When I started my first yoga studio in 2000, computer technology was way out of my wheelhouse. In fact, for the first two years, I didn't even have a website. I did everything from scratch, including collecting emails, sending newsletters, marketing events, and corresponding with my student base. I was extremely content operating my business that way; my focus was on teaching yoga and creating community.
Since then, I have gone on quite a journey in learning to use the right technology to support my business goals. In this article, I want to give you real-life evidence that Linux is a viable operating system (OS) and share some of the ways that switching to Linux has helped my business thrive. I'm here to testify how much easier Linux has made my work life and my personal life.
Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.
However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.
HPLIP, HP’s inkjet and laser printers Linux driver, released version 3.21.10 with new devices and Linux distributions support.
Zorin OS, the modern Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, is finally supported by HPLIP’s official .run installer. And, it also adds Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.10 support.
Fast forward a few years, I remember reading an article stating that single-colon notation was some kind of backwards-compatibility artifact of the standardization process. Both were valid, but double-colon was “more right”.
Recall that “pull mode” means a local installation of Ansible on each node. Each node subscribes to a “repository” (of any type) and periodically pulls configuration files and playbooks from that repository, and runs them locally, as in
ansible-playbook -c local playbook.yml
Thanks to the fact that “pull mode” is less of a product but more of a concept everything can be fine-tuned however I wish to do this.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install EPrints on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, EPrints is a free and open-source software for document management systems, which are more commonly implemented as university repositories that store scientific work documents such as theses, theses, dissertations, and research journals.
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 EPrints on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RabbitMQ on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, RabbitMQ is a free, open-source, and one of the most popular message broker software. It supports multiple messaging protocols and uses plugins to communicate with popular messaging solutions like MQTT. RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols. RabbitMQ can be easily deployed in distributed and federated configurations to meet high-scale, high-availability requirements.
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 RabbitMQ on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This tutorial will explain how to install Ubuntu 21.10 into your computer. The result of this tutorial is your computer will run Ubuntu operating system and can be viewed as alternative to Windows or macOS. This installation is flexible, as you may choose to install normally (to the internal hard disk) or externally (to USB flash drive or external HDD) in either BIOS Legacy-MBR or UEFI-GPT mode, for either dualboot or singleboot purpose. You will start everything by downloading the operating system itself, make required preparations, make a bootable medium, then booting and finishing the installation procedures step by step. Good luck!
After months of development, Fedora 35 final version has been released on November 2, 2021. If you're already using Fedora 34, you can now safely upgrade to Fedora 35 desktop or server edition for latest features, performance and stability improvements as described in the following steps.
ProFTPD is a highly enriched flavor of FTP server. It is available on Linux and Unix-like machines but can also be used in Windows via Cygwin. It is free and open-source software.
Its environment exposes a person to many configuration options and a person who has used FTP before on Unix system will learn this version very easily.
It was released and distributed under the GNU Public License. This FTP version is very versatile because it can support TLS (SSL) for a secure connection.
Prometheus is a free and open-source monitoring and alerting tool that was initially used for monitoring metrics at SoundCloud back in 2012. It is written in Go programming language.
Prometheus monitors and records real-time events in a time-series database. Since then it has grown in leaps and bounds and had been adopted by many organizations to monitor their infrastructure metrics. Prometheus provides flexible queries and real-time alerting which helps in quick diagnosis and troubleshooting of errors.
In this guide, we are going to install Puppet 7 Server Open Source in Rocky Linux/Centos 8 Server. We will set up a Puppet server and an agent and install nginx using puppet manifests.
Puppet is a software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use. Puppet operates in an agent-master architecture, in which a master node controls configuration information for a fleet of managed agent nodes.
Puppet is distributed in several packages. These include puppetserver, puppet-agent and puppetdb. Puppet Server controls the configuration information for one or more managed agent nodes. PuppetDB is where the data generated by Puppet is stored.
Docker is a powerful platform for developers and sysadmins that simplifies the process of deploying applications inside software containers. Containers allow you to package up an application with all its parts (code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that would usually go in /usr/bin, or /usr/lib) so it will run consistently on any Linux machine. This includes the operating system kernel and other shared resources such as memory and disk space. Docker provides a portable environment for both development and production environments. You can create a container from one set of files that works anywhere else without having to worry about dependencies being different on each new server.
Docker CE is useful for Linux users because it helps them in creating their own environments without affecting other users on the system. It also automates deployment, which eliminates configuration errors and makes it easy to manage projects across teams of developers who are working together on software applications.
In this guide, we will take a look at how we can install Docker CE to create and manage development environments on an AlmaLinux 8 system.
In this tutorial guide we will learn how to install aapanel in Fedora 34.
Aapanel is a free open source hosting control panel, it manages the servers through graphical user interface. It is an international version of BAOTA. aapanel provides one click function such as one click LAMP install, one click deployment of SSL, remote backup etc. It is a server software system that offers ideal support for Linux systems.
If you have ever tested throughput performance in a container deployment, you know that the UDP protocol is (a lot) slower than TCP. How can that be possible? After all, the TCP protocol is extremely complex, whereas UDP is simple and carries less per-packet overhead. This article will explain the not-so-dark magic beyond the superior TCP throughput performance and how recent improvements in the Linux kernel can close that gap. You'll also learn how to use all these shiny new features in the upcoming version 8.5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to boost UDP throughput in container deployments by a factor of two or more.
In this tutorial, we discuss how you can convert audio files into different formats on Ubuntu with a neat tool called SoundConverter. Before the rise of music streaming services, people bought their music DRM-free.
In the final episode of LearnLinuxTV's Proxmox VE tutorial series, we explore the concept of high availability. This will ensure that our most important virtual machines are always running, even if one of the nodes in our cluster stops responding.
A number of years ago I shared a script to help with getting your system up and running with software and tweaks when you had freshly installed Fedora (F27 I think it was at the time)
Looking around on the internet I found that a lot of Fedorians were asking the same questions “How do I install this?” “How do I get that?” So I thought to myself I’d create a revamped version to help with this so it’s all in one place.
I mainly use it for myself but I thought I’d release it to the public with the hope that some of you also find it useful.
So here it is.
Creative Assembly has now confirmed that Total War: WARHAMMER III will be officially launching on February 17, 2022 but if you're waiting on the Linux port it will be a little after.
This was confirmed yesterday, with their official FAQ being updated to note it will "also be available as close to launch day as possible on macOS and Linux thanks to our friends at Feral Interactive – we’ll be confirming exactly when closer to release day".
We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since October 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks...
Rejoice RPG fans! There's a fresh and fancy new release of OpenMW, the free and open source game engine reimplementation for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. One of the best around, this enables you to play Morrowind on modern platforms (like Linux!) easily with many enhancements over the original while still keeping the original gameplay.
Over a year since the last release this brings with it absolutely tons of bugs solved for the game and the editor, while also bringing with it brand new features. A fair amount of the game engine features improved and background things, some of which users won't directly notice but keep OpenMW running smoothly.
More quick fixes coming in recently for Proton Experimental to get even more Windows games to play nicely on Linux with this compatibility layer. Note: to play games using CEG DRM, you should opt into the Steam Client Beta.
Released November 4, the latest update to Proton Experimental added in improved support for Mafia II (Classic), Disgaea 4 Complete+ and Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered. On top of that, work more went into improving the new support for CEG DRM on Linux with Proton. Now you should see an improvement to the startup time of games using it, pushing it another step forwards towards being ready to roll out in a stable version of Proton.
After more than eight years of development and six months after LXQt 0.17.0, LXQt 1.0.0 is here as the first mature version of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, the successor of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, but written in Qt rather than GTK.
As you can imagine, LXQt 1.0.0 is packed with numerous new features, such as a Do-Not-Disturb mode in LXQt Desktop Notifications, a new LXQt Panel plugin called “Custom Command” that lets you run a custom command, as well as the ability to save and load Qt palettes in LXQt Appearance Configuration.
KDE Gear 21.08.3 is here about a month after KDE Gear 21.08.2 and it brings one last batch of bug fixes and improvements for those of you using the KDE Gear 21.08 software suite. A total of 74 changes are included in this last KDE Gear 21.08 point release across several KDE apps and core libraries.
GNOME 41.1 is the first point release of the GNOME 41 desktop environment, which introduced a new Calls and Connections apps, a redesigned Software app, new multitasking and mobile connection settings, and enhanced power management features.
Now, GNOME 41.1 builds on these changes and brings a first batch of improvements that update the GNOME Software package manager to allow searching for GNOME extensions, improve codec installation process, add the new GNOME Circle apps to the featured carousel, improve metadata support for Snap apps, and much more.
The bigger problem is your web browser profile, which almost always contains things that your browser will want to update (such as your history and your current cookies). If there are multiple copies of your browser running they all need to coordinate access to your profile; they need to carefully lock it for updates, and probably to notify each other that important things have been updated. Essentially it's a shared database, and shared databases are pain points. Given the locking, it's also a fine way for one copy of the browser to cause another copy to perform badly, as the other copy waits for an update lock or to pick up new things or whatever.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client. Updated to version 91.3.0.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. Updated to version 94.0.1.
For EasyOS 3.x there is a firefox SFS, which runs real nice. Running the latest Easy 3.1.7 (not released) with pulseaudio, starting firefox from a terminal...
[...]
This build of EasyOS is using pulseaudio. Although there is only the one instance of the daemon, running as root, it is still usable by non-root users (if they belong to 'audio' group), via the socket /tmp/pulse-socket...
Tor Browser 11.0a10 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable Windows/macOS/Linux release instead.
Gather around, my friends, for there is another company which thinks we are stupid and we enjoy having our faces spat in. Apollo Federation has announced that they will switch to a non-free license. Let’s find out just how much the Elastic license really is going to “protect the community” like they want you to believe.
Let’s start by asking ourselves, objectively, what practical changes can we expect from a switch from the MIT license to the Elastic License? Both licenses are pretty short, so I recommend quickly reading them yourself before we move on.
Today will I take you through the keyhole to look at a group of software systems not well known to the public, which I call "Bank Python". Bank Python implementations are effectively proprietary forks of the entire Python ecosystem which are in use at many (but not all) of the biggest investment banks. Bank Python differs considerably from the common, or garden-variety Python that most people know and love (or hate).
Thousands of people work on - or rather, inside - these systems but there is not a lot about them on the public web. When I've tried to explain Bank Python in conversations people have often dismissed what I've said as the ravings of a swivel-eyed loon. It all just sounds too bonkers.
I will discuss a fictional, amalgamated, imaginary Bank Python system called "Minerva". The names of subsystems will be changed and though I'll try to be accurate I will have to stylise some details and - of course: I don't know every single detail. I might even make the odd mistake. Hopefully I get the broad strokes.
All of this fits with Python 3's general philosophy, of course. Python 3 really wants the world of text to be Unicode, and that includes input and output. Providing standard input as bytes and making it easy to process those bytes without ever turning them into Unicode would invite a return to the Python 2 world where people processed text in non-Unicode ways. Arguably, Unicode text processing is the reason for Python 3 to exist, so it's not surprising that the Python developers were so strongly against anything that smelled like it.
So let me walk you through how variables work in bash, starting with local shell variables and then covering special and environment variables. I think you’ll find understanding the basics to be extremely helpful.
And he wasn’t wrong, was he? € Eight decades later, who would deny that we’ve lived through something like an American century? After all, in 1945, the U.S. emerged triumphant from World War II, a rare nation remarkably unravaged by that war (despite the 400,000 casualties it had suffered). With Great Britain heading for the imperial sub-basement, Washington found itself instantly the military and economic powerhouse on the planet.
As it turned out, however, to “exert upon the world the full impact of our influence,” one other thing was necessary and, fortunately, at hand: an enemy. From then on, America’s global stature and power would, in fact, be eternally based on facing down enemies.€ Fortunately, in 1945, there was that other potential, if war-ravaged, powerhouse, the Soviet Union. That future “superpower” had been an ally in World War II, but no longer. It would thereafter be the necessary enemy in a “cold war” that sometimes threatened to turn all too hot. And it would, of course, ensure that what later came to be known as the military-industrial complex (and a nuclear arsenalcapable of destroying many planets like this one) would be funded in a way once historically inconceivable in what might still have passed for peacetime.
In the not-always secretive world of special operations, few post 9/11 warriors have become better known than Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher, a chief petty officer much beloved by former President Trump. When Gallagher faced a 2019 court-martial for allegedly killing a wounded ISIS prisoner in Iraq and committing other war crimes, Trump assured his supporters that “I will always stick up for our great fighters.” True to his word, after Gallagher was acquitted of all but a lesser charge (taking a trophy shot of the dead Iraqi teenager), Trump blocked a Navy attempt to demote him and take away his Trident Pin, the coveted symbol of SEAL Team membership.
Among those joining the “Free Eddie” campaign was former Marine€ Duncan Hunter,€ a Republican Congressman from San Diego who stole $250,000 in campaign funds and then avoided jail only thanks to a Trump pardon. As Hunter argued on Fox News, Gallagher “is the kind of guy we want out there killing for us, killing bad guys. He shouldn’t be going to court at all for doing his job.”
Whenever talking about Nella Larsen’s classic 1929 novel, Passing, I often confuse the names of its main characters. When I mean to refer to the Black woman who grows up in Chicago’s South Side and then decides to pass as white, I rarely identify her as Clare. I regularly mistake her for Irene, the Black woman who is Clare’s childhood friend and who encounters Clare as an adult. I may just be bad with names, but I think that this mistake stems, in part, from the novel. Both light-skinned, raised in Chicago, and relatively wealthy, Clare and Irene are foils. They blur together even as each character distinguishes herself from the other.
A central tenet of neoliberalism—a political theory of governmental administration—is a tendency to view the purpose of government and public processes in strictly economic terms, and to ascribe the cause of most problems to market inefficiencies and too little competition. Under this approach, all conflict is resolved by using rational, professional problem solving to find win-win, job-creating solutions. A defining characteristic of this approach is a reluctance to ascribe the cause of any problem to pervasive and systematic corruption, or to the ability of the rich and the strong to take advantage of the poor and the weak.
This theory is in sharp contrast to what activists have learned from decades of experience—a world view best summed up by Saul Alinsky (probably the 20th century’s best grassroots community organizer) who said, “We live in a world of unbelievable deceit and corruption…Giant corporations are unbelievably oppressive and follow a win-lose philosophy…. [and] will go to any length to make more money.” *
When it comes to shipping books internationally, the US post office provides three options.
1. Media Mail. I can get it just about anywhere in the world for less than $10. No international tracking. No guarantee of delivery. Might take months or years. Those container ships moored outside every port in the world, waiting months for an opportunity to unload? There are Media Mail packages adrift in every one.
2. First class mail. Costs $25 +/- $5-ish. Delivery guaranteed, eventually. Might take months. I can complain to the post office, and they’ll fill out a form. What they’ll do with that form is another issue.
3. International Priority Mail. Costs about $40 ($30 to Canada). Ouch. Delivers within a week or two, sort of guaranteed. Insured. Complaints are taken mostly seriously.
Chinese Internet conglomerate Tencent offers dozens of various cloud services and operates massive datacenters in China. Just like other cloud giants, Tencent has been developing its own datacenter infrastructure for a while. Now, in in a bid to increase performance, cut power consumption, reduce costs, and get a complete control over its software and hardware, Tencent has ventured into chip design.
"By going on a hunger strike in front of City Hall, there was no way you could ignore what we were doing to our bodies in the service of this fight."
"Next time folks wonder why I'm stubborn, it's because we're constantly told our requests are impossible or unreasonable until we wind up accomplishing it anyway through hard work and organizing," tweeted Ocasio-Cortez. "When we organize people, the people win!"
A few weeks ago, a ProPublica reporter decided to test his kids for COVID-19. They had the sniffles, and with a grandparent set to visit he wanted to minimize the risk that they were infectious.
This was the problem that quick, cheap COVID-19 tests were supposed to help fix. No need to go to a clinic or wait days for results. Just pick up a pack of tests at a local pharmacy whenever you want, swab your nose and learn within 15 minutes if you’re likely to pass the virus along.
The holiday shopping season always means big business for phishers, who tend to find increased success this time of year with a lure about a wayward package that needs redelivery. Here’s a look at a fairly elaborate SMS-based phishing scam that spoofs FedEx in a bid to extract personal and financial information from unwary recipients.
Facebook is operating in a gray zone under Apple’s rules for the App Store, though a spokesperson said the social network believes its approach has always been allowed on iOS. The App Store currently forbids iOS apps from offering alternative payment options for purchasing digital goods, but in this case, it’s the creator, not Facebook, the app developer, that will be sending people to pay for a subscription on the web. The spokesperson for Facebook confirmed the social network isn’t removing the ability for users to sign up for a creator subscription using Apple’s native payments system.
Employees of the Maryland-based company — which is the second-largest broadcast company in the U.S., owning or operating 185 television stations in 85 markets, multiple national networks, and 21 regional sports network brands — reported at the time that the attack had caused “major technical problems” and made it difficult for some stations to get on the air. The company also reported that [crackers] had taken data in the attack.
In 2014, the Supreme Court extended Fourth Amendment coverage to the contents of cell phones. Prior to that ruling, cops had successfully argued that searching the contents of someone's cell phone was no different than searching the contents of their pockets when arresting them. Claims -- bad ones -- were made about "officer safety" and, for the most part, courts tended to agree. If the pants pocket argument didn't work, cell phones -- with their wealth of personal information and private communications -- were analogized as the digital equivalent of car trunks or address books.
An internal FBI document shared with Joseph Cox of Motherboard by Ryan Shapiro of Property of the People gives a little more insight into law enforcement's data grabs. The Third Party Doctrine -- ushered into law by the Supreme Court decision that said anything voluntarily shared with third parties could be obtained without a warrant -- still governs a lot of these collections.
The metaverse is a decades-old concept. Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, but versions of it appear in much earlier speculative fiction. Think of it as virtual reality on steroids, a computer/Internet environment into which humanity could, and might, effectively move most of its social activities.
To some, this sounds utopian. Others (especially writers of fiction) treat it as at least potentially dystopian. Either way, it’s coming, and the political possibilities are intriguing.
Providers of messengers and cloud services will be allowed to voluntarily screen for child abuse content worthy of prosecution, which is to become mandatory across the EU. The Council and Commission are pushing for an extension to other crime areas. Next week, the EU interior ministers will publish a declaration on this.
Against those massively well-financed and well-connected groups, the fight to rein in micro-targeted advertising might seem hopeless. Nonetheless, there are efforts to counter those powers. Privacy News Online wrote about one of them back in July. The Tracking-Free Ads Coalition is “a coalition of political leaders, civil society organisations and companies from across the EU that are committed to put an end to the pervasive tracking advertising industry that dominates the internet today.” It includes 24 Members of the European Parliament from a range of parties. Recently, they took the unusual step of writing to leading businesses that use targeted advertising:
In the wake of data breaches at€ Target€ and€ Equifax€ where hackers compromised the personal information of millions of Americans and the€ Cambridge Analytica scandal, customers and policymakers are increasingly worried about the privacy and security of our personal information online. Unfortunately, policymakers often confuse these privacy and data security concerns with broader anti-tech fervor against America’s leading technology businesses. But simply put, kitchen-sink anti-tech responses could exacerbate, not ease, concerns regarding data privacy and security.
Open-source browser fingerprinting startup FingerprintJS Inc. said today it has raised $32 million in new funding to accelerate the development of additional developer tools, including a JavaScript bot detection application programming interface.
Craft Ventures led the Series B round. Also participating in the round were Nexus Venture Partners and Uncorrelated Ventures.
Because of the very sensitive nature of personal communications, location and internet usage data, the 2002 ePrivacy Directive guaranteed special data protection for telephone and internet communications, which goes far beyond the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The ePrivacy Regulation is intended to replace this 2002 Directive, for better or for worse. Mass intelligence surveillance, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and potentiallywrongful convictions based on false telecommunications data inDenmark show how urgently better protection of our telephone and [Internet] use is needed.
Here is a simple seeming question you might wind up asking someday. Suppose that for some reason you need to keep encrypted copies of your backups. Does it matter if you use symmetric encryption for this (where the encryption key is also the decryption key), or do you need some form of asymmetric encryption (where the encryption key is not the decryption key)? Well, it depends on what your threats are (a threat model, in the jargon).
Faced with this “harvest now and decrypt later” strategy, officials are trying to develop and deploy new encryption algorithms to protect secrets against an emerging class of powerful machines. That includes the Department of Homeland Security, which says it is leading a long and difficult transition to what is known as post-quantum cryptography.
The student data was found on a single, open Amazon Web Services Inc. S3 storage bucket. The 157 gigabytes of student data covered an estimated 27,000 to 50,000 students and included personally identifiable information, national ID cards, academic records and more.
Following a Pentagon official's assertion Wednesday that the August 29 airstrike in a Kabul neighborhood that killed 10 innocent Afghan civilians, including seven children, was not the result of misconduct or negligence, human rights advocates reiterated that the United States' remote-controlled assassination program is "rotten" from top to bottom and called for a moratorium on drone warfare.
"We need to shut down these strikes until we figure out what the hell is going on."
I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request.
The real “Sputnik moment” in 1957, when the Soviet Union was the first to launch a vehicle into space, had international and national consequences for American national security policy.€ Physicists and engineers around the world know that hypersonic weapons do not represent a revolution in the strategic arsenal.€ Writing in “Scientific American” in August 2021, David Wright and Cameron Tracy noted that many of the claims regarding hypersonic weapons are exaggerated or simply false.€ They are not game-changers.€ The Pentagon and the Congress should not be allowed to use this canard to drive a new arms race and escalate the chances of conflict.
Over the past year or so, the Department of Defense has delivered a series of statements that exaggerate the power and influence of China in order to increase U.S. defense spending and to “strengthen deterrence” against China.€ Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia and the Pacific Ely Ratner outlined a plan in June 2021 to deploy a permanent naval squadron to waters surrounding Taiwan that would include an aircraft carrier task force.
Frustrated by the U.S. attorney general's failure to investigate or take legal action against former President Donald Trump and his associates for various potential crimes, Free Speech for People argued Thursday that because Merrick Garland "is unwilling to step up, it is time for him to step down."
"Garland is no longer fit to serve as attorney general."
To understand what they are still hiding and why they are still hiding it, it’s necessary to go back to the 1990s during the era of the Assassination Records Review Board — and even further back than that to November 22, 1963 — the day that Kennedy was assassinated.€
People often say that if the CIA and the Pentagon had orchestrated the assassination of President Kennedy, someone would have talked by now.€
Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian poet, writer, and activist who grew up in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. When he was 11 years old, settlers carrying rifles and backpacks, and supported by the Israeli army, took over half his house.
In order for state protection departments to be able to cooperate better at EU level in the area of politically motivated crime, they need common definitions of the persons to be prosecuted. A corresponding initiative to this end comes from Germany. This way, threats are prosecuted that have not even occurred yet.
On a winter night in 1984, Bernhard Goetz brought his handgun on the New York City subway and shot four young unarmed black men he claimed were trying to rob him. The people he shot were never charged with attempted robbery, which they would have been had Goetz had any evidence of the crime. Goetz claimed he had bought the gun for self-defense after being attacked on the subway three years earlier. The story drew national attention. Some people hailed him as a hero, others damned him as a villain. Goetz was eventually charged with assault and attempted murder but was only convicted on one count of carrying an unlicensed firearm. He served eight months in prison and, as far as I know, is still out there somewhere in the world, armed and dangerous.
We speak to Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the low-lying island nation of the Maldives, at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Nasheed is one of the world’s leading climate advocates, who once held a cabinet meeting underwater to bring attention to the threat of global warming, pledged to make the Maldives the first carbon-neutral country and installed solar panels on the roof of his presidential residence. Now serving as speaker of parliament, Nasheed survived an assassination attempt earlier this year that required 16 hours of surgery. As a result of the sea level rising four millimeters a year in the Maldives, Nasheed says the country faces devastating consequences such as contaminated water, loss of biodiversity, inclement weather and coastal erosion. “We want to see countries agree that this is an emergency, and we want to see countries do things that they do in an emergency,” he says.
Four congressional Democrats on Thursday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to make reducing nuclear weapons risks a "top priority" in his upcoming virtual summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, emphasizing the important context of the United States' huge arsenal.
The message to Biden from Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) as well as Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and John Garamendi (D-Calif.) came a day after the Pentagon projected that China's cache of deliverable nuclear warheads could increase fivefold to 1,000 by 2030.
Anti-war activists on Thursday accused the Biden administration of throwing fuel on the flames of the Saudi-led war in Yemen after the U.S. State Department notified Congress it approved a new $650 million missile sale to the repressive Middle Eastern monarchy.
Defense News reports the Pentagon said the Saudi government requested to purchase 280 AIM-120C-7/C-8 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles and 596 LAU-128 missile rail launchers in a deal that would also include spare parts, support, and logistical services. The missiles would be fitted to Saudi warplanes including Eurofighter Typhoons and McDonnell-Douglas F-15s.
A SECRET DOCUMENT distributed by Israel to justify its terrorist designations of six prominent Palestinian human rights groups shows no concrete evidence of involvement in violent activities by any of the groups.
The designation of the Palestinians groups, which was met by international outrage from defenders of human rights, was announced on October 22 by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Gantz cited alleged links between the groups and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, a left-wing Palestinian political party with its own military wing.
Despite the severity of the declaration, Israel has yet to publicly present any documents directly or indirectly linking the six groups to the PFLP or to any violent activity.
The pressure on OPEC+ is unusually strong. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday to press for increased production. Other oil-consuming nations are pushing hard as well, with Japan and India wanting more production as the energy crisis threatens to undermine the economic recovery in Europe and Asia.
As gasoline prices pose increasing domestic political risks, the issue came up on the sidelines of the Group of 20 meeting over the weekend in Rome, with Biden administration officials calling for more production when producers meet on Thursday.
Members including Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Angola and Nigeria have indicated that they want OPEC+ to stick with its current plan to increase output gradually.
Not all ecologists or economists are enthusiastic about this “green growth” alternative. According to these critical views, which have now begun to move into the mainstream, the planet simply can’t sustain the current pace of growth and even renewable energy sources like solar hit up against significant resource limits. The only effective way to control carbon emissions, as well as related problems of pollution and biodiversity loss, is to address “overshoot,” the unconstrained use of energy and material resources well beyond planetary limits, particularly in the richer parts of the world. These arguments pick up from some of the earliest computer modeling of resource limits highlighted in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report in 1972, but now with a climate crisis twist.
With the fiftieth anniversary of the Club of Rome report approaching, a number of scientists and economists gathered in early October to assess the current state of play of the zero-growth argument, its traction in the mainstream, and how best to call attention to the data supporting these positions. They looked at this question from various angles—physics, geology, biology, economy, ecology—and discussed the major obstacles to greater acceptance of more critical approaches to economic growth as well as ways of overcoming these obstacles.
A board member of a new MP-backed ‘Net Zero Watch’ campaign group has said today that “global warming is not a problem”, defended burning fossil fuels, and said carbon dioxide’s “principal effect” is the growth of plants.€ €
Net Zero Watch (NZW), which launched last month, presents itself as a reasonable campaign to scrutinise the impact and cost of the UK government’s net zero policies. The group has been quoted in the media and retweeted by prominent anti-net zero MPs Steve Baker and Craig Mackinlay.€ €
Martina Comparelli’s pollen allergies have been getting worse. Sometimes it’s so bad that€ she has to spend whole afternoons in bed with her windows closed. As the planet heats up, allergy seasons are getting longer and the climate crisis is “violating” her “right to health” said Comparelli, a climate activist€ in her 20s with Fridays for Future Italy.
Above all, though, Comparelli is afraid. She is afraid that when her parents are older, they will be subjected to the tremendous heat waves climate scientists say are already becoming more common. She is afraid for her own future. And her country isn’t doing anything to protect them. That is why Comparelli is suing.€
World leaders must bring in stricter criteria to exclude fossil fuel companies from decision-making, campaigners have urged, as talks at the crucial COP26 summit enter their fifth day.
A broad coalition of 138 green groups submitted an open letter in Glasgow on Wednesday, calling for decision-makers to address the “elephant in the room holding back global climate ambition: the fossil fuel industry and its lobbying”.€ The letter calls on leaders including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, COP26 President Alok Sharma and head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Patricia Espinosa to revoke the sponsorship of two of the companies officially partnering the event – National Grid and Scottish energy provider SSE.€
GLASGOW, SCOTLAND – Only two of the 35 stalls lauding countries’ green credentials at the COP26 UN climate summit mention the need to cut fossil fuel production — the chief cause of the carbon emissions driving climate change.€
The summit’s official “blue zone” includes large corporate-style pavilions run by some of the world’s leading producers of oil, gas, and coal, including the United States, Australia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Germany, and Qatar. They highlight the countries’ environmental efforts while failing to mention their massive and ongoing trade in fossil fuels.
Over a hundred climate activists confronted Sen. Joe Manchin outside his Washington, D.C. houseboat on Thursday to protest the West Virginia Democrat's obstruction of climate policy in the Build Back Better Act.
The activists from the youth climate group Sunrise Movement, some who have been participating in a hunger strike to demand a $3.5 trillion climate and jobs package, corralled around Manchin as he walked to his parking garage from his yacht to leave for a committee meeting.
A new study published Thursday by a pair of watchdog groups shows Facebook is allowing climate misinformation to proliferate widely—and profiting from it—even as its newly rebranded parent company vows to curb such lies on the massive social media platform.
"Facebook cannot and will not police themselves. We need real, independent, transparent outside oversight and regulation."
A quartet of congressional progressives was applauded by the nonprofit EarthRights International on Thursday for urging members of President Joe Biden's Cabinet to use "targeted sanctions as a method of deterring reckless, climate-destroying behavior."
"Those who destroy the planet for profit, such as fossil fuel companies, need to face the consequences."
While they burn gas or off-road diesel, their castings were forged many decades ago. Their life cycle contributions to today’s “carbon budget”are (I think) fairly modest——especially compared to the much larger machines manufactured today using fracked fossil energy products pulled out of the Earth’s crust at great financial/environmental cost.
Most every calorie of food energy in America has long come at the cost of€ fossil energy, As Michael Pollan pointed out in his 2008 public “(Letter) To the Farmer-in-Chief,”€ we now have. “…. transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel to produce a single calorie of supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gasses.”
Declaring that "cash comes from our legacy business," the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell has asserted that continuing the company's oil operations is necessary to help it transition away from non-oil energy operations.
Ben van Beurden made the remarks in an interview with the BBC published online Thursday.
UK energy ministers attending the COP26 climate summit will tonight socialise with the CEOs of highly-polluting companies, including HSBC and Heathrow Airport.
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and Scotland secretary Alister Jack are among the 600 expected attendees at the Confederation of Business Industry (CBI) event in Glasgow, Politico reported earlier today.
After falling in 2020 due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, global carbon dioxide emissions are on pace to nearly reach pre-pandemic levels this year as powerful nations—including the United States—continue to burn fossil fuels at a dangerous clip.
"To stop further global warming, global CO2 emissions must stop or reach net-zero."
More than 20 countries across the globe—including the U.S., Canada, Finland, Portugal, and Ethiopia—vowed Thursday to cut off public financing for international fossil fuel projects by the end of next year, a pledge climate campaigners hailed as a positive step that must be accompanied by action.
"All governments need to urgently end all support for fossil fuels and ensure a just transition."
Due to repeated misconduct, copyright lawyer Richard Liebowitz is suspended from practicing law in the State of New York, effective immediately. The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court took this drastic decision following a similar order from the Southern District of New York last year, which has since spilled over to other states too.
Following criminal referrals by anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, authorities in Denmark have arrested six men believed to be "ringleaders" or central staff at torrent sites including DanishBytes and ShareUniversity. Police have seized computers and other IT equipment plus money claimed to be profits from the supply of seedboxes.
We speak with Harjeet Singh, senior adviser with the Climate Action Network, who is at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Activists like Singh are pressuring world leaders to join the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would supplement the Paris Agreement by directly targeting the fossil fuel industry and outlining clear actions that every country could take to drastically decrease carbon emissions. “This treaty talks about ending fossil fuel expansion, phasing out, and also just transition,” says Singh. He also speaks about his home country of India, which has only recently become one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases and has fewer resources to adapt while “rich countries have been polluting for more than 100 years.”
We speak to Farhana Yamin, one of the most prominent climate lawyers in Britain, who has been deeply involved in international climate negotiations for decades, including the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, and has also engaged in direct action to effect change. Yamin is currently working with the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group that represents 48 of the countries most threatened by the climate crisis, at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. We last spoke with Farhana in 2019 after she was arrested for supergluing her hands to the ground outside Shell’s headquarters in London as part of an Extinction Rebellion action. She applauds the demonstrators outside the conference who are bringing political pressure on those inside. She says the net zero emissions goal that many global leaders are discussing “has to have emissions that are real, and those emissions cannot be bought at the expense of vulnerable people and countries.”
More than 100 peace and environmental groups are supporting a resolution issued Wednesday by U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee demanding that the U.S. military account for its carbon impact, and establish targets for reducing its emissions in line with the Paris climate agreement.
"The climate crisis is past the point where the U.S. can just take symbolic action, nor can we accept military greenwashing."
COP26 officials on Thursday are heralding developments they say signal that "the end of coal is in sight"—but advocates for strong climate action suggest holding the applause.
"An agreement that only tackles coal doesn't even solve half the problem."
Following Terry McAuliffe's Tuesday night loss in Virginia's gubernatorial election and amid the White House's ongoing failure to enact redistributive legislation due to obstruction from Republicans and right-wing Democrats in Congress, progressives are urging President Joe Biden to fully embrace and use his executive authority to challenge corporate power, which they say might give people a reason to vote for his party in next year's midterms.
"If... Democrats refuse to fight for the people, the people will seek fighters elsewhere."
And climate change begins . . .
As the national lockdown went into effect in March 2020, Susana, a Latina woman in her early 60s, was living alone on the Northside of Minneapolis. She had been getting by as a childcare provider for an affluent family. But when her employer began working from home, that source of income became impromptu at best—and, more importantly, unsustainable. Susana’s decade-long source of income came to a close.€
With living expenses rising and few job opportunities, Susana, her two adult daughters, and four grandchildren doubled up in a three-bedroom apartment to cut costs. A new routine developed: Susana’s daughters would go to work, regardless of COVID surges, and she would stay with the grandkids while they tried to make the most of online schooling.€
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
It seems like “last minute” negotiations about President Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislative agenda have been dragging on for months. Even now, after Biden outlined his “bottom line” before heading for Rome, disagreements persist, about details and about the timing of a vote. Each time it appears that a common understanding has been reached, Joe Manchin recoils.
Investigative accounts of the Trump administration, like the recent Washington Post feature on the January 6 insurrection, routinely write about three kinds of conservatives.
New York Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize–winner Nicholas Kristof has ended a four-decade career of globe-trotting and covering poverty, war and strife. He is choosing to return to his native Oregon, where he grew up on a farm, with an eye toward running for governor as a Democrat (New York Times, 10/14/21).
Summary:€ One of the many challenges with content moderation is the flexibility of language. When applying blocklists — a list of prohibited terms considered not appropriate for the platform — moderators need to consider innocuous uses of words that, when removed from their context, appear to be violations of the platform’s terms of use.
In reality, the bill’s goal is to increase state control over cyberspace by further localizing services and platforms that Iranian users rely on. It would allow the Iranian government to place bandwidth restrictions on any international services that do not comply with authorities’ demands (namely, to localize their data in Iran). By making it even harder for ordinary Iranians to use common international messaging apps, social media platforms, and other communication tools, lawmakers hope to drive users onto state-controlled Iranian alternatives like local cloud services and messaging apps, thus, making future shutdowns of communication even easier. The bill would also place full control of the internet gateway into the hands of the General Staff of the Armed Forces–Iran’s version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—turning Iranian cyberspace into an extension of the police state.
“Assange has been in solitary confinement in London’s maximum security prison in Belmarsh since April 2019, after applying for asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012 and living there as a political refugee for almost seven years,” the German PEN Centre said.
At a hearing scheduled until Thursday, the United States hopes to convince the High Court of London to overturn the decision rendered last January by Vanessa Baraitser. The magistrate had rejected the American request for extradition, putting forward a risk of suicide. U.S. government attorney James Lewis insisted on assurances from Washington that Julian Assange would not be subject to special measures or be held in the dreaded ADX super-security prison in Florence, Colo. nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”.
Bill Maher is mad at me.
The issue posed a critical question: “Freed from the binary of boy and girl,€ gender€ identity is a shifting landscape. Can science help us navigate?”
Provocatively, a number of articles profiled male gender identity in the U.S., including a trans boy, a gun-toting youth and a father raising two newborns. These stories suggest the range of maleness beginning to reshape masculine identity in a traditionally patriarchal society.
"The Democrats modified the eligibility rule to ensure that the lowest earners in the workforce cannot claim benefits from the program."
For eighteen days, four-year old Cleo Smith could not be found.€ She had gone missing from the Quobba Blowholes Shacks campsite north of Carnarvon in Western Australia, “last seen,” according to a notice, “at 1.30 am on 16thOctober 2021”.€ The Western Australian government had promised a $1 million reward for information on her disappearance.
There was a feast of coverage.€ Google’s search engine was cluttered (the latest search reveals some 85.5 million results).€ Bounty hunters, melting at the prospect of a reward, moved in.€ There were stretched claims that 65,000 “average Aussies” were deployed in the search effort.€ That number was taken from the Bring Cleo Smith HomeFacebook group, established to drum up publicity for the cause.€ In the social media age, such voyeuristic engagement can count as physical participation.€ The administrators of the group were keen that only acceptable members join: anyone questioning holes in the account, inconsistencies and motives (the Daily Mail charmingly called them “liars and trouble-makers”) were blocked.
It’s not the end of democracy. That ended years ago. Like George Bush’s hanging chad victory in 2000 and Donald Trump’s electoral but not popular vote win in 2016, it’s just another nail in the coffin. Or like Joe Biden’s win in 2020, where the corporate leadership of the Democratic Party twisted arms, promised paydays to politicians and otherwise forced the left-leaning primary candidates into a line behind Joe. Just like it is doing now in Congress as it morphs a bill designed to help working people into one that will mostly help the corporations that give most people in Congress their true payday.
Columnists fret, progressives fret, even leftists who focus on electoral politics fret. How can we stop the reactionaries from taking over everything? How can we stop the US fascists—the Trumpists and their allies—from total victory? While I don’t have the answer to that, I do know that it’s not by trying to be more like them. Fascism is a real possibility in the United States. It always has been. Wall Street knows this better than most liberals do. Wall Street would ultimately have no problem with a fascist regime in DC. Like German capital in the 1930s, US capital understands that an authoritarian state run for the benefit of profiteers is a great way to make money. The fact that so many of the Democrats in power are part of the same economy that would easily lie with the fascists compromises their opposition. They put their bank accounts and their potential for cashing in ahead of their commitment to the people who elected them and the democracy they claim to live in. Their party cannot overcome the fascists as long as it serves the same masters.
Relatives of Ahmaud Arbery, their attorneys, and racial justice advocates expressed shock and indignation Thursday following the selection of a nearly all-white jury—even after the presiding judge accused the defense of "intentional discrimination"—in the trial of three men accused of murdering the unarmed Black jogger in Glynn County, Georgia last year.
"Is the KKK serving as jury consultants in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial?"
The crux of the issue before the court is captured by a debate that Thomas Jefferson had with himself at the time of the founding.
When Jefferson was drafting a proposed constitution for his home state of Virginia in June 1776, he suggested a clause that read “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
On September 30, the California legislature passed Senate Bill 796, which made it possible for a government entity to return property that had been unjustly taken from Black property owners. At issue was a former Black-owned resort in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. In 1912, Black entrepreneurs Charles and Willa Bruce opened Bruce’s Beach on two previously undeveloped waterfront lots. Black Americans from California as well as around the country soon flocked to the resort, because it was one of the few beaches in the United States that Black people could legally patronize. Not surprisingly, the white Manhattan Beach community resented the success of Bruce’s Beach. In 1924, the City used eminent domain to force Charles and Willa Bruce and other nearby Black property to sell their beachfront land for a fraction of its value on the pretense that it was needed for a public park.
Across the country we are witnessing a historic strike wave, with over 22,000 US union members on strike right now. From our BCTGM Local 374G right here in Lancaster, Pa., on strike against the greed of Kellogg’s, to the 10,000 UAW workers at John Deere plants walking off the factory floor, the Ironworkers Regional Shop Local 851 on strike against Erie Strayer Company in northwestern Pennsylvania, or the 24,000 health care workers at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast who have overwhelmingly authorized a strike, workers have had enough, and they are taking action.
"The future of reproductive freedom is in peril."
"It is past time to pass the Women's Health Protection Act and safeguard the legal right to abortion."
So after the longest (and completely unexplained) delay in FCC and NTIA history, last week the Biden administration finally got around to fully staffing the nation's top telecom regulator. While the selection of fairly centrist Jessica Rosenworcel is expected to make it through the confirmation process, the same can't be said of Gigi Sohn, a popular consumer advocate:
After Moderna announced Thursday that it expects to deliver up to 300 million fewer coronavirus vaccine doses this year than previously anticipated despite posting large profits, public health campaigners ramped up pressure on President Joe Biden to force the U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant to share its recipe with the world.
Despite the lower delivery forecast, Moderna said it still expects to rack up between $15-18 billion in sales this year from its vaccine, which was largely funded by the U.S. government and developed in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
That would be Alice v. CLS Bank, the Supreme Court case that made it clear you can’t get a patent on an abstract idea just by adding in generic computer language.
As we’ve told Congress before, the only ones experiencing “uncertainty” because of the Alice precedent are people and companies using weak software patents to demand money from others.
For people who actually work with and on software, the Alice precedent has produced more certainty than ever before. Software innovation in the past seven years has been extraordinary. In the U.S., since Alice, the software industry is experiencing record profits and levels of employment. It certainly helps that more baseless patent lawsuits are being thrown out by courts. Truly innovative companies that build stuff—rather than rely on software patents—are thriving.
King.com and its flagship product, mobile game Candy Crush, have made it onto our pages several times in the past. The most common reason for that is that King appears to enjoy playing trademark bully. Fighting with the folks behind hit game Banner Saga, not to mention picking fights with any other game maker that uses the word "candy" in their titles, have become the norm. Notably, some of the time, when there is a severe public backlash over its antics, King has also shown that it is capable of running away from such disputes.
For the last three months, Facebook lawyers have been hounding us to sell our name to them. We refused their offer on multiple bases. Namely, the low offer wouldn’t cover the costs of changing our name, and we insisted on knowing the client and intent, which they did not want to disclose.
At least two law firms were involved: One in the USA that requested our trademark and domains (Kilpatrick, Townsend & Stockton), and the other in Europe aggressively contacting trying to get us to sell our domain registrations (Hogan Lovells).
On October 20th, 2021, during a phone call with Facebook attorneys, we declined their low offer and maintained our requirements. At this point, we presumed it was Facebook and identified them on the call. The attorney representing Facebook declared they would respect our existing right and registration.
On October 28th, 2021, Facebook decided to commit trademark infringement and call themselves “Meta”.
Last year when a bunch of the biggest publishing houses sued the Internet Archive, in the midst of a pandemic, over their digital library program, I was a bit surprised that the announcement about the lawsuit came not from any of the publishers themselves directly, but rather from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which is officially not a party in the lawsuit. That alone felt a bit... sketchy.
