kstart provides the programs k5start and krenew, which are similar to the Kerberos kinit program with some extra support for running programs with separate credentials and running as a daemon.
This is the first full release in nearly six years. The major change is new support for the Linux kafs module, which is a native Linux implementation of the AFS protocol that David Howells and others have been working on for years. It has an entirely different way of thinking about tokens and credential isolation built on Linux keyrings rather than the AFS token concept (which sometimes uses keyrings, but in a different way, and sometimes uses other hacks).
This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
This article explains how to create users on your Ubuntu machine. Let’s start with a brief explanation of groups as they are central to the process.
Groups help define the permissions and access for each user account. They determine who has access to files, directories, settings, devices, and more. Finding out the groups to which a user account belongs helps give you a better understanding of that user’s access (and troubleshoot when things don’t function as expected).
In a default desktop installation, the first user on the system is considered an administrator. That user is a member of various groups. The groups command shows the groups to which a user belongs.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss the best privacy focused search engine. Who reigns supreme? Let’s find out together. Then we’re going to head to Jill’s Museum to see what treasure of hardware history Jill has to show us. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Encryption is incredibly useful tool but don't get that tool confused for something that it isn't useful for, while encryption can stop people snooping at your data packets if you just let anyone in no encrypted chat will protect your secrets
The kernel turns 30, flagship phones get even more locked down, great news for running Linux on M1 Macs, AMP looks to be exactly what we thought it was, KDE Korner, and more.
Linux Kernel 5.14 was released with latest features and new hardware support. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu.
Version 5.14 of the Linux kernel shipped over the weekend, featuring new protections against the Spectre and Meltdown attacks that threatened Intel CPU security.
A secret feature enables developers to create memory areas available only to the application that owns them, blocking even the kernel from monitoring them. This is useful to hold sensitive data, such as encryption
Linux celebrated its birthday on August 25, 2021. In its 30-year history, it has become one of the most formative projects of the open source movement.
Linux block subsystem maintainer and I/O expert Jens Axboe sent in his set of feature pull requests today for the Linux 5.15 kernel cycle.
In addition to the block subsystem changes submitted for the Linux 5.15 merge window, Jens Axboe also sent in a separate pull request for this new kernel cycle to provide support for bio recycling. In turn this can enhance the Linux I/O limits by around 10%.
The feature pull request mailed out today adds support for bio recycling in order to quickly reuse the bio for high IOPS scenarios rather than having to go back through the slab allocator. This cache though only works for polled I/O scenarios due to not being IRQ safe. With less than 200 lines of new code, this bio recycling is wired up and support added to IO_uring for using this bio allocation cache.
After finally publishing about our Linux 5.12 contributions and even though Linux 5.14 was just released yesterday, it’s hopefully still time to talk about our contributions to Linux 5.13. Check out the LWN articles about the merge window to get the bigger picture about this release: part 1 and part 2.
In terms of Bootlin contributions, this was a much more quiet release than Linux 5.12, with just 28 contributions.
These are rough notes. A service team was debugging a performance issue and noticed it coincided with a high rate of paging. I was asked to help, and used a variety of performance tools to solve this including those that use eBPF and Ftrace. This is a rough post to share this old but good case study of using these tools, and to help justify their further development. No editing, spell checking, or comments. Mostly screenshots. ## 1. Problem Statement The microservice managed and processed large files, including encrypting them and then storing them on S3. The problem was that large files, such as 100 Gbytes, seemed to take forever to upload. Hours. Smaller files, as large as 40 Gbytes, were relatively quick, only taking minutes. A cloud-wide monitoring tool, Atlas, showed a high rate of paging for the larger file uploads:
Based on the recently released Linux 5.14 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.14 kernel is here to clean up the i915 Intel OpenGL graphics driver, clean and move the drivers for sp8870 and other av7110 cards in the upstream tree, adjusts the cleaning up script of the Renesas xHCI driver, and removes a r8188eu file.
It also adjust the cleaning up of the btqca driver since it was renamed upstream, cleans up a dts file that contained a blob-loading feature for a new Qualcomm ARM64 variant, disables another blog-loading feature from a new Emulex Fibre Channel Target driver, and cleans up new blob names from the adreno, amdgpu, and btrtl drivers.
It looks like the real-time (RT) patches for the Linux kernel are almost to the point of being fully upstream in the mainline Linux kernel. Merged for Linux 5.15 is the PREEMPT_RT locking code that represents a bulk of the outstanding RT patches.
Noted earlier this month was how the PREEMPT_RT locking code appeared ready for Linux 5.15 with it being queued up as part of the "sched/core" changes. Sure enough, on the first day of this Linux 5.15 merge window the pull request was sent out and already merged by Linus Torvalds to mainline.
Everyone’s seen the Phoronix benchmark numbers by now, and though there’s a lot of confusion over how to calculate the percentage increase between “game does did not run a year ago” and “game runs”, it seems like a couple people out there at Big Triangle are starting to take us seriously.
It looks like within the coming days that the Vulkan ray-tracing support for Mesa's "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver will be upstreamed for Mesa 21.3.
Over the past number of months RADV developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been working on Vulkan ray-tracing support for RADV, this unofficial open-source Vulkan driver for Radeon GPUs. This has been without any hardware documentation from AMD and not having any other open-source AMD driver to use as a reference point since AMD has not yet published any Vulkan ray-tracing support for their official AMDVLK driver.
Jack Wallen shows you how to simplify your Linux life by using aliases.
How much space remains on those drives connected to your server? That data is but a quick command away. Jack Wallen shows you how.
One of the single most helpful tools in your Linux admin arsenal is log files. And with the open-source platform, there are quite a few different log files to view. But how do you get the most out of your viewing?
One of the best ways to use log files to troubleshoot a system is by viewing the log in real-time. As the logging system writes entries to the log file, it makes it considerably easier to see what's going on in such a way as to help discern what's causing the problem.
The other option is to open the log file and either scroll through it or search it for specific strings. Personally, I much prefer the real-time option.
To view a log file in such a way, there's a handy command available, called tail. According to the tail man page, tail will print the last 10 lines of each file to standard output. In simplest terms, tail prints out the most recent entries to a file as they are written.
As you know MySQL is the most popular open-source relational database management system. It allows users to store, organize, and retrieve data from the database. It has a variety of working options to grant privileges to specific users within the tables and database.
I am assuming you have installed MySQL software on your system already, if not, then you can read my another post how to install MySQL in Ubuntu 19.04.
I will cover in this article how to create a MySQL user account and grant permissions, and last how to delete MySQL user.
Querying from a MySQL database shell is always fun and techy until you need a database output saved somewhere for easy access and reference; especially when dealing with large datasets.
Quick data access saves you from having to each time log in to a MySQL server via a terminal shell to reference specific MySQL-query-associated outputs. The CSV (Comma Separated Value) file is an ideal candidate for resolving these types of repetitive user-to-database interactions.
Installing WordPress is not a big deal. You can install it using LAMP server for local development. You can also deploy it for the real world on a proper public facing Linux server.
Cloud servers like Linode, DigitalOcean etc also provide the option to deploy a brand-new Linux server preconfigured with WordPress. Even easier, right?
But what if you want to install more than one WordPress on a single server?
An easy way would be to use a service like ServerPilot. Not only it updates your server automatically, it also lets you easily deploy multiple WordPress instances on the same server.
That would cost you a bit more money and if you do not want that, you can use Docker to deploy multiple WordPress instances.
Through this guide, you'll learn how to easily set up a dual WordPress setup running from their individual containers and add more instances!
NVM stands for Node Version Manager, which is a command-line utility for installing Node.js. It allows the programmers for installing Node.js in their account only. This means the installation is done user-specific. All the users in a single system have their own installation of Node.js.
Using the nvm utility, we can install the multiple node.js versions in a single account and manage them easily. The application can have use .nvmrc at root folder to autoselect the Node.js version.
This tutorial will help you to install nvm on Debian 11 “bullseye” Linux system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sysdig on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Sysdig is a free and open-source activity monitoring tool that can be used to capture and analyze application logs. It provides a complete overview of the usage of CPU, Memory, IO, users, and more directly on the command terminal in a well-structured interface. Sysdig can be installed on almost all operating systems, even on Windows and OS X.
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 Sysdig monitoring 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.
A user may want to write a code to do a certain job in a variety of circumstances. On the other hand, one might wish to run this computer code again for some monotonous activities. For example, some numerical numbers must be compared repeatedly. Here’s when the operators come in useful. When doing a contrast within a bash script, comparison operators come in handy. The comparison is typically done within the code’s if-else clause. We’ll be comparing two integers or numerical values the majority of the time. Hence, this guide is meant for those who want to explore how different comparison operators can be utilized for comparisons within numbers in bash language.
It is a best practice to find and remove old or unused files from the Linux system after a certain period of time, as this will free up some space on the system, which can be used for some other purpose.
Please make sure these files are no longer needed, as it will not ask for your confirmation before deleting the files.
This quick guide show you how to find and remove files older than 30 days in Linux.
When installing a piece of software on Linux, a message like “W: Some index files failed to download” pops up. But why does it happen? It turns out, one of the Ubuntu mirror servers is down. Even if you update the repository lists or reboot, the same error may show again. Worried? Well, don’t be. Reverting to the original Ubuntu Mirror is an easy solution for it. You can also select the nearest mirror to get things cleared out. Now, when all odds fail, try copying the sources list content from a functioning system. Now let’s dive deep into how you can get the damn thing fixed.
Linux is a truly modular operating system. For example, you have the freedom to not only change the desktop wallpaper but the entire desktop environment. Other operating systems such as Windows or macOS come with a preset desktop system that you cannot change.
The K Desktop Environment, popularly known as KDE, is a famous Linux desktop environment that is the default desktop on distros such as Manjaro KDE, Fedora KDE, Kubuntu, and SteamOS. But this doesn't mean that you'll have to install these distros to use KDE. You can install it on other Linux distros too.
Let's install and explore the KDE desktop environment on Ubuntu.
MX Linux is a mid-weight Linux distro based on Debian stable. It uses core antiX components, with additional software created or packaged by the MX community. The OS was developed as a cooperative venture between antiX and former MEPIS communities.
This system is currently among the most popular Linux distros and the most highly rated Linux distro on DistroWatch.
This article will show you how to burn music CDs/DVDs using this MX Linux.
Kali Linux is the most popular operating system for security professionals because it comes equipped with all the popular penetration-testing tools, reducing installation costs. Also, Kali Linux is a Linux-based operating system making it less prone to virus attacks while, on the other hand, providing more stability during the penetration and testing period.
Therefore, Kali Linux will save you the time needed to install the necessary and relevant tools and components, plus the stress of plunging into errors during the installation period.
Metasploit is a re-known penetration testing platform that allows the user to exploit, find and validate vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is vital to provide the tools, content, and infrastructure required to perform penetration tests and extensive security auditing.
New Metasploit modules are provided regularly thanks to Rapid7’s open-source community’s hard work and dedication, ensuring users are always updated with the latest releases. As a result, the Metasploit framework is considered the most helpful security auditing tool freely available to security professionals today.
Systemd is an init system and system manager in Linux systems and is compatible with LSB and SysV. You can use the systemd suite to manage and optimize system start-up services and resources in a Linux system. It is a practical tool for sysadmins to get their system up and running, optimize processes, debug, and troubleshoot system services.
This article will build on our systemd series guide and illustrate how to manage system Units, file systems mounts, troubleshoot, and give you tips and tricks when working with systems.
Our first systemd guide highlighted why systemd is a practical tool for Linux sysadmins. The second illustrates how to schedule system tasks with systemd timers and automate the tedious system boot tasks.
Ubuntu is the most popular Debian-based distribution of Linux Operating System; It was initially released in 2004. Due to its distinctive features, various distros of Linux are developed based on Ubuntu. It is developed and maintained by Canonical Ltd. and a large community of software developers around the globe; Canonical Ltd. is a software company with its origin in the UK, and it has hired staff in several countries to work for Ubuntu. There are several releases of Ubuntu, such as stable release, Long Term Support (LTS), and unstable. The stable and unstable releases are launched every year in April and October, respectively, whereas the long-term support variant is released after two years and is available for the next five years. The latest LTS release is 20.04; it will be available till 2025. Ubuntu supports both Command Line Interface (CLI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI) to perform various tasks on the OS. CLI is the basic way to interact with systems hardware (processor/memory); you can perform all the tasks that GUI can perform. In this article, we will demonstrate the use of 25 basic commands that provide ease to execute various tasks of Ubuntu using CLI.
Ready up for your next space adventure with The Captain. A blending of a point and click adventure, a space sim and much more into one gorgeous looking game. Developed by Sysiac Games, with publishing help from Tomorrow Corporation.
It's a race against time as you race across the galaxy carrying the only thing that can stop dark forces trying to destroy the Earth. Sounds perhaps a little bit like the basic story from FTL: Faster Than Light but with a rather different way to play through with planetary exploration.
I was using Unix well before my first Linux, as you can tell from the history of my SGI Indy (which I kept running until 2006, and might have kept running longer in different circumstances). But 1999 was when we needed to refresh the hardware in the undergraduate labs that I was then involved in, and when we went to evaluate the various hardware on offer nothing could beat the low cost and solid performance of general x86 hardware (we wound up with branded PCs from DEC). This was my real introduction to the relentless march of inexpensive x86 machines and one of things that informs my views that PCs can be Unix workstations.
LibreELEC 10 brings Kodi 19.1 to the Raspberry Pi 4 users, but support for Raspberry Pi Zero and 1 is now discontinued.
If you’ve been looking for info on how to build a home theater PC, you may have heard of the LibreELEC operating system for Kodi. LibreELEC is a minimal yet fully-functional operating system created for the sole purpose of running Kodi. Based on Linux and originally intended specifically for the Raspberry Pi, it has since been ported to other single-board computers and x86_64 PCs.
Now, a stable version of LibreELEC 10.0 becomes available for download. As usual, the developers have summarized further information in the Release Notes for LibreELEC 10.0 “Matrix”.
LibreELEC 10 now offers stable and good working versions for Allwinner, Generic and Rockchip devices. The official announcement focuses on what works and what doesn’t on Raspberry Pi 4.
Last last night, after renaming some buildlists, which were actually setnames, for poudriere, I realized that files in /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d also needed to be renamed.
Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) committed a change which significantly reduces hibernate time on machines with larger amounts of RAM: [...]
One strand of the ancient and convoluted SCO versus IBM legal mess that sought to determine who owns UNIX – and perhaps has a claim over Linux – may be about to end.
The case commenced in 2003, but its roots go even deeper.In 1998 IBM, the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO – a vendor of UNIX for x86 CPUs) and others teamed to create Project Monterey, with the aim of developing a version of UNIX that worked on multiple hardware platforms.
Which is just what the Linux community had started doing, too.
By 2001, IBM decided Linux was the future and quit Project Monterey, even acquiring some of the participants. By then Big Blue had created an experimental cut of its own UNIX-like AIX operating system that used some SCO code. But once Monterey was abandoned, IBM contributed some of its IP to Linux.
Would you remember that, 20 summers ago, a lawsuit put the future of Linux at risk?
At the time, the high profile suit, SCO v. IBM, filed in March 2003, involved SCO suing IBM for $1 billion, along with a mailing campaign with letters sent to 1,500 of the largest companies in the world that asserted IBM illegally contributed portions of SCO’s proprietary UNIX code, was roiled in confusion, WRAL TechWire reported in 2003.
[...]
According to a recent article on ZDNet, when Xinuos made the deal to acquire SCO, “its CEO, Richard A. Bolandz, promised that the company ‘has no intention to pursue any litigation related to the SCO Group assets acquired by the company. We are all about world leadership in technology, not litigation’.”
I first started using Debian sometime in the mid 90s and started contributing as a developer and package maintainer more than two decades years ago. My first very first scholarly publication, collaborative work led by Martin Michlmayr that I did when I was still an undergrad at Hampshire College, was about quality and the reliance on individuals in Debian. To this day, many of my closest friends are people I first met through Debian. I met many of them at Debian’s annual conference DebConf.
Given my strong connections to Debian, I find it somewhat surprising that although all of my academic research has focused on peer production, free culture, and free software, I haven’t actually published any Debian related research since that first paper with Martin in 2003!
This is Debian central point - with large quantities of meat and salads, an amount of beer/alcohol and "Cambridge gin" and general goodwill. This year was more than usually atmospheric because for some of us it was the first time with a large group of people in a while. Side conversations abound: for me it was learning something about the high energy particle physics community, how to precision build helicopters, fly quadcopters and precision 3D print anything, the maths of Isy counting crochet stitches to sew together randomly sized squares ... and, of course, obligatory things like how random is random and what's good enough entropy. And a few sessions of the game of our leader.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 698 for the week of August 22 – 28, 2021.
Sinovoip has unveiled a “Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro” router board that runs OpenWrt on a quad -A55 RK3568 and offers 4x GbE with WAN, 2x USB 3.0, SATA, HDMI, MIPI DSI/CSI, 40-pin, mini-PCIe, and M.2 E-key.
Sinovoip is updating its Banana Pi BPI-R2 router SBC with a “Pro” model that offers a much faster processor and adds MIPI-CSI, an audio jack, a speaker connector, RTC with battery, up to 4GB RAM support, and twice the eMMC at 16GB. The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro also replaces the WiFi/BT module with an M.2 E-key slot and removes the optional second SATA interface and the SATA power connector. There are no photographs, pricing, or availability information for the Pro, but a preliminary product page has been posted.
Learning is based on the open exchange of ideas and experiences. By sharing, testing, and practicing what we've learned with others, we're able to develop in our lives and careers. It follows that openness is the ideal state for any successful learning organization.
I am passionate about learning, building teams, and technology. At Red Hat, we believe that open source powers innovation and results in better solutions. Five years ago, our learning management system was proprietary and closed. All of our learning platforms existed as islands with limited integration and provided a mediocre user experience. Over the past five years, our team has embraced the open source ethos. We've built and implemented new open source platforms, integrated our disparate learning platforms allowing us to freely exchange data and create a superior user experience.
On this episode, CC’s Director of Product, Anna Tumadóttir, sits down with Matt Mullenweg. Originally from Houston, Texas, Matt is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Jetpack.
This series concerns a software licencing system used in a proprietary software application from circa 2004. The software was available in an unregistered trial mode with limited functionality. A free licence could be obtained by registering online with the software vendor. The software became abandonware circa 2009 when it ceased to be offered, and while the software binary has been archived, to date there has been no effort to restore the functionality once available with a free licence.
In part 1, we reverse engineered the registration code licencing mechanism of this particular software. However, that mechanism was not the mechanism actually in use in 2004; rather, a different mechanism was used based on licence files named license.bin. In this part, we investigate that licencing mechanism.
In part 2, we reverse engineered the decrypted format of the licence file data for this particular software. In this part, we investigate that how exactly that licence file is encrypted.
n computing, almost all programming languages support the idea of loops. In computing, loops are a set of instructions that allow the programmer to do something repeatedly in a quick and efficient manner. Loops iterate/repeatedly execute through a block of code until a certain condition is met.
All high-level programming languages provide several different types of loops. The syntax of these loops may be different but they are used to perform the same tasks. These loops are interchangeable but some are specifically built to be used in some specific conditions.
A central idea behind Candid is that services evolve over time, and so also their interfaces evolve. As they do, it is desirable to keep the interface usable by clients who have not been updated. In particular on a blockchainy platform like the Internet Computer, where some programs are immutable and cannot be changed to accommodate changes in the interface of the services they use, this is of importance.
Therefore, Candid defines which changes to an interface are guaranteed to be backward compatible. Of course it’s compatible to add new methods to a service, but some changes to a method signature can also be ok.
Serialization converts an object into a stream of bytes to be stored in the disk or sent to another computer through a network. There are two kinds of objects in C++: fundamental objects and objects instantiated from a defined class. Note, in C++, the struct is considered a class, and the name of a struct represents the instantiated object of the struct.
Individual fundamental objects are not normally serialized. However, since an instantiated object has fundamental objects, as the whole object is serialized, the fundamental objects are also serialized. In C++, all data structures, such as the vector, are predefined classes.
Serialization is also called marshaling. The opposite of serialization is deserialization or unmarshalling. The serialized object as a file from the disk or the network can be converted back (resurrected) to the object at the local computer to be used with the local C++ application (program).
The fstream term stands for File Stream. Stream refers to a sequence of characters moving from the disk to the C++ program or from the C+ program to the disk. Moving characters from a file in disk to the program is inputting. Moving characters from the program to a file in the disk is outputting. Input-file-stream abbreviated as ifstream is structured by the template class, basic_ifstream. Output-file-stream abbreviated, ofstream is structured by the template class, basic_ofstream.
It is possible for inputting and outputting to take place in one session. This is made possible by the class template, basic_fstream. Now, fstream is a synonym for basic_fstream. fstream, which is still basic_fstream, uses basic_ifstream and ofstream to operate.
We have some very exciting news to announce today: we (Marius and Kevin) are joining Anaconda! Anaconda is a well-known company that produces open-source Python software, and we think that by joining them we can significantly accelerate the trajectory of Pyston, our faster implementation of Python.
Pyston began many years ago as an open-source JIT-based Python implementation developed by Dropbox. But after Dropbox dropped Pyston development, it went dormant for several years before the developers decided to create their own start-up around it and released Pyston 2.0. The Pyston developers are now joining well known Python organization Anaconda.
An array is a container that stores the values of a similar data type. The storage process deals with entering the values at any index of the array, and the index of the array accesses that value. Whenever you declare an array, you have two options. Either assign the values at the time of declaration or enter the values when they are needed dynamically. In this guide, we have experienced both approaches. To perform this function in bash, you need to create an environment of the Linux operating system where you can access the terminal and other applications of user privileges.
To perform operations on array in bash, you need to install bash on Linux operating system. By installing the packages, it is already installed in the system. The version of bash should be greater than 4 to continue this guide further. If it is less than 4, you need to install the latest bash version or at least 4. Execute the command on the Linux terminal to check the version.
In Ubuntu, including Bash, loops have made it possible to apply operations on multiple files. Looping is the most effective thing as it allows the user to apply the same logic to the item repeatedly by using a small code-line.
To understand the concept of looping over files in the directory, you need access to the Ubuntu application and services. When you have some privileges, you can only operate with files and directories.
You should have installed Bash on Ubuntu operating system. In some installations, it is installed by default in the updation of packages. If it is already installed, you need to upgrade the version because it must be above 4. To continue the current guide, you need to keep the version above 4. To check the version of the pre-installed Bash in your system, use the command on the Ubuntu terminal.
An array is a container containing the same data type items, either integer type or float type. We can deal with arrays by performing several operations on them. One commonly used Delima is to break the array and print each word on a new line. This feature is discussed in today’s article. To understand this concept, you need to access a Ubuntu terminal to perform bash-related terms on Ubuntu. We have covered the topic from simplest to critical samples for the understanding of the user.
Maybe he’s right, maybe not, but he’s going farther than he has to go. The standard for use of deadly force — not just in the Capitol Police Department but generally — is not certain knowledge but rather, as the department’s policy puts it, a reasonable belief that said use of force “is in the defense of human life, including the officer’s own life, or in the defense of any person in immediate danger of serious physical injury.”
Did Byrd’s actions meet that standard? The events of the day, and the video record of the shooting, say yes.
Here are some of the explanations offered by those supposedly in the know:
Stupidity and Laziness: The traditional narrative says that the cause is stupidity combined with laziness. As€ one researcher describes it, “if you believe false things, then you must be stupid. It must be because you haven’t really made an effort to actually figure out what is going on.” This is a superficial assessment. Most people indeed are not critical thinkers who consciously seek to “actually figure out what is going on” in an independent fashion. Essentially, they do not possess enough free will to do so. On the social level, they figure things out according to cultural, community, or group dictates. This is not “stupid” of them, nor is it a function of laziness. It stems from being born and raised as part of a society. And, some societies, particularly smaller ones, families, villages, tribes, and can exert considerable social pressure.
Finally we pointed out that this is customer feedback: i.e., you've already lost my business, please don't rush to save it now. You should take this feedback and recalibrate so as not to leave future people in the lurch like what happened here.
Someone noted that it would probably have been okay if the person went "here's your button and by the way we added pretty things". Instead, it turned into "look how I amused myself, made you wait for months, and did nothing to improve your experience, but I had fun and that's the important part".
Sitting here in my home office, I mostly lack this academic peer group. The good news is that there are some great people on Twitter to spar with from time to time – which is already very useful. But I need more.
So, as an experiment, I’m going to document my discovery process here, both to solicit feedback and to create some pressure on myself to actually get this thing done!
Now, to reduce the tension a bit, let me describe the somewhat niche things that I have done, and which I hope could possibly be worthwhile: [...]
Almost immediately after the Taliban’s takeover of the country following the withdrawal of US forces, Afghan women reported that they were being turned away from campuses and were burning university ID cards and degree certificates out of fear of retribution.
The bottom line: We need to acknowledge that robots are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Imagine the damage that could be done if a [cracker] was able to maliciously hijack and control robots being used in, say, a healthcare setting.
The U.S. Department of Education on Monday opened civil rights probes in five states to determine whether prohibitions on mask-wearing deny students with disabilities—who are more vulnerable to serious illness from Covid-19—equal access to safe in-person instruction.
"The department has heard from parents from across the country—particularly parents of students with disabilities and with underlying medical conditions—about how state bans on universal indoor masking are putting their children at risk and preventing them from accessing in-person learning equally," Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
A Republican running for elected office in a Pennsylvania county on Sunday provided yet another example of the vitriol and even potential danger that school board members face over Covid-19 safety measures as children across the United States return to in-person learning.
Steve Lynch, who is running for Northampton County executive, took aim at mask mandates during a Harrisburg rally, issuing a call to action directed at "strong men" and declaring, "make men great again," tweaking a popular campaign slogan of former President Donald Trump.
In early March 2020, Rob Wallace, an evolutionary biologist who had been adrift after an unceremonious exit from the University of Minnesota, flew to New Orleans and then got on a bus to Jackson, Miss., where he was scheduled to speak at an event on health and racial injustice. Wallace, who turned 50 this summer, has been studying and writing about infectious diseases and their origins for half his life. For almost as long, he’s been warning that the practices of industrial agriculture would lead to a deadly pandemic on the scale of Covid-19—or worse. “A pandemic may now be all but inevitable,” he wrote of the H5N1 avian influenza virus in 2007. ”In what would be a catastrophic failure on the part of governments and health ministries worldwide, millions may die.”
Before his trip to Jackson, Wallace had been closely monitoring the outbreak of a novel virus in Wuhan. Though he’d been spooked by a news report that showed a delivery driver in China practicing extreme social distancing, he went ahead with the trip. As an underpaid academic, he needed the money, and as an American, he didn’t expect anything to happen to him. “I too had been infused with a peculiarly American moment, wherein financial desperation meets imperial exceptionalism,” he wrote.
The vulnerabilities are in equipment made by multinational vendor B. Braun that are used in pediatric and adult health care facilities in the United States.
While there are no reports of malicious exploitation of the flaws, the research illustrates the challenge of securing devices conceived decades ago from 21st-century digital threats. The findings come as the health care sector reckons with a series of ransomware attacks that hit aging hospital computer networks during the pandemic.
That's how the vaccination passport works. Now you can write your own programs to verify and decode your own passport! All that's needed is to find the public key's from the goverment, which will be stored in VaxiCode Verif! Check the bottom of this text to see it once I've updated. Source code for a self-verifier and self-decoder will also be available.
I think this is a very innovative thing for the government to have done. It's the largest scale use of digital identity more or less at the time of writing in Québec. I look forward to other advancements.
In new rules published Monday by China’s National Press and Publication Administration (NPPA), which oversees the nation’s gaming market, teens under 18 will be limited to playing games three hours per week.
It’s not just how much time can be spent gaming that will be limited. According to state run media, players can only play from 8 p.m. Until 9 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Play will also be allowed, but only for one hour, during public holidays.
Marion’s experience was a harbinger of what was to come for school districts nationwide, especially in places where universal masking or vaccine requirements are politically—or legally—impossible. Seven other states ban schools from mandating masks, and districts from Mississippi to Oklahoma to Texas have shut down because of high Covid-19 rates. In Mississippi, at least six children have died from Covid-19 during the pandemic. In Georgia, 2,000 children a day are testing positive for the virus. And Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed an executive order prohibiting vaccine mandates.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (exiv2, grilo, gthumb, and redis), Fedora (krb5, nbdkit, and rubygem-addressable), Mageia (libass and opencontainers-runc), openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, go1.15, opera, qemu, and spectre-meltdown-checker), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, libsndfile, and libX11), SUSE (389-ds, qemu, and spectre-meltdown-checker), and Ubuntu (grilo).
Using sudo_logsrvd to centrally collect sudo session recordings from your network is a huge step forward in security: users cannot delete or modify session recordings locally. However, by default, transmission of recordings is not encrypted, making it open to modifications and eavesdropping. Encrypting the connection between sudo and sudo_logsrvd can eliminate these problems. Larger environments usually either have in-house PKI tooling in place, or colleagues who know all openssl options off the top of their heads. However, small and medium enterprises often lack the infrastructure or knowledge to work with TLS certificates.
This blog can help you to secure connections between sudo and sudo_logsrvd when there is no PKI tooling available to you, or you want to create all the certificates yourself using openssl. It is based on the sudo_logsrvd manual, but changed in such a way that all information is entered on the command line. While interactive certificate generation works fine for a single cert, generating multiple client certificates is easier when everything is on the command line.
Trend Micro has released new research on the state of Linux security in the first half of 2021. Giving valuable insight into how Linux operating systems are being targeted as organisations increase their digital footprint in the cloud.
One of the worst offenders is Clearview AI, which extracts faceprints from billions of people without their consent and uses these faceprints to help police identify suspects. For example, police in Miami worked with Clearview to identify participants in a recent protest. Such surveillance partnerships between police and corporations are increasingly common.
Clearview’s faceprinting violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires opt-in consent to obtain someone’s faceprint. As a result, Clearview now faces many BIPA lawsuits. One was brought by the ACLU and ACLU of Illinois in state court. Many others were filed against the company in federal courts across the country and then consolidated into one federal courtroom in Chicago. In both Illinois and federal court, Clearview argues that the First Amendment bars these BIPA claims. We disagree and filed an amicus brief saying so in each case.
Last week, the judge in the Illinois state case rejected Clearview’s First Amendment defense, denied the company’s motion to dismiss, and allowed the ACLU’s lawsuit to move forward. This is a significant victory for our privacy over Clearview’s profits.
The company on Monday forecast third-quarter revenue between $1.015 billion and $1.020 billion, compared with the analysts' average estimate of $1.013 billion, according to Refinitiv data.
The problem, however, isn’t that we can’t “log off,” as so many on Twitter implore others to do; the problem is that Twitter has come to define “real life.” A human being who lives until the age of 70 will spend about 50,000 (out of 400,000) of their waking hours on a social media platform. To “log off” is to become an ascetic, disconnected from the “real” (virtual) world. Assuming we can’t uninvent social media—and there’s little to suggest we can—we’re left with two questions: Can Twitter be a politically productive space? And perhaps more important, is it possible to live a healthy online life?
The US had started collecting and collating data from some 3,00000 Afghans in 2009, mainly prisoners and Afghan soldiers. Then a biometrics centre was opened in November 2010. US officials aimed to compile information on as many as 25 million Afghans that would allow them to spot Taliban infiltrators. But it evolved into a way to identify Afghans hired or visited by the US forces. Eventually, everyone who worked with the Afghan government or the US military -- including interpreters, drivers, nurses, and secretaries -- was fingerprinted and scanned for the biometric database over the past 12 years.
The Afghan Automated Biometric Identification System (AABIS), administered by about 50 Afghans at the Interior Affairs ministry in Kabbul, registered fingerprints, iris scans, and other biographical data. The data were registered using hand-held scanners. Report has it that the US forces had 7,00 pieces of equipment.
After news broke about the security lapse, US officials have not confirmed how many of the 7,000 scanners were left behind or whether the biometric database can be remotely deleted.
But the fear doesn't stop with paper documents. There are also US military biometric devices, which are high-tech tools that contain sensitive data, like iris scans and fingerprints, tools to distinguish friend from possible enemy, that are in the hands of the Taliban. The Intercept first reported how they could be used to identify Afghans who worked with coalition forces.
The US separately has provided the Taliban with a list of Americans and Afghans it wants to evacuate from the country, a move one defense official told Politico was “just put[ing] all those Afghans on a kill list.”
But the power and reach of the US biometric database is much larger and more comprehensive. Virtually everyone who worked with the Afghan government or the US military, including interpreters, drivers, nurses, and secretaries, was fingerprinted and scanned for the biometric database over the past 12 years.
The victims included a blogger, activist, members of political organization Waad and members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. Five of the targets identified by Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog from from the University of Toronto, were listed on a list of individuals obtained by Amnesty International as a part of its “Pegasus Project” investigation. The list is believed to comprise potential targets of NSO Group’s customers.
Whether it be Twitch or TikTok, Agora’s study found that Gen Z are increasingly relying on RTE video or audio features in the apps they use. In fact, 87% are using more apps with built-in interactive live video streaming or calling. Meanwhile, 62% have tried apps with interactive live audio streaming, capturing the growing popularity of services like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse.
The suit alleges that the company "knowingly collects personal information" from children under the age of 13 and sells that data to third party marketing companies, which is then used to target advertising back at the children.
Most importantly, Balderas claims that Rovio “monetizes children by surreptitiously exfiltrating their personal information while they play the Angry Birds Gaming Apps and then using that personal information for commercial exploitation.” That information is then provided to third-party marketing networks to target the children with personalized advertisements. “This conduct endangers the children of New Mexico, undermines the ability of their parents to protect children and their privacy, and violates state and federal law,” the suit concludes.
Filed on Wednesday, the federal lawsuit by Attorney General Hector Balderas accuses Rovio of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). It is said to do so in part because Angry Birds is marketed to younger device users.
COPPA requires companies to get permission from the parents of children under the age of 13 before collecting any personal information about them. In mass-market services for all age groups, companies also have to take steps to make sure they don't collect data for users in that age range.
The complaint alleges that data related to children under 13 who played the Angry Birds games was shared with third parties via software development kits (“SDKs”) embedded in the apps for purposes of targeted advertising. Further, the complaint alleges that Rovio failed to obtain verifiable parental consent prior to collecting and sharing children’s personal information via SDKs for this purpose. The AG also alleges that Rovio’s privacy policy “misleadingly” stated that the Angry Birds apps are not directed to children when Rovio was aware that children make up a significant portion of the games’ audience.
The noisiest group of Afghanistan stayers are the neoconservatives resentful because their bit of political real estate is getting away.€ In being defeated, they are left with the task of explaining to the soldiery that blood was not expended in vain against a foe they failed to defeat.€ “You took out a brutal enemy,” goes a statement from US President George W. Bush and his wife Laura, “and denied Al Qaeda a safe haven while building schools, sending supplies, and providing medical care.”€ The couple throw in the contribution of Dr. Sakena Yacoobi of the Afghan Institute of Learning, behind the opening of “schools for girls and women around the nation.”
Paul Wolfowitz, who served as Bush’s deputy defence secretary, is less sentimental in his assessment of the Afghanistan fiasco. To Australia’s Radio National, he was unsparing in calling the victors “a terrorist mob that has been hating the United States for the last 20 years.”€ They had provided the launching ground for “one of history’s worst attacks on the United States” and were now “going to be running that bit of hostile territory.”
After all, we grew up living it or hearing about it. The 20th century rates as the deadliest in human history — 75 million people died in World War II alone. Millions have died since, including a quarter-million during the 20-year U.S. war in Afghanistan.
But for our forebears, the incredible deadliness of modern warfare came as a shock.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan are racing to evacuate people from the country ahead of Tuesday’s withdrawal deadline as the Kabul airport is targeted by rocket fire from militant groups. The rocket attacks come just days after over 175 people, including 13 U.S. troops, died after a suicide bomb outside the airport, with the group ISIS-K claiming responsibility for the attack. The Pentagon has publicly acknowledged that some of the people killed outside the airport on Thursday may have been shot dead by U.S. servicemembers in the panic after the suicide bombing. The U.S. retaliated over the weekend with two airstrikes the Pentagon says targeted more potential suicide bombers, but local residents say the strikes also killed Afghan civilians, including as many as six children. “We see how the war on terror in Afghanistan started and how it is ending now: It’s with drones and civilian casualties,” says Emran Feroz, an Austro-Afghan journalist and author. He says the U.S. airstrikes in the final days of the war — and the innocent people they killed — are emblematic of the entire 20-year conflict. “In many rural areas, these things happened on a daily basis,” says Feroz.
The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare which centuries later inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal's military tactics.€
The desire to anticipate what the future holds is not new. The Delphic oracle in the eighth century BC held a prestigious and authoritative position in the Greek world, providing predictions and guidance to both city-states and individuals. In 1555, Nostradamus’ Les Propheties attracted an enthusiastic following, and even today many credit him with predicting many major world events. During the Cold War, techniques designed to anticipate the future were instrumental in informing strategic decisions. Analysts at the RAND Corporation, for example, pioneered the development of foresight methods such as scenario development to predict the Soviet Union’s nuclear strategy during the Cold War in their seminal 1988 report, “How Nuclear War Might Start”.
As the Western occupation of Afghanistan has come to an end, TV news is broadcasting harrowing scenes of death and destruction, citizens in fear, allies abandoned, and dreams dashed.
The Pentagon announced Monday that the very last U.S. military plane had lifted off from the airport in Kabul, ending 20 years of America's on-the-ground war and occupation of Afghanistan.
"Every single U.S. servicemember is out of Afghanistan," said Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, in a televised statement.
Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them. But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government in Afghanistan can only be believed by those who refuse to remember what Washington did when Kabul actually had one.
A U.S. drone strike purportedly targeting a suspected ISIS-K vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan killed at least 10 members of a single family—including six children—as they were getting out of their car on Sunday.
"Too many children have already died from U.S. drone strikes. We cannot accept one more, let alone six."—CodePink
Americans have been shocked by videos of thousands of Afghans risking their lives to flee the Taliban's return to power in their country—and then by an Islamic State suicide bombing and ensuing massacre by U.S. forces that together killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. troops.€
The list of governments, former government officials, and organizations in the region that have accused the US of supporting ISIS-K is expansive and includes the Russian government, the Iranian government, Syrian government media, Hezbollah, an Iraqi state-sponsored military outfit and even former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who called the group a “tool” of the United States as journalist Ben Norton recently noted, characterizing Karzai as “a former US puppet who later turned against the US, and knows many of its secrets.”
Only Secretary Gates proclaimed, however, that he would never sign deployment orders for a strategy that he didn’t believe in.€ Only Gates has sanctimoniously asked to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery to “rest among my heroes for all eternity.”€ Gates never risked his life on the battlefield; he has no right to “rest among” those who did.
On his various trips to Afghanistan, Gates told soldiers he was “encouraged by the progress you’re making in securing and stabilizing the country.”€ He knew this was not true, but he audaciously castigated President Barack Obama for not believing in the Afghan mission and for distrusting the nation’s military leaders.€ He charged that Vice President Joe Biden was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”€ But it was Biden who warned Obama in 2009 against both increasing troop strength in Afghanistan and getting “boxed in” by Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And it was Gates who argued mendaciously that the “training of the Afghan military is going well, and security responsibility is steadily being transferred to them.”
The Carthaginian general Hannibal, who came close to defeating the Roman Republic in the Second Punic War, committed suicide in 181 BC in exile as Roman soldiers closed in on his residence in the Bithynian village of Libyssa, now modern-day Turkey. It had been more than thirty years since he led his army across the alps and annihilated Roman legions at the Battle of Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, considered one of the most brilliant tactical victories in warfare which centuries later inspired the plans of the German Army Command in World War I when they invaded Belgium and France. Rome was only able to finally save itself from defeat by replicating Hannibal’s military tactics.
We’ve all heard the story about the CEO whose voice was imitated convincingly enough to initiate a wire transfer of $243,000. Now, the constant Zoom meetings of the anywhere workforce era have created a wealth of audio and video data that can be fed into a machine learning system to create a compelling duplicate. And attackers have taken note. Deepfake technology has seen a drastic uptick across the dark web, and attacks are certainly taking place.
In my role, I work closely with incident response teams, and earlier this month I spoke with several CISOs of prominent global companies about the rise in deepfake technology they have witnessed. Here are their top concerns.
One nice statistic that is quite useful to reflect on is that the the heat held in the top one metre of the ocean contains as much heat energy as the whole of the atmosphere. It has this capacity for storing heat. It’s this movement of the heat around the globe that keeps our climate nice for us to live in. If all the heat was just concentrated in the tropics, they’d be too hot to live in and everywhere else would be too cold to live in. That’s the importance to us, the way it modulates our climate and our weather.
People who deny that climate change is happening have something in common with people who believe in a flat Earth.
On Sunday afternoon, Hurricane Ida made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, making it one of the most powerful storms to strike Louisiana in recorded history. Ida made landfall on the 16th anniversary of the devastating Hurricane Katrina.€
And around 10:00 p.m. that night in St. James Parish, a wind gust from Ida lifted most of the roof from the home of Sharon Lavigne. Lavigne, inside, prayed that the roof wouldn’t fly away entirely, she told DeSmog Monday morning. And indeed, one portion of the roof remained, over a bedroom where the 69-year old retired special-ed teacher sheltered as Ida howled around her. Ida’s sustained wind speeds at the time exceeded 100 miles per hour, National Hurricane Center reports show, with higher gusts.
Two-thirds of Louisiana’s industrial sites lie in the path of Hurricane Ida, including oil refineries, storage tanks and other infrastructure like oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana’s Gulf Coast is a major oil and gas hub, with 17 oil refineries, two liquefied natural gas export terminals, as well as a nuclear power plant and many Superfund sites. Oil spills and chemical releases due to climate change-intensified storms are a “worsening, consistent problem” in Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, says Antonia Juhasz, a longtime oil and energy investigative journalist. Communities of color living on the Gulf Coast near polluting gas and oil infrastructure “now also have to deal with that worsening climate crisis creating a storm that harms these facilities, that then causes more releases,” she adds.
Hurricane Ida has completely knocked out power to the city of New Orleans and reversed the flow of the Mississippi River after it hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi, flooding the area with storm surges. The Category 4 storm hit on the same date Hurricane Katrina devastated the area 16 years earlier. “This is a storm like no other,” says Monique Verdin, a citizen of the United Houma Nation and part of the grassroots collaborative Another Gulf Is Possible. “This is a part of South Louisiana that is losing land at one of the fastest rates,” Verdin notes. She also discusses how the storm hit the area as “Delta has been raging in the Mississippi River Delta.”
With search and rescue efforts underway and widespread power outages in the wake of Hurricane Ida barreling into the Louisiana coast Sunday as a Category 4 storm, the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Monday urged President Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.
"We're done with thoughts and prayers and so are the communities of the Gulf South. We need action now."—Varshini Prakash, Sunrise Movement
More than a million Louisiana residents were without power Monday morning and at least one person was reportedly killed as Hurricane Ida pummeled the Gulf Coast of the United States, causing life-threatening flooding, lashing homes and buildings with powerful wind, and slamming the industry that some experts blamed for the catastrophic storm.
"As you watch from afar in horror, remember: it's fossil fuels. It's been fossil fuels for a very long time."—Emily Atkin
In a Monday letter to party leadership, dozens of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives called for repealing fossil fuel industry subsidies in the reconciliation bill that lawmakers are now working on after approving the budget blueprint last week.
"We support a deal that sufficiently enhances climate justice, especially in repealing fossil fuel subsidies."—54 House Democrats
Despite desperate climate warnings against new fossil fuel development, ExxonMobil is pursuing a massive new oil project in Guyana that is projected to be the corporation’s largest oil production in the world. A new investigation by Antonia Juhasz, a longtime oil and energy investigative reporter, reveals the project will release 125 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, turning Guyana from a carbon sink into what she says could be a “carbon bomb” and posing major environmental risks.
A first for Namibia, the agreement will see the two countries pursue feasibility studies to implement joint hydrogen pilot project and to strengthen capacity building for trained professionals.
Under plans for the feasibility study, it is hoped that production of hydrogen in Namibia will be a success. The study will also explore potential exportation of hydrogen into Germany from the South African country.
De Zwaan was built as a grain windmill and still operates as one. Wheat is purchased from a local farm and is brought up to the fifth floor using wind power. It is also ground by the millstones using wind power. Normally you can buy the flour at the park, but repairs to the windmill have paused milling operations.
It is the only authentic working Dutch windmill in the United States.
As the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service noted in its 1993 Grizzly Bear Recovery Plan, “roads probably pose the most imminent threat to grizzly habitat today.” Why? Because roads bring humans into areas where grizzlies live and increase the potential for human-grizzly conflicts that often result in dead bears – and there are many more roads now than there were in 1993.
Because roads are a very serious problem for grizzly bears and other wildlife, the Forest Service claims to “remove roads” by bulldozing a berm across them, not recontouring the road base. The agency may wish to pretend the road no longer exists, but research, backed up by photographic evidence, proves that people simply drive over and around the berms, rendering the road “removal” totally ineffective.
This past April, I reported on another obscene milestone in U.S. wealth concentration. Back then, for the first time ever, $1 trillion sat in the pockets of just eight rich guys, a group small enough to squeeze inside a single SUV.
Today, barely four months later, that “trillion-dollar club” will shortly kick another member to the curb. According to Forbes, the collective wealth of America’s seven wealthiest white men — Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Larry Ellison — stood at $996 billion at the end of the day yesterday. The seat in the Trillion-Dollar SUV about to be vacated belongs to Warren Buffett. The trillion-dollar club’s deep pockets soon won’t need his $100-billion net worth to make a trillion. So long, Warren.
Services such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and China's WeChat Pay, which have grown rapidly in recent years, are not currently designated as payment systems, putting them outside the regulatory system.
So I emailed him. I told him how disillusioned I was, but also how inspiring I found his writings. He responded and was so supportive. He had obviously gone through similar shit leaving the SWP. We started a long friendship.
It’s clear from reading everyone’s tributes that Lou and Marxmail played some significant sort of role in transitioning the Marxist left from then to now, especially among younger people, that many are still trying to process. For me, in addition to his writings and the space of Marxmail, I can’t count how many great people who are now lifelong friends he personally connected me with.
Lou was a fighter and we had our fights over the years and I enjoyed most of them, even though he bloodied me up a couple of times. Usually they were fights about important things. Lou didn’t tolerate “beliefs”, he demanded ideas and he wanted proofs.
Alexander Cockburn used to tweak Lou mercilessly in his columns, as the last Trotskyist. And Lou took it good-naturedly. In part because he idolized Alex and admired his writing. In part because it meant that his ideas were important enough to be debated, even parodied, at that level. Lou had his passions, Syria, being one, which often put him on the wrong side of many doctrinaire anti-Imperialists. He had his reasons, some very personal ones, but he didn’t flinch.
Former Trump lawyer/current conspiracy theorist/lawsuit defendant Sidney Powell has one more thing to add to her extremely dubious CV: sanctions.
It's not just headliners like L. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell getting sanctioned for pursuing bullshit election fraud lawsuits. Other grifting asshats with Esq. on their letterhead are getting benchslapped for abusing the court system to pursue political goals, utilizing nothing more than speculation and wild conspiracy theories as "evidence."
Jacob Wilson, hailing from Pomona College in California, has a different definition of self-respect, and of his own humble significance in the furiously moribund culture of our most constitutionally powerful branch of government. He most certainly doesn’t fit in with the staff on loan from the corporatist canyons of K Street.
Wilson came from the peace movement – Peace Action – to be exact. He pitched practical peace to one Congressional office after another. His important message was not exactly a head turner, he discovered. War, military armaments’ lobbyists signaling campaign donations get the attention at the abdicating war-permissive legislature.
With just two weeks to go before California's closely watched gubernatorial recall election, Senator Bernie Sanders warned Sunday that the effort to oust Gov. Gavin Newsom is a "bold-faced Republican power grab" and urged the state's voters to reject it at the polls.
"At this unprecedented moment in American history, when we're trying to address the crisis of climate change, guarantee healthcare for all, and pass real immigration reform, the last thing we need is to have some right-wing Republican governor in California," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said in a 30-second spot recorded for the "Stop the Republican Recall" campaign.
Unlike the USA’s first past the post system with one-person one-vote, Germans have, funnily, two votes. One vote goes to the candidate in a local electorate and the second vote goes towards proportional representation.
As a consequence, Germany is not defined by two parties. It does not have Democrats vs. Republicans (USA), Labor vs. Tories (UK), or as some evil heretics might say, “Coke vs. Pepsi”. Instead, several parties seek to govern after an election.
Representative Barbara Lee was in a hurry. The House was preparing to advance a multitrillion-dollar budget blueprint and voting rights bill during a rare August session, ending a standoff with a gang of conservative Democrats threatening to derail President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda. A frantic two-day session on Capitol Hill was coming to a close, and the California congresswoman had to go vote.
The Maricopa “audit” has assumed such mythic proportions among the Trump diehards who insist that their Il Duce won the presidential election that some QAnon believers have insisted that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is a hoax—to distract attention from the allegations of vote-tampering in Arizona. No doubt rumors have begun somewhere in cyberspace that the forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, and droughts sweeping across the world are also “false-flag operations” designed by the Biden camp to help them erase evidence of election fraud.
The Trump forces that have taken over the Republican Party regularly fulminate against The Squad, antifa, that “socialist Biden,” and other convenient punching bags. But the real target of their ire is closer to home: Republicans who have refused to join the Trump personality cult.
Alphabet Inc's Google unit, Facebook Inc and Microsoft Corp are the three biggest lobbying spenders in Europe in a battle against tough new laws aimed at curbing U.S. tech giants' powers, a study released on Tuesday showed.
Such efforts should be a wake-up call to EU policymakers to further beef up the draft laws and lobbying rules, the study by campaign groups Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl warned.
The tech sector outspends even the pharma, fossil fuels, finance and chemicals sectors, which used to dominate lobbying, the report said.
The study warned about the industry's access to the European Commission, with lobbyists involved in three-quarters of the 270 meetings commission officials had on the two draft laws.
Reporter Joseph Bernstein recently published a fantastic cover story in Harpers all about "disinformation" and "fake news" but not in the way you normally think about it. It's not like most such articles -- often decrying just how much disinformation is flowing out there, but rather taking a very critical eye about how we (especially the media) talk about such things. The piece is thought-provoking and well worth reading, and I've spent the last week or so letting it sit and percolate in my head before writing up this post about it.
My first post for 2021 was a retrospective on the year 2020 entitled Looking back on 2020: Too many physicians behaving badly. The reason was simple. The COVID-19 pandemic, which first hit Wuhan, China in December 2019, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020, and shortly thereafter caused mass shutdowns and travel restrictions led some physicians to reveal themselves to be very bad actors indeed in terms of spreading misinformation, advocating quackery, and outright grifting. Sure, the usual suspects (several of whom were ultimately dubbed the “Disinformation Dozen” a few months ago) were involved, which is exactly what one would expect. After all, what were doctors like Joseph Mercola, Sherri Tenpenny, Kelly Brogan, and the like going to do during a pandemic except switch their grift to the coronavirus and COVID-19 vaccines? This was utterly expected. Years—even decades—before, I had wondered how doctors like these could keep their state medical licenses. Last month the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) entered the fray, which is the topic of this post. Before I get to that, though, let’s look back briefly.
An AFP investigation has found that the 63-year-old widow developed a business around coronavirus skepticism at the same time as she owes US tax authorities at least half a million dollars.
Earlier this year, Tenpenny was named one of the worst known spreaders of falsehoods, myths and misleading statements about vaccines -- a group the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate dubbed the "Disinformation Dozen."
Wagshul is a co-founder of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes the use of Ivermectin despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that it has no effect and could be dangerous.
Dr. Leanne Chrisman-Khawam, a physician and Ohio University professor, called the group "snake oil salesmen," noting that there are "serious" issues with their research and that the studies they cite often "don't show positive results" and have "design flaws."
"Based on evidence-based medicine and my read on this large number of small studies, I would find this very suspect, even the positive outcomes," she told the Capital Journal.
Despite these risks, there has been an unfortunate absence of expert voices contesting supplement company claims with real data. "There needs to be a more robust response from the science community in the face of pseudoscience and misinformation," says Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law at the University of Alberta, who has worked on studies and books examining ads and posts claiming to support the immune system on social media. He explains that supplement marketing often builds on the common misperception that if the right amount of a vitamin is good for you, more is better. "That's not the case at all," he says.
On the topic of supplement misinformation, Pieter Cohen, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a general internist at Cambridge Health Alliance, says, "The main problem is that the law permits companies to promote supplements as if they have important benefits for health even if there has never been a single study in humans to study the product's efficacy or safety."
Everything is bigger in Texas, even the act of unconstitutional spitting on the 1st Amendment. We've already talked about the blatantly unconstitutional bill, HB20, that picks up where Florida's already-declared-unconstitutional bill leaves off, and makes it even worse. Well, that bill was voted on Friday and Texas Republicans approved it by a vote of 76 to 44.
Facebook and Instagram have a combined worldwide usership of over three billion people, and only one rule book split between them. Their “Adult Nudity and Sexual Activity” section of the guidelines firmly assigns nudity to sexual activity without room for negotiation. Within this section, they have dedicated a big portion of text to describing when and how a female nipple is and isn’t allowed, therefore making an exposed female nipple a sexually explicit act by default — with a few vague exceptions, such as for breastfeeding and “acts of protest.” These guidelines prohibit “visible genitalia” and “fully nude close-ups of buttocks” in the same breath as “uncovered female nipples,” making a female-presenting body twice as likely as male-presenting body to be flagged as obscene simply for possessing and showing her nipples.
SensorTower, a site that tracks the top downloads from the Google Play store (the majority of people in Afghanistan use Android phones), shows internet security apps like virtual private networks (VPNs) and secure messaging apps like Telegram are gaining users.
"A lot of people are changing their handsets as well as their contact numbers," said journalist Totakhil.
"Many are also switching to using [the encrypted messaging app] Signal because they believe that WhatsApp is compromised."
The Taliban has cut [Internet] and mobile connections to Panjshir, the only Afghan province not under their control and the last bastion of resistance to their takeover, sources said on Sunday.
The move is apparently aimed at limiting the ability of anti-Taliban resistance in the Panjshir Valley to communicate with the outside world.
Internet services in South Sudan were disrupted on Monday and security forces were deployed on the streets, which were quieter than usual as residents sheltered inside after activists had called for protests against President Salva Kiir's government.
With Kiir scheduled to address lawmakers at parliament's opening session on Monday morning, a coalition of activist groups reiterated their call on Sunday for public rallies demanding he resign. However, there was no sign early on Monday of major street gatherings in the capital Juba. Some activists told Reuters they were in hiding for security reasons.
Under the guise of fighting online disinformation, Kyrgyzstan’s president has signed a law allowing the authorities to summarily suppress information at the request of any citizen who says they are being defamed. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for the immediate repeal of this law, which could be used to censor the media.
The incident apparently occurred in the Andarab i Valley, for which the singer takes his namesake, roughly 50-60 miles north of Kabul. Separate reports point to the murder happening in the Panjshir Valley, which is similarly situated north of Kabul. Andarabi was reportedly dragged from his home before being executed.
As envisaged by the government, the PMDA will be a one-stop shop regulator for all media — print, broadcast, film, and digital — and headed by a government-appointed bureaucrat. The PMDA will also have tribunals to hear complaints against media organisations, decisions of which can only be appealed at the Supreme Court. The tribunals, headed by chairpersons of high court judge level, will have the power to impose fines of Rs25 million and hand down jail time of up to three years. The PMDA will grant licences to media organisations which will have to be renewed yearly; it will also have the power to seal offices of media houses.
The PMDA will repeal the Press Council Ordinance, 2002; the Press, Newspaper, News Agencies and Books Registration Ordinance, 2002; the Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) Act, 1973; the Pakistan Electronic Media Ordinance, 2002, as amended by Pemra Amendment Act, 2007; and the Motion Pictures Ordinance, 1979.
In today's digital age, it may seem like no [Internet] means a complete communication breakdown. In fact, there are still a few options. DW has compiled a list.
The actions of the major occupying power, America, were exposed by Julian Assange when he published the Afghan War Logs. These logs set down in detail what was happening in the country to many citizens. They exposed war crimes on an industrial scale, and corruption at the highest level.
For this Julian has been hounded, endured years of detention, culminating in spending the last two years in the UK’s worst prison – in solitary confinement. An appeal by the US against the lower court judgement to refuse extradition based on the state of his mental health is to take place in October. The failure of the Australian government to take a strong stand to get him freed is a disgrace.
Arghand, a female anchor at TOLO, an Afghan news network, interviewed a senior Taliban representative on the air. The interview garnered headlines around the world.
Two days later, Arghand did it again, interviewing Malala Yousafzai, the activist who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, in what TOLO described as the first time Yousafzai had ever been interviewed on Afghan TV.
Arghand was blazing a trail, but her work has been put on hold. She decided to leave Afghanistan, citing the dangers that so many journalists and ordinary Afghans are facing.
From requiring law enforcement to garner independent judicial authorization as a condition for cross border requests for user data, to prohibiting police investigative teams from bypassing privacy safeguards in secret data transfer deals, our recommendations submitted to PACE will add much-needed human rights protections to the draft Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime. The recommendations seek to preserve the Protocol’s objective—to facilitate efficient and timely cross-border investigations between countries with varying legal systems—while embedding safeguards protecting individual rights.€
Without these amendments, the Protocol’s credibility is in question. The Budapest Cybercrime Convention has been remarkably successful in terms of signatories—large and small states from around the globe have ratified it. However, Russia’s long-standing goal to replace the treaty with its own proposed UN draft convention may be adding pressure on the Council of Europe (CoE) to rush its approval instead of extending its terms of reference to properly allow for a meaningful non-stakeholder consultation. But if the CoE intends to offer a more human right protective approach to the UN Cybercrime initiative, it must lead by example by fixing the primary technical mistakes we have highlighted in our submission and strengthen privacy and data protection safeguards in the draft Protocol.€
This post is the first of a series of€ articles describing our recommendations to PACE. The series will also explain how the Protocol will impact legislation in other countries. € The draft Protocol was€ approved by the€ Council of Europe’s Cybercrime Committee (T-CY) in May 28th following an opaque, several-year process largely commandeered by law enforcement.€ €
The largest Muslim civil rights organization in the United States demanded Monday that the Biden administration immediately put in place a "moratorium on drone warfare" after the U.S. killed at least 10 Afghan civilians—including half a dozen children—with an airstrike in Kabul over the weekend.
"Enough is enough," Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement. "For more than ten years, our government's drone strikes have killed thousands of innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Muslim world—destroying family homes, wedding parties, and even funeral processions. The civilian casualties in Kabul are simply the latest victims of this misused technology."
As a Syrian asylum seeker in the United States, I face a classic Catch-22: I have applied for asylum, but the new regulations prohibit me from working for at least a year, preventing me from supporting myself as I pursue my asylum claim.
Human rights advocates are demanding that policymakers across€ Europe do more to safely accomodate Afghan refugees within their countries after it was revealed Monday that the European Union is€ reportedly planning€ to thwart the arrival of people fleeing the war-torn nation.
"Based on lessons learned, the E.U. and its member states stand determined to act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled large-scale illegal migration movements faced in the past, by preparing a coordinated and orderly response," E.U. ministers are expected to say during a Tuesday meeting about Afghanistan,€ according to a draft statement obtained by Reuters.
Lawmakers and criminal justice advocates in Massachusetts are calling for changes to the laws that govern how law enforcement seizes, and keeps, cash and property confiscated in suspected drug crimes. The push follows a WBUR and ProPublica investigation that found a top prosecutor stockpiling people’s money for years, even when they weren’t charged with a drug offense or their cases were dismissed.
The system, known as civil asset forfeiture, was designed to disrupt criminal drug operations, but in Massachusetts, it’s easier for prosecutors to hold onto cash indefinitely once it’s seized. That’s because, under state laws, district attorneys need only meet the lowest legal burden of proof, probable cause, to support suspicions that the money was involved in a drug crime; DAs also face no deadline to notify a person that they intend to keep the cash.
Logan, W.Va.—Heading east from here, County Road 17 snakes up and down craggy hills for several miles before crossing an unremarkable intersection. A deserted church sits on one corner. On the other, a small bronze plaque recounts the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor dispute that saw almost 10,000 miners face off against a union-busting sheriff, several thousand deputized locals, and the US military. It was the largest armed uprising in the country since the Civil War. This year marks the 100th anniversary, yet hardly a soul today remembers it.
Holding 17 different factors steady in a complex statistical analysis of more than 2 million conventional mortgage applications for home purchases, we found that lenders were 40% more likely to turn down Latino applicants for loans, 50% more likely to deny Asian/Pacific Islander applicants, and 70% more likely to deny Native American applicants than similar white applicants. Lenders were 80% more likely to reject Black applicants than similar white applicants. These are national rates.
In every case, the prospective borrowers of color looked almost exactly the same on paper as the white applicants, except for their race.
These findings are congruent with a previous study — conducted by Tulchin Research and commissioned by SEIU — showing that drivers are “receiving little information” about the benefits, with many drivers entirely unaware of the benefits.
“Rather than rectifying the problems app-based drivers face, Prop 22 has intensified drivers’ vulnerability to health and safety risks as well as feelings of confusion and disillusionment,” concludes the report. As to how to fix the problem, in the short term, the authors recommend removing restrictions on the health care stipend. “The stipend should cover 100 percent of the average monthly premium for a Covered California Bronze plan. Drivers’ total work time, rather than engaged work time, should be counted when calculating stipend qualification,” they write.
Privatization will undermine access to water and wastewater services, which the United Nations has recognized as a fundamental human right. UN experts have noted that the pandemic has exposed the “catastrophic impact” of privatization that “prices out the poor and may result in violations of human rights.”
Surprising nobody, the traditional cable TV industry lost another 1.2 million paying subscribers last quarter as users flee to other alternatives. Largely those alternatives consist of streaming video services that are cheaper, more flexible, and feature better customer service. Many others are rediscovering free over the air broadcasts. Others have simply shifted away from TV entirely, choosing to embrace YouTube or TikTok.
So we've noted for a long time how the FCC's broadband maps are a bit of a joke, routinely overstating broadband competitors, speeds, and service availability. We've also routinely noted how these bad maps go hand in hand with extremely sloppy subsidy programs that often dole out money to regional monopolies for doing as little as possible. That was punctuated recently by a $9 billion scandal in which the FCC (under Trump appointee Ajit Pai) doled out hundreds of millions of undeserved dollars to ISPs (like Elon Musk's Starlink) so they could deliver broadband to airport parking lots and traffic medians.
You may recall that my colleague Karl Bode discussed Netflix's response to real competition last month, dealing mostly with how Netflix has attempted to hand-waive concerns over losing subscribers in the face of increasing streaming options from the likes of Amazon, Disney, and Comcast. But buried down in the last paragraph was a reference to Netflix's reported interest in video game streaming. Reports indicated that Netflix had hired an executive that had previously worked for EA, speculating that the company was getting into game publishing. There was no official word from Netflix as to what this game studio would actually look like, and the speculation was roughly what you would expect.
As many Kluwer readers will know, the last 18 months have witnessed a changing of the guard within the English Patents Court with long-standing first instance judges Arnold and Birss JJ being promoted to the Court of Appeal and their shoes in the Patents Court being filled by the highly respected patent practitioners, Meade and Mellor JJ.
Almost a year since Meade J was installed as a High Court Judge, this seems as good a time as any to reflect on the way that practices within the English Patents Court have been evolving, particularly with regard to the timetabling and conduct of trials.
A group of movie companies continues its legal efforts to hold VPN services liable for pirating subscribers. A new lawsuit lists Surfshark, VPN Unlimited, Zenmate, and ExpressVPN as defendants. Besides damages, the filmmakers want the VPNs to block pirate sites and start logging user data. The accused companies have yet to respond in court.
FitGirl Repacks is currently one of the most popular torrent sites on the Internet but its operator is warning of turbulent times ahead. Site operator FitGirl says that due to a serious domain issue, the site's main domain could go offline temporarily or even forever.
Naoto Hieda is a Japanese artist based in Cologne, Germany. They challenge the current paradigm of productive coding to speculate its new form, namely post-coding, through their neurodiverse perspective and live coding experiences. The duo co-founded Hydra community meetups at venues including NODE20 (Germany), and presented hybrid media installation GlitchMe at CODAME (US).
That outcome, however correct, is far from certain. The Federal Circuit got this issue very wrong just a few years ago, in Oracle v. Google. But with the facts stacked against the plaintiff, and a simpler question simpler to decide, the Federal Circuit might get it right this time.
The parties in the case, software companies SAS Institute Inc. (SAS) and World Programming Ltd. (WPL), have been feuding for years in multiple courts in the U.S. and abroad. At the heart of the case is SAS’s effort to effectively own the SAS Language, a high-level programming language used to write programs for conducting statistical analysis. The language was developed in the 1970s at a public university and dedicated to the public domain, as was software designed to convert and execute SAS-language programs. Works in the public domain can be used by anyone without permission. That is where the original SAS language and software executing it lives.
A few years later, however, some of its developers rewrote the software and founded a for-profit company to market and sell the new version. It was alone in doing so until, yet more years later, WPL developed its own, rival software that can also convert and execute SAS-Language programs. Confronted with new competition, SAS ran to court, first in the U.K., then in North Carolina, claiming copyright infringement. It lost both times.
