of "collusion with a foreign country."
Five Apple Daily executives were arrested, making it the first time a new national security law was used to arrest top editors of a media agency.
The newspaper announced today (June 23) (link in Chinese) that its last print edition will come out tomorrow, while its online version will stop updating after midnight today. The closure comes three days earlier than the company had planned, with the decision based on concerns about the safety of its staff.
All the Senate Republicans, and all but fourteen of the Republicans in the House, voted in favor of establishing the holiday.€ Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mt., released a statement before the vote that captures Republican concerns that are festering within their ranks: “This is an effort by the Left to … celebrate identity politics as part of its larger efforts to make Critical Race Theory the reigning ideology of our country.” As a result,€ Republicans have begun a national campaign opposed to teaching Critical Race Theory in public schools and in some state universities.
However, Michael Eric Dyson, author of€ Long Time Coming, told MSNBC that June 19 as a national holiday would not have happened without CRT€ moving people to grapple€ with race in our history and having to deal with it now.
The park had long been the center for the avant-garde. The beats gathered there in the 1940s and 1950s, as did folk musicians of all levels of talent from the well-known to the Johnny-(and Jane) come-lately guitar strummer. But it was in the 1960s and early 1970s that the park skyrocketed in popularity among the swelling numbers of baby boomers who had come of age and who created the “turn on, tune in drop out” lifestyle, and variations on that theme and serious members of the Vietnam-era peace movement.
Being in the park during the 1960s and 1970s was like living the dream of the counterculture. On any afternoon during the warmer months, the park would swell with kids from all over the five boroughs of New York City and from New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester County and beyond. The fragrance of marijuana permeated the air while kids played guitars at all levels of competency and wine flasks were a common clothing statement, as was hippie garb. Bands and accomplished musicians dotted the park as they do now, and their sounds often mingled with one another. Everywhere there were soap-box speakers and demonstrations and political gatherings and marches often took place in the park or began or ended there as they often do today. The park was the first time I heard the wonderful sound of steel drums that became a standard instrument of Reggae.
Last year I predicted that as a ploy to get more support for police officers, the media would frame a defunded police force as the reason for a rising crime rate. The headlines by the same media companies who claim to be woke read daily about crime. The media intends to scare the public. But their plan has hit a hiccup. The police are the ones scared, not the public.
What am I referring to? The movement by police to cancel themselves and go on leave! While this did create the shortage of cops the media fear mongered about it looks a little different when the cops walked out on their comrades.
From forced hydration, feeding, and urinary catherization to involuntary blood draws and the use of restraints, hunger strikes over poor conditions at immigrant detention facilities across the United States have been met with "cruelty and coercion," according to a first-of-its-kind report published Wednesday.
The report, entitled Behind Closed Doors: Abuse and Retaliation Against Hunger Strikers in U.S. Immigration Detention (pdf), is based on over 10,000 pages of previously undisclosed documents obtained via public records request as well as interviews with formerly detained individuals who participated in such strikes during the Covid-19 pandemic last year.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a significant€ blow to the rights of agricultural workers to organize, ruling 6-3 that a California regulation granting union representatives€ access to farms amounted€ to an uncompensated government taking of farm owners' private property.
"While Cedar Point is devastating for California€ agricultural workers, its impact on others workers may be minimal—but only because they already have so few rights on the job."—Samir Sonti, CUNY
When the COVID-19 pandemic bore down on Navajo Nation in early 2020, Dixon noticed a distinct divide between her regular listeners at home on the reservation and those outside of it. As Dixon worked on translating public health announcements and taking calls on the air, she noticed an uptick in listeners tuning in from Florida, Maine, Alaska, Louisiana, and Montana. Those callers away from home were hungry for local updates to know what was going on within the Nation — an ambiguous virus that no one understood thoroughly just yet was spreading. People wanted to know if their families were safe and just how transmission was occurring in a place where households are far flung across vast swaths of desert. But Dixon realized as her local listeners, specifically elders, called in that they wanted something different from her: they did not want to hear about the virus whatsoever, no matter how high the rates of infection in Navajo Nation were.
Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, is living up to its name. The tech company will launch a four-day work week next year, becoming one of the most prominent names in business to embrace the forward-looking practice as part of its post-pandemic reality.
Deliberately or not, the New York-based company is all but taunting its competitors to follow its lead: less time spent working for the same pay is a perk that’s tough to beat.
The unprecedented investigation will include compiling and reviewing decades of records to identify past boarding schools, track down known and possible burial sites at or around those schools, and find the names and tribal affiliations of students, she said.
Despite a challenging year, the European Digital Rights network has been relentlessly working to advocate for better digital policies, challenge creepy surveillance, inform and mobilise people across Europe. Read more about the need of digital rights and our impact in 2020 in our newly launched interactive Annual Report.
Historians are finding many errors in the 1619 Project but the most glaring errors are what they are not finding -- what is missing. The 1619 Project history of slavery in the U.S. doesn’t mention that the Native American tribes had slaves when the Europeans came. In fact, slavery was the custom throughout recorded history worldwide. Instead, we’re told that US history starts with the arrival of the first ships with slaves to our shores. But where exactly did these slaves come from?
The history of African slavery in the US began with US merchants purchasing them on the West Coast of Africa from Muslim slave dealers. Due to Islamic jihad, the slave pens were filled with Africans. Part of the jihad battle booty was taking the conquered people as slaves.
Now there was a reason that the slave traders were Muslim. According to Islamic doctrine, all believers must emulate the Islamic prophet Mohammed who traded slaves, wholesaled and retailed slaves, gave and received slaves as gifts. He had Arab slaves, black slaves, white slaves, Christian and Jewish slaves. He had sex slaves. Slavery is enshrined in Islamic doctrine and is still practiced today. But this part of the 1619 Project history is left out.
Most people today are ignorant of the centuries-long peril that once faced Christian Europe and which gave such urgency to John of Matha’s mission. For a thousand years between the eighth and the nineteenth centuries, Europe was in a state of ongoing war with the expanding Muslim world. Islamic armies during this period subjugated Palestine, North Africa, Spain, southern France and Sicily, effectively placing the entire Mediterranean Sea under their control. Muslim pirates would sail freely, looting ships, plundering coastal cities and most eagerly of all, capturing as many as they could to take as slaves. They did so in massive numbers, enslaving over a million until European powers would colonize northern Africa in the nineteenth century.
Not the Romans back in the dark ages. And no, not the Vikings either.
Between 1580 -1840 approximately. Recent history. Overlapping the black history of slavery. The same time in fact!
The author explains how slave girls were acquired, first during the Islamic conquests, as chattel taken from conquered people and given as spoils to warriors. Later the slave trade and piracy would supply the bodies that had been previously taken by conquest. Ayyub is quick to point out that in the Mediterranean, both Muslims and Christians traded in slaves and acquired them through pirate raids.
Only estimates, some of which vary widely, exist as to how many Africans were sold from East to North Africa. This is also due to the fact that many of the slaves perished. Scientific research concludes that about three out of four slaves died before they reached the market where they were to be sold. The causes were hunger, illness or exhaustion after long journeys.
Author N'Diaye estimates that 17 million East Africans were sold into slavery: "Most people still have the so-called Transatlantic [slave] trade by Europeans into the New World in mind. But in reality the Arab-Muslim slavery was much greater," N'diaye said.
"Eight million Africans were brought from East Africa via the Trans-Saharan route to Morocco or Egypt. A further nine million were deported to regions on the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean."
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the country's largest and most powerful unions, has said in an official resolution obtained by Motherboard that unionizing and building worker power at Amazon is the top priority moving forward. The announcement comes on Prime Day, one of Amazon's busiest days of the year.
But, so far, industry opposition from AT&T and cable have successfully sidelined the money—as EFF warned earlier this month. Now, they’re attempting to reshape how the state spends a once-in-a-generation investment of funds to eliminate the digital divide into wasteful spending and a massive subsidy that would go into the industry’s hands. Before we break down the woefully insufficient industry alternative proposals that are circulating in Sacramento, it is important we understand the nature of California’s broadband problem today, and why Governor Newsom’s proposal is a direct means of solving it.
This cannot be emphasized enough, but major industry players are discriminating against communities that would be profitable to fully serve in the long term. Why? These huge companies have opted to expand their short-term profits through discriminatory choices against the poor. That’s how California became the setting for a stark illustration of the digital divide in the pandemic: a picture of little girls doing homework in a fast food parking lot so they could access the internet. That was not in a rural market, where households are more spaced out. That was Salinas, California, a city with a population of 155,000+ people at a density of 6,490 people per square mile. There was no good reason why those little kids didn’t have cheap, fast internet at home. We should disabuse ourselves of the notion that any industry subsidy will change how they approach the business of deploying broadband access.
Gary Shapiro, the CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, said at a conference Tuesday that while social media platforms have responsibilities to the public, repealing Section 230 would violate the Constitution’s free-speech protections.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects social media platforms from legal responsibility for the third-party content posted to their website.
I had many reasons, but, many of them are better left discussed internally.
Of those that I can speak about, chiefly among them is a matter of identity. A couple of months ago, Freenode was the world’s FOSS IRC hub. Today its identity is heading towards a more general purpose network. While the new identity is one rooted in freedom of expression, if you’ll recall when I first joined the effort it was to empower the targets of serial defamation and to eventually disempower and remove the people and structures in FOSS communities that participate in it, enable it, cover it up, and propagate it, often in serial fashion. That included some of the ex-staff at Freenode prior to things blowing up earlier in the year, as well as some of the current staff at OFTC.
This is regrettable to me, as, in response to things completely beyond my control, I have observed that the majority of the FOSS community has relocated to either OFTC or Libera; effectively unifying and emboldening the network of abusers I sought to remove, who are continuing even today to engage in vicious targeting of the staff at Freenode in a cyclical arrangement, and with a convenient cover narrative about what happened. Instead of the real reason, which is that their repeated behaviour over years caught up to them and dislocated the majority of the open source world as a result, they now can cite events that they themselves antagonized and orchestrated in some cases, which just adds further insult to injury.
[...]
What’s next is July 4th, and an awesome BBQ being planned. At some point between then and now, me and my puppy are going out to a closed fence park where he can run himself stupid chasing a dirty tennis ball. Then I am considering retheming the site. Then looking at hopefully devoting more time to SURRO Linux development. Couple of events to go to along the way.
We've written so many stories about how you don't own what you've bought any more due to software controls, DRM, and ridiculous contracts, and it keeps getting worse. The latest such example involves Peloton, which is most known for its extremely expensive stationary bikes with video screens, so that you can take classes (usually on a monthly subscription). I will admit that I don't quite understand the attraction to them, but so many people swear by them. The company also has branched out into extremely expensive treadmills with the same basic concept, but that product has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately, after a six year old child died in an accident with the device (for what it's worth, that article links to a page on the Peloton site where the article says Peloton posted an open letter to its customers about the accident, but the letter is no longer at that link).
Way back in the ancient history of 2019, famed director Steven Spielberg became something of the front man for the aging Hollywood crowd that sees streaming services as somehow deficient when he announced plans to push the Academy to disallow Oscar nominations for films that appeared first on streaming services, arguing they should instead be considered for Emmys. Spielberg's plans were for naught, however, as the Academy refused to ban stream-first films from nominations. This led to Spielberg, directly and through mouthpieces, walking back his very clear intentions so as to pretend that he felt differently than was the reality. I'll stress again that all of this occurred all of two years ago.
Peloton’s Treadmills cost between $2,500 and $4,000. They’ve also injured 70 people and killed one child. Peloton issued a recall on the treadmills after an investigation by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Those who kept the Tread+ got a nasty shock in their inbox recently: After the treadmill downloaded an update Peloton said was designed to make the device safer, users reported they could no longer run on it without paying Peloton a $39.99 per month subscription fee.
The deal with Amazon, whose Fire TV devices have over 50 million active users, could help NBCUniversal’s one-year-old streaming service boost its subscriber base as it competes in a heavily saturated streaming market. Though Comcast said in late April that 42 million users had signed up for the service, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that fewer than 10 million have paid for the service, which starts at $4.99 a month for an ad-supported subscription tier.
The European Commission said on Tuesday, that it has opened a formal investigation into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers, and advertising technology services.
The investigation underscores European concerns about Google’s dominance in the online advertising industry and whether it’s exploiting its data advantage to cement its position in the display ad market, which the EU estimates is worth $24 billion annually.
“I’m trying to figure out why one of the biggest offenders, of Big Tech, has mysteriously avoided the scrutiny of this committee and this broad swath of bills that seek to radically rewrite our antitrust law,” Massie said, waving a draft of the bill that he said was shared with Microsoft before it was public. “I’m talking about Microsoft.”
Microsoft was given advance copy of major antitrust legislation, a document given to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie by a whistleblower appeared to show.
Unsurprisingly, patent owners keep trying to convince the Supreme Court those post-grant challenges are unconstitutional. This week, they failed again. In United States v. Arthrex, the Supreme Court held that the administrative patent judges who preside over post-grant reviews were constitutionally appointed. That’s a relief: as we and Engine Advocacy explained in our amicus brief, the post-grant review system created has helped drive down the cost and number of patent infringement lawsuits clogging federal courts, raising consumer prices, and smothering innovation.
But the way the Supreme Court reached that outcome is a surprise: by holding the Director of the Patent Office formally accountable for each and every post-grant review decision. That may not make much of a practical difference, but symbolically, it is a crushing blow to the myth of the Patent Office as a place where technical expertise rather than political power rules. The Supreme Court’s willingness to say so could be empowering as long as we are willing to use political processes to hold the Patent Office accountable for the hugely consequential decisions it makes.
In Arthrex, the future of the post-grant review system was at stake. As we’ve written many times, this system allows granted patents to be challenged for claiming things that were known or obvious, and therefore cannot qualify as patentable inventions. We need this system because members of the public get no chance to challenge the original decision to grant a patent. That decision is made by a patent examiner. When an examiner rejects a patent, the applicant gets to request further examination and to appeal (either at the Patent Office or in federal district court). But when an examiner grants a patent, there’s no chance for the rest of us to request further examination or appeal before the patent goes into effect.
Police in Japan have arrested three individuals who uploaded so-called 'fast movies' to YouTube. These edits of mainstream movie titles, that use copyrighted content to reveal entire plotlines in around 10 minutes, are said to discourage people from watching the originals, costing the industry hundreds of millions in lost revenue.
The Premier League has obtained an order that allows it to compel Irish ISPs to block illegal streams of matches. The Premier League obtained its first blocking order in 2019 and in the High Court Tuesday, Justice David Barniville approved a renewed and enhanced order for the coming season, allowing the sports league to combat techniques used to evade previous orders.
YouTube won its latest copyright-infringement challenge after Europe's top court said online platforms are not liable for users uploading unauthorised works unless the platforms failed to take quick action to remove or block access to the content.
The case marks the latest development in a long-running battle between Europe's $1 trillion creative industry and online platforms, with the former seeking redress for unauthorised works that are uploaded.
The vote marked the end of a noisy battle for control of Universal, which accounts for 30% or so of global recorded-music sales. In January Tencent, a Chinese media and e-commerce giant, increased its stake in the label to 20%. Earlier this month it emerged that Daniel Loeb, a New York hedge-fund billionaire, had built up a stake in Vivendi. Then on June 20th Bill Ackman, a rival hedgie, announced that his special-purpose acquisition company was to buy 10% of Universal for €3.5bn ($4.2bn), the biggest SPAC deal so far (and a particularly complex one). Vivendi will itself hang on to 10% of the label; the remaining 60% of shares will be distributed among Vivendi’s existing shareholders.
The headlines from this week's court documents, however, make it clear: "As currently stands, operators of online platforms do not, in principle, themselves make a communication to the public of copyright-protected content illegally posted online by users of those platforms.
"However, those operators do make such a communication in breach of copyright where they contribute, beyond merely making those platforms available, to giving access to such content to the public."
The interpretation seems to be that if YouTube and others fail to take action if notified about such matters, they can be held liable.
