In my examination of container images, I discussed container fundamentals, but now it's time to delve deeper into container runtimes so you can understand how container environments are built. The information in this article is in part extracted from the official documentation of the Open Container Initiative (OCI), the open standard for containers, so this information is relevant regardless of your container engine.
1:59 Linux Innards 48:03 Vibrations from the Ether 55:26 Check This Out 59:19 Announcements & Outro
In our Innards section, Pi’s Pi’s and more Pi’s
And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
You're stranded on a desert island. What's the one command you take with you?
Typing commands into a darkened terminal window may seem antiquated to some, but for many computer users, it's the most efficient, most accessible, and clearest way to accomplish nearly any task a computer is capable of performing. These days, thanks to all the projects that bring open source commands to non-open platforms like macOS and Windows, terminal commands are relevant to everybody, not just Linux and BSD users. It may surprise you to learn that there are thousands of commands installed on an average POSIX computer, but of course, a good many of those aren't really intended to be used, at least not directly or regularly. Some commands are more universally useful than others, and still fewer are absolutely essential for effective terminal use.
A recent Linux patch from AMD hints that the company might be gearing up to refresh its second generation Radeon DNA (RDNA 2) graphics card lineup, similar to how NVIDIA has a history of adding "Ti" and "Super" variants of its GPU product lines. Nothing is official at the moment, but if a refresh does occur, would expect to see a bump in performance and power efficiency.
The networking subsystem updates for the recently opened Linux 5.15 merge window have landed.
If the existing root password is no longer memorize or is forgotten, you can reset the forgotten root password on boot by switching into single user mode.
This guide describes how to recover or reset a forgotten root password on RHEL 8 and CentOS 8 Linux using single user mode.
SSH or Secure Shell is a protocol utilized to enable communication between two computers and share data. It provides a password-enabled or password-less (disabled) authentication and encrypts communication between two hosts. When working with CentOS servers most of the time is spent in the terminal linked to your server via SSH.
In this guide, we’ll be focusing on setting up SSH keys-based authentication for a CentOS 8 server. SSH keys offer a straightforward, steady technique of communicating with remote servers and are encouraged for all users.
PgAdmin 4 is an open-source, powerful, and front-end PostgreSQL database administration tool. PgAdmin 4 allows administrators to seamlessly manage PostgreSQL databases from a web browser and run SQL queries among other database tasks. It’s written in Python and Javascript/JQuery and is an improvement of its predecessor PgAdmin.
This tutorial explains the steps to install elementary OS 6 to your computer. This offers you several modes you might want to choose, including dualbooting with Windows, dealing with either UEFI or BIOS Legacy, and even installing it to a blank USB flash disk drive. For your information, in this version we meet the brand new installer and is divided into two stages will be explained below. Time to install!
Fail2ban is an intrusion prevention software framework that protects computer servers from primarily brute-force attacks, banning bad user agents, banning URL scanners, and much more. Fail2ban achieves this by reading access/error logs of your server or web applications. Fail2ban is coded in the python programming language.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install Fail2ban and do some configurations with full examples and basic tips to get you started on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Mozilla Foundation’s dedication and effort in developing the Thunderbird mail client application software paid off in a big way. Other than being a renowned mail client, Thunderbird also functions perfectly as news and chat client on top of being an effective RSS feeder. However, most Linux users associate with it as a free email application because of its customizable and easy-to-setup footprints.
It's every developer's dream to have clean and issue-free code which can readily be deployed into staging and production environments. One tool that can help you achieve this is in your CI/CD pipeline is SonarQube. SonarQube is a cross-platform and web-based tool used for continuous inspection of source code. It is written in Java. SonarQube enables you to write cleaner and safer code by inspecting code and detecting bugs and other inconsistencies.
SonarQube can be integrated into platforms such as GitHub, Gitlab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps to mention a few platforms. It comes in various editions including Community, Developer, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions.
How to configure redirection using .htaccess file. Htaccess is file which is used to make changes to your web server configuration without editing the server configuration file. This .htaccess file will be placed in your website root directory.
In this guide you are going to learn to how to configure some list of redirections which is mostly needed for your SEO and ranking in search engines.
AYN Odin is a 6-inch portable game console powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 or MediaTek Dimensity 900 processor and offered with an optional dock with an HDMI port to connect it to a large screen, various ports for controllers, and even a 2.5-inch SATA bay.
It offers a much more powerful experience, a larger display, a more recent Android 10/11 OS, and better multiplayer abilities than the Amlogic S905D3 powered Powkiddy A20 portable game console we have just covered.
I will use the queuing features from the OpenBSD firewall PF (Packet Filter) which relies on the CoDel network scheduler algorithm, which seems to bring all the features we need to do what we want.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) ranks as one of the fastest-growing professions, with practitioners highly sought after in 2021, according to LinkedIn. In addition to having proficiency in C++, Python, or Java and an aptitude for math, the strongest AI/ML professionals and teams are well-rounded in their general business knowledge and ability to communicate.
Organization-wide adoption of AI/ML technologies is the next phase of digital transformation, so a powerful team of programmers, developers, and data scientists is critical to improving AI literacy from the top down. It is important for technology leaders to communicate that AI/ML is meant to enhance the organization’s teams, not replace jobs.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
When you click on the download button on the Ubuntu website, it gives you a few options. Two of them are Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server.
This could confuse new users. Why are there two (actually 4 of them)? Which one should be downloaded? Ubuntu desktop or server? Are they the same? What is the difference?
Powkiddy A20 is a 3.5-inch portable Android game console based on the same Amlogic S905D3 processor found in Khadas VIM3L SBC, equipped with 2GB RAM, 8GB storage, and supported 18 different emulators for gaming. It could potentially also be an interesting platform to play with AOSP, as we’ll see below.
Wouldn't it be nice to control the general-purpose input/outputs (GPIOs) of the Raspberry Pi remotely with your smartphone? If you can answer the question in the affirmative, I would like to introduce you to a simple way to implement this. Writing this article, I have no specific application in mind, but I can think of combining it with lawn irrigation, any illumination, or a garage door opener.
Anyway, all you need to get started is a Raspberry Pi and a smartphone. The actual logic is already available on GitHub, so even without programming skills, you will be able to follow the steps described in this article.
There is no such thing as the perfect web browser. It all depends on what you prefer and what you use it for.
But, what are your best options when it comes to web browsers for Linux?
In this article, I try to highlight the best web browsers that you can pick for Ubuntu and other Linux.
Moodle is an open-source e-learning platform with a focus on security and privacy that allows educators to create flexible and highly accessible online spaces for their learners.
As a widely recognized educational software, Moodle is trusted by hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The solution is totally open-source and is supported, besides its global community, by a network of certified service providers.
Moodle offers a wide range of educational activities and tools that allow schools and universities to create their own personalized learning environments that can be accessed any time and anywhere, even from mobile devices.
Distributed under the GPL license, the self-hosted version of Moodle is free.
Anyhow, these thoughts have been swirling in my head. Then one day I came across web-dev-feeds by simeviads, a collection of 1,000 feeds for web developers.
My first reaction was: “I gotta parse and analyze all those feeds! Surely that will surface common patterns for feed URLs!” So that’s what I did. Below are my findings.
Note: what follows likely isn’t 100% precise, but is meant as a rough analysis.
The guest team is a Moroccan football powerhouse and an African champion par excellence. AS Roma, though it had a tough season last year, seemed ready to reclaim its past glory, especially with Jose Mourinho now leading the squad.
The match was Roma’s final ‘friendly’ before embarking on the difficult task of reclaiming their strong standing in Serie A. Relegated from both the UEFA Champions League and Europa League, Roma is forced to play in the less prestigious Conference League. Neither the team nor the fans, however, seemed shaken by the setback. On the contrary, the team’s Ultrà were, once again, back in the stadium, in their fixed spot in the Curva Sud, with their massive flags and melodious chant, “Roma, Roma, Roma …”
I have been struck by how little attention in sports and historical circles has been given to the 50th anniversary of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ deploying the first all-Black (African American and Latino) team in the history of Major League Baseball.
A couple of years ago, just one simple quiz could determine how racist you are. Such was the sudden ubiquity of the implicit association test, or IAT, a diagnostic tool purporting to measure one’s unconscious biases. While it can be calibrated to gauge any number of hidden prejudices, the IAT has most commonly been used to determine lurking racial attitudes. And during Barack Obama’s second term, the IAT, which was developed in 1995, found a new life online. NPR calmly instructed its liberal readers what to do if they flunked it; The Washington Post wrote up what an aggregate of test results allegedly told us about America; even Hillary Clinton brought up the concept of implicit bias, in her 2016 debates with Donald Trump.
Earlier this month, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' Department of Health deliberately altered how it reported€ Covid-19 deaths, making it appear as though the public health crisis was waning even as the state's residents endured the most significant escalation in infections since the pandemic began,€ according to a report published Tuesday by the Miami Herald.€
New data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that much of the United States is in the midst of a deadly coronavirus surge driven by the ultra-contagious Delta variant.
Vix Lowthion, Green Party education spokesperson and a secondary school teacher on the Isle of Wight, said:
Environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to the head of the Pesticides Unit at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Jose Tarazona.
Mason wrote to Tarazona because the Rapporteur Member States (France, Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden) tasked with risk assessing glyphosate and appointed by the European Commission in 2019, said on 21 June 2021 that there was no problem with glyphosate-based herbicides.
The "ssh-rsa" signature type is now disabled by default.
"ssh-rsa" signatures can be selectively re-enabled if necessary.
RSA ("ssh-rsa") keys are not affected by this change and remain valid.
Trend Micro announced the results of its first half 2021 Linux Threat Report study, demonstrating how hackers are targeting Linux systems with malware.
For a while it's been clear that Apple has been hoping to use "we care about privacy" as a marketing advantage in an internet economy that consistently... doesn't. For example Apple has stood up to the FBI when it comes to backdooring encryption. And in 2020 Apple unveiled several new privacy features and policies it hoped would differentiate it from its other "big tech" contemporaries repeatedly under fire in the press and in Congress. Granted there's been ongoing hints this dedication isn't exactly consistent, but it's the thought that counts, I guess.
Over the past year, EFF has been tracking vaccine passport proposals and how they have been implemented. We have objections—especially when rolled out by opportunistic tech companies that are already creating digital inequity and mismanaging user data. We hope we can stop them from transforming into another layer of user tracking.
Paper proof of vaccination raises fewer concerns, as does a digital photo of a paper card displayed on a phone screen. Of much greater concern are scannable vaccination credentials, which might be used to track people’s physical movements through doors and across time. Thus, we oppose any use of scannable vaccination credentials. At a minimum, such systems must have a paper alternative, open source code, and design and policy safeguards to minimize the risk of tracking.
Last year “immunity passports” were proposed and sometimes implemented before the science was even well-developed on COVID-19 immunity and vaccination. Many governments and private companies apparently were driven less by informed public health and science, as by the need to promote economic movement. Some organizations and governments even took the opportunity to create a new, digital verification system for the vaccinated. The needed transparency and protection has been lacking, and so have clear boundaries to keep them from escalating into an unnecessary surveillance system. Even though we recognize that many vaccine credentialing systems have been implemented in good faith, there are several examples below of dangerous missteps that we hope will not be repeated.
President Joe Biden, echoing President George W Bush after 9/11, said: “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”
But the self-destructive US response to 9/11 should serve as a warning about the perils of ill-directed over-reaction. Reducing complex developments in Afghanistan to another episode in “the war on terror” is misleading, counter-productive and one of the root causes of the present mess.
Among its many findings, the report clearly establishes that “massacres” were perpetrated by Bolivian state security forces in the communities of Senkata and Sacaba. The report also includes a number of recommendations regarding the treatment of victims, calls for those responsible for human rights violations to be held accountable, and stresses the need for a greater autonomy and depoliticization of the Bolivian judiciary. Many of the report’s recommendations seek to address structural issues, including the pervasive racism in both the Bolivian state and in Bolivian society. The report concludes “that the [2019] violence had a racial and anti-indigenous character, and that the security forces used excessive or disproportionate force and did not adequately prevent acts of violence.”[1]
In the preliminary section of the GIEI report, which provides general background on the events that preceded the Senkata and Sacaba massacres, the authors clearly identify the audit of the 2019 elections carried out by the Organization of American States (OAS) as a major factor that contributed to the political crisis that led to the forced resignation of President Morales and the installment of Jeanine Añez as de facto president. The report states:
Whatever you think of what happened on January 6th, people should be concerned about the House Select Committee that is investigating those events now demanding information from various social networks. As the committee announced in a press release, it was demanding records from a long list of social media companies.
Yemeni lecturer and professor Mohammed Ali (a pseudonym, by his family’s request) was in a dazed state when he was suddenly told that he was being fired and would longer be allowed to enter the Saudi University at which he taught. Last week, the head of the university in Asir province in southern Saudi Arabia told Ali over the phone that his contract was being cancelled without explanation and that he should leave the Kingdom. “I went home and just curled up in my bed in a fetal position for six hours; I was shocked,” Mohammed said. The Yemeni academic was not alone. “All of my colleagues at the university received notifications from the university that their contracts have been canceled or will not be renewed, without explanation,” he added.
Many do not realise that these visuals serve to divert attention from another daunting reality: the humiliating defeat suffered by the US and its allies after a 20 year occupation of Afghanistan. It was an occupation which according to Brown University’s Costs of War project devoured US 2.26 trillion dollars. € At its height it employed 775,000 US service personnel. The US and its NATO allies had at their command some of the world’s most lethal and sophisticated weapons. Still, some 2.322 US military deaths occurred. As a result of US and NATO military operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, 240,000 deaths were recorded. Afghan civilian deaths were estimated at 47,245 while Pakistani civilian deaths hit 24.099. 3.5 million Afghans were internally displaced and there were 2.5 million Afghan refugees at the end of 2020.
In contrast, the Taliban had limited fire power. € As Pepe Escobar put it, “They relied only on Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades and Toyota pick-ups € —€ before they captured American hardware these past few days, including drones and helicopters.” Except for a core, their guerrillas had only basic military training. It is estimated that the Taliban had 78, 000 fighters, 60,000 of them active. There were also some fighters in Pakistan; otherwise, international support for the Taliban was modest. And yet, by the middle of August 2021, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan led by Taliban co-founder, Mullah Baradur Akhund was at the driving wheel.
Much has been said in the past few weeks about the sudden takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban. For all the money spent and blood spilled by the United States, at the end of it all, the corrupt government that was in place garnered so little support that it fell without so much as a whimper.
Anti-war advocates on Tuesday credited President Joe€ Biden with finally ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan, even as many expressed surprise that it was ultimately the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a lifelong proponent of U.S. military intervention, to end the 20-year quagmire.
The then-senator€ backed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and voted for the authorization to start the Iraq War in 2003.€ In the years prior to the U.S. attack on Iraq, Biden€ claimed€ that "taking Saddam down"—not diplomacy—was the only way to ensure there were no weapons of mass destruction in the country.
"It is right that the Western troops are finally leaving our country—they should have done so much earlier. We cannot have a serious peace process as long as the Americans are in Afghanistan. We must build our country with our [own] hands. …The Americans replaced the barbaric regime of the Taliban with€ brutal warlords, and then began to negotiate with the Taliban, even though the nature of the Taliban has never changed. The Americans have thrown bombs, polluted the environment, made the system even more corrupt. They have never been interested in the Afghan people."—Malalai Joya, author, activist, and former member of the Afghan Parliament.
We’ve all heard that question asked, in a dozen variations, probably a hundred times in the past few months in the media.€ And it’s not just the wrong question: it strengthens the GOP frame that lets George W. Bush off the hook for many of his worst failures and crimes.
Afghanistan had little to nothing to do with 9/11.
Sunday, October 7, 2001: Less than a month after 9/11, President George W. Bush announces to the world, “On my orders the United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Following the Taliban's seizure of power, people across the political spectrum have expressed concern about the fate of Afghans who helped the United States and are therefore at risk of retribution. (This concern is not universal: We are also seeing a€ rise in far-right, anti-Afghan refugee sentiment.) Pundits and politicians who gave little attention to civilian deaths in Afghanistan during 20€ years of U.S. occupation are joining in this outpouring—a dynamic that is building pressure for the Biden administration to extend the U.S. military€ presence.
Just as the United States completed its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan on Monday after two decades of war and occupation, House Republicans announced plans to push for a $25 billion increase in annual military spending—a proposal that progressive lawmakers and advocacy groups swiftly rejected.
"Now is the time to shift our investments away from endless wars and toward addressing human needs."—Rep. Barbara Lee
A child he’ll never see. But a child who will grow up hearing never-ending stories about his/her father.
All at the start of Joe Biden’s presidency during an evacuation from a forsaken 20-year war in Afghanistan gone terribly wrong at its tail end, with warnings of more possible terrorist attacks to come before the exodus is to end Tuesday. And everything had been going so well domestically for Biden. He’s dropping in the polls.
Here’s the price tag: $5.48 trillion. No, that’s not the cost of what President Biden is calling a “generational investment” to rebuild America. That’s the price of the so-called War on Terror since 2001, as detailed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs—the cost to US taxpayers of sending forces to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and other countries in a continuing war that, as Biden implied last week, has metastasized more than it has succeeded.
Conservation advocacy groups on Tuesday responded with alarm and disappointment to the Biden administration's long-awaited new rule for protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whales from Maine to Florida.
"There's no time to waste—the rule must be strengthened immediately with expanded time/area management and effective monitoring if North Atlantic right whales are to survive."—Whitney Webber, Oceana
A group of progressive lawmakers led by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib urged President Joe Biden on Tuesday to replace Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—a Trump appointee—with a leader committed to tackling systemic climate risk and strictly regulating Wall Street banks.
"Under his leadership the Federal Reserve has taken very little action to mitigate the risk climate change poses to our financial system."—Letter
Advocacy groups on Tuesday blasted the Biden administration for resuming oil and gas lease sales for public lands and waters as the United States faces multiple disasters exacerbated by the fossil fuel driven-climate emergency.
"Committing more public land to filthy fossil fuel extraction is disastrous policy that will only worsen the climate and extinction crises."—Taylor McKinnon, Center for Biological Diversity
"You had a future, and so should we."
"We, tomorrow's leaders, call on all agencies, from the holding companies to the independent shops, to stop working with fossil fuel clients. This means oil giants as well as the alphabet soup of trade associations and front groups."—71 young professionals
Thirteen years ago, while sharing several “thoughts on peer-to-peer production and deployment of physical objects, I criticized an article (now offline) that argued that “when peer-to-peer hits energy, we can be sure it will change life as we know it”.
In 2008, I did not like that article because it:
either refers to really advanced technology so far in the future to not make any difference for anybody living when it was first written, or hopes that the laws of termodynamics will be proven wrong very soon: “this will really take off when we figure out how to produce cars that generate power instead of consume it”
Passersby were abusive. “Your shoes are leather,” they would yell, a simplistic syllogism that both meant human use of animals was inextricable and that we were hypocrites. Our shoes were not leather.
“Get a job,” they would yell, an absurd allegation since demonstrating on Saturday did not mean we did not have jobs –– we did.
California's Caldor Fire forced tens of thousands of people to flee South Lake Tahoe on Monday, an extreme weather disaster that experts said provides further evidence of the need to rapidly slash greenhouse gas emissions and transition to clean energy.
"Wildfire season in the West is still producing horrific scenes daily."—Eric Holthaus, meteorologist
Sen. Bernie Sanders has expressed confidence that congressional Democrats will be able to overcome an aggressive corporate lobbying campaign against their popular $3.5 trillion reconciliation proposal, which special interests are aiming to strip of climate investments, Medicare expansion, taxes on big businesses, and other key progressive priorities.
"These guys don't lose," Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told the Washington Post earlier this summer when asked about the lobbying effort. "They're going to lose this round."
America doesn’t€ need their charity. We need them to pay their fair share in taxes€
If that trend continues, our future as a democracy will come to an end. So, the first step is to recognize it, and the second is to address it now.
This trend was quantitively demonstrated in a RAND Corporation paper,€ Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018 by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards. They used a time-period agnostic and income-level agnostic measure of inequality that relates income growth to economic growth. A summary and commentary of their work by Nick Hanauer And David M. Rolf€ is readily accessible to the public in€ Time.€
"Any politician endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce is no ally to workers."—Brianna Westbrook, former House candidate
The legal case
Saab continues to fight this flagrant attempt of extra-territorial judicial overreach by the US. In response to Saab’s recent appeal to the US 11th Circuit Court, the US filed on August 24 an application for an extension to reply on October 7. This legal delaying tactic is likely a US ploy to allow Saab’s pending extradition without recognizing his diplomatic immunity.
It shouldn’t have turned out this way. Just a few years ago, Newsom was seen as a progressive superstar, elected in 2018 to lead the world’s fifth-largest economy after serving as mayor of San Francisco. These were the same midterm elections that saw progressive newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and others elected to federal congressional seats in what was seen as a game-changing year for liberal politics and a worthy consolation prize to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic nomination loss.
Newsom’s campaign slogan, “Courage for a Change,” led political pundits to dub him the “next head of the California resistance.” He campaigned on ushering in a statewide Medicare for All or single-payer system and won the endorsement of the National Nurses United (NNU) as a result. A year before his win, Newsom addressed NNU members on the issue of health care, saying, “If we can’t get it done next year, you have my firm and absolute commitment as your next governor that I will lead the effort to get it done. We will have universal health care in the state of California.”
One form of the lie is rejection of deep inquiry into social context, which is banalized into immediate gratification and sensationalism, a barrage of soundbites lacking depth or breadth. In Edward Snowden’s words, hyper-consumption of online information “comes at the cost of being hyper-consumed”, bled dry of data regarding our (externally imposed) “preferences” that is then used to reconstruct our “reality”. Then, “the real cost to this recursive construction of reality from the ephemera of our preferences is that it tailors a separate world for each individual”, where meaning is manufactured from mere coincidence, which is “the essence of paranoia”, a mental state that is most amendable to political manipulation. The hyper-individualist idea of freedom as “I’m alright, Jack” entails complicity with the injustices and crimes that inevitably appear when enormous inequalities are covered up by the system that causes them. The worse the injustice, the more intractable the national and international systems in which untruths thrive and morph into violent forms.
There are connections, then, between apparently isolated atrocities in Brazil, like the school massacre in the Suzano municipality of São Paolo (2019), the murder of a gay politician, sociologist, and human rights activist Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, in Rio de Janeiro (2018), and the Tasso da Silveira Municipal School massacre of twelve children aged from twelve to fourteen, ten of them girls in 2011, also in Rio de Janeiro. And they have elements in common with mass killings in other countries, for example, the Christchurch mosque massacre (2019), the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings (2018), and the El Paso shootings (2019). The killers are males who tend to frequent deep web forums where anonymity covers criminality. They consume conspiracy theories and fake news, detest in-depth knowledge, spread hate speech against women and historically defamed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, fetishize firearms, and revere facistoid political leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump. Racist, white supremacist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and opposed to human rights, they represent the rise of the far-right around the world, which also takes the form of a kind of resentful, violent revenge against the political and cultural achievements of LGBTQI+, Black, Indigenous, environmentalist, and feminist movements in recent years.
There's an interesting discussion that happens in content moderation circles with regards to government requests for takedowns: are those requests about content that violates local laws or about the content violating website policies? Many people lump these two things together, but they're actually pretty different in practice. Obviously, if a government comes across content that violates the law, it seems reasonable for them to alert the platform to it and expect that the content will be removed (though, there may be some questions about jurisdiction and such). However, when it's just content that may violate site policy, there are some pretty big questions raised. This actually gets to the "jawboning" question we've been discussing a lot lately, and exploring where the line is between a politician persuading a website to take something down and compelling them to do so.
It's time.
Like Ben Affleck, we here at Salon have been in a two decades-long, on again, off again relationship. For him, it's with Jennifer Lopez. For us, it's our comments. On Friday, September 3, we will be eliminating the comments section here, consciously uncoupling for good.
The media landscape is vastly different than it was even just a year ago, and enormously different than the last time we changed our commenting platform in 2018. (You may have noticed we don't have any comments that stretch back earlier than that.) Conversations are mostly happening in different ways now, and it makes sense for us to adjust accordingly.
The name Salon has always stood for spirited conversation, diverse opinions and above all, true community, and that has never been a one-way proposition. Over the years, that imperative has taken numerous forms, from message boards to an in-house blog system (a space where, among other things, "Julie and Julia" was born) to traditional story comments. The comments appearance and infrastructure has changed over time, and we've even gone long periods without having them at all. We've always tried to stay attentive to the ways in which communication evolves, and that is a process that continues today.
[...]
So while comments are going away, this isn't an end of the conversation. It's just time to change the channels we use to talk — and listen — to each other. I know we all still have plenty to say.
“When we can discuss socialism rationally. It will be as if a heavy curtain has been lifted from man’s eyes.” Those were not the words of Karl Marx or Eugene Victor Debs, though either of those radical thinkers might well have uttered them.
Look at the mainstream media-politics treatment of a Twitter statement in which the putschist Congressman Mo Brooks (APoT[1]-AL) expressed compassion for the actions of the North Carolina Trumpist Floyd Ray Roseberry, who threatened to set off a bomb outside the Library of Congress last Thursday. Brooks voiced sympathy with Roseberry, saying this: “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society. The way to stop Socialism’s march,” Brooks added, “is for patriotic Americans to fight back in the 2022 and 2024 elections.”
Brooks’ statement contained no forthright denunciation of Roseberry’s action (for which the pathetic terrorist could face life in prison) and ended with an ominous warning: “Bluntly stated, America’s future is at risk.”
One of the many, sometimes contradictory narratives the media told about millennials in the 2010s was that they were “the perfectionist generation.” In 2018, an op-ed in The Guardian reported that perfectionism was “destroying the mental health” of the millennial generation; that same year, The Chicago Tribune called millennials a generation of “overachievers.” Much of this reporting framed young people’s exacting tendencies as a choice—they care too much about grades, or are spending too much time comparing themselves to others on social media. In her new book, An Ordinary Age, Rainesford Stauffer proposes a different theory: The growing political and economic precarity facing this generation has forced them to strive for perfection, because it often feels like the only guaranteed path toward stability, if not survival.
Louis had a bottomless curiosity, and he had a thirst to know everything. He was interested in and knowledgeable about nearly every subject under the sun: films, art, poetry, literature, classical music, jazz, the music of the Global South, history, physics, ecology, medicine, politics, economics, the arcana of leftist parties and sects, class struggle, agriculture, Indigenous peoples, philosophy, Marx and Marxism, labor unions, Trotsky and Trotskyism, education. On these and other topics, he must have written several million words. For many of us, he was a veritable clearinghouse of what was worth reading. We looked forward to the posts on his blog, The Unrepentant Marxist, the links he put up every day on Marxmail, the listserv he moderated for twenty years, and what he posted on his Facebook page. It was always as if we were in a free school, learning new things and re-thinking those we thought we knew something about.
Most people accept the way things are and live their lives accordingly. But a few do not. They rebel against the status quo. Some abandon the world in one way or another, living off the grid, refusing to settle down, joining a religious cult. Others dig in their heels and devote their lives to analyzing society and doing what they can to change it. Louis was one of these. He was born in Kansas City, but he grew up in the Catskills in the “Borsht Belt,” as he used to say. While raised in the Jewish faith and certainly influenced by what it meant to be a Jew in an antisemitic society, from an early age, he was a nonbeliever. He enrolled at Bard College when he was sixteen, and he did some graduate studies at the New School. He wrote much about his upbringing and his education, as well as his entire life, perhaps most openly and wittily in the comic book autobiography, in which he wrote the dialogue while Harvey Pekar, who had become a close friend, did the strips. Anyone wanting to learn about his life will want to read this. You can find it here.
Under president Donald Trump, ICE went from barely tolerable to fascist stormtroopery, doing anything in its power to kick people out of the country. Trump claimed he was just trying to make the nation safer by ridding us of the "worst of the worst." His vague directives lit a fire under the worst ICE employees, giving them free rein to forcibly eject as many people as possible, even if those people were not the "worst," nor even trending towards that direction.
I feel like people are waiting for the headline “Roe v. Wade Overturned” to appear in a giant font above the fold of The New York Times before they demand that Democrats do something to protect abortion rights. I feel like as long as Roe remains on the books, only women’s rights activists will talk about, or even notice, that the right to bodily autonomy is being functionally revoked in Republican-controlled state after Republican-controlled state. I feel like the battle for reproductive rights has already been lost, and Democrats never even showed up to fight.
Although there are limited ways that conservation groups can influence state management (or lack thereof) of these lands, there are a few options that the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) and a few other conservation groups have utilized to protect key parcels. The obstacles to public influence on state trust lands are numerous and similar across the West. But in some instances, the very regulations that protect resource abusers can sometimes be used to further conservation goals.
For instance, WWP just won a 20-year lease on a 640-acre section along Champion and Fourth of July Creeks in the scenic Sawtooth Valley of central Idaho. Champion Creek is home to ESA-listed steelhead and Fourth of July Creek provides habitat for bull trout, which are also listed under the ESA. With the removal of livestock, the riparian areas and water quality will improve, thus benefiting the fish. There is also a small herd of pronghorn that frequents the section who will no longer have to compete with domestic sheep for forage.
Early last year, the Cook County public guardian grew worried that Illinois’ child welfare agency once again was failing the Spanish-speaking families whose children were in its care.
So Charles Golbert decided to conduct an experiment. For 10 months, lawyers from his office counted the number of new cases that involved Spanish-speaking families. Then the staffers checked how many of those families’ files included a critical document that determines whether the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services must provide them services in Spanish, as required by a federal court order.
When the UK announced its rebranded "Online Safety" bill (originally, the "Online Harms" bill) we noted that the mechanism included was effectively identical to the original Great Firewall of China. That is, when China first began censoring its internet, rather than telling websites explicitly what needed to be taken down, it just gave vague policy guidance about what "harmful" information would be a problem if it was found online, and backed that up with a serious threat: if any service provider was found not to have taken down information the government deemed problematic, it would face serious consequences. There was, of course, no such threat for taking down information that should not have been taken down. The end result was clear: when in doubt, take it down.
After Pai’s announcement, those same millions - and millions of their friends - flooded the FCC’s comment portal, actually overwhelming the FCC’s servers and shutting them down (the FCC falsely claimed it had been hacked). The comments from experts and everyday Americans overwhelmingly affirmed the consensus from the 2015 net neutrality fight: Americans love net neutrality and they expect their regulators to enact it.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the FCC vote: thousands, then millions of nearly-identical comments flooded into the Commission, all opposed to net neutrality. Some of these comments came from obviously made-up identities, some from stolen identities (including identities stolen from sitting US Senators!), and many, many dead people.. One million of them purported to be sent by Pornhub employees. All in all, 82% of the comments the FCC received were fake, and the overwhelming majority of fake comments opposed net neutrality.€
Sending all these fake comments was expensive. The telecoms industry paid millions to corrupt the political process. That bill wasn’t footed by just one company, either - an industry association paid for the fraud.€
Canada is barreling towards a federal election, and if recent legislative proposals are any indication, the outcome will have huge implications for the future of the internet in the country. Between the recent Bill C-10 and the proposed online harms legislation (among other things), it's clear that plenty of Canadian politicians want to make drastic and draconian changes to how the internet is regulated. This week, I join Mike on the podcast along with Matt Hatfield, the Campaigns Director of OpenMedia (something like Canada's version of the EFF), to discuss the Canadian election and what it means for a variety of important internet policy issues.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced that it intends to grant Respiratorius the patent application for the RESP9000 series, which includes the drug candidate RCD405, (European Patent Application No. 19740090.6 NOVEL BRONCHODILATING HETERO-LINKED AMIDES). After the formal fees have been paid, the patent will be granted, which gives Respiratorius market exclusivity in Europe until 2039. This is the first approval for the patent family.
You will recall that we were just discussing a cool little story about Bethesda going so far in embracing the modding communities surrounding its games that it ended up hiring one of the writers of an impressive Fallout 4 mod onto its team. Part of what made that story interesting was not how totally novel it was. After all, modders have found their way into developer roles in the past. Instead, it's that it was Bethesda that made it interesting, being a AAA title developer and the fact that the gaming industry certainly doesn't approach modding communities with unanimity.
A group of independent movie companies ha asked a Virginia federal court to grant millions in copyright damages against a popular fork of the piracy app Popcorn Time. The request for a default judgment also comes with a far-reaching injunction which, among other things, would require Internet providers to block several Popcorn Time domains.
Her recent independent productions “Calcutta Sonata” and “Dwelling in Travelling” have been critically acclaimed in the festival circuit and bagged some prestigious awards. Her film “Promising Plastic Polymers” won the Bronze Beaver Award at the 9th National Science Film Festival organized by Vigyan Prasar, and also a special award at the Eco Art Contest organized by American Centre and SAFE. She is also an avid writer. Her recent publication is Schools of Kolkata: Weaving Magic in Education (Volumes I & II), Published by Sampark.
Global anti-piracy group Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment is maintaining intense pressure on unlicensed streaming platforms. In a new wave takedowns, the video-focused coalition has targeted pirate IPTV services, app developers and unlicensed streaming sites, reaching settlements with some and sending others into hiding.
