Debian GNU/Linux 11.1 is here about two months after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 11 "Bullseye" as an up to date installation and live medium that includues all the latest security updates and bug fixes pushed through the stable software repositories during this time.
Debian GNU/Linux 11.1 comes with a total of 99 updated packages, split into 75 miscellaneous bug fixes and 24 security updates. This makes it easier to deploy the latest Debian GNU/Linux 11 "Bullseye" operating system on new machines as you don't have to download hundreds of updates after the installation.
Before getting into the details, let's take a step back and look at the history of Cluster API.
The Cluster API project started three years ago, and the first releases focused on extensibility and implementing a declarative API that allows a seamless experience across infrastructure providers. This was a success with many cloud providers: AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, GCP, Metal3, vSphere and still counting.
With extensibility addressed, the focus shifted to features, like automatic control plane and etcd management, health-based machine remediation, machine rollout strategies and more.
Fast forwarding to 2021, with lots of companies using Cluster API to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters running workloads in production, the community focused its effort on stabilization of both code, APIs, documentation, and on extensive test signals which inform Kubernetes releases.
With solid foundations in place, and a vibrant and welcoming community that still continues to grow, it was time to plan another iteration on our UX for both new and advanced users.
Enter ClusterClass and Managed Topologies, tada!
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We want to make managed topologies even more powerful and flexible, allowing users to dynamically change bits of a ClusterClass according to the specific needs of a Cluster; this will ensure the same simple and intuitive UX for solving complex problems like e.g. selecting machine image for a specific Kubernetes version and for a specific region of your infrastructure provider, or injecting proxy configurations in the entire Cluster, and so on.
Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant digs into projects files, settings, and keybindings for Kdenlive, an open source video editing solution. This video will help those that use Kdenlive work more efficiently. We hope you find this series useful and informative, and we hope to do similar projects like this in the future, so if you have ideas for topics you’d like us to cover, please let us know!
I've promised a Linux From Scratch series for a very long time and I've kept putting it off but we're finally here and I'm finally ready to hate my life.
For those unfamiliar, Asahi Linux is a project to port Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Asahi ringo is the name of the familiar McIntosh variety of apple in Japan, so naturally it follows that Linux for the Apple Macintosh is called Asahi Linux. The project is headed up by Hector Martin (also known as marcan42), most famous for his incredible achievements while reverse-engineering game console hardware, such as the Nintendo Wii and Sony's PlayStation 3 and 4.
I received an email from R Melville, that the tray battery monitor isn't working in EasyOS 3.0, but is working with the Buster-series.
I looked at the source code, and found that it relies on a deprecated feature in the kernel, that has been removed in the kernel. Don't know what kernel version it happened, but CONFIG_ACPI_PROCFS_POWER is removed.
This configure option causes the appearance of /proc/acpi/battery, but that folder is no longer there. The battery status, on my laptop, is now at /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1
And just to make life more complicated, it seems that in earlier kernels it was /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0, but the kernel developers decided to rename it to BAT1. Don't know what kernel version that started either.
Earlier this year, I joined Collabora as an intern to work on improving testing in libcamera and automating it through KernelCI. Having recently completed the internship, here's a look back at this experience and what was accomplished.
Teams and organizations are constantly searching for ways to increase workplace productivity through collaboration. However, finding the best collaboration software suite to meet your teams’ needs can be a daunting task. There are several good recommendations for proprietary software, but you can also find several good open-source alternatives that give you enterprise-level functionality.
Collaborating on tasks within your business can enhance the skills of team members through sharing of ideas and help your organization improve productivity and efficiency within project workflows. On the other hand, a lack of collaboration might lead to miscommunication, conflicts, and delays in your project completion that negatively impacts.
The article will highlight some of our picks for open source tools to help you manage tasks, files and communicate effectively to be more productive through collaboration.
Library management software is a tool to manage the in-house functioning of a library. It helps to manage, handle, and maintain countless books in the library.
Library management software allows you to find books quickly, issue and reissue them instantly, and efficiently manage all the data.
In this article, we will give you a brief on the best open source library management software in 2021.
Kodi 19.2 is here five months after Kodi 19.1, which introduced initial support of the Kodi 19 “Matrix” series for the Xbox gaming console, added better support for SMB shares, improved reliability for HTTP and NFS network filesystems, enabled file caching by default for network filesystems, and fixed playback of optical DVDs in Linux.
The big news in Kodi 19.2 is that Xbox support has been greatly improved. For example, it improves the performance of the HEVC DXVA2 decoder using 128 byte aligned decoder surfaces, improves support for 10-bit swap chain surfaces used for HDR-capable TVs, and improves swap chain performance when using the DXGI_SWAP_EFFECT_FLIP_DISCARD variable.
In this post, I explain how the well-known IPv4 concepts work in IPv6. This post is aimed for home and small office networks. So if you know about ARP, DHCP, and NAT, and if you wonder how these work in IPv6 networks, this post is perfect for you. If you already know about IPv6 addresses, NDP, RA, PD, SLAAC, and DHCPv6, there is nothing new here.
Snap has grown in popularity among Linux users. Instead of using system packages, snap containerizes their dependencies. Each snap app is unaffected by whether or not a certain package is present on the system.
Snap applications are simple to design and distribute for a variety of Linux distributions. Because snap programs package their dependencies in a bundle, they may be installed on any Linux distribution that supports snaps. Snap applications are an excellent way for novice Linux users to get past the learning curve.
Snaps, like any other package manager, has simple commands for installing, removing, and updating snap packages. Make sure your distribution has snap installed and configured before installing a snap application. If not, use your distribution’s package manager to install snapd.
Today we are looking at how to install Blockbench on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to set up Nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx and Apache both are free, open-source, and most popular web servers around the world. Apache is known for its power while Nginx is known for its speed. Both have some pros and cons. Nginx will be used as a frontend web server that will handle client requests and send them to Apache, which will be our backend web server, and return the requested response. This procedure allows obtaining various benefits from performance to safety.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Nginx as a reverse proxy for Apache on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
The commands given here to install ImageMagick or PHP Imagick are applicable for both Ubuntu 18.0 LTS Bionic and Ubuntu 204.04 LTS Focal Fossa.
ImageMagick is a free, open-source software package for creating and editing raster graphics. It can currently read, modify and write more than 200 of the most popular image formats. In addition, images can be generated dynamically, which is why it is also used by web applications. it is also available as a PHP module to integrate the functionally of ImageMagick for PHP-based applications or CMS such as WordPress.
Well, if you are looking for an ImageMagick alternative the there is a program graphicsmagick, a spin-off of it, and can also be installed on Ubuntu via the default package manager.
Follow through this tutorial to learn how to create virtual/secondary IP addresses on an interface in Linux. This enables you to assign multiple IP addresses to a single interface.
CRPG Black Geyser: Couriers of Darkness has been in early access for about six weeks now, and in that time the studio has pushed around 12 major updates centered around community feedback. Today's addition of Mac and Linux support is one such update, fulfilling a long community request.
After almost 19 month I finally got to attend a non-virtual event for KDE again, the ITS City Hack Hamburg 2021 last weekend. This has been a good opportunity for exchange and connecting with the Open Transport community, people and organizations we are collaborating with to make applications like KDE Itinerary or KTrip possible.
OpenTripPlanner and KPublicTransport
Meeting some of the people working on OpenTripPlanner (OTP) and operating instances of that has been particularly useful for KPublicTransport, our client library for realtime public transport data queries.
One issue we had been struggling with is automatically selecting the right instance for a given location. This has been complicated by some installations reporting bizarre bounding polygons. This is typically caused by a few issues in the data consumed by OTP. I got shown diagnostic tools and new API to identify those problems, which allows better bug reports to upstream, fixing OSM input data ourselves, and applying outlier filters we already have in the library anyway.
KDE is one of the most customizable and fastest desktop environments out there. While you can always install KDE if you know-how, it is best to choose a Linux distribution that comes with KDE out-of-the-box.
Here, let me list some of the best KDE-based Linux distros.
In addition to this list, several other Linux distributions feature KDE desktop as their preferred choice.
Nitrux OS should be a unique pick overall, and if you want to move away from Ubuntu-based distributions, there are solid arch-based distros like Garuda Linux and Manjaro to try.
What is your favorite KDE-based Linux distribution? Do you focus on out-of-the-box customization or prefer to customize the KDE experience yourself?
At long last, KDE software is now covered by a GitLab-based continuous integration system, replacing the old Jenkins-based system used until now. The new one is much better and runs automatically on every merge request, making it much less likely that faulty code that fails to compile or regresses unit tests will be committed. The system is still its infancy and has not yet reached its full potential, but already it is helping us to save time and improve the quality of KDE software. Big thanks to KDE’s sysadmins for rolling out this system!
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
KDE Frameworks 5.87 is here to make the Plasma Discover graphical package manager faster when checking for updates and when loading the initial content from any of the Add-Ons categories, fix a crash in the Dolphin file manager, Plasma desktop and other KDE apps when undoing a file copy, and to adds icons in the Breeze icon theme for different types of Godot Engine files.
Furthermore, KDE Frameworks 5.87 greatly improves support for Kirigami-based apps by making the header text in their toolbars smaller to better match the scale of everything around it, add correct spacing between items in narrow and mobile-style form layouts within groups, add support for navigating between sidebar list items using the arrow and Enter keys, as well as to hide some textual headers.
The loongson hardware platform has been retired. The upcoming OpenBSD 7.0 will be the last release to support this platform.
OnlyOffice DesktopEditors has been updated to 6.3.1. OnlyOffice DesktopEditors is a free office suite that combines text, spreadsheet and presentation editors allowing to create, view and edit documents stored on your Linux PC. It is fully compatible with Office Open XML formats: .docx, .xlsx, .pptx.
Flatpak 1.12 has recently appeared , the latest version of the software deployment utility responsible for managing the package format of the same name and offering a framework that allows applications to work universally, without initially depending on the distribution used. beyond Flatpak’s own usefulness.
Flatpak 1.12 brings a couple of important changes . The first is support for better control of sub-sandboxes. This feature was already being used by the Flatpak version of the Steam client , so the developers of the package format and its corresponding utility have decided to enhance it in order to make it easier to handle.
The second most important change is the correction of a vulnerability in which Flatpak applications with direct access to AF_UNIX sockets, which are used by Wayland, PipeWire, and pipewire-pulse (allowing PipeWire to be compatible with the software it uses PulseAudio), ” can trick portals and other host operating system services into treating the Flatpak application as if it were an ordinary non-sandboxed host system process . “
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has been selected by VodafoneZiggo to provide a hybrid cloud platform based on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. The platform will be designed to unify application infrastructure for VodafoneZiggo’s network and IT architectures, including its new standalone 5G core, targeting increased productivity and faster time to market.
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VodafoneZiggo already had a common platform in place for its 4G mobile core and several business applications, built on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The company chose to continue this horizontal platform approach by selecting Red Hat OpenShift as its foundation for cloud-native applications across both the network and the business, with 5G Core as its first deployment. After a successful proof of concept, VodafoneZiggo enlisted Red Hat Consulting to support the production roll out of Red Hat OpenShift and to provide guidance for embracing agile development models like DevSecOps as well as moving to a more open, collaborative culture. This new environment can deliver benefits for people and processes, such as greater team cohesion, cross-functional observability of platform and workloads, proactive resolution of operational issues and reduced downtime. The end goal is to deliver a better user experience for customers and partners.
Mobile network operators must view the shift to hybrid cloud and automation amid 5G deployments as a journey that won’t return benefits quickly, Bharti Airtel CTO Randeep Sekhon said at Red Hat’s Open5G event.
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The global operator, which has service in 18 countries and the second largest mobile network in India, worked with Red Hat to build a hybrid cloud architecture that allows it to simplify operations and “drop in capacities and capabilities on the go,” he said.
Hybrid cloud also equips Bharti Airtel with the resources to overcome challenges resulting from global supply chain shortages by automating network management as it works through plans to deploy 5G services, according to Sekhon.
It's early 2020, I'm less than a year into my new people management role, and I'm already feeling like a trouble maker. I just finished reviewing a team proposal, and I have concerns about it. My heart races, and my muscles tighten. I don't want to be difficult by challenging ideas as the new person on the team.
My fear says to be quiet, but my intuition tells me to speak up. I decide that I owe it to my team to follow my intuition, so I swallow my anxiety and work up the courage to talk with my manager. I get a few sentences in, explaining my concerns, and he smiles and says, "It's okay to disagree."
This was a pivotal moment. My manager's openness dissolved my doubts about sharing conflicting ideas and started me on a new path of discovering the value of disagreement.
Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU has been used in many boards, but I think I had seen the dual-core MCU in a PLC, or even any industrial products just yet. Sfera Labs Iono RP is a compact I/O module (PLC) with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller that’s programmable in C/C++ and MicroPython, or even the Arduino IDE.
The DIN-Rail mountable, RP2040 based industrial PLC offers digital and analog input and output lines, power relays, and an RS-485 interface, supports power input from 12V-24V with all signals accessible through terminal blocks. Sfera Labs can also provide some optional options such as an RTC or an earthquake sensor module.
In 1980, France took a step into the future when the telecom companies introduced the Minitel system — a precursor to the Web where users could shop, buy train tickets, check stocks, and send and receive electronic mail through a small terminal. Minitel still had 10 million monthly connections in 2009, but the service was discontinued in 2012.
Software support includes a Linux BSP, firmware the V2X accelerator, and AUTOSAR MCAL. There will also be an i.MX 8XLite evaluation kit that will come with board design files and a hardware design guide. Public information is limited at this time, with NXP i.MX 8XLite processor still in “preproduction”.
The Arduino programmable fingerprint sensor is equipped with Fingerprints‘ FPC BM-Lite fingerprint capacitive biometric sensor that’s much more compact and power-efficient than traditional optical fingerprint sensors.
We’ve often written about Adafruit Feather-compatible boards in the past, but Blues Wireless Swan board is a little different, as the STM32L4-based board comes with castellated holes instead of just through holes which allows the board to expose up to 55 GPIOs, or 36 more pins than a traditional feather-compatible board.
The company also introduced the “Feather Starter Kit for Swan” that enables the board to work with the company’s Notecard LTE Cat-M/NB-IoT M.2 modem that ships with 10-year (up to 500MB) of IoT connectivity, as well as GPS/GNSS connectivity.
Prototyping new ideas can be a lot of fun, but putting new projects in a durable enclosure can be a difficulty. This is especially the case when the user of this product is one of the most destructive forces in nature: A toddler! This is the circumstance that [blue blade] found himself in when he wanted to build a durable MP3 player for his grandson, and you can see the results of his work below the break.
The hardware is simple: A 16850 lithium-ion battery powers an MP3 Decoder/Amplifier module that plays MP3s stored on a Micro SD card. A speaker, power switch, and micro USB powered battery charger complete the build. What stands out most is the enclosure. Why?
When children are involved, durability isn’t a matter of product lifetime, it’s also a matter of safety. Items that are easily broken aren’t just useless, they can be dangerous. With this in mind, [blue blade] built a brightly colored enclosure with extra thick walls joined by metal bolts. Externally, a rounded cover bolts over the charger connector and Micro SD card slot. The only other protrusion is a lighted rocker switch for powering the MP3 player on and off.
The semiconductor shortage has curtailed the choices available to designers and caused some inventive solutions to be found, but the one used by [djzc] is probably the most inventive we’ve yet seen. The footprint trap, when a board is designed for one footprint but shortages mean the part is only available in another, has caught out many an engineer this year. In this case an FTDI chip had been designed with a PCB footprint for a QFN package when the only chip to be found was a QFP from a breakout board.
You can follow a site through the browser’s three-dot menu to subscribe to its RSS feed and have it update in your Chrome app. Sites you’re following will appear in a tab called “following,” which sits along Google’s “for you” tab of recommended articles. The feature isn’t out yet on iOS, so I’m not able to check it out on my phone, but Felt shared some screenshots of what it looks like on Android so you can get an idea.
The FSFE is organizing a Legal Education Day on Saturday, 6 November 2021. This online event is open for all to attend. It will include talks and Q&A sessions on the basics of copyright law, licenses, and other legal topics. The event will help Free Software developers to understand these legal topics so that their software projects can reach their full potential.
We all love the four freedoms that Free Software grants to users and developers, and how they benefit the individual user as well as digital society as a whole. In order to ensure these freedoms, users of Free Software rely on legal instruments and the legal system to be able to enforce them when other try to take them away from us.
And there’s more: Thorsten Behrens from The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors is on the jury. So, if you fill the requirements listed above and want to get hacking on a project, join in!
An updated version of the corels package is now on CRAN!
The change is chiefly an updated configure.ac (just like RcppGSL yesterday, RQuantLib two days ago, and littler three days ago.
OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an open standard API for Shared Memory parallelization in C, C++ and Fortran which consist of three primary API components: compiler directives, runtime routines and environment variables.
An OpenMP-parallelised application starts as a serial application that runs on a single compute core. When instructed by the programmer, the application spawns a number of threads, which can run concurrently on separate cores. Thus, work can be distributed to leverage more resources.
Here’s our recommended OpenMP tutorials.
Is there anything unique about working with, managing or being an open source developer. On a recent episode of Dynamic Developer, I spoke with Todd Moore, vice president for open technology and developer advocacy, at IBM about these topics as well what he looks for when hiring open source developers, the right way for companies to turn their open source projects into open standards and some of the coolest open technology initiatives IBM is working on.
Todd has a long history in software and hardware development and is a leader in the open source world. He and his team of developers have worked with leading open source communities like the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Eclipse and OpenStack.
The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for readability. You can listen to the podcast player embedded in this article, watch a video above or read a transcript of the interview below.
These are some answers for Week 133 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on October 10, 2021 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when you turned on a PC, more often than not, you’d get a Basic prompt. Most people would then load a game from a tape, but if you were inclined to program you could just start writing. [Richpl] wanted that same experience and thus PyBasic was born.
This atomization is the result, if not the intention, of capitalism’s latest phase—neoliberalism. As the reader most likely knows, the main features of neoliberalism involve the destruction of the social element of human civilization. Services provided by the state are either privatized or just terminated. The process begins with services provided to the poor. From there, other services follow. Universities once generously subsidized by the state find their budgets reduced, causing them to raise tuition, hire part-time instructors, and farm out their research resources to the very industries benefiting from the end of state-funded education. Roads and other infrastructure are left to disintegrate while private developments and their financiers build private roads while state governments push through more and more tolls on existing and new construction. The wealthiest few pay little or no taxes to the state, which now serves them to a degree never before seen in recorded history. Indeed, the system for which Wall Street is a synonym is now the state in the USA, if not the world. Traditional forms of resistance seem increasingly futile; antiwar movements mutate into support for one of the war parties while social democrats and democratic socialists in power lead the rush to transform the government into another set of privatized entities funneling the public money to the bank accounts of that wealthy few.
This is the foundation of author Suzanne Schneider’s new book, The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Simultaneously a brief history of the roots of jihad, its meaning throughout history and its relationship to the Muslim worshiper, the text is also a critique of modern capitalism and the effects of its predatory nature. The reader is presented with the essence of western colonialism and imperialism and their role in the creation of today’s increasing inequalities and accompanying despair. In addition, the discussions of the changing roles of state actors in relation to private capital and the effect those roles have on the ordinary human provide a context that applies to phenomena well beyond the primary focus of this book—modern jihad. Perhaps even more important is her argument that neoliberal capitalism was “prefigured—if not actively constructed—in the colonial world.” (227) In other words, the trappings of neoliberalism we are growing more familiar with each day—authoritarian mechanisms to control the population, hyper-surveillance, the privatization of the public sphere, and the irrelevance of popular politics—were created and honed by the west in its colonies. Now, not only are the populations of former colonial and imperial powers experiencing the economic and racial inequalities that were the basis of colonial rule, those populations are also experiencing the measures of control developed and refined in the former colonies by the imperial powers. Of course, certain elements of the populations in the imperial states have always been under the regimes of poverty and oppression; especially the Black population in the United States.
On Wednesday, the National Women’s Soccer League got back to playing ball, but it wasn’t business as usual. During the sixth minute of game time, the players on NJ/NY Gotham FC and the Washington Spirit stopped playing. They walked to the center of the pitch and linked arms for a full minute before the match resumed. Instead of confusion or boos, fans rose to their feet and cheered. This act of political protest has occurred—or will occur—in every NWSL game after a sexual harassment scandal rocked the league in late September.
On the morning of September 13, shortly after the New York school system’s Covid-screening website crashed, Mayor Bill de Blasio stood outside PS 25 in the Bronx celebrating the reopening of the city’s public schools. It was a heady occasion: For the first time in 18 months, the largest public school system in the country—nearly 1.1 million students—would be back in swing, and de Blasio was intent on proving that it was not only the right but also a safe decision.
Molnupiravir is the new pill that's been all over the news recently because it can cut hospitalizations and deaths of unvaccinated Covid-infected people by as much as half and doesn't require folks to go to the hospital or an infusion center, like the monoclonal antibody remdesivir. Just take a pill every day for five days and you're good.
He had oil in his beard and defiance in his eye. Both gleamed in the October sunshine streaming through the windows at the back of the immigration hall at Heathrow Airport Terminal 2.
The meticulously styled facial hair, brownish-red and thick, would have garnered attention in normal times, but it was even more of a sight to behold during the Wars on Covid and Terror. He was the only person not wearing a mask among the hundreds of passengers getting ready to queue up for passport control:€ a real crowd displeaser, this face-freedom fighter.
"It is extremely concerning that, despite the evident and increasing need for mental health services, which has become even more acute during the Covid-19 pandemic, good intentions are not being met with investment."
After Wiggins’s unwillingness to get vaccinated became known to the media in late September, he was criticized relentlessly. On October 4, after he yielded and got his shot, Rusty Simmons of the€ SF Chronicle€ quoted Wiggins explaining, “’I had a bad reaction a few years ago to Tylenol and from there I never really like to take anything. Let stuff heal naturally. That was a little fear factor.” Simmons may not have understood the significance of the comment, which was buried in his article.
Having once had a strong, adverse drug reaction is grounds for a medical exemption to the Covid-19 vaccination mandate. If the Warriors’ well-paid media staff had explained and publicized Wiggins’s valid reason for not getting the shot, the dignified young man would have been spared a lot of nasty criticism. By not citing his allergic reaction to Tylenol in his defense, the Chase-Centered flacks were instinctively or consciously protecting the image of Johnson & Johnson and Capital-M Medicine. If the Warriors refusenik had been assistant general manager Kirk Lacob, the owner’s son, you can bet the PR people would have publicized his valid excuse.
The Marcus Center for Cellular Cures at Duke University bills itself as “harnessing biology through technology” and further describes itself thusly:
Whitney joined TLAV to discuss her recent article on Moderna, as well as our previous discussion around your anonymity and privacy, and how these concepts are on the way out in lieu of a “reimagining” of our world where these concepts are a burden on the system; a system in which “you own nothing and you have never been happier” – or so we are aggressively told – known as The Great Reset.
Jim Walter and Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade said in a blog post about Hive in August: "The group is notable in its undiscerning choice of targets, having no limits when it comes to healthcare providers and hospitals, as evidenced in a recent attack on Memorial Health System hospitals in Ohio.
"Hive ransomware is written in Go to take advantage of the language’s concurrency features to encrypt files faster. Hive remains active with as many as 30 victim companies listed on its Hive Leaks onion site at the time of writing."
A group of Democrats on Friday urged the Biden administration to do more to confront the growing use of cryptocurrency markets in ransomware attacks, which have become an increasing national security threat over the past year.
On October 7, 2021, the Apache Software Foundation released Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.51 to address Path Traversal and Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-41773, CVE-2021-42013) in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 and 2.4.50. These vulnerabilities have been exploited in the wild.
CISA is also seeing ongoing scanning of vulnerable systems, which is expected to accelerate, likely leading to exploitation. CISA urges organizations to patch immediately if they haven’t already—this cannot wait until after the holiday weekend.
As the report explains, this draws on an older idea known as “nudge theory“, which uses positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions as a way to influence people’s behavior. Wikipedia quotes one of the best-known examples of nudge theory: placing the image of a housefly on the men’s room urinals at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, which is intended to “improve the aim.” Back in 2010, the UK government set up a formal “Nudge Unit“, which was given the task of using nudge theory to improve public services. In 2014 it was spun out as a limited company called the Behavioural Insights Team. It now has offices around the world.
There have been a bunch of slightly wacky court rulings of late, and this recent one from magistrate judge Zia Faruqui definitely is up there on the list of rulings that makes you scratch your head. The case involves the Republic of Gambia seeking information on Facebook accounts that were accused of contributing to ethnic genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. This situation was -- quite obviously -- horrible, and it tends to be the go-to story for anyone who wants to show that Facebook is evil (though I'm often confused about how people often seem more focused on blaming Facebook for the situation than the Myanmar government which carried out the genocide...). Either way, the Republic of Gambia is seeking information from Facebook regarding the accounts that played a role in the genocide, as part of its case at the International Court of Justice.
This is the first part in a series about a journey across what used to be called Macedonia, which is now divided among Albania, North Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey.
Just before the world closed in on itself, I decided to travel overland from the Albanian coastline to Istanbul, roughly along the front lines of the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and those of World War I (1915-18). In many ways the fighting on these remote peaks of Macedonia, on a craggy fault line from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus, defined the postwar fate of Europe in the 1920s, if not that of the twentieth century.
But the very week before the Dems’ $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate money-bags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Senator Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as “fiscal insanity,” but he has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.
Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country’s urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, 6 more than Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more F-35s vs. investing $12 billion in education, healthcare, clean energy or fighting poverty.
President Joe Biden on Friday ordered federal record-keepers to allow the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection to access a cache of former President Donald Trump's White House documents, denying an attempt by Trump to shield the information through executive privilege.
"As a part of this process, the president has determined an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives," White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday.
Human rights defenders are expressing outrage after the United Nations Human Rights Council on Thursday voted against continuing a U.N.-backed probe into possible war crimes in Yemen.
Amnesty International said the outcome followed "pressure by Saudi Arabia and other coalition partners."
For some, the memory of that horrific day included headshaking over the mistakes this country made in responding to it, mistakes we live with to this moment.
Among the more prominent heads being shaken over the wrongdoing that followed 9/11, and the failure to correct any of it, was that of Jane Harman, a Democrat from California, who was then in the House of Representatives. She would join all but one member of Congress — fellow California representative€ Barbara Lee€ — in€ voting€ for the remarkably vague Authorization for the Use of Force, or€ AUMF, which paved the way for the invasion of Afghanistan and so much else. It would, in fact, put Congress in cold storage from then on, allowing the president to bypass it in deciding for years to come whom to attack and where, as long as he justified whatever he did by alluding to a distinctly imprecise term: terrorism.€ So, too, Harman would€ vote€ for the€ Patriot Act, which would later be used to put in place massive warrantless surveillance policies, and then, a year later, for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq (based on€ the lie€ that Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction).
The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by days of remembrances—for the courageous rescue workers of that moment, for the thousands murdered as the Twin Towers collapsed, for those who died in the Pentagon, or in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, fighting off the hijackers of the commercial jet they were in, as well as for those who fought in the forever wars that were America’s response to those Al Qaeda attacks.
A Turkish armed drone was demonstrated in Turkmenistan equipped with a camera from Hensoldt. The device could guide weapons developed with German help to the target. Turkey might use it in missions that violate international law.
On the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Code Pink, Massachusetts Peace Action and several other co-sponsoring organizations, including Project Censored, held an online seminar on the worldwide toll of the US “War On Terror,” and strategies for resisting militarism in the years to come. This week’s Project Censored Show presents excerpts from some of the speeches at that event, including from Medea Benjamin, David Swanson, Kathy Kelly, Jodie, Evans, and more.
Recently, others at the prison have not been as fortunate. In January, 30 year old Wilson Diaz Guzman was found to have hung himself in his cell. In March, it was 30 year old Javier Velasco found unresponsive with a bedsheet wrapped around his neck. On August 10th, it was 25 year old Brandon Rodriguez with a T-Shirt. On August 30th, 58 year old Segundo Guallpa.
Then there was Robert Jackson found dead in July after a correction officer abandoned his post leaving Jackson unattended. According to the Correction Officers union, the guard, who is facing disciplinary action, had worked 20 straight hours without relief. Three more prison officers were suspended in connection with the death of 24 year old Esias Jackson in early September. An initial source claimed Jackson’s death the result of an overdose but the matter is still under review. Other inmates have come forward claiming Jackson had been complaining of stomach pains. Desperate pleas for medical attention were ignored according to the detainee who found him. On September 19th, Isa Abdul Karim, a wheelchair user with underlying medical conditions died from COVID-19 having spent days in an crowded intake unit of the Otis Bantum Correction Center, one of eight jails in the complex. Karim was forced to spend the entire time in his wheelchair for lack of bunks. He was one day shy of qualifying for release.
State Rep. Jeff McNeely and other conservative lawmakers claimed at a Thursday news conference that they are acting on behalf of constituents who believe fraud and “machine tampering” took place in the 2020 election. McNeely said the group plans to conduct their inspections by “randomly pick[ing]” counties from across the state and then examining voting machines used in the presidential election to see if they have a modem that can connect to the internet. North Carolina state law prohibits voting machines from having modems.
The number of "independent departures," which top 700 and could be higher, has not been previously reported. But the phenomenon is raising alarms among immigration advocates concerned about the risks to Afghans who give up on what is now an open-ended, complex and completely voluntary resettlement process.
“This hostage-taking involved two guards who were released voluntarily, the first around lunchtime and the second after the raid intervened as part of a handover protocol. He voluntarily agreed to surrender,” he said.
There are no five means of action. The crux of the matter is war! The boycott or the strike. Or both.
Mr Erdogan’s pitch comes down to safety and money. The canal, he says, would be easier to navigate than the Bosporus, reduce congestion in one of the world’s busiest channels and bring in new revenue. Under the Montreux Convention, signed in 1936, civilian vessels can pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the straits linking the Sea of Marmara and the Mediterranean, free of charge. (Only the littoral states of the Black Sea are allowed to send warships through.) But traffic can lead to long waiting times. Mr Erdogan’s hope is that ships will pay transit fees to jump the queue and use his canal.
Facebook’s announcement comes after a February BBC investigation into its Marketplace that found people illegally sold large plots of land in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest on Facebook’s Craigslist alternative. The plots were frequently sold without an official land title designating ownership, driven by the deforestation of the Amazon caused by the Brazilian cattle industry, the BBC found.
The eating of wild meat in tropical forests could generate carbon credits through avoided emissions, a new paper has claimed – but other academics have said the study shows the limitations of a “carbon-only” approach.
The research, published in science journal Nature on Thursday, analysed studies conducted between 1972 and 2019 on the diets of around 150,000 residents from 49 tropical forest sites, including in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.
Millions of people without childcare, for example, can’t join the labor force – costing the economy tens of billions each year. Young people who can’t afford community college end up costing the economy vast sums in terms of lost productivity and whatever public assistance they may need down the line. If we don’t slow climate change, we’ll be spending hundreds of billions more per year dealing with worsening wildfires, floods, and droughts. If we don’t begin to reverse widening inequality, half of America won’t be able to buy the goods and services the economy produces. Talk about costs.These biases in the mainstream media aren’t the result of intentional decisions among publishers, editors and writers to favor the status quo over progressive change. They simply reflect the dominant views of the American establishment, as seen mainly through the lenses of New York and Washington. The establishment supports the status quo and puts a high burden of proof on those seeking fundamental change because it is the establishment.Yet as a result, the mainstream media is doing a rotten job informing America about one of the most important pieces of legislation to come along in decades, at a time in our nation’s history when fundamental change is badly needed.What do you think? € Tell me in the comments at https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-medias-rotten-reporting-on-bidens.
Wars, bad governments, gross inequalities, and natural upheavals unsettle civilization and personal and national certainty about the present and the future.
The Peloponnesian War
As world leaders prepare to jet off to this month's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Scotland, the heads of several Pacific island nations in recent days urged world leaders to leave their good intentions at home and commit to urgent, meaningful climate action.
"We refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the coal mine, as we are so often called."
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday voted for the first time to formally recognize the right to a clean and sustainable environment, a move that climate campaigners applauded as the hard-won result of activism from grassroots groups and small-island countries.
"Today's historic decision is the culmination of over 40 years of efforts to recognize the right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment," Sébastien Duyck, senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said in a statement.
The Huntington Beach blowout was not merely predictable. It was inevitable. But when does the inevitable become the criminal? And where does the liability begin and end? With the pipeline company? The oil drilling company? The holding companies? Their lobbyists and PR hacks? The hedge funds? The regulators? The politicians?
The piety of California’s politicians on climate change is as insufferable as their actual record is hollow. As Dan Bacher has vividly reported for CounterPunch, Gavin Newsom, following in the oily footprints, of his predecessor Jerry Brown, has stuffed his pockets with oil and gas industry cash, while approving hundreds of new fracking and drilling permits. There’s no need to consult the Pandora Papers. It’s all out in the open. Audacious hypocrisy is how Newsom rolls. He should have been recalled for turning Southern California over to the oil companies, while parading around the Bay Area from bistro to bistro as a climate change warrior.
Solar energy comes to Earthlings in many ways. Ancient Persians used passive solar architecture. East Africans about the same time funneled cool ocean wind through tunnels to cool themselves.
The global climate and debt crises are connected and wealthy, high-polluting countries aren't doing their part to address either or advance global justice, according to a policy blueprint published Friday by Progressive International.
"Climate justice is essential to the future of the planet, and it is impossible without debt justice."
Now at long last, solar energy is outpacing new fossil fuel and nuclear facilities on price, environmental safety, and speed of installation.
One use of solar that has not received enough attention is drying clothes with clotheslines or clothes racks. Before global warming and our climate crisis became a public concern, some local governments banned backyard clotheslines as community eyesores. Fortunately, 20 states have passed “Right to Dry Laws” that allow people to use this simple low-tech and appropriate technology to reduce fuel consumption.
Having covered telecom for a long time, I've lost track of the times I've watched some befuddled lawmaker shocked by the content of their own bill. Usually, that's because they outsourced the writing of it to their primary campaign contributors, which in telecom is usually AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter. Sometimes they're so clueless to what their "own" bill includes they'll turn to lobbyists in the middle of a hearing to seek clarity. This is, of course, outright corruption. But we tend to laugh it off and normalize it, and the press generally refuses to accurately label it corruption.
On October 5, the Pennsylvania Attorney General unveiled criminal charges against the Mariner East 2 pipeline, a long-distance natural gas pipeline that traverses the state.
Stemming from a grand jury investigation, Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced 46 environmental crimes, plus an additional two charges that were referred to his office by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).
Not only has Covid-19 killed more than 4.5 million people, it saw global energy consumption shrink by 4.5 percent last year — the biggest drop since World War II, according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy. That nosedive was the reason that in April 2020 oil prices went negative for the first time in history.
“As a result of that, a lot of producers just stopped producing,” said Keith Bell, an engineering professor at the U.K.’s University of Strathclyde. “That is not an easy thing to do because you’ve got to make these offline oil and gas facilities safe, too.”
Wind turbines are a fantastic, cheap, renewable source of energy. However, nothing lasts forever, and over time, the blades of wind turbines fatigue and must be replaced. This then raises the question of what to do with these giant waste blades. Thankfully, a variety of projects are exploring just those possibilities.
So we mapped what was literally roadless and wild on the ground. We did not rely on agency inventories, because relying on federal agency inventories limits one to what the agencies have inventoried. Agency “roadless area” inventories are notoriously incomplete and often follow political demarcations such as state and county lines, national forest and BLM district boundaries, and isolated sections of state or private land. Moreover, agencies frequently gerrymandered “official” roadless area boundaries to exclude big chunks of wild country in order to facilitate plans for logging, mining, oil wells, off-road vehicle routes, water projects, livestock developments and so on. In other words, for a variety of reasons, many big contiguous chunks of roadless wilderness were and are divided into different administrative units, masking the true extent of the wildland.
Therefore, we hoped that by providing a comprehensive accurate inventory that clearly depicts the true extent of each big roadless area on the ground, regardless of political boundaries or considerations, conservationists would be more likely to develop and promote bigger, more holistic proposals for additions to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
Under the Sky We Make is an excellent exploration of what needs to be done to fight climate change. Its author succeeds in the difficult task of inspiring the desire to act. Yet she ignores the importance of reversing population growth, missing an important opportunity to educate readers on a key aspect of climate disruption and sustainability.
Who can ever forget the brilliant oratory of Joe “Nothing Would Fundamentally Change” Biden two nights after Election Day last November? “Democracy is sometimes messy,” Joe “No Empathy, Give Me a Break” Biden said two months before Donald Trump’s wild-eyed marauders would descend on the US Capitol. “It sometimes requires a little patience. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance that’s been the envy of the world.”
What wise counsel! “Patience, underlings, your globally unmatched democracy will hear your cries!” What came over those Hunger Marchers and Sit-Down Strikers in the 1930s? What was Rosa Parks thinking when she refused to get up from that bus seat? Surely the great Black American escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass needed to be more patient and feel more rewarded when he offered these bitter and impetuous reflections on July 4, 1852:
There is nothing the Democratic Party loves more than indulging in some existential hand wringing over its declining popularity in the crumbling American heartland. Indeed, this was the favorite pundit pastime of the entire Trump era. Amid the wailing over cultural differences and economic insecurity, a€ rarely heard word is "unions." Yet, a€ new report adds to the evidence that the fate of the Democratic Party is intimately tied to the decline of union power. It's also one more sign that the labor movement itself needs to throw everything it has into new organizing with a€ fervor that has been lacking in our€ lifetimes.
Republican lawmakers argued, and many of their Democratic counterparts accepted, that slashing federal jobless aid would lead to robust growth in employment. However,€ data released Friday shows that while eight million people were booted from expanded unemployment insurance programs last month, employers added just 194,000 jobs—the weakest monthly increase this year.
"194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3% of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September."
Fitzgerald had it right. Particularly these days, when the wealthiest people in the US are not millionaires, or even people worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but rather are billionaires, with some, like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett having total assets in excess of $100 billion, the rich are not just quantitatively but qualitatively different.
There are 664 Americans today who are billionaires (that’s 1000 times $1 million in assets). That number is 50 people, or families, higher than it was a year ago.
A global tax deal reached Friday by 136 countries was widely hailed as a "historic" step toward a more just and equitable economic order.
But global humanitarian groups and policy experts warned that a closer look at the agreement reveals it to be a "shameful and dangerous capitulation" to corporate tax dodgers and the countries that enable them.
As the bombshell Pandora Papers continue to expose dubious details about how the world's superrich hide their fortunes and avoid paying their fair share of taxes, Bloomberg€ on Friday published an analysis of U.S. Federal Reserve data revealing that Americans in the top 1% income tier now have more wealth than the entire middle class.
Occasionally, when I'm walking the dog on the beach, I find a lump of coal, black against the yellow sand. The Firth of Forth, the fjord that washes the north of Edinburgh, cuts deep into the seam that Scotland's central belt is built on. Sometimes, the waves dislodge a chunk of the bed, and wash up a 350-million-year-old piece of driftwood from the mighty forests of the Carboniferous Period.
"Turning student debt payments back on in the middle of a pandemic is an act of policy failure. Cancelling student debt is both the morally right and economically sound thing to do."
Yet, more than self-explanation is necessary because the expanded CTC already has a work requirement. The expanded CTC is conditional on raising a minor child, and, as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), among others, has noted:€ “raising children is work.”
Of course, the expanded CTC doesn’t directly or fully compensate parents for the socially necessary, but unpaid, work of raising children. At $3,000 a year per child ($3,600 if the child is under age 6),€ it is far too modest to do that. But it is a form of public support and recognition of the valuable essential work that parents do when they raise children.
We’re still 5 million jobs below February 2020 levels, and 2.7 million people have been out of work for six months or more, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment. Many of these people are hurting, to be sure.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's proposal to lop $2 trillion off his own party's social spending and climate agenda would support nearly two million fewer jobs per year than the full $3.5 trillion reconciliation plan backed by President Joe Biden, progressive lawmakers, and a majority of the U.S. public.
"The conservative, underfunded $1.5 trillion proposal is an absolute non-starter."
While I still held to core Republican values, I soon joined the progressive side of political discussions. And as the GOP evolved to become a Trump cult, I decidedly joined the Democratic camp. Not so for my college roommate who moved much farther to the right. After a recent and somewhat uncomfortable exchange, he sent a link to a Peggy Noonan editorial, America has Lost the Thread, about our polarized politics.
Noonan’s piece is a thoughtful and objective lament about the thread, now lost, that had unified the left and right after 9/11. But it said little about what we should do to bring us together again, how we could reconcile our differences.
In a January 15, 2021 email to We the People — a whistle-blower protection group in Rowley, Mass. — the OIG’s Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Malion Bartley wrote that his office “has an open investigation and is reviewing the concerns you provided and your supporting documents.” Bartley’s email, made public only recently, follows a December 14, 2020 letter in which Bartley confirmed, “The Office of the Inspector General, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, is reviewing your allegation regarding counterfeit and substitute parts in nuclear plants around the United States.”
For over 35 years We the People has demanded an investigation into whistle-blower declarations that reactor manufacturers have installed counterfeit, substandard parts in reactors across the United States. The allegations are based on tape-recorded conversations with several nuclear industry and NRC whistle-blowers.
Instead of pursuing Medicare for All they are pursuing incremental improvements in Medicare – also known as Medicare for Some.
They are also pursuing single payer at the state level.
Already under fire from progressive activists and lawmakers for holding up congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden's agenda, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema drew additional ire Friday with reporting that she's proposed cutting $100 billion in climate provisions from the reconciliation package.
"Maybe if she actually took the time to speak to the people of her state, she'd realize how much their families need her to deliver action on climate."
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made his bones in the Senate on political money—both raising influence-buying contributions and blocking efforts to curb the corrupting impact of this money in Washington.
If social movements want to have long-term power in the United States, they must reckon with the state. And if they want to win control of the state, they must consider their relationship with political parties.
And while€ “marine protected areas” created under the leadership of a Big Oil lobbyist are currently threatened by the€ massive oil spill,€ the€ two groups said the California Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) is€ 278 days late in delivering Newsom a rule setting a barrier between oil operations and vulnerable communities.
Also on Monday, Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed a state of emergency in Orange County to support the emergency response to the oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach that originated in federal waters.
Senator Bernie Sanders wants the public to know that the fight to pass Democrats’ $3.5 trillion social spending bill isn’t just about meeting the needs of working-class families and combating the climate crisis—it’s about “the future of American democracy” and whether oligarchs will be successful in defeating a popular agenda.
In his 2008 novel “The Three-Body Problem,” Liu Cixin wrote about nations banding together to deal with a looming alien invasion that would likely result in the end of humanity.
Now he’s not so sure about that unity, Cixin said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. If anything, he said, the coronavirus pandemic shows that we might do the opposite.
The need to speak out for journalists is undeniable. In 2020, more than twice as many were murdered for doing their jobs as in 2019, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an NGO based in New York. At the end of 2020 over 270 journalists were imprisoned, according to the same organisation. That was the highest figure ever recorded by their annual census, which has been going for almost three decades. Highlighting the perils of being a journalist in repressive countries is no bad thing. Yet some will wonder if the Nobel Committee could not have been a little bolder.
The former CNN bureau chief set up news website Rappler in 2012, bringing together multimedia reporting and social media to offer an edgy take on Philippine current events and a critical eye on the government of President Rodrigo Duterte.
No matter your ultimate lean on politics, you have to admit it’s pretty strange to sit with the knowledge that OAN, a conservative news network, was effectively funded by AT&T, right?
Facebook removed and suppressed content about "apparent war crimes" that Israel's apartheid regime committed in May during its deadly assault on Palestinians, Human Rights Watch said€ Friday.
As Israeli forces illegally banished Palestinians from their homes throughout the Occupied Territories, attacked Islamic places of worship, brutally repressed demonstrators, and bombed civilian infrastructure in the besieged Gaza Strip, many people "turn[ed] to social media to document, raise awareness, and condemn the latest cycle" of abuses, Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted.
When Mike introduced our latest Greenhouse series on content moderation at the infrastructure layer, he made it abundantly clear this was a particularly thorny and complicated issue. While there's been a relentless focus on content moderation at the so-called "edge" of the internet (Google, Facebook, and Twitter), less talked about is content moderation at the "infrastructure" layers deeper in the stack. That can include anything from hosting companies and domain registrars, to ad networks, payment processors, telecom providers, and app stores.
It sometimes seems that Techdirt spends half its time debunking bad ideas for reforming or even repealing Section 230. In fact, so many people seem to get the law wrong that Mike was moved to write a detailed post on the subject with the self-explanatory title "Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act". It may be necessary (and tiresome) work rebutting all this wrongness, but it's nice for a change to be able to demonstrate precisely why Section 230 is so important. A recent court ruling provides just such an example:
“It is proved beyond reasonable doubt that accused Salma Tanveer wrote and distributed the writings which are derogatory in respect of Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and she failed to prove that her case falls in exception provided by section 84 of PPC,” the verdict stated. Section 84, dealing with the accusation on people of unsound mind, states, “nothing is an offense which is done by a person who, at the time of doing it, by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to law.”
One person also suggested kidnapping Wilders, and live-streaming his murder. "Get Geert Wilders to say something. And then I'll behead him, live, on Facebook."
"Bro man, you just use an AK and pop him with his guards at a press conference, you know? You just yell, 'Allahu Akbar', ... Just six bullets," one suspect allegedly said. "Once you're shooting, you don't stop. You don't stop and aim."
The university said the decision was "based on the latest risk assessment and legal advice" without expanding on this explanation.
Beijing has recently moved to silence opposition to its rule in Hong Kong.
Now, HKU has reportedly directed that its eight-metre monument, a totem-like heap of human forms commemorating the protesters killed by the Chinese military during its 1989 crackdown, be removed from the campus where it has stood for 24 years.
According to one HKU academic, who asked to remain anonymous, the decision “can be seen as a final stage of mainlandising Hong Kong’s university campuses”.
I and my late husband, Stephen Cohen, first met Dmitrii Muratov in 1993. He and a few other colleagues had gathered in the basement cafeteria of Moscow News—then a bold newspaper of the glasnost era—to plan the launch of Novaya Gazeta. Survival was on their minds at that time; they were beginning the paper with two computers, one printer, two rooms—and no money for salaries. A few months later, an initial boost of support came from President Mikhail Gorbachev, who contributed part of his 1990 Nobel Peace Prize money to buy the newspaper its first computers.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday morning to Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and Russian newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov for their work to “safeguard freedom of expression.” Ressa has repeatedly been arrested by the government of Rodrigo Duterte for the groundbreaking work of her news site Rappler, which has exposed Duterte’s deadly war on drugs that has killed tens of thousands. “The Nobel Peace Prize committee realized a world without facts means a world without truth,” said Ressa today after winning the prize. We reair a 2019 interview when Ressa came into the Democracy Now! studio.
Yahoo! News (9/26/21) published a bombshell report detailing the US Central Intelligence Agency’s “secret war plans against WikiLeaks,” including clandestine plots to kill or kidnap publisher Julian Assange while he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Note the flavor of contempt for “naturalized citizens” — i.e, immigrants seen as infiltrators.
Assange is not an American, so how he can be tried under that law will be fleshed out by lawyers in the future. In the meantime, as if acknowledging this fact, the US, such as Mike Pompeo have publicly called him a “”non-state hostile intelligence service.” This makes him drone-eligible; he is being seen here by the US government as a terrorist, the reasoning for his kill not far removed from the thinking that went into Obama killing US citizens€ Anwar al-Awlaki, and, later, his 16 year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (and other unnamed children), and, under Trump, an 8 year old Awlaki girl, Nawar al-Awlaki. That’s what we are now prepared to do to American citizens — Hellfire missile them to death.
Brief Historical Perspective
The recently enacted Texas law banning abortion after 6 weeks gestation, even in cases of rape and incest, represents the latest battle in the long war on women being waged by conservative Republicans in this country against women’s reproductive rights. Roe v. Wade, adopted in 1973, was a break-through law ensuring that women could terminate their pregnancy at any point up to “viability”, about 24 weeks. States could restrict or prohibit abortion after that time, but exceptions must be made to preserve “the life or health of the woman.”
What does Marx have to say to feminists? More to the point, what do feminists have to say to Marx? Well, quite a lot, as any reader of Sylvia Federici’s new book, The Patriarchy of the Wage, can tell you. Granted, a main reason Marx ignored domestic work was that in his time he saw women in factories toiling such long hours that they, in fact, did no domestic work. That changed later in the nineteenth century, as the ruling class became alarmed about the proles’ ability to reproduce themselves, something emaciated people, worked to death before age 30, with no time for childcare, no less breast-feeding, whose offspring starved on their pathetic diet of commercial elixirs, could not do. With the shift from light textile to heavy, iron and coal, industry, the bourgeoisie instituted the patriarchy of the wage, namely, booting women out of factories, shortening hours but intensifying the work and paying men enough to support a family. Thus the upper class reproduced its nuclear family model in the working class. In so doing, it lengthened some working-class lifespans and decreased infant mortality. So some might say that, oppressive as all this was, it became, objectively, an improvement. But not Federici.
In this new scheme, the thrifty housewife tended home, children and her husband’s sexual needs. This labor, done by half of humanity, escaped Marx’s notice – again, partly because, for a while, he had observed women workers not doing it. But domestic work and care-giving occupy billions of people. It is unwaged work, as was the plantation toil of slaves and much of the moil of campesinos in Latin America. As Federici argues, the white male working class, whose cause Marx championed, forms but a sliver of a much larger agglomeration of laborers who produce the goods and people our world depends on. And many of those laborers work for no pay.
From the use of child labor and beatings of locals to the destruction of "climate-critical rainforest," an investigative report published Thursday exposes how the abuse of people and the planet by Papua New Guinea's palm oil sector has direct ties to global financiers and major household brands.
"It is increasingly urgent that governments legislate to prevent supply chains and global financiers bankrolling deforestation and human rights abuses."
Toward this question, it is valuable to begin by anchoring an understanding of the collapse of the West and specifically America, the declining imperial superpower which is today cracking under its own contradictions. Freed from the ideological shackles of assumptions of western imperial rule, one is then able to develop possibilities of new political realignments and new moral principles.
In 2020 the crisis of America was captured by three historic phenomena: the Covid-19 pandemic, presidential election and widespread national protest. The interaction of these forces represented shifting political alignments and must be understood in order to “save the soul of America” as the Civil Rights Movement strove to do. These complex dynamics must be understood by any genuine progressive who seeks to change society. They can be uniquely understood in Philadelphia, the country’s poorest big city which is€ 42% black, and a fertile ground of political struggle and conflict.
Recent events at the US House of Representatives clearly demonstrate this unprecedented reality. On September 21, Democratic lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposes to give Israel $1 billion in military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was specifically destined to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Two days later, the funding of the Iron Dome was reintroduced and, this time, it has successfully, and overwhelmingly, passed with a vote of 420 to 9, despite passionate pleas by Palestinian-American Representative, Rashida Tlaib.
Mobile, Ala.—MacKenzie Brackett, 14, held up a toothbrush ready for transformation. “We’re going to finish up our robotics badge by making a toothbrush robot,” she announced to four fellow members of Mobile, Ala.’s Girl Scout Troop 8274 in June. Under her khaki uniform vest MacKenzie wore a T-shirt featuring the periodic table, with the slogan periodically i’m sarcastic.This story about Girl Scouts was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
More than 220 human rights groups on Friday sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas expressing their outrage over the administration's plans to reopen and expand immigration detention centers in violation of the president's campaign promises.
"We call on President Biden and DHS to reverse course and immediately end private immigration detention, while moving aggressively towards the abolition of all immigration detention."
And the laundry in question proved to be bountiful, with internal company documents running into the thousands showing a fruit salad range of mendacity, deception and approaches to combating hate, violence and misinformation on its platform. The Wall Street Journal capitalised.
Before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Production, Product Safety, and Data Security, Frances Haugen, who revealed her identity on October 3, elaborated. Lawmakers were certainly more pleased with Haugen’s frankness, a far cry from the testimony of Facebook global head of Safety, Antigone Davis, who gave little away the week prior.
Janine Jackson interviewed Jane Manning about gender-based violence for the October 1, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
More than at any time in the recent past, Congress and the Biden administration have the means to open a path to citizenship to millions of undocumented residents who have been living in, and contributing to, this nation for many years.
These residents include DACA recipients who were brought here as children; millions of individuals working in such essential fields as agriculture, health, construction; and people living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status for humanitarian reasons.
Given this reaction, you could be forgiven for thinking that abuse like this isn’t normal for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). But those of us who live in border states can tell you: It is.
The CBP agents who were chasing down Haitian migrants were “following routine protocol,” explained the migrant rights group No More Deaths. “Border Patrol attacks migrants (on horseback and otherwise) every day in the remote desert, away from the cameras.”
The state was still partially confessional in nature; and in the fascinating social learning process in the few years before the UN Charter was finally drafted, Canadian political and religious elites took it for granted that Canadian society could be identified as “Christian.” In his speech to the Canadian parliament on 8 September 1939, PM Mackenzie King extolled a “civilization based upon the Christian conception of the brotherhood of man with its regard for the sanctity of contractual relations and the sacredness of human personality” (cited, p. 2). King had already translated Christian notions into the publicly accessible notions of the “brotherhood of man” and “contractual relations.”
During the historically-significant creation of the UN Charter of Human Rights in 1948, Canadian churches participated vigorously in the “background culture” (Rawls) or “civil society” (Habermas). Egerton (2004) says that they “played a vital national and international role in shaping opinion, articulating political values, and influencing policy” (p. 1). The secularization of Canadian society was well underway, but the separation of church and state, while evident, assumed that Canada was a Christian pluralist society whose citizenry was distributed throughout Roman Catholicism and Protestant churches. Canada was not yet fully religiously pluralist in sensibility. But the authority of religion had not yet receded into private and interior spaces. Moreover, the separation of the different domains (science, art, morality), while evident as well, was rejected by most Canadian Christian leaders and politicians (particularly the idea that morality could be separated from the affirmation of human rights). Habermas’ idea of the “linguistification of the sacred”—in the aftermath of WW II—was a repellant notion to those who wanted the first article of the UN Charter to name “God” as the foundation of human rights and anchor them on a solid religious moral foundation.€ Some thirty years later, the brilliant Liberal Catholic PM Pierre Trudeau didn’t “think God gives a damn whether he’s in the constitution or not” (cited, Egerton, 2000, p. 90).
With the enthusiastic support of Indigenous leaders and conservation groups, President Joe Biden on Friday is set to use his executive power to fully restore protections to a trio of beloved national monuments that the Trump administration rolled back in a giveaway to corporate interests, including the oil and gas industry.
"Through this action, the history of our people, our culture, and religion will be preserved for future generations."
The family of Henrietta Lacks has filed a lawsuit against biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific for making billions in profit from the “HeLa” cell line. Henrietta Lacks was an African American patient at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Doctors kept her tissue samples without her consent for experimental studies while treating her for cervical cancer in 1951. Benjamin Crump, one of the lawyers for the case, filed 70 years after her death, calls Henrietta Lacks a “cornerstone of modern medicine,” as her cells have since played a part in cancer research, the polio vaccine and even COVID-19 vaccines. Ron Lacks, author and grandson of Henrietta Lacks, laments the fact that the family was never notified when his grandmother died, and that part of what motivates the lawsuit is to ensure “no other family should ever go through this.”
As Republican lawmakers attempt to make it harder to vote in states across the country, we look at the life and legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights pioneer who helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Historian Keisha Blain writes about Hamer in her new book, “Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer’s Enduring Message to America.” In addition to fighting for voting rights, Hamer challenged state-sanctioned violence and medical racism that Black women faced. Blain based the book’s title on a frequent saying of Fannie Lou Hamer’s: “Whether you are Black or white, you are not free until I am free.”
It is difficult to explain the extent to which Texas’s Senate Bill 8—which bans abortions after six weeks of gestation and empowers private bounty hunters to sue anyone who “aids and abets” an abortion—is unconstitutional and lawless. Even calling the law “unconstitutional” is like calling the Marianas Trench “deep”: It’s true, but it fails to capture the abysmal quality of the thing. I feel I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad SB 8 is, but US District Judge Robert Pitman gave it a try. On Wednesday, he ordered a temporary injunction suspending enforcement of SB 8 and dedicated 113 pages to explaining why.
The EU is not allowed to return refugees to countries where they face persecution. In 2017, the Commission therefore set up a backdoor for refoulement to North Africa. Published text messages now reveal how Frontex is providing aerial reconnaissance for the Libyan coast guard.
Friday, April 15, 2016: Hobgood Elementary School, Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
Private searches that uncover contraband can be handed off to law enforcement without the Fourth Amendment getting too involved. Restrictions apply, of course. For instance, a tech repairing a computer may come across illicit images and give that information to law enforcement, which can use what was observed in the search as the basis for a search warrant.
Boko Haram has allegedly taken over communities in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State and ordered residents to marry off their daughters at the age of 12.
According to Morning Star News, the Lahore High Court in Pakistan refused to return a 14-year-old Christian girl to her family after she was abducted, forcefully converted to Islam, and forcefully married to her abductor. In refusing to return the girl to her family, the judge effectively ruled that the conversion to Islam superseded Pakistan’s laws against child marriage and statutory rape.
So for a long time the FCC has made "fighting robocalls" one of their top priorities. Though with Americans still receiving 132 million Robocalls every single day, you may have noticed that these efforts don't usually have the impact they claim. Headlines about "historic" or "record" FCC robocall fines usually overshadow the agency's pathetic failure to collect on those fines, or the fact that thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings, the agency is boxed in as to which kind of annoying calls and spam texts it can actually police.
Facebook has grown into a planet-wide, $1 trillion company that allows people to connect online with family and friends, sharing photos and "liking" the posts of others. Beneath this benign façade lies a vast network where Facebook profits by promoting discord, violence, human trafficking and by driving young people, especially girls, into a self-loathing that can spiral into depression and suicide. Facebook knows all this. A trove of leaked internal Facebook documents led to a recent series of explosive exposés by the Wall Street Journal. On Sunday, the whistleblower who released the documents, Frances Haugen, appeared on CBS' "60 Minutes," then, on Tuesday, went before a Senate Commerce subcommittee.
In her testimony, Haugen explained that at Facebook, metrics are king. Facebook’s “growth division” works to increase "user engagement," and it succeeds. € This is a circular process: Facebook identifies content that users "engage" with and promotes it, leading to more engagement. Facebook's automated systems don't evaluate what is being engaged with – they just identify and rank materials by engagement itself. So, according to Haugen, the automated scoring system will rank successful bullying as "engaging" alongside anything else that garners a lot of attention. € Politicians who make extreme statements get more engagement, and are therefore ranked higher by Facebook, and are therefore seen by more Facebook users.
It’s not like Facebook could discriminate between “good” and “bad” content even if it wanted to. Haugen says the "AI" € Facebook uses to evaluate content is bad at posts in English and worse at posts in other languages. Facebook “focused on scale over safety” and “chooses profit over safety.”
These aren't mere priorities—they are reflected in the incentives Facebook offers to its engineers, designers and product managers, whose bonuses are tied to the quantity of € “meaningful social interactions” (AKA "engagement") their products generate.
The iPhone maker gave notice Friday that will appeal a judge’s ruling in its fight with Epic Games Inc. ordering the Cupertino, California-based company to stop blocking developers from letting users complete in-app purchases on the web. It also asked the judge to put her Dec. 9 deadline for App Store rule changes on hold during the appeal, which if allowed could keep business as usual for Apple for at least a year.
As part of the appeal, Apple is asking for a stay to prevent the company from having to implement the new anti-steering rules, arguing that it “will allow Apple to protect consumers and safeguard its platform while the company works through the complex and rapidly evolving legal, technological, and economic issues.” And the company’s arguments there are pretty revealing if we’re reading the document right.
Apple is appealing a court ruling from September that would have required it to allow iPhone and iPad app developers to accept in-app payments using third-party payment systems.
Currently not only does Apple require developers to use Apple’ own in-app payment service, with Apple taking a 30% commission on all purchases, but the company prevents developers from even mentioning in the app that there might be another way to pay. Apple does plan to soften its stance on that next year for some apps next year, but not for games.
A few weeks ago I woke up one day to find the Lake Tahoe region on fire and the New York region underwater. Meanwhile the Supreme Court had just upended decades if not centuries of Constitutional law. But I could learn about none of it from watching local news because Locast had shut down overnight following a dreadful decision by a district court a few days before.
In 2019, the alleged operators of popular 'pirate' IPTV service IPGuys were sued by DISH Network in the US. If the lawsuit had gone the broadcaster's way, it could've ended with a damages award in the millions but after more than two years of litigation, a judge has awarded just $14,000 and declined an injunction.
Hosting provider Sharktech has settled a copyright lawsuit filed by several movie companies. The service stood accused of failing to take action against VPN providers, some of whose subscribers were pirating films. As part of the settlement, Sharktech agreed to block prominent pirate sites including 'Pirate Bay,' 'YTS', and 'RARBG'.
