I woke up this morning not planning to write anything on this blog, much less anything about AWS. But then, as I was eating breakfast, I read a horrifying story in Mother Jones about how an AWS employee was treated as he did his best to cope with his wife’s terminal cancer.
In the free software community, Amazon (more specifically AWS) has been criticized for years for taking a largely exploitative position concerning FOSS projects. These conversations frequently result in proposals to use licensing as a weapon against AWS. In general, I believe that it would be difficult to target AWS with licensing, as statutory licenses must be fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. But the issue of exploitation remains: AWS takes from the commons of FOSS projects and productizes that work, frequently without giving anything back.
They are, of course, allowed to do this, but at the same time, in doing so, they have frequently undercut the efforts of developers to monetize the labor involved in software maintenance, which leads to projects adopting licenses like SSPL and Commons Clause, which are significantly problematic for the commons.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to discuss whether you or your organization should be using Brave browser and it’s new search engine. Then we’re going to discuss a new data analysis predicting some explosive growth in Linux and what this means for innovation and jobs in the open-source world. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Microsoft upsets the FOSS community, Moxie trolls NFT clowns, Trump’s people don’t seem to understand licences, a 1337 haxx0r tool, KDE Korner, and more.
NVIDIA 495.44 is a new feature branch version and introduces support for the GBM API, which implements a GBM backend driver that can be used with the GBM loader from the Mesa 21.2 or later. This is good news, especially for KDE Plasma users as the latest 5.23.2 update also adds initial GBM support.
A single application to help you manage multiple services comes in handy when you do not want to do everything on your browser. While technically, you can, it may not be the most organized way of doing things.
Hence, options like Rambox and Franz are pretty popular cross-platform solutions to sign in to several services and access all of them at a glance.
Even though they both are available for Linux (and we’ve covered them separately), they offer limited features for free.
In contrast, Ferdi is a fork of Franz offering many premium functionalities for free while aiming to provide a better experience.
Planning to get the Python 3.10 installed for your work? Here's how to install Python 3.10 in Ubuntu and related distributions.
Engineering is about trade-offs and compromises. One of the most fundamental trade-offs to be made when designing a storage format is whether multi-byte numbers will be encoded as little or big endian numbers. But have you ever studied the data structures involved in ISO-9660, the standard filesystem format for optical discs? It seems that the committee tasked with developing this standard were unwilling to make this one tough decision and specified all multi-byte numbers as omni-endian. I just made that term up. Maybe it could be called bi-endian or multi-endian. The raw detail is that multi-byte numbers are stored in little endian format and then in big endian. For example, 0x11223344 is stored using 8 bytes: 0x44 0x33 0x22 0x11 0x11 0x22 0x33 0x44.
I recently discovered another bit of compromise in the ISO-9660 spec: It seems that there are 2 different methods for processing the directory structure. That means it’s incumbent upon ISO-9660 creation software to fill in the data structures to support both methods, because about some ISO-reading programs out there rely on one set of data structures while the rest prefer to read the other set.
Elevate is an open-source project developed by the AlmaLinux team that allows the migration of CentOS 7 to newer and major versions of RHEL-based distributions such as AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8, Oracle Linux 8, and CentOS Stream 8. It combines RedHat's Leapp framework with a community-developed library to assist with the migration.
This instructional guide provides you with the steps to upgrade/migrate CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux 8 using Elevate.
A block of code or text which can be redirected to the command script or interactive program is called here document or HereDoc. Different types of scripting languages like bash, sh, csh, ksh, etc., can take text input directly using here-document without using any text file. So when the coder needs less amount of text data, then using code and data in the same file is the better option, and it can be done easily by using here-document in the script. Without scripting language, here document can also be used in various high-level languages like php, perl, etc. How you can use here-document in the bash script is shown in this tutorial.
To use here-document in any bash script, you have to use the symbol << followed by any delimiting identifier after any bash command and close the HereDoc by using the same delimiting identifier at the end of the text. The syntax of writing HereDoc is shown below.
Using comments in any script or code is very important to make the script more readable. Comments work as documentation for the script. The reader can easily understand each step of the script if the author properly comments on it. Comments are ignored when the script executes. The single line can be commented on very easily in the bash script. But there are multiple ways to comment on multiple lines in the bash script. How you can use single and multiple lines comments in bash scripts is shown in this tutorial.
Oracle DBMS is a multi-model database management system Basically it’s a SQL DB System.
It is a database commonly used for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) database workloads. Oracle Database is available by several service providers on-prem, on-cloud, or as hybrid cloud installation. It may be run on third party servers as well as on Oracle hardware (Exadata on-prem, on Oracle Cloud or at Cloud at Customer.
Hello Guys ! We will discuss about Oracle DB today, surely, like every other tutorials, we will go through hands on ! But before that, some boring description about the Oracle DB, Hope you will get some important staffs from this.
Oracle Database is the first database designed for enterprise grid computing, the most flexible and cost effective way to manage information and applications. Enterprise grid computing creates large pools of industry-standard, modular storage and servers. With this architecture, each new system can_be rapidly provisioned from the pool of components. There is no need for peak workloads, because capacity canbe easily added or reallocated from the resource pools as needed.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Debian come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
The following tutorial will teach you to install the latest bleeding-edge Nvidia Beta Graphic drivers for Debian 11 Bullseye.
Civilization 6 is a modern take on the classic RTS concept introduced in games like Age of Empires, StarCraft, etc. games. The idea of RTS games is fairly simple; you start in the basic era where farming and agriculture are the biggest keys to survival, and your army is not well equipped to handle situations as well. Then as your base focuses on research, your knowledge advances, and with enough research, you could transition into a different era of civilization which would bring numerous wonders for your base and your people.
If you are a music freak, there is no way you haven’t heard of Apple Music. Known as one of the best music streaming services platforms developed by Apple Inc. 4 years ago, offers over 50 million songs for streaming over several connected devices. Users have an option to stream their favorite songs on-demand and listen to curated playlists from all across the world.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Prometheus on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time-series database, and a modern alerting approach.
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 Prometheus monitoring system on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use the mkdir command on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, mkdir command stands for make directory allows the user to create an empty directory on Linux operating system. This command can also create multiple folders at once as well as set permissions for folders. It is important to note that the user executing this command must have enough permissions to create a directory in the parent directory, or he/she may receive a ‘permission denied error.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the use of mkdir (Make Directory Command) on Linux. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In modern times, Linux-based distributions have become one of the most widely used operating systems, competing with the likes of Windows and macOS. If you’re someone working in the field of Networking or anything related to Information Technology, the chances are that your workspace system uses a Linux distribution.
This is because Linux provides a plethora of advanced features related to security, networking, privacy, ease of access, and adaptability that aren’t readily available in its competitors.
With advantages like these, no doubt you’d want to switch to Linux as your go-to operating system.
This guide is meant to help you learn how to install Linux on a Mac PC. The tutorial will help you run a Linux-based operating system on your Mac. Bear in mind this will completely overwrite the original OS.
Are you tired of keeping track of different time zones for your work? Have you experienced time mix-ups and missed committed online meetings because of the time difference? If the answer to the above questions is yes, this article will show you how you can set the multiple time zones right there on your desktop bar.
Gnome-clocks is an extremely simple and easy-to-use utility that can help you set up multiple time zones with just a few clicks.
As I begin the last article in this series, it is my hope that you have been able to grasp the importance of HTML 5 and mobile-friendly / responsive web development.
Regardless of your desktop distribution of choice, Netbeans is a powerful IDE and when used together with basic Linux command-line skills and the tools discussed in Part 3, can help you to create outstanding applications without much hassle.
Sysadmins use audits to discover security violations and track security-relevant information on their systems. Based on preconfigured rules and properties, the audit daemon (auditd) generates log entries to record information about the events happening on the system. Administrators use this information to analyze what went wrong with the security policies and improve them further by taking additional measures.
This article covers how to install, configure, and manage the audit service. It also shows how to define audit rules, search audit logs, and create audit reports. If you are new to system auditing, this article helps you gain a basic understanding and usage of audits on your system.
Cryostat is a profiling and monitoring tool that leverages the JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) framework already present in your HotSpot JVM applications. Cryostat provides an in-cluster collection hub for easy and secure access to your JDK Flight Recorder data from outside of the cluster.
This article follows our recent announcement of Cryostat 2.0. It is the first of several hands-on guides to using Cryostat 2.0 in your Java applications. In this article, we'll explore how to set up and configure a Quarkus-based Java application to use Cryostat on Red Hat OpenShift.
In the previous two articles of this series, we explained how to set up Netbeans in a Linux desktop distribution as an IDE to develop web applications. We then proceeded to add two core components, jQuery and Bootstrap, in order to make your pages mobile-friendly and responsive.
In this article, we will create a dynamic HTML5 web application using PHP/MySQL and jQuery in our development and deploy it to a remote web server in Ubuntu.
Bitwarden is a free and open-source password manager that stores website credentials in an encrypted vault. It allows you to store all of your login credentials and keep them synced between all of your devices. It is designed for individuals, teams, and business organizations to manage their credentials from a centralized location. Bitwarden provides a client application for Desktop PC as well as, smartphones and tablets. It also provides a password generator for generating strong and secure passwords.
In this post, we will show you how to install the Bitwarden password manager on Debian 11.
CyberPanel is a control panel designed with the main purpose of being user-friendly for non-technical users. CyberPanel is very easy to learn because it uses a simple layout that most hosting companies are already familiar with. CyberPanel also has several features that most other control panels don’t have.
CyberPanel offers an advanced interface that can be used instead of having to use FTP or SSH to upload files via the command line from your computer. CyberPanel also provides a service script installer so you can easily install scripts such as WordPress and Joomla without having to research how each script needs to be installed individually through FTP/ssh.
CyberPanel has a fantastic feature called CSF Firewall which protects from brute force attacks, CyberPanel also allows you to manage the firewall through a dashboard along with many other management options CyberPanel offers a lot of different features that running your own control panel does not come with. CyberPanel also provides an API that can be used by hosting companies or developers for custom development projects. CyberPanel works on all major platforms such as Windows, Linux, BSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X.
NumPy(Numerical Python) is a library for the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large collection of high-levelmathematicalfunctions to operate on these arrays.
The ancestor of NumPy, Numeric, was originally created by Jim Hugunin with contributions from several other developers. In 2005, Travis Oliphant created NumPy by incorporating features of the competing Numarray into Numeric, with extensive modifications. NumPy is open-source software and has many contributors. NumPy is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project.
Apart from its multi dimensional array object, it also provides high-level functioning tools for working with arrays.
In Part 1 of this series, we set up a basic HTML 5 project using Netbeans as our IDE, and we also presented a few elements that have been added in this new specification of the language.
In a few words, you can think of jQuery as a cross-browser and cross-platform Javascript library that can greatly simplify client-side scripting in HTML pages. On the other hand, Bootstrap can be described as a complete framework that integrates HTML, CSS, and Javascript tools to create mobile-friendly and responsive web pages.
In this article, we will introduce you to jQuery and Bootstrap, two priceless utilities to write HTML 5 code more easily. Both jQuery and Bootstrap are licensed under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses, which are compatible with the GPL and are thus free software.
Apache is one of the most popular web servers out there but it is also the subject of many questions. Today we will try to answer two how to install and configure Apache web server on Debian 11.
We’ve already talked about the Apache web server on Debian 11, but it’s always good to remember that it’s a software-level web server from the Apache Foundation. That is, it is open source and we can use it in almost any circumstances.
For this reason, any users want to know how to configure it to serve their websites. Although this varies greatly according to the site and its needs, at least have a gateway to Apache.
In addition to this, Apache has a lot of documentation that will help us in case we have doubts in the process. This documentation should be read before working with the application.
Using Cloudformation, we can create and manage AWS resources very easily. Cloudformation can be used to manage all AWS resources using a text file. Cloudformation allows us to create and model our infrastructure and applications without having to perform actions manually. Cloudformation helps us to manage our complete infrastructure in a text file, or template. Cloudformation template is a formatted text file in JSON or YAML language that describes our AWS infrastructure.
In this article, we will see a Cloudformation to create a VPC with 2 Public and 2 Private Subnets.
Rofi is a free and open source application typically used in the context of very minimal graphical environments on Linux (simple windows manager like i3, instead of full fledged desktop environments like GNOME or KDE). Rofi has multiple functions: it can work as a window switcher, an application launcher or a run dialog, and can be used as a replacement for dmenu. In this tutorial we see how to install it on some of the most used Linux distributions, and how to use it.
In a 2016 post I explained how to update the Intel CPU microcode in a Gentoo Linux Stable Branch installation without an initramfs (I do not use sys-kernel/genkernel to build the kernel in the installation on my Clevo W230SS laptop). The behaviour of the tool sys-apps/iucode_tool for updating the Intel CPU microcode has changed since that post, hence this update.
Although not essential I normally perform the microcode upgrade procedure when I either rebuild or upgrade the Linux kernel, therefore I explain both procedures contiguously here.
These days the grub-mkconfig command edits the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg to add a line to the GRUB menu entries, to load the CPU microcode at boot, but nevertheless I prefer to follow a slightly different method that works reliably for me.
In the previous article, we have seen how to work with conditional statements in bash to evaluate conditions and take decisions based on the results. Similarly, in this article, we will learn how to use case statement in Bash scripts, which is also used to evaluate conditions. You can use a Bash case statement instead of writing a long list of if..elif..else statement. If you have no idea about conditional statements, we have a detailed article on the topic. I suggest you take a look at it before reading this article.
This tutorial explains how a user can search for files and folders on a Kubuntu computer. This tutorial applies to Dolphin, the file manager of Kubuntu, thus also applies to any other systems that use Dolphin like KaOS and openSUSE.
Whenever the user executes some command in the terminal, the output is displayed there in the terminal as an output. We can change this behavior through the use of the command “tee”.
The Tee command in Linux is mostly used in combination with other commands, it reads the input and in response to that writes the output to one or more files. It does this so that the output can be displayed as well as saved to a file at the same time. In this article, we will learn more about the tee command, from its syntax to its use along with examples to help you understand better.
By releasing Wine 6.20, Wine now provides the packages for Ubuntu 21.10 in its official repository.
Wine is a free open-source software allows to run Windows apps in Linux, macOS and BSD. The latest development release now is Wine 6.20 that features...
Kathy Rain: Director's Cut is the definitive edition of the popular point and click mystery adventure from Clifftop Games and Raw Fury. It's out now and it comes with native Linux support.
Originally released in May 2016 where is gathered only a modest attention, but won over fans of the genre over time thanks to its compelling story, excellent voice acting, and clever puzzles. Kathy Rain eventually found its audience, achieving over 1.2 million users on Steam alone. The original wasn't supported on Linux but this expanded and improved edition of it is.
Megaquarium: Architect's Collection is the next expansion for the great aquarium building game from developer Twice Circled and it's ready to release on November 11.
This is the second expansion pack for Megaquarium. The first, Freshwater Frenzy, launched in 2020 and gave players freshwater habitats, the ability to develop hybrids, new campaigns and more. With Megaquarium: Architect's Collection you get to focus a bit more on spaces outside of tanks with new architectural features such as bridges, archways, tunnels and more and of course it comes with some new creatures too.
Horizon Chase Turbo is a popular and well-reviewed retro arcade racer and the developer just released a DLC dedicated to the legend that is Ayrton Senna who died in 1994.
Senna, hailed as one of the greatest F1 racers of all time, sadly died in an accident during the San Marino Grand Prix when colliding with a wall on a corner. For a first time in Horizon Chase Turbo, this new expansion gives you the ability to race in first-person. The aptly named Senna Forever DLC brings with it a new 5 chapter single-player career mode to race through.
yuzu, the free and open source Nintendo Switch emulator has advanced once again with the introduction of a brand new Resolution Scaler enabling you to play games at much higher resolutions. Now available in their Early Access builds, it will roll out for all users once it's properly ready for the public.
Hey there, yuz-ers! For those of you eager to go beyond the limits of Switch hardware and experience the full potential of Switch games, the wait has finally ended. Our most requested and anticipated feature — the Resolution Scaler — is finally here!
Caves of Qud is a roguelike we've been writing about for years now and it continues to be one of the best modern iterations on the classic gameplay style. A huge new stable update just went out making it better than ever, for all types of players. Some of the big changes have been available in a Beta on Steam for a while but now all players get it.
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Outside of that there's the two new late-game regions, a new two-tiered settlement with many new NPCs, two new factions, a new side-quest, the Rainbow Wood was expanded and is now more dynamic, there's new plans, new plant-like animals, tons of new items and the list just goes on forever.
You may want to set aside some money and fill up that Steam Wishlist, as the next couple of big sale events now have their dates confirmed.
Ubuntu has become one of the most suited Linux-based distributions for gaming. This is because of the large community support and updates. It offers compatibility for a majority of gaming titles available on Steam. One of the popular free-to-play games on Steam is War Thunder. War Thunder brings a twist to the multiplayer shooter genre by providing advanced ground and aerial combat (in the form of tanks and airplanes).
War Thunder provides a wide range of tanks and airplanes to choose from and customization options to improve the vehicle stats further. This ensures that no two vehicles are the same, and the combat experience feels fresh in every match.
With features like these, we can see why you’d like to play War Thunder.
This guide will cover how you can install War Thunder using Steam. Although there are other methods, you can use to proceed with the installation, working with Steam is the simplest as it gets rid of the process of working with packages.
KDE Plasma 5.23.2 comes only a week after KDE Plasma 5.23.1 and introduces a big feature for NVIDIA GPU users, namely support for the GBM backend of the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver. Over time, this should improve the Plasma experience for NVIDIA users in many ways.
GNOME Gingerblue 2.0.1 is Free Recording Software for GNOME.
In the 2.0.1 release I have added support for XSPF 1.0 from Xiph.org.
It has been almost a year since we announced conformance for Vulkan 1.0 on Raspberry Pi 4 devices. Since then, we have been working on improving driver performance, expanding the feature set, and advancing towards Vulkan 1.1 support.
Today we are excited to announce that Khronos has just granted Vulkan 1.1 conformance to Raspberry Pi 4.
All the required driver changes for Vulkan 1.1 have already been merged in the upstream v3dv Mesa driver and will hopefully be available soon in Raspberry Pi OS.
Last week I mentioned how Mesa landed Vulkan 1.1 support for the V3DV driver most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. With those changes in Mesa Git, The Khronos Group has now officially granted this driver Vulkan 1.1 conformance for the Raspberry Pi 4.
It's now official with The Khronos Group signing off on the Vulkan 1.1 conformance test results for the V3DV driver running on the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single board computer.
Good news for fans of the tiny Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, as it has been announced that the v3dv Mesa driver has hit Vulkan 1.1 conformance officially now.
Shared on the Raspberry Pi website, with a post from Igalia’s Iago Toral they mention that it's been almost a year since the driver officially hit Vulkan 1.0 so it's great to see it continue to advance. In the post they noted that all the required changes are already merged in the upstream Mesa project. This means it will be available officially with the next major Mesa release later this year (Mesa 21.3).
BMWs are known for many things: performance, luxury, quality, and pedigree. But BMW drivers are only known for one thing: being inconsiderate to others on the road. That stereotype is exemplified by a complete lack of turn signal usage, according to Marc Radinovic. To solve this issue and repair the reputation of BMW drivers, he turned to Arduino to create a training device.
Radinovic attached this device to his own car, which he didn’t want to hack apart. So he avoided tapping into the CAN bus by utilizing an abundance of hardware. That hardware includes two Nano 33 BLE boards, an Uno WiFi Rev. 2, and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Each Nano 33 BLE has an integrated 9-axis IMU, which Radinovic uses to detect steering wheel movement and turn signal stalk movement.
Tor Browser 10.5.10 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version launches the Privacy is a Human Right fundraiser.
Plenty of people have raised concerns that Donald Trump's sketchy new social media site, Truth Social, is just a lightly reskinned Mastodon, which is violating Mastodon's fairly strict AGPLv3 license. As we had previously discussed, the aggressive (and sloppy) terms of service for the site claim that the code is proprietary, and even claims that "all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs, audio, video, text, photographs, and graphics on the Site (collectively, the “Content”) and the trademarks, service marks, and logos contained therein (the “Marks”) are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us..."
There are many problems with the existing Internet email system, such as spam, scam, surveillance, insecurity, centralization, and complexity. The problems are starting to outweigh the benefits of the system. Fixing the problems by evolving the current system seems overwhelmingly difficult. This essay examines some solutions to the problems on the assumption that a completely new, parallel email system can be built.
This is not a proposal for a new system, but an exploration of the solution space, meant to provoke constructive discussion.
Environmentalism is often experienced as a desire to return to rural nature: from the pastoral sunlit uplands to the ancient forest. Yet more than half€ of the world human population lives in cities today.
Giggles aside, the scandalous venture that is space tourism is a perfect example why harsh penalties might be levelled on certain capitalists who think that climate change and pandemics are the sort of things best left to other people.€ You do not have to be puritanical to turn your nose up at this.
Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson have called their orbital ventures all manner of things: space utilisation, desperate innovation, new frontier fumbling, human beings finding themselves in adolescent rediscovery.€ It is little different to the embarkations from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century for what would be, inaccurately and disturbingly termed, the New World.
The show's cast included Academy Award winner Rita Moreno, Bill Cosby and a then unknown Morgan Freeman. Guest stars included Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Joan Rivers. The teen pop band Short Circus (get it?) included future star Irene Cara. The comedy writers were among the best in the business, and later went on to work on hit TV shows including MASH and Everybody Loves Raymond.
So, with all that going for it, why did The Electric Company run out of juice? The answer shines a light on the fate of many a public media endeavor where making money is as important as the mission statement.
When strung together, four monosyllabic words make one of the most powerful sentences in the English language: “Not in my name.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, an unfortunately all-too-common topic for me was the proliferation of€ dubious acupuncture studies€ from practitioners of what I like to refer to as quackademic medicine. These studies ranged from basic science studies€ using animal models€ to clinical trials that were not even really designed to€ test whether acupuncture works€ but instead were€ practically designed€ to produce a “positive” result, even when the€ result was negative, while still other studies€ rebrand “electroacupuncture”€ as “acupuncture.”
As U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema continues to take heat for opposing Medicare drug pricing reforms in the Build Back Better package, another Big Pharma-backed Senate Democrat has come under fire in recent days for rejecting the popular cost-cutting provisions included in the budget reconciliation bill.€
"Lowering prescription drug prices for patients, seniors, working families, and employers through negotiations in Medicare is not a controversial issue."
The Conti ransomware affiliate program appears to have altered its business plan recently. Organizations infected with Conti’s malware who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment are added to Conti’s victim shaming blog, where confidential files stolen from victims may be published or sold. But sometime over the past 48 hours, the cybercriminal syndicate updated its victim shaming blog to indicate that it is now selling access to many of the organizations it has hacked.
Russia’s premier intelligence agency has launched another campaign to pierce thousands of U.S. government, corporate and think-tank computer networks, Microsoft officials and cybersecurity experts warned on Sunday, only months after President Biden imposed sanctions on Moscow in response to a series of sophisticated spy operations it had conducted around the world.
Mr Fleming, director of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), told how attacks have doubled in the last year, with [attackers] using software to lock files on computers before stopping victims from accessing their own data, essentially holding it hostage and demanding money from them.
A total of 190 significant cyber attacks were reported in September, the highest figure for any month this year. Several attacks took advantage of the education sector at its busiest time.
It said in a blog post that the claimed activity had been observed in the US and Europe since May.
News of the SolarWinds attacks came to light in December 2020, with both FireEye and Microsoft describing the attack as a global one, with a trojan being implanted into a file which was part of updates for the product; the compromised file was given the name SUNBURST. SolarWinds' Orion monitoring software, the target, runs on Windows.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.3 and php7.4), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (chromium and virtualbox), Oracle (xstream), Red Hat (kernel, rh-ruby30-ruby, and samba), and Ubuntu (binutils and mysql-5.7).
Malware merchant NSO Group's year of embarrassment continues. Leaked data published in July appeared to show NSO malware (namely its phone-hijacking malware Pegasus) had been used to target dissidents, journalists, religious leaders, and prominent politicians.
Last year, when everybody was freaking out over TikTok, we noted that TikTok was likely the least of the internet's security and privacy issues. In part because TikTok wasn't doing anything that wasn't being done by thousands of other app makers, telecoms, data brokers, or adtech companies in a country that can't be bothered to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era. If we're serious about security and privacy solutions, we need to take a much broader view.
With all-in-one deployment, you install and configure the Wazuh server and Elastic Stack on the same host.
Every year, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds and distributes the technology behind the Tor network and Tor Browser holds a fundraiser and we ask for your support. (If you’re a Tor fan, you probably know that by now!) And every year, we unveil new gifts and a slogan that highlight our values and the importance of Tor.
This year, our message is simple: Privacy is a human right.
Although an useful statement, the joint opinion doesn’t put any direct pressure on the European Commission. However, that’s not true of a resolution passed by the European Parliament, demanding strong safeguards when AI tools are used in law enforcement. Even though the vote is advisory, it is nonetheless a clear signal of what the European Parliament expects to see in the new EU AI law, and the changes that it will want from the European Commission when it comes to drawing up and voting on a final text. Here are the main demands:
The company's latest quarterly earnings report came on the day that it faced a deluge of news stories based on thousands of internal documents obtained by news organizations, including NBC News. The documents, originating with former Facebook product manager and whistleblower Frances Haugen, provided the deepest look yet at the internal workings of the company and revealed employee dissent over the platform's policies.
“I think there is a view inside the company that safety is a cost center, it’s not a growth center, which I think is very short-term in thinking because Facebook’s own research has shown that when people have worse integrity experiences on the site, they are less likely to retain,” Haugen said.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this month that Facebook plans to bring on 10,000 workers over the next five years for its metaverse project in Europe.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen was “shocked” when she heard the company planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the “metaverse,” a version of the internet based on virtual and augmented reality, when its money would be better spent on safety, she told British lawmakers Monday.
“I was shocked to hear that Facebook wants to double down on the metaverse and that they’re going to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to work on the metaverse,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘Wow, do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers?’ It would have been amazing.”
The company also revealed plans to significantly change how it reports earnings going forward. Beginning in Q4, Facebook will report Facebook Reality Labs (FRL) as its own segment, separate from what the company will call “Family of Apps,” including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. FRL will include all virtual reality and augmented reality hardware, software, and content. The company says its investment in FRL will reduce its 2021 profits by $10 billion, and Zuckerberg added that it plans to increase that spending in future years.
Facebook has cited the privacy rule changes made by Apple in April for the uncertain outlook it faces in the fourth quarter, after the company released third-quarter results on Monday.
The Apple privacy updates, which began rolling out in April and prevent advertisers from tracking iPhone users without their consent, has had investors in digital ad companies on edge for fear that reduced access to data would upend the nearly $100 billion mobile ad market.
The European Parliament’s resolution on artificial intelligence in criminal law and its use by the police and judicial authorities in criminal matters reflects the need for stronger regulation of AI technologies
The resolution to ban the use of facial recognition in public spaces is an important step in fighting against mass surveillance
This resolution provides an opportunity to reconsider the EU’s role in the development and sale of AI technologies used for law enforcement by third countries
As a New York Times correspondent who covers the Middle East, I often speak to people who take great risks to share information that their authoritarian rulers want to keep secret. I take many precautions to protect these sources because if they were caught they could end up in jail, or dead.
But in a world where we store so much of our personal and professional lives in the devices we carry in our pockets, and where surveillance software continues to become ever more sophisticated, we are all increasingly vulnerable.
As it turned out, I didn’t even have to click on a link for my phone to be infected.
To try to determine what had happened, I worked with Citizen Lab, a research institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto that studies spyware.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has sent a draft decision to EDRi's member noyb - European Center for Digital Rights and informed noyb that the draft decision would be shared with the other European Data Protection Authorities for consultation. The case concerns Facebook's reliance on contracts for serving advertising to its users - the legal trick Facebook applied in May 2018 to bypass the GDPR.
The feature basically allows users to synchronize their mobile phone contacts with Messenger to see who has a Facebook account. This allows users to connect with those in their contact list via Facebook if they so wish.
The [access] took place over a period of just over a year, between January 2018 and September 2019. Alexander Alexandrovich reportedly used an automated tool to feed Facebook’s servers random phone numbers.
The attacker supposedly conducted the campaign between January 2018 and September 2019, when Facebook shut down the importer, and started selling it on a black market forum in December 2020.
Several news outlets published stories Monday based on thousands of internal Facebook documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, ratcheting up the pressure on a company already besieged by weeks of high-profile criticism.
Together the reports paint a picture of a company that prioritizes profits to the point of ignoring clear internal warning signs, dismisses concerns outside of the United States and is desperate to cling onto an aging user base.
Soon after news of his death was announced, Che became an overnight revolutionary icon, though he was already headed in that direction. I remember seeing his image everywhere, especially in buses and taxis, when I lived in Mexico in 1975.€ € Che is still an iconic figure, though his image has been tarnished in part by his all-too-honest account of the seven months in 1965 when he failed to foment a revolution in the Congo, not far from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, which, he explained, constantly “tempted” him and offer an escape route to friendly Tanzania. Doomed from the start, the expedition seems to have been the beginning of the end for Che who wrote,€ “During those last hours of our time in the Congo I felt alone.” He added “never have I felt myself so alone.”
Call the Congo, Che’s “Heart of Darkness,” the place where he confronted his own inner demons and was undone by them. Too embarrassed to return to Cuba immediately after the military defeat of the guerrilla army he had assembled, he spent six months living clandestinely at the Cuban Embassy in Dar es Salaam and at a “safe house” in Prague, evading would-be assassins.
Philip Nelson uses a cane and, when permitted, a wheelchair to navigate Five Points Correctional Facility in upstate New York. At 54, he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, and asthma.
Nearly two decades later, and with Colin Powell having now passed from complications with Covid-19, I now feel less confused, less uncertain obviously. After two decades of the War on Terror, after two decades of surveillance and rampant Islamophobia, after two decades of war, neoliberal decay, and the rise of Trump, due to the complicity of Republican leaders, some of whom Powell himself served (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), it is now evident to me that what Powell represents is a particular strand of “progress” for some and misery for nearly everyone else.
“General Powell was an exemplary soldier and an exemplary patriot,” President Barack Obama stated. Enter your email to subscribe to the CNN Newsletter The Point with Chris Cillizza.
It is too early to speculate what went wrong during the filming of the Western movie “Rust.” But the incident, in which the film’s director was also injured, highlights a simple fact: Guns are commonplace in Hollywood films.
As scholars of mass communication and risk behavior, we have studied the growing prevalence of firearms on screen and believe that the more guns there are in movies, the more likely it is that a shooting will occur – both in the “reel” world and in the “real” world.
The two sources, both of whom have been granted anonymity due to the ongoing investigation, describe participating in “dozens” of planning briefings ahead of that day when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol as his election loss to President Joe Biden was being certified.
A Sunday story from Rolling Stone didn’t directly tie lawmakers to the violent assault, but two sources who spoke to the outlet instead detailed multiple meetings with members of Congress to coordinate contesting the election results and plan the rallies that preceded the attack.
In response to new reporting that several congressional Republicans and White House officials were "intimately involved" in planning the January 6 Capitol attack—part of former President Donald Trump's far-reaching election subversion plot—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night demanded the expulsion of any lawmaker who aided and abetted the violent assault on U.S. democracy.
"Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation's Capitol must be expelled," tweeted Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). "This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond."
Rolling Stone‘s bomshell report that multiple Republican members of Congress met with organizers of the Stop the Steal event preceding the Capitol insurrection has elicited outrage across the nation — and through the halls of Congress. Lawmakers have responded to the story published Sunday night in droves, with some Democratic representatives going so far as to push for the expulsion of any members of Congress who were involved in planning the attack on the Capitol that occurred after the rally.
“They tried to overthrow the government, they had a plan, they executed it, and they broke many laws along the way,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), tweeted shortly after the report was published Sunday night. “The problem won’t naturally fade away,” he added, noting that Trump appears to be gearing up for a 2024 run at the White House. “It must be confronted.”
Driving the news: Military units began arresting civilian officials and prominent political leaders, among them adversaries of General Burhan, early on Monday.
Dr. Jain said that the UNO and all human rights organizations remain crippled. Islamic fundamentalists are bent on making Bangladesh a country totally devoid of Hindus. The Bangladesh government has become a mute spectator.
Instead of controlling the radical Jihadis, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh is advising the Government of Bharat that it should not allow any such incident to happen in Bharat/India that would ‘inflame the Muslims’ in Bangladesh. After this statement of Sheikh Hasina, Muslim fundamentalists became more frenzied and the brutal atrocities on Hindus increased. The cycle of atrocities shows no sign of stopping yet.
The Joint General Secretary of VHP said that Bangladesh is a declared Islamic country with Islam as its state religion. That is why, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, there have been heinous atrocities on Hindus in Bangladesh since the beginning, but the current developments have broken all the previous records.
Iskcon has also written to the UN to step in and send a delegation. “Did the minorities of Bangladesh, who suffered the deadly Noakhali riots of 1946 and the massacre of 1971, stay back to see this day?” said the letter written by Iskcon Kolkata vice-president Radharaman Das to UN secretary general Antonio Guterres.
Biden may face within days his first major test in the Middle East. What is at issue, after all, has never been terrorism. The Turks are hard-pressed to back their accusations of cross-border Kurdish terrorism with evidence. Turkey’s currency, meanwhile, is in free fall, as is what remains of Erdogan’s popularity. True to form, the Turkish leader appears now to take a page out of the distraction playbook of Argentine military dictator Leopoldo Galtieri, who ordered the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who in 1990 ordered the invasion of Kuwait.
The newly appointed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) boss in Tibet, a hardline apparatchik under multiple international sanctions for severe human rights abuses in neighboring Xinjiang, is expected to apply to Tibet’s Buddhists the same harsh policies carried out against the Muslims in Xinjiang, Tibetans and experts said.
Wang Junzheng, deputy CCP boss and security chief in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), has overseen atrocities against the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in the XUAR that have been labeled genocide in Western capitals.
Tibet advocates greeted the announcement Monday of the promotio n of the 58-year-old Wang with concern that he will take the repression Tibetans have known for decades to a higher-level, and they called for the continuation of coordinated sanctions on him by Britain, Canada, the European Union and the U.S.
To date, the authorities have not been able to figure out the mystery behind Adrian Lamo’s death, although they did find a sticker on his body during the subsequent investigation, which according to The Daily Mail, read, “Adrian Lamo Project Vigilant Assistant Director Threat Analysis/Investigation 70 Bates Street Northwest Washington DC 20001.” Determined to follow this lead, authorities questioned several people about Project Vigilant but did not receive a satisfactory answer. Although reports mention that Project Vigilant was a now-defunct secret government agency, most people who heard of it refused to speak about it because of non-disclosure agreements.
Thus, even in the face of multiple speculations around Adrian’s death, the general consensus believes that the hacker died after ingesting a mixture of different chemicals and drugs. However, it should be noted that such a belief is not official, and the police still maintain that the reason behind Adrian Lamo’s death is undetermined.
Plastic pollution in oceans and other bodies of water continues to grow sharply and could more than double by 2030, according to an assessment released on Thursday by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).
The report highlights dire consequences for health, the economy, biodiversity and the climate. It also says a drastic reduction in unnecessary, avoidable and problematic plastic, is crucial to addressing the global pollution crisis overall.
Donziger offered an additional explanation for the intensity of Chevron’s attacks against him, “There are individuals within Chevron who want to destroy my life, because they’re so angry at the role I’ve played in helping previously marginalized peoples to empower themselves to such an extent that they were actually able to win a legal case against Chevron. Those people in Chevron never expected that to happen,” he said. “They feel, ‘We’re in charge.’ Their view is very racist. They see the people in Ecuador as weak and dumb.”
Rich nations will likely be three years late in starting to fulfill their pledged $100 billion in annual funds to help developing nations tackle the climate emergency, according to a document out Monday, sparking outcry from advocates for climate justice.
Developing countries have put up with accounting tricks, delays, and broken promises for far too long.
This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond€ 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before this century's end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far, the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration's climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it's too late.€ €
In roughly two weeks, leaders from around the world will converge on Glasgow for COP26, the 26th United Nations Climate Change summit and U.S. President Joe Biden will be among them — setting the stage to further reclaim the United States’ position as an international climate leader and a willing participant in the global discourse about how to save the planet.
Since officially taking over the White House in January, which formally marked the end of the Trump presidency, the Biden administration has been bold in its promise to usher in a new era where tackling climate change head-on would be put at the center of U.S. foreign policy and national security. On Inauguration Day, Biden hit the ground running and in the following days signed a flurry of executive orders aimed at doing just that.
Carbon dioxide concentrations reached a new record high in 2020, with comparable levels not seen for roughly 3 million years, the United Nations weather agency said Monday.
"There is no time to lose."
Jessica Reznicek was sentenced to eight years in federal prison, ordered to pay millions in fines and labeled a terrorist by the government for her actions of civil disobedience that damaged the equipment of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is owned by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) a $54 billion dollar corporation that also co-owns the Bayou Bridge Pipeline. When ETP intentionally and illegally damaged the private property of hundreds of people in Louisiana, the company received no criminal consequences at all.
Hertz will add 100,000 Teslas — primarily the Model 3 — to its fleet by the end of 2022, Fields said in a statement. It also will set up a network of 3,000 quick chargers in 65 markets by the end of next year. Customers will also have access to Tesla's own Supercharger network.
Tesla stock surged Monday, propelling the electric car maker's valuation closer to $1 trillion.
The deal is “non-exclusive,” Hertz spokesman Ray Day told NBC News, adding that the rental company “is open to working with all automakers.”
We are in a historic (and potentially very brief!) political moment when progressives have a real shot at winning a path-breaking tax on the nation’s super-wealthy.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said over the weekend that Democrats are close to reaching a deal on a pair of major budget bills that form the backbone of President Biden’s domestic agenda. Progressives in Congress have spent months defending provisions such as Medicare benefits, paid family leave and free community college, but conservative Democrats such as Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have slashed them from the budget. Congressmember Ro Khanna draws a hard line on items such as climate provisions, as per President Joe Biden’s wishes ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference “to show American leadership” and aim for a “50% reduction by 2030” on greenhouse gas pollution.
For the first time in years, American workers have enough bargaining leverage to demand better working conditions and higher wages—and are refusing to work until they get them.
For the past 30 years, South Dakota has been a bastion of extreme wealth, a place for multimillionaires and billionaires around the world to stash their money in vehicles known as trusts. As the explosive Pandora Papers investigation has exposed, the world’s wealthy employ complex schemes in order to avoid taxation, and the use of trusts is an essential strategy.
The program’s finances improved substantially the next year and have continued to improve in subsequent years. The most recent report projects the date of the Trust Fund’s depletion as 2057. The improvement in finances is due to a lower rate of allowances and, since 2010, fewer people applying. We trace this pattern in the discussion below.
Figure 1 below shows the projected date of the DI trust fund’s exhaustion from the annual Trustees’ Reports.
Senators Warren & Sanders have also been talking for months about a ‘wealth tax’. That idea has been rejected outright by nearly all Democrats in Congress and Biden. The latest effort to come up with some wealth tax to pay for the Build Back Better bill is in current discussion in the tax committees in Congress. It proposes to tax just the 745 US billionaires whose wealth increased by $2.1T and 70% just since the Covid crisis began 18 months ago. The problem with this proposal is it taxes the level of wealth attained in stocks and bonds by the billionaires when the prices of those stocks and bonds rise. However, it leaves open the prospect of massive tax cuts on billionaires wealth when prices of stocks and bonds decline. Better is to tax the transactions that lead to that wealth accumulation instead of the level of the wealth. A financial transactions tax does just that. And prevents a subsequent massive tax cut later that a wealth tax on levels of wealth makes possible.
All the phony positioning in Congress (Biden’s proposals, Warren’s, billionaire tax discussions, etc.) over the attempt to ‘claw back’ just some of Trump’s $4.5T 2017 tax cuts totally ignores the real solution to all of the financing of the fiscal stimulus bills: A Financial Transactions Tax.€ The total cost of the $.55t new spending in the Infrastructure bill and the current $1.9T in the Build Back Better (human infrastructure) bill could be completely PAID FOR WITH A FINANCIAL TRANSACTION TAX!
The Democratic plan to crack down on individual retirement accounts worth hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars and to tighten the rules governing IRA investments is facing intense opposition from several industry groups seeking to kill or soften the proposed reforms.
Several retirement industry firms, including one backed by tech investor Peter Thiel, who amassed a multibillion-dollar IRA, have mounted a lobbying push against the plan, disclosure filings show. They have hired an array of former Capitol Hill staffers, a former congressman and at least one former U.S. senator to fight efforts to rein in and regulate the accounts.
On Nov. 3, 2020, Americans went to the polls in record numbers and voted to give Democrats control of the House, Senate, and the White House based on the promise that we would finally deliver on the most pressing issues facing our country, including voting and civil rights, health care, climate change, immigration and gun safety.
Bill McKibben popped up in the Zoom window on my laptop screen looking a little haggard, perhaps showing his 60 years, having just spent many hours in the custody of the D.C. police. Logging in from his Washington hotel room, he had been arrested that morning in front of the White House, just one of the hundreds engaging in mass civil disobedience as part of the Indigenous-led The People vs. Fossil Fuels week of actions.
Bolstering criticism of the few U.S. Senate Democrats who continue to impede key party priorities—including voting rights protections—by refusing to reform or abolish the filibuster, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday signed "extremely gerrymandered" political maps that could help the GOP retain control of the state for another decade.
"It is a monumentally bad idea to let politicians draw their own district maps."
If Joe Manchin gets what he wants in negotiations with the Biden White House and his fellow Democratic senators regarding climate policy, which now seems likely, it could have a devastating impact on the planet—and on Democrats’ prospects in 2022.
Pop culture expert Chuang Chia-ying, associate professor of Taiwanese Language and Literature of at National Taiwan Normal University, said the incident showed that music is politics.
From company personnel officers to politicians, those who attend to official “complaints” say that people who present grievances and complaints almost never state the exact relief they seek. But agencies, legislators, and the entire American political process are organized to deal with people who seek specific solutions to specific problems. So being very specific about your goal helps everybody understand what you want—including your own volunteers.
Identify the goal of your campaign and put it in writing and know and state the specific relief you seek.
Internal documents dubbed "The Facebook Papers" were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
"It's time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it's inflicted on our democracy."
What researchers found was often far from positive. Time and again, they determined that people misused key features or that those features amplified toxic content, among other effects. In an August 2019 internal memo, several researchers said it was Facebook’s “core product mechanics” — meaning the basics of how the product functioned — that had let misinformation and hate speech flourish on the site.
“The mechanics of our platform are not neutral,” they concluded.
"The Facebook Papers" on Monday prompted longtime critics of Big Tech to renew demands for policymakers within and beyond the United States to crack down on and even break up the social media giant.
A consortium of 17 American news outlets—along with a separate group of European newsrooms—on Friday began publishing articles on internal documents obtained by former employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen, though much of the reporting was released Monday.
A consortium of 17 news outlets is examining the “Facebook Papers,” a trove of internal documents turned over to federal regulators by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen that sheds new light on the social media giant’s role in spreading misinformation and polarizing content. The documents reveal most of Facebook’s efforts to combat online hate are focused on the United States, even though 90% of users are outside the country. A test account set up by Facebook managers to represent an average young adult user in India quickly became flooded with Hindu nationalist propaganda, anti-Muslim hate speech and incitements to violence. This is “deeply concerning,” says Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, and notes his grandfather was active in Gandhi’s independence movement and spent several years in jail for promoting human rights. Khanna says Facebook needs to take remedial action and acknowledge what’s wrong. “You need legal remedies.”
If you decided to take a breather this weekend from the relentless stream of Facebook news, you've got a lot of catching up to do.
“The problem is that DCMS [Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport] officials think it’s their job to work there for four years then get a job at Facebook,” the source said. “They don’t get scrutinised by Acoba [the advisory committee on business appointments, which vets the appointments of former crown servants] except at the most senior [...]
She became one of the greatest sources of the century, turning over the tens of thousands of pages of internal documents she had collected. Starting Sept. 13, the Journal justified her confidence with a meticulous rollout that included 11 major articles by Horwitz and other reporters cleverly packaged under a catchy rubric, The Facebook Files.
Key revelations included how Facebook executives handled politicized lies, including Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud. Often, the company chose to let misinformation spread widely, to keep more people logging on. The series also noted the lengths that Facebook went to in its desperation to hang on to its audience as young people drifted away from its platforms.
Sens. Doug Mastriano, R-Gettysburg, and Scott Hutchinson, R-Oil City, said their Senate Bill 604, also called the Social Media Accountability Act, would create a private right of action to allow residents to sue social media companies like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter for banning or censoring their account due to sharing religious or political beliefs on the platform.
A censored or banned user can seek up to $75,000 in statutory damages, attorneys’ fees, and other forms of relief, the senators said.
One of the bill provisions requires the social media company to notify the user as to why their account was banned or disabled within 30 days and offer a course of action for reinstatement.
It concluded that Kavala's arrest was based on political motives, without any reasonable evidence backing the accusations. However, Turkish officials did not implement the decision and said the ECHR's judgment was not final.
On September 17, the Council of Europe issued Turkey a final warning to release the 64-year-old entrepreneur.
It warned that infringement proceedings against Ankara would start at the end of November, if Kavala was not freed by then.
Last week we wrote a bit about Trump's new planned social media website, Truth Social (which forbids too many capital letters, so I will oblige by not capitalizing the entire "Truth" part of the name, as Trump's branding apparently prefers). We mostly focused on the ridiculous terms of service (forbidding capital letters among other things), and the fact that it was already kicking people off the system (who only got on the system because Trump's coders apparently failed to properly secure the site pre-launch). We also talked briefly about how it appeared to be a reskin of Mastodon, and that's potentially an interesting legal issue, because it certainly appears to be violating the AGPLv3 license for Mastodon.
The senators should grill the companies — especially TikTok and YouTube, which are driven by sophisticated algorithms that recommend video content to users — about personalizing content in ways that lead to “excessive time” on platforms and exposure to potentially harmful content, Golin said.
Zuckerberg expects the changes to take years. One of the more immediate shifts could be to Instagram, which he says will see “significant changes” to lean further into video and make Reels “a more central part of the experience.”
Hundreds of international scholars have begun a fightback against pro-Israel lobbyists who have been scoring increasingly high-profile victories on UK campuses as they seek to curb academic freedoms under the guise of stamping out antisemitism.€
Network data from NetBlocks confirm a significant disruption to internet service in Sudan from the morning of Monday 25 October 2021 affecting cellular and some fixed-line connectivity on multiple providers. The incident is ongoing as of 8:30 a.m. UTC and comes amid reports that senior government officials have been detained in an apparent military coup attempt.
TLP supporters had gathered on Friday to march to the capital, Islamabad. They are demanding the release of their detained leader Saad Rizvi and the expulsion of the French ambassador.
Rizvi was arrested in 2020 during demonstrations against the publication in France of caricatures of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
The school system has held “multiple racially segregated events for students,” the Parents Defending Education lawsuit said, describing how the school district’s equity director lamented that the school did not keep a list of students sorted by race and ordered white students not to come to certain events.
[...]
The school district’s Biased Speech Policy’s “overbroad, vague restrictions on student speech” empowered certain students to “punish classmates who express unpopular views,” the lawsuit said.
Kevin Gosztola is the managing editor of the news web site Shadowproof.com. He has covered the Julian Assange legal proceedings in the UK from the beginning, as well as other press-freedom and whistleblower cases. Mickey’s conversation with Kevin Gosztola is a rebroadcast from a Project Censored Show of this past August.
Ahead of the US appeal hearing on the extradition of Julian Assange, Amnesty International has written to both Prime Scott Morrison and Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, urging the Australian Government to engage in a dialogue with the US and demand that all charges against Assange be dropped.
As jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces an extradition hearing Wednesday in London, supporters gathered Friday for the Belmarsh Tribunal, named for the Belmarsh maximum security prison where Assange is being held. The mock trial highlighted major WikiLeaks revelations of U.S. war crimes and demanded Assange’s freedom. Assange faces up to 175 years in prison in the U.S. under the Espionage Act for publishing classified documents exposing U.S. war crimes. Though a British judge blocked his extradition in January, the U.S. appealed the decision. We feature speakers from the tribunal, including writer Tariq Ali, Afghan political activist Selay Ghaffar, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. “Julian, far from being indicted, should actually be a hero,” said Ali. “He should never have been kept in prison for bail. He should not be in prison now awaiting a trial for extradition. He should be released.” We also hear from Srećko Horvat, philosopher and Belmarsh Tribunal chair; Ewen MacAskill, former Guardian journalist; and Stella Morris, partner of Julian Assange.
These hearings, taking place on October 27 and 28, are an attempt to appeal the decision that Judge Vanessa Baraitser made earlier this year to not extradite Assange to the United States because it is likely he will commit suicide if subjected to the inhumane conditions of the U.S. prison system. However, while this decision was focused on his health, these hearings are really about what the Assange case has always been about: the United States’ determination to silence anyone who exposes the crimes of the U.S. empire.
Leading press freedom and human rights organizations have been clear about the implications of a potential Assange extradition and have called on President Biden to drop the case. If there were still any doubts that the Department of Justice’s focus on Assange was corrupt and politically motivated, those who remain skeptical should consider two major revelations about the U.S. campaign against Assange since the last hearing.
But the US case raised free speech issues, with Assange and his defenders maintaining that WikiLeaks enjoys the rights of any other media to publish secret materials in the public interest.
Rebecca Vincent, of media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said he had been "targeted for his contributions to public interest reporting" and urged President Joe Biden to drop the case.
Julian Assange started WikiLeaks in 2006 with the intent to reveal a plethora of “pertinent” information. Although he published numerous reports and documents from its inception, the publication of over half a million classified US government and army documents in 2010 threw him into the spotlight. It was later revealed that army analyst Chelsea Manning (Bradley Manning) was the one who leaked the documents. While Chelsea was prosecuted according to US laws, various agencies called out for Assange to be held responsible.
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gathered in centr al London on Saturday. Holding signs reading "Don't extradite Assange", they marched from the BBC's New Broadcasting House building down a London street. (Oct. 23)
The extradition case depends on the promise of a fair trial and humane treatment if Assange faces US justice. These fresh revelations surely render that case laughable?
They also make wholly unbelievable the USA’s insistence that its pursuit of Assange is not “political”.
For Assange, who remains in HMP Belmarsh, this is a fresh crumb of hope. For those who believe in an unfettered media, however, a dark cloud remains.
The briefing panel, which also included Mr Assange’s lawyer and partner Stella Moris and director of international campaigns at Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Rebecca Vincent, said the forthcoming hearing follows an investigation, published by Yahoo News, which alleged plots to abduct or kill Mr Assange
A security firm, under investigation in Madrid, is also alleged to have spied on Mr Assange on behalf of the CIA while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and been part of the alleged plot.
Ms Moris said: “This is a game-changer going into the appeal because it shows the true nature, the true origins, the true criminality of the US actions against Julian and it completely taints any semblance of legality of this appeal going into it.”
China's internet regulator has updated a whitelist of pre-approved media organizations whose copy may be freely used by websites behind the Great Firewall, omitting the cutting-edge, privately owned Caixin Media.
In a move aimed at tightening control of the "master switch" of online news and information, the Cyberspace Administration of China said it had made the changes to "adapt to a new situation, recent changes and new demands" in the online information sector.
“We call on the authorities to display some humanity by releasing these journalists, whose state of health is incompatible with imprisonment,” said Sabrina Bennoui, the head of RSF’s Middle East desk. “If the judicial system refuses to recognise the arbitrary nature of their detention, it should at least allow them to receive proper medical care.”
While the passage is frequently attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, it actually appears to have been written by an anonymous author in the lead-up to the First World War. The misunderstanding can be traced back to a mass-produced prayer card featuring an image of the Italian friar with the relevant text.
Whoever wrote it, the passage offers a great deal of timeless wisdom in a small number of densely-packed lines. The opening is particularly important: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” As someone who cares about our treatment of animals, especially those we use for food, I’ve thought about this quite a bit in recent months.
While there is no scale of being shocked (outraged? appalled? offended? dismayed?) or a measurement of how out of alignment the traditional moral compass has become, what is one to think about people in a train who did nothing while witnessing a woman being sexually assaulted in the same railroad car? Eduardo Medina, in the New York Times, recently reported that: “As a woman was being raped while on a train near Philadelphia on Wednesday night, riders watched, failed to intervene and did not call 911, the authorities said.”
The head of the local police department, Timothy Bernhardt, was not sure of how many people were in the car at the time, but he was quoted as saying: “Collectively, they could have gotten together and done something. Anybody that was on that train,” he warned, “has to look in the mirror and ask why they didn’t interfere or why they didn’t do something.”
When Elizabeth Axley first told Liberty University officials she had been raped, she was confident they’d do the right thing. After all, the evangelical Christian school invoked scripture to encourage students to report abuse.
Being a successful parent is often a combination of skill and luck. It would be great if raising a child were more like an equation: Find the perfect algorithm for decisions, and your kid will have a happy childhood before becoming a responsible and compassionate adult. But most parents learn that no matter how much they want to mold their children into perfect human beings, kids have their own identity—their own spark, their own flaws, needs, idiosyncrasies, and desires.
EU agencies advise increased confiscation and extraction of asylum seekers‘ mobile phones and now provide a manual on how to do so. Apps to encrypt or disguise locations are disliked in the report as ââ¬Å¾countermeasures“ to surveillance.
Reps. Ro Khanna,€ Ilhan Omar, and other House progressives on Monday stressed that they will fight for the inclusion of dental, hearing, and vision benefits, along with a host of other popular measures, in the Build Back Better agenda put on the chopping block by corporate Democrats.
Echoing Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) weekend remarks that a proposed expansion of Medicare benefits—one of the pending legislative package's most popular provisions—is "not coming out" of the reconciliation bill to appease right-wing Democrats,€ Khanna (D-Calif.) told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman that the Vermont Independent "is€ absolutely right."
Twenty-one Israel-based civil society groups on Sunday joined Palestine defenders around the world in condemning the Israeli government's labeling of six Palestinian advocacy groups as terrorist organizations, calling the move "an act of cowardice."
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz's "designation of prominent Palestinian civil society organizations, among them our colleagues in the Palestinian human rights community, as terrorist organizations is a draconian measure that criminalizes critical human rights work," the groups said in a statement.
The Supreme Court spent decades making it all but impossible for citizens to successfully sue law enforcement officers for violating their rights. The Supreme Court created the doctrine of "qualified immunity" nearly 40 years ago and has spent most of the intervening years honing it into a nearly impenetrable shield for officers who violate rights.
The initial court ruling against Zaghari-Ratcliffe was five years plus a one-year ban on traveling abroad. The extra year added to her sentence means Zaghari-Ratcliffe cannot leave Iran to join her husband and 7-year-old daughter in London for nearly two more years.
noyb filed another complaint against Amazon Europe today. The e-commerce giant offers customers the possibility to pay for products later via "Monthly Invoice". A customer who was rejected for this payment method without any reasons given submitted an access request to Amazon in order to find out why he was rejected. The company refused to provide any information.
A German woman who joined the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for allowing a Yazidi girl she and her husband "purchased" as a slave to die of thirst.
Jennifer Wenisch, 30, was sentenced at a court in Munich after being found guilty of two counts of crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement as well as aiding and abetting the 5-year-old victim's killing by failing to help her, reported the Agency France-Presse news agency.
Wenisch was found guilty of “two crimes against humanity in the form of enslavement,” as well as aiding and abetting the girl’s killing by failing to offer help, and membership of a terrorist organization.
Wenisch and her IS husband “purchased” a Yazidi woman and child as household “slaves,” whom they held captive while living in then IS-occupied Mosul, Iraq, in 2015, the court found.
Germany has charged several German and foreign nationals with war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out abroad, using the legal principle of universal jurisdiction which allows crimes to be prosecuted even if they were committed in a foreign country.
The European net neutrality rules are being reformed to fix one of the biggest loopholes in the EU‘s framework: Zero-Rating. EDRi has been vocal about the dangers of Zero-Rating, a practice by which telecoms companies discriminate between online services by making some data traffic more expensive than other such traffic. Prompted by three judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Board of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) has acknowledged that their previous 2016 Guidelines on how to enforce the Net Neutrality Regulation have to be overhauled. The direction of the reform is looking to confirm the previous submissions of EDRi over the past six years and today we add another submission to BEREC with the hope of fixing the last loophole in Europe’s net neutrality framework.
China blocked the Wikimedia Foundation’s bid for observer status at WIPO. This is the second time this has happened after the Foundation’s initial application in 2020. Wikimedia’s exclusion sets a worrying precedent and should alert European lawmakers who are concerned about the democratic governance of intergovernmental organizations.
"Free Download Manager" is an iconic download tool that's been around for nearly two decades. In 2007, the software was one of the first applications to support YouTube downloads but that's come to an end, for now. Following a complaint from YouTube parent Google, the functionality was suddenly removed a few days ago.
Columbia Pictures, Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner and Netflix have obtained a new injunction from the High Court in London. It requires six major ISPs to block access to five pirate streaming portals with tens of millions of visitors. They appear to have been on the radar of the Motion Picture Association for some time.
CPAC, NDP MP Charlie Angus Calls for Stronger Regulation of Facebook
Today, Creative Commons proudly presents the latest translations of the CC Certificate course content. Thanks to CC Nigeria, CC Turkey, and the following individuals, our course content on open licensing and recommended practices for open sharing are available to over 140M Yorùbá, Burmese, Turkish language speakers around the world.€
Happy International Open Access Week! Open Access Week is a global, community-driven week of action to open up access to research, taking place from October 25-31 this year. In celebration of this, our guest on this episode is Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). SPARC€ is a global advocacy organization working to make research and education open and equitable by design—for everyone. Heather is a United States-based advocate for open access and academic journal publishing reform. Under her stewardship, SPARC has become widely recognized as the leading international force for effective open access policies and practices.
