Basically, some Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Kylin, OpenSUSE or Debian run on the PC. The x86-64 emulator Box86, possibly with the Windows-to-Linux translator Wine, enables games that would otherwise not run on ARM CPUs.
Last week Google engineers uncovered a reference count underflow issue affecting all Linux kernels going back to v4.14 in 2017. This issue led to memory leaking from one process to another and only uncovered by accident. To address this class of memory corruption issues moving forward, Google is proposing a new "Page Table Check" feature moving forward.
A new design is needed for a business card with a company logo, the person’s name, job title, email and phone contacts, as well as the company name and address. In this article you will learn how to install Inkscape, how to create a new document, design a simple logo, type texts, and how to lay out the logo and the text to finalize the card.
Mozilla implemented support for importing CSV-formatted password lists generated by Firefox or other Web browsers, but it’s hiding by default.
It’s fairly clear that Mozilla wants everyone to be pressured to create an account to use their Web browser. That way all of your browsing data is stored on a server you have no control over, and Mozilla may not either.
(We don’t know if they farm this out to Clown Computing partners like Microsoft or Amazon.)
To enable password import in Firefox or LibreWolf, type about:config into the address bar and hit enter, agree that you’ll be careful.
Search for this entry:
browser.bookmarks.addedImportButton
Double click to make it True.
Now you are able to import passwords in CSV format. You should be able to export passwords from another browser and into Firefox or LibreWolf (where there is no Firefox Sync, due to privacy reasons), without needing any pesky Sync servers.
How to add Brave Search to GNOME Web and switch from DuckDuckGo.
In this article, we explore Brave Search. A new search engine from the company that makes the Brave Web browser.
Perhaps you hop around browsers like I do and want to use Brave Search in GNOME Web, but all you get when you ask Brave how to add it is this.
If your team and you work with content a lot, it might be a good idea to use an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) system. Taking into consideration a vast array of available solutions, it’s very difficult to choose the right tool for your purposes and needs.
One of the best software tools in this category is Alfresco. Using it, you can easily store and collaborate on content with your teammates. In this guide, you will learn how to enable document editing within Alfresco with the help of ONLYOFFICE Docs.
If you are a system administrator, a developer, or a DevOps engineer, chances are that at some point you’ve had to set up (or work with) a LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL or MariaDB / PHP) stack.
The web and database servers, along with the well-known server-side language, are not available in their latest versions from the major distributions’ official repositories. If you like to play or work with cutting-edge software, you will need to either install them from a source or use a third-party repository.
Docker is arguably one of the most cherished DevOps tools that streamline the development, deployment, and shipping of applications inside containers.
The concept of containerization entails leveraging container images. These are small, lightweight, and standalone executable packages that include everything that is needed to run an application including the source code, libraries and dependencies, and configuration files.
By doing so, the application can run in almost any computing environment; traditional IT infrastructure, cloud, and a myriad of Linux / UNIX flavors.
Nvidia's image scaling and sharpening feature, Nvidia Image Scaling, has been updated today to improve performance and image quality. Though there's more here of interest to gamers, even AMD ones. This upscaling feature is also being made open-source and cross-platform, meaning it could soon play nicely with AMD and Intel GPUs.
GNOME Web uses WebkitGTK, which is basically an improved version of the one that Safari has. (No DRM modules and support for open media codecs.)
However, it has some of the same limitations. One of these is using Content Blockers for the ad blocking. GNOME Web previously had one that was much, much worse, and caused many bugs, and ate RAM like it was going out of style, and was only partially compatible with Adblock Plus.
So deleting it out of the browser and moving to use Webkit Content Blockers was a win by that measure.
However, Apple is such a piece of shit company that they designed the scheme so that you’re limited to 50,000 rules. To put that in perspective, in most of my browsers, I have twice that many, and no, they don’t slow the browser down at all, because uBlock-Origin is efficient.
The Fedora Community Outreach Revamp (FCOR) has been underway since summer of 2020. The co-leads, Mariana Balla and Sumantro Mukherjee, along with Marie Nordin, set out to repair broken bridges around Fedora’s outreach. We have made significant steps as a team towards completing the deliverables set out in the Fedora Objective. We are hoping to wrap things up in the next six months. As we move towards the close of 2021, we want to share the latest work that we have accomplished.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Fedora Linux 33 will reach end of life on Tuesday 30 November. Nominations for the F35 elections cycle are now open.
That’s right!!! We are officially ready to start brainstorming for Fedora 36 Wallpaper ideas because our candidate with a K last name has been chosen (drum roll please) and it’s Deepika Kurup! Ideas and progress are going to be documented on Design issue 789. If you want to help us brainstorm an approach, join us at 1830 UTC Wednesday in #fedora-design on Matrix.
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.15. This version was released just recently and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, November 14, 2021 through Sunday, November 21, 2021. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.15. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, November 14, 2021 through Sunday, November 21, 2021. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
It’s time to start thinking about Test Days for Fedora Linux 36. A Test Day is an event aimed getting together interested users and developers to test a specific feature or area of the distribution. You can run a Test Day on just about anything for which it would be useful to do some fairly focused testing in ‘real time’ with a group of testers; it doesn’t have to be code. For instance, we often run Test Days for l10n/i18n topics. For more information on Test Days, see the wiki.
Formerly, cockpit-tls, the process responsible for handling encryption on HTTPS connections to cockpit, would directly read the certificate file for itself. This required the private key file to be owned by the cockpit-ws user (or group) that this process ran as. Users sometimes want to share the same key file with several different services, making this arrangement awkward. It also required additional configuration steps in the case of automatically-issued certificates.
Cockpit now reads the certificate and key files as the root user, allowing them to be installed with any set of permissions.
We released Fedora Linux 35 and that means it’s time for the elections for various governing bodies in Fedora. This includes the Mindshare Committee. One seat is open on the Committee this election to serve two release cycles (one year). We invite you to vote in the upcoming Mindshare Committee election, and even run for the seat if you are inspired! Participating on the Mindshare Committee takes 1-3 hours weekly, as well as the expectation that you will attend any face-to-faces (virtual or in-person) if possible. This is an opportunity to support the Fedora Project in an organizational capacity, and you don’t need a lot of experience. Each Fedoran’s perspective is valuable to the work that Mindshare does. We would love to have you be a part of the Committee.
Maybe you know someone who wants to be more involved in Fedora and would be a good fit. Make sure to get consent from the nominee if you decide to nominate someone. If you or someone you know is interested in running, add those names to the Mindshare Election wiki page. The Election Wrangler will reach out to you with next steps.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta is released and CentOS 9 Stream is available, so my repository is already open and (mostly) fully populated.
As EPEL is not yet ready, for now you have to enable "remi" repository which provides lot of packages usually available in EPEL.
We are glad that this week we shipped all backlog orders and now the boards are again for sale!
STMP157-OLinuXino-LIME2 Open Source Hardware Linux computer running Mainline Linux is in mass production in four variants: [...]
Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive single-board computer useful for many things. And, until Raspberry Pi 4, it was not an impressive option as a quick desktop replacement.
So, yes, Raspberry Pi 4 changed the game with its new capabilities. But, how does it compare to Raspberry Pi 3?
Is Raspberry Pi 3 still worth considering? Or, should you go for the latest and greatest Raspberry Pi 4?
In this article, we try to get you some answers to that by highlighting some key differences between the two.
First, let us look at the specifications both offer.
USB battery banks are a dime-a-dozen and useful for recharging all of those devices in your life. But the typical cheap battery banks don’t provide you with much information about their status. You usually just get a few LEDs that provide a very general idea of how much battery life remains. Keenan Johnson needed more info for an upcoming project and so he hacked a USB battery bank to gather telemetry.
The most useful data about a USB battery bank is its voltage at any given time, which tells you approximately how much longer the batteries will last. But there is other telemetry that Johnson wanted to have, including the charging current and output current. This USB battery bank contains an HT66F018 microcontroller to monitor the battery cells and control charging/discharging, but it runs custom firmware and doesn’t make the telemetry accessible through a standard interface like I2C or SPI.
Brave version 1.32 includes a dedicated wallet built right into the browser, in which users can store their private keys for various cryptocurrency holdings. (Read our review of Brave 1.0.) The company claims that the direct integration is more secure than a third-party browser plugin, but also allows users to connect with hardware wallet devices like Trezor and Ledger. Brave’s wallet also provides real-time market information as well as the ability to buy and pay via various cryptocurrencies.
Alone I spirit myself away looking at the many flowers born on the balcony, certainly not thanks to me, the gardener was the wind. They skin me with precision, their beauty sinks in with the same noble knife used by the missing. I remember your laughter whirling all around when I confessed that flowers frighten me.
Mine is a young pain, it’ll take patience, waiting as the bird at the edge of a field just barely sown. I loved you with a human love, like taking off one’s clothes at night and putting them back on in the morning. Now in these boundless days I write you an invisible letter to tell you there’s a wonderful path a pearl that goes rolling fast down a tree-lined avenue towing lightness with it, towing wakefulness.
It was like waking up in California— the awkward blossoms, the sky an aggressive blue. I remember the smell from your armpits, the greenhouse windows covered in white paint, where the air was heavy. The silver weeds. A small herd of farm animals at the Agricultural College wore the field to dust. The wind was hot and fresh on our faces. The donkey looked so dumb trying to walk. It was simple: Beneath your shirt was skin. I remember that first year, pulling your briefs from the hamper.
PBS has hired Maribel Lopez, an executive producer and managing director at a PBS member station in Minnesota, to lead its digital studios, which produces original and short-form content on social platforms like YouTube.
Lopez begins on December 13 and replaces Brandon Arolfo, who exited PBS earlier this year to join Travel + Leisure as vp creative and content. Lopez will join PBS from Twin Cities PBS, where she is the executive producer of Sound Field, a music education series on YouTube that is produced for PBS Digital Studios, and the managing director of Racism Unveiled, a multimedia storytelling project that explores racism in Minnesota.
As QSR Magazine explains, back in the 1980s when the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder was the burger to beat, A&W had the great idea to debut a 1/3 Pound Burger at the same price as a Quarter Pounder. More meat for your dollar—what could go wrong? Unfortunately, the burger was a total flop, for reasons that A&W didn’t see coming. In focus groups following the disastrous launch of the 1/3 Pound Burger, customers indicated that they thought 1/3 pound of meat was smaller than 1/4 pound, because 4 is a bigger number than 3. So people considered the burger a rip-off, not a deal.
A&W, perhaps embittered by the hard-learned lessons of the past, is still stuck on winning Americans over with a big, juicy burger. So it has decided to rebrand the 1/3 Pound Burger in a way that Americans of all math skill levels will be drawn to: the 3/9 lb. Burger.
The Greens say the combination of federal and state legislation and “active steps” by university management has left staff and students with little say in decisions that affect them. Such decisions have been outsourced to “a small group of unelected senior managers” and governing body appointees who “have entrenched a corporate university model”.
“The collapse of democracy on university campuses has had devastating consequences for staff and students,” Dr Faruqi said. “Funding cuts, fee hikes, systemic wage theft and rampant casualisation have all followed.
In 1996, conservative Christian activist Ralph Reed declared, “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members.” As today’s school board meetings devolve into screaming matches and fistfights over mask requirements, vaccine mandates, and anti-racist curriculums, conservatives are once again growing their influence within one of the most underrated power structures in American politics.
“If you build it, they will come,” said Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams. In Cuba, they didn’t come. Dissidents on the island, with their U.S. backers, had been working feverishly for months to turn the unprecedented July 11 protests into a crescendo of government opposition on November 15. They built a formidable structure, with sophisticated social media (including an abundance of fake news), piles of cash from Cuban Americans and the U.S. government, and declarations of support from a bipartisan Congress and all the way up to the White House.
We demonstrate that it is possible to trigger Rowhammer bit flips on all DRAM devices today despite deployed mitigations on commodity off-the-shelf systems with little effort. This result has a significant impact on the system’s security as DRAM devices in the wild cannot easily be fixed, and previous work showed real-world Rowhammer attacks are practical, for example, in the browser using JavaScript, on smartphones, across VMs in the cloud, and even over the network.
My study highlighted loopholes in the agency’s oversight processes that exploited vulnerable people and led to faulty data for drug approval decisions. Until the early 2000s, participants in FDA-reviewed research trials came almost entirely from the U.S. But a 2010 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 78% of research participants were enrolled overseas. Faster research subject recruitment and lower expenses – paired with these regulatory loopholes – seem to be driving this shift.
It isn’t clear how often these gaps allow problematic trials to slip through the system, because trials that go wrong can simply not be disclosed, and there are virtually no on-site inspections.
In public health, a “sentinel event” is a case of preventable harm so significant that it serves as a warning that the system is failing. The alarms are now blaring.
A growing number of babies are being born with syphilis after their mothers contract the sexually transmitted disease and the bacteria crosses the placenta. These cases are 100% preventable: When mothers who have syphilis are treated with penicillin while pregnant, babies are often born without a trace of the disease. But when mothers go untreated, there is a 40% chance their babies will be miscarried, be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Those who survive can be born with deformed bones or damaged brains, or can suffer from severe anemia, hearing loss or blindness.
When New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country’s transition away from its coronavirus elimination strategy, also known as “zero-Covid,” US and British media outlets framed the decision as a recognition of the inevitable failure of an irrational goal.
Humanitarian and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, where the U.N. estimates that more than half of the population suffers from acute hunger. The country has fallen into an economic crisis after the U.S. and other Western countries cut off direct financial assistance to the government following the Taliban takeover in August. Taliban leaders are also unable to access billions of dollars in Afghan national reserves that are held in banks overseas. “Forty million civilians were left behind when the NATO countries went for the door in August,” says Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently visited Afghanistan and with refugees in Iran, where as many as 5,000 Afghans are fleeing everyday. “They told me very clearly, ‘We believe we will starve and freeze to death this harsh winter unless there is an enormous aid operation coming through.’”
Medicare Part B recipients will soon be hit with one of the biggest premium increases in the history of the government program, a hike driven in large part by the Food and Drug Administration's scandalous approval of a costly—and, according to many experts, dubious—Alzheimer's drug.
"Medicare's inability to negotiate lower drug prices means that Big Pharma companies can charge whatever they want."
The drafts found the safe levels of ingestion for chemicals perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) are much lower than the agency had found in prior assessments.
The agency also found that PFOA is “likely” carcinogenic to humans. This is a step up from before, as it has previously said that there is “suggestive” evidence that the substance can cause cancer.
First of all, it should be said that the firmware is encrypted with keys that are known only to the vendor. An attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities described by Positive Technologies (one in each device) to upload firmware to the dispenser without knowing the encryption keys (they will be mentioned below as KEY0 and KEY1). That is, having a clean code, an attacker can modify it however he likes, encrypt it again, upload it to the ATM, and then withdraw cash bypassing the existing USB traffic encryption algorithms. Well, now let's move on to the details...
About 60 former subpostmasters in England, Wales and Northern Ireland convicted of theft and false accounting have already had their convictions overturned, including 39 in a landmark Court of Appeal hearing in April this year. There are likely to be many more. Between 2000 and 2015, 736 were convicted of crimes based on evidence from the faulty Horizon system.
A government minister researching the Horizon project in 2000 said that, given the choice, he would have sacked the entire Post Office board.
The Horizon project saw the Post Office branch network computerised, but the system led to subpostmasters being wrongly blamed and even imprisoned because of unexplained accounting shortfalls that were actually caused by software errors.
The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry took place in London on Monday 8 November. Chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, the process’ aim is to provide a public summary of the failings which occurred with the Horizon IT system at the Post Office leading to the suspension, termination of subpostmasters’ contracts, prosecution and conviction of subpostmasters.
The Inquiry had been made statutory earlier this year in light of the quashing of sentences of subpostmasters who had been wrongly convicted due to errors made by the Horizon system.
New Delhi, Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Android Trojan that can circumvent multi-factor authentication on banking apps on smartphones, putting users' financial data and money at risk.
Called 'SharkBot', the Android malware has been found in attacks across Europe and the US, focused on stealing funds from mobile phones running the Google Android operating system.
The EU is at it again. Recently Mozilla put out a position paper highlighting the latest dangerous move by busybody EU regulators who seem to think that they can magically regulate the internet without (1) understanding it, or (2) bothering to talk to people who do understand it. The issue is the Digital Identity Framework, which, in theory, is supposed to do some useful things regarding interoperability and digital identities. This could be really useful in enabling more end user control over identity and information (a key part of my whole Protocols, Not Platforms concept). But the devil is in the details, and the details are a mess.
The amended complaint now includes 17 states. Its 173 pages offer one of the best descriptions of how the online advertising model works, and how deeply embedded Google is in every aspect of the system. Of particular interest to readers of this blog are some fairly stunning allegations about Google’s attempts to limit protection for its users’ privacy. For example, one section claims:
Although the two companies compete in a variety of ways (Microsoft’s Viva Connections also provides social network capabilities, for instance, and both recently unveiled competing visions for immersive collaboration) Wednesday’s move is an acknowledgement that many customers now rely on a range of tools to support employee collaboration.
Even though the new proposals are only intended to affect individuals living in the EU, as many chat services are worldwide, the “obligation” placed on service providers may extend to “all users”, Patrick Breyer, a Pirate Party MEP and privacy campaigner, told the Express.
If the algorithm is to blame, can Facebook change the algorithm to make it better? What would that look like? To find out, I interviewed 12 leading experts on data and computer science, as well as former Facebook employees, and asked them to propose changes that could help the algorithm suck less. What I got was a range of ideas about how Facebook could start to solve this problem, or whether a solution is even possible. Some are more radical than others, so I’ve categorized these ideas from mild to spicy (though we know Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg prefers it sweet).
“Safari sends typed text both to a Google server clients1.google.com and to an Apple server api-glb-dub.smoot.apple.com. Data is initially sent to both every time a new letter is typed, although transmission to clients1.google.com stops shortly after the first word “leith” is complete. The result is 7 requests to clients1.google.com and 25 requests to api-glb-dub.smoot.apple.com, a total of 32 requests”
Long before its current run of Very Bad News, Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group was already controversial. Investigations had shown its exploits were being used to target journalists and activists and its customer list included governments known mostly for their human rights abuses.
A group of migrants trapped in freezing conditions at the Belarus-Poland border faced water cannons and tear gas by Polish border guards on Tuesday amid an ongoing humanitarian and political crisis.
Polish forces put the blame for the violence, which took place near the Bruzgi-Kuznica border crossing, on some of the thousands of migrants throwing objects.
"Much of the world's backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world's most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances."
Even as Congress moves to increase the Pentagon budget well beyond the astronomical levels proposed by the Biden administration, a new report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has outlined three different ways to cut $1 trillion in Department of Defense spending over the next decade. A rational defense policy could yield far more in the way of reductions, but resistance from the Pentagon, weapons contractors, and their many allies in Congress would be fierce.
Who is America's god? The Christian god of the beatitudes, the one who healed the sick, helped the poor, and preached love of neighbor? Not in these (dis)United States. In the Pledge of Allegiance, we speak proudly of One Nation under God, but in the aggregate, this country doesn't serve or worship Jesus Christ, or Allah, or any other god of justice and mercy. In truth, the deity America believes in is the five-sided one headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.
President Joe Biden’s virtual summit Monday with Chinese President Xi Jinping follows the two countries’ announcement just days earlier they will work together to confront the climate emergency after Xi did not attend the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow. Tension has been mounting between the two superpowers, especially over Taiwan and Hong Kong, with some speculating that a new Cold War is developing. “The United States, in the immediate future, is faced with the possibility of fighting a war over Taiwan … that it would probably lose,” says Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an extended interview about U.S.-China relations. “China is also working to break the U.S. geopolitical hold over the Eurasian landmass.” McCoy is a prolific author and his newest book is out today: “To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change.”
Searchwing has developed a waterproof drone that can be hand-launched from a ship. In a two-hour mission, the aircraft flies up to 120 kilometres. For real-time transmission, members are working on a new model.
Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar faces a formal censure on Wednesday in the Democratic-controlled Congress.
It came after he posted then deleted an anime video that Democrats say promoted violence against President Joe Biden and lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This is what happened last weekend when two trainee community service officers were “cornered” at the Ãâ°bano discotheque in Peñíscola after being recognised as members of the police corps.At the discotheque, a group of five people of different nationalities, mainly Moroccans, who are known criminals in the area, recognised the civilian officers and started harassing them inside the club. “We are waiting for you outside,” was the threat. In view of this, the officers decided not to leave the discotheque but to wait until it was closed, believing that they had left the discotheque but were waiting for them. When the club was closed, they appeared and shouted:”We Arabs have the say here”, pointed out that the Guardia Civil had no business in this place and started to attack the officers.
According to the book, after the election, Flynn placed a call to Ezra Cohen, a senior intelligence official who had previously worked under Flynn. Cohen was traveling in the Middle East at the time, but Flynn urged him to get back to the United States because, as Karl writes, there was going to be an “epic showdown” over the election results. Flynn told Cohen that “he needed to get orders signed, that ballots needed to be seized, and that extraordinary measures needed to be taken to stop Democrats from stealing the election.” (To be clear, this is projection on Flynn’s part: The actions he urged Cohen to take would be an effort to steal an election. There’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud.)
When fossil fuel companies found out about the link between their product and climate change decades ago, they did everything they could to hide it. They lied, manipulated, and deceived.€
Today, denying the reality of climate change isn’t as easy, and it is certainly more controversial. But that doesn’t mean climate deniers — fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, and their allies opposed to climate action — have moved past the lies.€
Last year, President Xi Jinping, pledged that China’s CO2 emissions would peak before 2030, and China would become carbon neutral before 2060.
China has a track history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them–often before deadline–so this pledge is significant. Under the CPC, China has already created “an economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world.€ It has virtually eradicated Covid through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 Billion) and distributing over 1 Billion-to the rest of the world. It has also been applying this incredible focus and national resolve to tackle Climate change.
Of all the speeches and political grandstanding at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26), the words of Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, were the most profound and least hypocritical.
The United Nations COP26 Glasgow Climate Pact signed on November 14 is another confirmation of what we learned in Durban in 2011, at the 17th UN climate summit. As expressed by Indigenous activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney (from the Tla A’min Nation in western Canada): ‘COP26 is a performance. It is an illusion constructed to save the capitalist economy rooted in resource extraction and colonialism.’
Swedish youth leader Greta Thunberg was also clear: ‘The COP26 is over. Here’s a brief summary: Blah, Blah, Blah. But the real work continues outside these halls. And we will never give up, ever.’
After a summer that featured the "world's most extreme heatwave in modern history," which experts linked to human-caused global heating, the Pacific Northwest was inundated with floodwaters Monday, fueling fresh calls for ambitious action to combat the climate emergency.
The recent rain and subsequent flooding—which came on the heels of the COP26 climate summit in Scotland—led to evacuations, power outages, rescues, school closures, and stranded vehicles in Washington state and British Columbia, Canada.
It sounds incredible: while politicians have been cackling about the climate emergency and profiling in empty promises to halt it, they have spent six trillion US dollars from taxpayers' money to subsidise fossil fuels in just one year: 2020. And they are set to increase the figure to nearly seven trillion by 2025.
Lopez Obrador raged against the “technocrats and neoliberals” – world leaders who hold the future of humanity in their hands. This was a direct reference to leaders of the powerful countries that “increase their fuel production, at the same time that they hold summits for the protection of the environment,” while arriving in Glasgow on private jets.
Indeed, hypocrisy continues to define what is meant to be a collective global fight against climate change and its ravaging, often deadly consequences.
The pact creates a timeline to bring nations back to the table with higher commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, references the reduction of fossil fuels, and allocates more funding from developed nations to developing nations.€
Prior to heading to Glasgow, Morrison, having done his bit of crossdressing on the climate change front, was coy.€ He refused to reveal the modelling that went into the fabulous predictions of net-neutral utopia.€ But on his return, and after any sense of jet lag had been overcome, he was happy to promote the scanty details of an enterprise verging on a hoax.
Such efforts have become the stock and trade of a man habitually committed to the advertising message.€ At best, it is simple dissimulation; at worse – and here, we find ourselves on difficult territory – it is mendacious.€ Little wonder, then, that critics have been coming out of late with a sort of adamant righteousness against the Australian prime minister’s relationship with lying.
Environmental groups have utterly failed to organize citizens to lobby environmental enforcers to go after big polluters. Meanwhile, citizens see every day that government brings the full force of the law down on average citizens without mercy. This undermines efforts to strengthen the laws and provides evidence to conservatives, populists and nationalists that liberals and strong government advocates are really on the side of the banksters, hedge funds and big guys. Neoliberalism and win-win have created people like Trump, who can persuade people the fix is in. And that fix includes the entire edifice of partnerships, consensus and win-win to keep corporations on top and average people in thrall to anything that purports to bring people together.
Bad actors and ivory tower academics have always tried to lure activists into consensus and partnerships, but from Alinsky’s words there is no escape: “All change means movement, movement means friction and friction means heat. You’ll find consensus only in a totalitarian state, communist or fascist… conflict is the vital core of an open society…”
The top executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and BP America were put in the hot seat last month, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee€ grilled them under oath€ about their companies' well-documented campaigns to€ spread disinformation€ and deceive the public about the role their products play in causing climate change.€
Climate and environmental campaigners on Tuesday took President Joe Biden to task on the eve of his administration's scheduled oil and gas drilling auction of 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico—a move that comes just days after the U.S. leader pleaded for "every nation to do its part" to combat the climate emergency at the U.N.-backed climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
"Continued leasing for dirty and dangerous offshore drilling is a disaster for our environment, our economy, and our climate."
Despite this, university students around Europe are not travelling in an environmentally friendly way when using the European Union’s student exchange programme Erasmus+. Taking the plane is the standard procedure when students go to study abroad. To limit the carbon footprint of international exchange, we have to give the students a better opportunity to get off the plane and on the train.
Alarmed by the rising energy needs of cryptocurrency mining, Sweden’s financial and environmental regulators have recently proposed an EU-wide ban on proof-of-work coin minting. The Swedish officials believe this would encourage a move towards a more energy-efficient extraction of bitcoin while supporting the transition towards climate neutrality in Sweden and Europe. A state-run power company warns, however, that restrictions could have an adverse effect on global carbon emissions.
India has another reason for hanging on to coal: politics. The black stuff is big business, making it ripe for graft. In the 1990s and 2000s mining contracts were handed out to government cronies at knockdown prices, a scandal that became known as “Coalgate”. Mining also provides a rich seam of votes. According to one study, between 10-15m Indians depend on coal for their livelihood, many of them miners in the country’s poorest states, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
"While there's $400 trillion of wealth in the world today, shame on us that we let a single child die of hunger."
But the drop in pay is just part of the story. The industry is far less unionized than it was back in the 1970s, when President Carter began to deregulate trucking.
Not having a union means that truckers have far less control over their working conditions. That’s a big deal in trucking. Without a union to stand behind them, truckers can be forced to work irregular shifts and long hours. They can be forced to drive in all sorts of weather. They can also be forced to drive trucks that they don’t think are safe due to bad brakes or other issues.
Yes, Democrats improved their mid-term prospects. Those shovel-ready projects bring in votes— Assuming that enough back-ordered shovels Can get unloaded from the jammed up boats.
A few months ago, Salley May showed up at a mosque in Harlem where a woman was having a mental health crisis, holding children inside and refusing to allow people in or out. About 50 onlookers had gathered outside, as well as a large number of police officers.
On Tuesday, the eve of a likely U.S. Senate vote on the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would vote against the legislation because it enriches the military-industrial complex at the expense of desperately needed social programs and climate action.
"Meanwhile, the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet."
As House members await the Congressional Budget Office's cost assessment of the Build Back Better package, outside progressives are attempting to hammer home their view that right-wing Democrats' expressed concerns about the looming CBO deficit projection are completely cynical—and should be treated as such.
"The whole 'pay for' thing is a right-wing scam, and Democrats are dumb for playing by GOP rules that the GOP doesn't itself follow."
At the turn of the last millennium, there was a wave of optimism surrounding new technologies and the empowerment of the modern digital citizen. A decade later, protestors across North Africa and the Middle East leveraged platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to bring down authoritarian regimes during the revolutions of the Arab Spring and it was believed these technologies would bring about a new flourishing of the worldwide liberal democratic order.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton tried to put unrelenting focus on Trump’s failings, convinced that these were so flagrant that they would alienate the majority of voters. The demonisation backfired because it gifted Trump millions of hours of free television time as his every word was covered by the media, while Clinton’s speeches were cut or ignored. Assisted further by Clinton’s comically inept campaign, Trump was able to win an election that he had expected to lose.
Five years on and the Democrats have just been defeated at the polls in a series of closely watched elections for much the same reasons as they lost in 2016. They pursued their old strategy of portraying Trump as the source of all evil. In the Virginia gubernatorial election, in which the Democrats suffered their worst reverse, the Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe failed to win in a state carried by Joe Biden with a large majority. A former governor with an undistinguished record, he was regarded by many as a party hack close to the Clintons and with a limited appetite for campaigning. He portrayed his Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin as a dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter, although Youngkin had distanced himself from the former president.
Ohio's Republican-dominated Senate on Tuesday approved a congressional district map that critics say is designed to benefit the GOP—a move that sparked swift criticism of the state's lawmakers and bolstered demands for Congress to pass federal legislation to protect voting rights and outlaw gerrymandering.
Unveiled late Monday by Republican state lawmakers, the new map was advanced by the Ohio Senate Local Government and Elections Committee before being approved by the full upper chamber. It still needs approval from the Ohio House and GOP Gov. Mike DeWine.
The pulling of the talks highlights how a barrage of leaks and external scrutiny has chilled the flow of information inside the company formerly known as Facebook. Many of the changes appear designed to thwart the next Frances Haugen, who worked in the Integrity organization responsible for making the social network safer before she quit earlier this year, taking thousands of internal documents with her. Those documents served as the basis for a series of damning stories in The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other news outlets, including The Verge. Some of them, such as internal research showing Instagram and Facebook can have negative effects on young people, have led to congressional hearings and lawsuits. And as the bad press continues, Meta executives have argued that the documents were cherry-picked to smear the company and paint an incomplete story.
Researchers for cybersecurity company Mandiant made the attribution as part of a new report, assessing with “high confidence” that the activity of what has been labeled the “Ghostwriter” information campaign was “aligned with Belarusian government interests.”
A cyber espionage group, which Mandiant labeled “UNC1151,” was also linked to the Belarusian government. Mandiant in April had reported that UNC1151 was helping conduct Ghostwriter influence operations.
At the time, Leahy was the youngest senator ever elected from Vermont. He took office as one of the two youngest Democrats in the chamber. The other was Delaware Senator Joe Biden. Now, Biden is the 78-year-old president of the United States, and Leahy is the 81-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate, making him the third person in the current line of succession to the presidency.
If there is going to be an accusation of racism against Blacks as a cause of slavery, then perhaps the “1619 Project” advocates should look at the Islamic world were an estimated 529,000 to 869,000 black men, women and children are still slaves.
Pope St. Zachary (741-752) is documented for saying: “Wherever Islam goes slavery follows, and specifically the horrible institution of sex slavery, as that was the primary reason for it.” And while thre might have been a times where Muslims were told to treat their slaves decently, or promised a great reward in heaven if they choose to free a slave. But there is NOT A SINGLE VERSE in the Quran or the hadiths that abolishes slavery: [...]
It didn't get as much press as some of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's other high profile talks to government inquisitors, but last week, Haugen testified before the rather Orwellian International Grand Committee on Disinformation. This is a bizarre "committee" set up by regulators around the world, but its focus -- and its members -- are kind of notable. Considering that tons of evidence shows that cable news is a much larger vector of disinformation flows to the general public, it seems notable that the "International Grand Committee on Disinformation" seems to only want to pay attention to online disinformation. I mean, it's right in the group's mission:
More than 100 global philanthropic foundations and individual donors on Tuesday joined a growing chorus of human rights advocates who have condemned Israel for its recent decision to label€ six prominent Palestinian civil society groups as "terrorist organizations," and stressed that the apartheid regime's move will not affect their funding decisions.
"The cynical weaponization of anti-terrorism laws poses an existential threat both for Palestinian human rights defenders and those defending human rights globally."
Since September, six members of the streaming group Stream Queens, a collective of drag queens who stream mostly horror video games on Twitch, have been swatted, according to members of the group.
Swatting can be deadly. In 2017, Andrew Finch, of Wichita, Kansas, was killed during a swatting raid. Tyler Barriss, who called in the false report, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Naomi Osaka has joined a growing list of high-profile tennis stars to have expressed concerns regarding the safety of fellow player Peng Shuai. The Chinese player has been facing censorship in her country following her allegations of sexual abuse against the country's Vice Premier of Zhang Gaoli.
But that might not be so. In a new paper, ‘The Gospel of Deviance’, satire researcher Dennis Meyhoff Brink from the University of Copenhagen has traced the early roots of religious criticism to the 1100s and argues that satire actually played a greater role in the spread of democratic values ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹in medieval Europe than Christianity itself.
But: It is possible that Slim is now even being investigated. “Irrespective of a possible endangerment of the person concerned, the Offenburg public prosecutor’s office is currently examining whether the publication of the person concerned could in turn be punishable.”
Meaning: Did Mohammed Ali Slim insult religious societies with the publication?
I was working as an editor at DOXA, an online student magazine in Moscow. Three other editors and I released a three-minute video in which we criticised universities for illegally expelling protesters. As my sign off, I said, “the government has declared war on young people. But we will definitely win.” We showed the script to lawyers, who said it didn’t contain criminal content.
[...]
The judge placed me and the other editors under house arrest. We were also banned from using the [Internet] and making phone calls. Two weeks later, after we appealed, the court let us go out for a two-hour walk each morning.
MT: What is the Islamophobia industry?
DB: There are two #Islamophobia Industries. One is run by Muslims to fight Islamophobia – what they refer to as the irrational fear of Islam. I would suggest that for many, fear of Islam is rational.
The other is the one about which I write: the Industry set out to silence anyone who criticizes or questions Islam. This Industry has managed to turn Islam, a religion and political ideology, into a race. By doing that they can legally stop any criticism because race is immutable; one, obviously, cannot change one’s race, so attacking race is forbidden.
After the Muslim mob had had its fill, it was the Muslim authorities’ turn: at least four of the teenagers were arrested on the charge of “insulting Islam,” detained for 45 days and subjected to “ill-treatment,” according to one human rights group.
Then, in early 2016, three of these Christian teenagers were sentenced to five years imprisonment. The fourth defendant, 15, was handed a juvenile detention for an indefinite period. They “have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife,” explained their defense lawyer, Maher Naguib: “The judge didn’t show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment.”
Two of the martyrs, Anthony Huber and Joe Joe Rosenbaum, were killed by the cop-and Trump-worshipping teen vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 25, 2020. They died trying to prevent Rittenhouse from murdering people marching for Black lives and against the brutal and outrageous Kenosha police shooting of the 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake.
Closing arguments in Rittenhouse’s murder trial are being made today (Monday, November 15th). Most legal experts following the trial expect Rittenhouse to escape conviction on the most serious charges. Contrary to what his defense team claims, Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t come to Kenosha with a fully loaded and illegally owned military assault rifle just to protect used car dealerships. He hooked up in Kenosha with the Boogaloo Bois, a neo-Nazi network that wants to spark a genocidal race war. He later partied and made white-supremacist hand signals with the Proud Boys.
One of the most prominent groups advocating for this heavy-handed censorship is the misleadingly named "Moms for Liberty," which presents as a "parents rights" group, but is in fact a racist organization dedicated to banning books about Martin Luther King Jr. and replacing them with books that insist there was no racial component to American slavery. Now the New Hampshire branch of Moms for Liberty is taking it to the next level. As Insider reports, the group is offering a $500 bounty to any person who reports a teacher supposedly breaking the law banning "critical race theory."
Pesky journalists such as Varadarajan, and a new crop of similarly doughty media platforms that provide space for views that don’t echo the established narrative, are a thorn in the side of despotic power. By contributing to a diversity of views, these journalists threaten the echo chamber that despotic power builds to fortify itself. The price they pay is intimidation, and worse. Knocks on the door by personnel from the UP Police—with its formidable track record of 124 deaths in nearly 6,500 “encounters” in three-and-a-half years under Adityanath (at the time)—can be daunting.
Under this, both governments will increase the validity of journalist visas from three months to one year, provided they are eligible under all applicable laws and regulations.
Both countries have also pledged to allow journalists to freely depart and return, which they had previously been unable to do.
Growing up, I didn’t know that I came from a lower class. Once, I even had a birthday party at a Build-a-Bear workshop! My dad worked for a theater and we were able to watch movies and got popcorn for free, while my mom stayed at home and helped translate for Spanish-speaking parents of kids who went to my school. I come from a big family; I have four siblings, two nieces, two nephews, and more cousins than I can count. My house is always full of smiles and laughter that help make the small space feel big. My home was a haven for me, but school was a different story. This story was produced for Student Nation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email€ protected].
Human rights defenders in Mexico's Oaxaca state and beyond are demanding the safe return of an Indigenous forest defender who disappeared nearly three weeks ago after years of activism against illegal logging and corrupt local officials who enable and profit from it.
"Irma has revealed the depredation of the forest, as well as the corruption and collusion between loggers and authorities who illegally act against those who defend the territory."
The voters’ decisive rejection earlier this month of the public safety amendment that would have replaced the troubled police department here has left the city’s progressives battered and bruised. But politicians and activists on both sides of the issue agree that some crucial aspects in the referendum will remain unavoidable in any plan to reform policing.
After taking some positive steps towards trimming the growth of qualified immunity it had itself encouraged for years, the Supreme Court decided to reverse course. Two more cases on the court's "shadow docket" were sent back to the appellate levels with instructions to reverse the stripping of qualified immunity from government employees accused of rights violations.
For more than a year now, conservatives have been waging war against the misdefined conception of critical race theory that they themselves created. The right-wing campaign against so-called CRT largely amounts to a round-robin chorus of hysterical voices asking, Won’t someone think of the poor white children?! “CRT tries to make kids feel bad because of the color of their skin,” Representative Ron Nate, cosponsor of Idaho’s anti-CRT law, stated just after the bill passed in May. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who successfully led the state school board to ban CRT from public school classrooms last summer, tweeted in June that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill muzzling history educators over lessons that might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” In pursuit of that goal, Republican senators in Texas recently drafted and approved yet another anti-CRT bill—after ditching language inserted by outnumbered and outvoted Democrats that would have required teaching “the history of white supremacy,” including slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, “and the ways in which it is morally wrong.” “We don’t want to teach those little white children that they should feel guilty because of what previous white people did generations ago,” Senator Bryan Hughes explained to a local news outlet about why he filed the bill.
US President Joe Biden hectored Nicaragua about their November 7 elections accusing them of “a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.” Three days earlier, the US lavished a $650mil arms deal on Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where they don’t even pretend to have elections for higher office. Clearly more than democracy is at issue with the US offensive against Nicaragua.
At issue is what Biden described as “the arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40€ opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates.” An objective investigation reveals: (1) the motivation for the arrests had nothing to do with the election and (2) the effects of the arrests had no impact on the election.
He then preceded to go on a rant about being canceled, which just means one blogger doesn’t like you and you get that parlayed into millions of dollars based on the unhinged rage of rich white people. This was in theory the very same crowd Chapelle was critiquing but as always the thesis of liberalism being bourgeois just missed the mark.
Dave Chapelle may have been right to recognize that his original fan base was a bunch of racist white liberals but he has only been a reactionary thus far, moving from white liberalism to white conservativism, which pays even better. That being said Chapelle as always is doing something a little more than the typical reactionaries. That doesn’t mean his transphobia is any less dangerous.
In the past week, the federal government has twice(!) been forced to return money it stole from travelers just because it could. In both cases, American citizens were trying to board domestic flights at US airports. And in both cases, despite it not being illegal to carry large amounts of cash on domestic flights, the government decided the cash had to have been illegally obtained, and moved forward with forfeiture proceedings.
It happened on Saturday afternoon when the Bangladeshi girl, after refusing to wear the traditional Islamic female dress that covers the whole body, including the head, except for a slit for the eyes, was beaten by her older brother. But when she arrives at the Carabinieri of Ostia, she reports further assaults on her, always because she did not want to conform to Islamic culture. It is alleged that these assaults were not only related to her brother, but also to her mother.
The Rome Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation for assault and ill-treatment. The girl was first taken to Grassi hospital, where she was diagnosed with a head injury, and then taken to a facility with protection.
Mukhtar Masih (70 yrs) and his sons leased six acres of land belonging to a Christian family now living abroad from March 2021. The Christian family had a desire to work together to earn a decent living through farming. Unbeknown to them the land had previously been leased to Muhammad Qadir who was angry not over the loss of the lease but that he now had to farm alongside ritually impure Christians.
As the U.S. Senate is set to hold confirmation hearings on the nominations of Jessica Rosenworcel and Gigi Sohn to respectively become the next chairwoman and commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, it's important to remember the political stakes that await them at the agency.
By now we've well established that regional monopolization, limited competition, and the (state and federal) corruption that enables both (aka regulatory capture) are why US broadband is spotty, expensive, and slow. With neither competent regulatory oversight nor meaningful competition to drive improvements, regional dominant broadband providers simply... don't bother. The end result goes beyond high prices to substandard customer service, privacy violations, net neutrality violations, and unnecessary surcharges, usage caps, and fees they often don't clearly disclose.
More broadly, Netflix is flexing here: It’s underscoring the fact that it operates the biggest subscription-video service on the planet (with 213.6 million paid subs as of Q3). The streamer is giving notice to the industry, customers and Wall Street that it has an engine capable of producing a surprise hit like “Squid Game,” which (Netflix says) was viewed an astronomical 1.6 billion hours over its first 28 days of release. It will be interesting to see if Netflix rivals like Amazon, Disney and HBO Max follow suit by releasing their own metrics.
Ending abuses of the global tax system by the super-rich and multinational corporations would allow countries to recoup nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year—enough to vaccinate the world's population against Covid-19 three times over.
That estimate is courtesy of The State of Tax Justice 2021, a new report that argues rich countries—not the "palm-fringed islands" on the European Union's tax haven blacklist—are the primary enablers of offshoring by large companies and tax evasion by wealthy individuals.
2021 will perhaps be remembered as the year when the great powers demonstrated their inability to assume their responsibilities to prevent the world from sinking into the abyss. I am thinking of course of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. After having used up the available atmospheric space to develop, the industrialized countries reaffirmed their refusal to honour this climate debt, even though global warming has become an existential issue.
While many observers called Pfizer's new licensing agreement allowing generic drug manufacturers to produce its promising Covid-19 treatment a welcome step, public health experts also condemned the deal for shutting out nearly half of the world's population—and asked why the pharmaceutical giant remains unwilling to share vaccine know-how and technology.
"Billions of people will still be left without as the deal excludes many developing countries."
Under the agreement, Pfizer will grant a royalty-free license for the pill to the Medicines Patent Pool, a nonprofit backed by the United Nations, in a deal that will allow manufacturers to take out a sublicense. They will receive Pfizer’s formula for the drug, and be able to sell it for use in 95 developing countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, once regulators authorize the drug in those places. The organization reached a similar deal with Merck for its Covid antiviral pill, molnupiravir, to be made and sold inexpensively in 105 poorer countries.
Switzerland is a signatory to the European Patent Convention, so Swiss national patents and European patents granted by the European Patent Office coexist in Switzerland. The granting authority for Swiss national patents is the Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI) in Berne, which also maintains the register for Swiss national patents and the Swiss parts of European patents.6
Unlike European patents, Swiss national patents are granted without the IPI examining whether the invention is new and inventive in light of the prior art.7 Despite this difference, a Swiss national patent confers the same rights on its proprietor as the Swiss part of a European patent.
Under Swiss law, supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) for medicinal products and plant protection products may be granted on the basis of Swiss national and Swiss parts of European patents. The Swiss regime8 for SPCs closely follows the corresponding legislation of the European Union; however, because Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, judgments of the European Court of Justice on the interpretation and application of the EU legislation on SPCs are not binding in Switzerland. A Swiss SPC's maximum term of protection is five years.
Swiss lawmakers also partially followed the European Union's endeavours to improve the health of children by incentivising pharmaceutical companies to perform paediatric tests for their drugs by extending already granted SPCs by an additional six months (paediatric extensions).9 The Swiss legislator, however, went one step further and decided to grant the benefit of an additional six-month exclusivity period not only to those who have already been granted an SPC but also to those who, for whatever reason, have not previously obtained an ordinary SPC (paediatric certificate).10 The detailed regulations for the paediatric extensions and the paediatric certificate can be found in the Federal Ordinance on Patents.11
Courts around the globe have dealt with the inventions of Stephen Thaler’s artificial intelligence (AI) system Dabus. The German Federal Patent Court has now come to a pragmatic decision over DE1020191281202. According to the court, the listed inventor must be a natural person, even if the AI has identified both the problem and the solution. At the same time, however, the AI system itself can be additionally named.
In response to a lawsuit filed by Take-Two Interactive, four men behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects claim their work is protected under fair use. Among other things they fixed bugs, something the plaintiff stopped doing years ago. They also improved the games which, if anything, enhanced the market for the original games, which are required for the mods to run.
Copyright holders commonly ask pirate sites to remove infringing content. That typically happens after it appears online but the Polish branch of media giant CANAL+ is trying to get ahead of the curve. The company is asking sites to prevent the illegal distribution of an upcoming TV show, or face legal consequences.
You may recall that a couple of months ago we discussed Rockstar and Take2, the game studio and publisher behind the Grand Theft Auto series, taking down a fan-made GTA4 mod that aimed to put all of the cities from previous games in one massive map. While this was a labor of love by dedicated fans of the GTA series, it escaped nobody's attention that this action was taken on a mod started in 2014 just as Rockstar was about to release GTA Trilogy, consisting of remastered versions of GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas. The very cities the mod looked to input into GTA4. In other words, the fan project was only shut down when the game companies decided to try to make money off this retro love themselves.
In the weeks leading up to #GivingTuesday on November 30th, we’re spotlighting leaders in the Open Movement and encouraging you to support our Better Sharing, Brighter Future campaign.€
The track displayed a rawness unlike anything else that was released at the time, and you couldn’t stroll down the streets of Chicago’s South Side without hearing Bang’s lyrics pulsing from the stereos of cars rolling by:
Yet he was almost completely unknown outside of Chicago. His Facebook profile had less than 2,000 followers, he claimed his occupation was “smokin’ dope” and he still lived with his grandmother.
