Have you every wondered where is Linux? What key sectors does it power and in what areas is it commonly used?
Many people, to this very day, think that Linux is nothing more than a server operating system for advanced users, and nothing more. But that’s not true.
Linux can be found in unusual places that you may have not known before, and in today’s article we’ll be seeing some of these places.
Andrew File System developer AuriStor updated attendees at an IT Press Tour briefing about its work on the file system with an HPC and large enterprise customer base dating back 16 or more years.
AuriStorFS (a modern, licensed version of AFS) is a networked file system providing local access to files in a global namespace that has claimed higher performance, security and data integrity than public cloud-based file-sharing offerings such as Nasuni and Panzura.
AuriStor is a small and distributed organisation dedicated to expanding the popularity and cross-platform use of AuriStorFS.
**Slacktrack** and **SCons** from the **d** software series.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, Steam Autumn Sale 2021 & Steam Awards, NVIDIA Image Scaling SDK 1.0, Godot Engine Plus AMD’s FSR, German State Switch To LibreOffice & Linux, carbonOS 2021.1 Alpha, Venus: Virtual Vulkan Driver On QEMU, Stargate Digital Audio Workstation, Wireshark 3.6, Archinstall 2.3, Amazon Linux Rebased on Fedora Linux, Alpine Linux 3.15, Endless OS 4.0, and Deepin Linux 20.3. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what's going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what's going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
In this tutorial, we will discuss some of the steps and commands to install the Asterisk VoIP server on Debian 11 Bullseye or 10 Buster using the terminal to call over Android or iPhone using a local network.
PyCharm is a dedicated Python graphical IDE (Integrated Development Environment) popular amongst Python developers with its wide range of essential tools such as analyzing code, debugging, and integration. The IDE also comes with the command line, connects to a database, creates a virtual environment, and manages your version control system (Git).
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install PyCharm Community, Professional or Educational, with Flatpak or Snapcraft (Snap) on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Computer applications consist of many small files that are linked together to perform a set of tasks. Because they get presented as "apps," colorful icons in the menu or on a desktop, most of us think of applications as a single, almost tangible thing. And in a way, it's comforting to think of them that way because they feel manageable that way. If an application is actually the amalgamation of hundreds of little library and asset files scattered throughout your computer, where's the application? And existential crisis aside, what happens when one application needs one version of a library while another application demands a different version?
In this tutorial, you will learn how to easily install PowerDNS Admin on Debian 11/Debian 10. PowerDNS Admin is a web administrative interface for PowerDNS. It enables you to easily create and manage DNS zones from a web browser.
That last bit about integration with Mozilla VPN is new and can be useful in some edge situations. But we won’t get into that in this article. Let’s just focus on Containers. Like I said earlier, I’ve always relied on the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension because I thought that was the easiest method of managing Firefox containers. But what I didn’t know is that the features that the Firefox Multi-Account Containers bring to the table are already built into Firefox Core, so all that’s needed to make them shine is to just make 2 changes in the Firefox via about:config.
Those 2 changes will give me the same functionalities as the Firefox Multi-Account Containers. So that’s what I’m going to show you show to do in this post. To begin, open a tab and type about:config in the address bar. After clicking through whatever prompt or warning it throws up, type privacy.user in the search bar. The two preferences you’re looking for are privacy.userContext.enabled and privacy.userContext.ui.enabled. Figure 2 shows both preferences in their default state – false. Notice that if you long left-click the new tab (+) button before installing the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension and with both preferences in their default state, that noting happens.
Recently, I migrated Graphviz'technical documentation from the Jekyll static site generator to the Hugo static site generator, and specifically the Docsy Hugo theme for technical documentation.
I thought it would be straightforward to move static site generators, but it turned out rather difficult, so perhaps it's worth writing about. Good technical doc infra is underrated. I hope this will be useful to write about for anyone considering a move from Jekyll to Hugo, or anyone interested in an evaluation of Docsy.
If you have the source code to the app, and the app is in debug mode (not obfuscated by ProGuard), this is easy: open Android Studio, click in the left-margin of the source code to add a breakpoint, untick the "Suspend" checkbox and tick the "Logging Options – Stack trace" checkbox.
Hi! If you run a server or a router, you may want to have a nice view of the bandwidth usage and statistics. This is easy and quick to achieve using vnstat software. It will gather data regularly from network interfaces and store it in rrd files, it's very efficient and easy to use, and its companion program vnstati can generate pictures, perfect for easy visualization.
Previously there were 10 posts to a page, then you had to click through to the next page to see more posts. I have nearly 250 posts on this site now; ain’t no-one got time to be wading through 25 pages of blog posts!
So now, all my posts render on a single page. To help you further, posts can be filtered by category at the top of the main blog page.
Since I don’t have any featured images being displayed in my posts feed, the page still loads really quickly. Even when rendering ~250 posts.
Our motivation for using SLURM at all is that we have a pool of compute servers of varying capacity, and some GPU servers as well. A few of these compute servers are general login servers, but the problem with these is that they're a free for all; anyone can log in at any time and start using CPU (and perhaps memory, although that can't be fair-share scheduled so it's first come, first served). Traditionally people have wanted to reserve some dedicated amount of resources that are theirs for some amount of time. Well, SLURM does that.
Overall, I think we can say that region allocation reduces fragmentation by making the order of allocating and freeing memory less important. If you intermix allocating a bunch of different sized objects and then don't free all of them (or delay freeing them for a long time), in a simple allocator you wind up with allocated holes in your free ranges. In a region allocator, those different sized allocations go to different regions, and failing to free all of the objects of one size (in one region) doesn't cause problems for other regions of other sizes.
The problem is that we have wound up with a lot of things on our devices that we want to keep confidential, or in another perspective we've wound up in a world where a lot of untrusted things have an inordinate amount of access to our devices. Cryptographic keys are the tip of the iceberg; there are also access tokens in the form of cookies, JWTs, and all of the other forms they take, URLs that we visit, apps that we use, what we type on the keyboard, and on and on and on. We are barely keeping up with identifying what's sensitive and needs to be kept confidential, never mind actually controlling snooping on it.
PhpMyAdmin is an open-source web-based application that offers a web interface to directly manage and access MySQL or MariaDB databases from anywhere/remotely using a web browser. The user can use the web graphical user interface provided by it to interact with databases without having extensive knowledge of the commands. Hence, even a newbie with some knowledge of computers can manage database tables for querying data and manipulating individual parameters.
Browsers can be customized; you can change the way they look by installing themes and you can add or extend features by installing add-ons. Firefox is no different. In fact, Firefox offers users access to more customization options than most other browsers.
Steam is a digital game distribution platform for gamers developed by Valve (a well-known game developer). It provides cross-platform support and can be used to buy, play thousands of games. To use Steam, users have to create an account, and they can access the same games on various computers. Steam was initially launched in 2003; since then, they have focused on providing Linux-based systems support.
Apart from providing games on Steam, users can also enjoy the voice/text chat feature. However, it is not necessary that these chats are related to the games only. The steam app is free to download, and along with paid games, it offers hundreds of free-to-play games as well. Many games now natively support Linux; in this guide, we will provide an installation process as well as the instructions to set up steam on Manjaro Linux.
A firewall is a network security system built into an operating system that monitors and manages network traffic according to preset rules. The firewall also aids in the monitoring of networks to determine whether they are trustworthy or not. They also protect your PC from hackers by filtering dangerous network traffic.
The uncomplicated firewall (UFW) in Linux Mint provides a user-friendly interface for managing firewall rules. Its main goal is to make firewall rule management as simple as possible, as the name suggests. Although it is recommended that you keep the firewall turned on, there may be times when you need to disable it, such as when troubleshooting or testing. So this article will provide you the details on how you can disable a firewall on Linux Mint.
RAR is a file format used to combine multiple files/folders in a single compressed file. The .rar file extension refers to the RAR files, and several applications can create these files. The RAR file format is practiced compressing files used for various purposes like you can keep various types of files inside one compressed file. These compressed files are then extracted to access the files contained by them.
The rar files can be extracted by using the graphical interface and terminal support of Manjaro. In Linux-based systems, unrar command-line utility is required to extract .rar files.
In this piece of writing, we have provided possible ways to extract rar file in Manjaro Linux. As the interaction with rar files is impossible without the unrar package. So, we will also provide the installation procedure of the unrar package as well.
Enabling remote access is crucial when you need to permit your office members to work from the branch office, home or when you want to hand over your system to the IT teams for troubleshooting purposes. However, when you want to access your own Linux-based system from anywhere, any time, without the hassle then the ideal way is to utilize remote desktop software or SSH.
This post is all about how to enable remote access on Manjaro Linux. For this purpose, we will first use SSH and then show you the procedure of installing and configuring Chrome Remote Desktop to establish a remote connection between your Manjaro system and mac. This post will also discuss some other remote desktop software for a Linux system. So, let’s start!
Enabling SSH on Ubuntu is one of the first things you should do after installing the operating system as it provides an encrypted network protocol for safeguarding remote server and client logins. It allows you to access your machine remotely and execute operations securely. It encrypts all client-server traffic to prevent eavesdropping, connection hijacking, and other types of attacks.
Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is used to manage or transmit data between computers through the internet. Old methods for accomplishing these actions, such as telnet do not have these capabilities. They are unsafe since they transmit the user’s password in plaintext. It offers a secure route over an unprotected network, connecting an SSH client program to an SSH server in a client-server architecture. It is mainly used to communicate to Unix-like operating systems, although it may also be used on Windows.
Linux is reliable and secure compared to other operating systems, yet granting complete permissions to an unskilled user might lead to severe difficulties. This is where the administrator took control, one of the most important aspects of being a system administrator is user management. Because there are so many critical components to administrate, even the tiniest error can result in the intruders taking over the entire system. The system administrator can create, add and give each user a separate set of permissions. When a user is added or created, the appropriate level of access is granted to that user. Adding a user on Linux Mint can be accomplished in two ways; through the terminal and through GUI.
Synology Drive is an alternative to OneDrive and Google Drive. You can upload files to your Synology Drive, share files, create documents, sync files between your computer and Synology Drive, and back up files from your computer to your Synology Drive. Each user of your Synology NAS can have their own Synology Drive and the files they create on their own Synology Drive are not accessible to other users by default. Each user can use Synology Drive from a web browser. Users can also sync and back up files using the Synology Drive Client desktop app.
To use Synology Drive, you will have to install the Synology Drive Server package on your Synology NAS. Once installed, your NAS will become a productivity and collaboration powerhouse.
In this article, I will show you how to set up and configure Synology Drive Server on your Synology NAS, install Synology Drive Client on Windows and Ubuntu operating systems, and use Synology Drive Client to sync and back up files. So, let’s get started.
This brief tutorial explains how to disable comments on WordPress sites in different and simple ways.
After reading this tutorial, you will get rid of comments on all your WordPress posts or on specific posts. All instructions explained in this article to remove comments from WordPress posts contain screenshots and can be followed by low and medium-level WordPress users.
Tar is a powerful archiver that is frequently used for collecting files and archiving them. It was created to produce archives for data storage on tapes, thus the name “Tape Archive”. It was initially included in UNIX version 7 in 1979, and it is currently accessible on a variety of systems.
Before we go into the situation’s specifics, let’s define Archive files so that no Linux newbies are left out. Archived file is a combination of multiple files with metadata information. By combining multiple files and their information into a single file, you may improve the storage and mobility of your data. The basic purpose of Tar is to combine the data but you can also compress the data using other utilities. These compressed files are referred to as Archive files, and they assist users to reduce file size and simplify data management. The tar is one of the must-have utilities for managing various files in Linux.
In addition to Vulkan support and a lot of graphics renderer work happening for Godot 4.0, adding to the expansive feature list is improved multi-player capabilities.
A prototype implementation of Godot multi-player scene replication support is ready and more functionality is being worked on as part of Godot 4.0. Godot to date has provided RPC-based messaging for multi-player games but hasn't itself provided a common mechanism around scene/state replication. With this new code being worked on, there is now an out-of-the-box solution and should be extensible for use by different games while being easy to use on the part of the game developers.
This is the first of a two articles on cross-platform package management / package building. It covers the basics by discussing why it is actually surprisingly (to many people) difficult to do and what some of the problems are. It also takes a quick look at some strategies to solve the problem.
Are you looking for a way of giving your Fedora distro a new look and feel? If so, here is how to install a new Linux desktop environment on your Fedora and which ones are worth testing. Ideally, there are over 30 diverse desktop environments and window managers available for this distro. However, this article will break down the eight excellent desktop environments for you and cover how to install and switch between them in just a couple of minutes.
Today, the most common desktop environment is probably GNOME and KDE Plasma. GNOME comes as the default desktop environment for Fedora, but that does not exempt you from installing the operating system with KDE plus a few other desktop environment alternatives by utilizing one of the many Fedora spins.
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Alternative window managers and desktop environments are readily available in this distro’s (Fedora) software repositories. Many may wonder what may be the difference between a desktop environment and a Windows manager. What distinguishes the two is the inclusion of apps and utilities. Windows manager is responsible for the placement of windows, how they interact with one another up to the point of their appearance.
While, the desktop environment is responsible for the toolbars, panels, and all the little tools we do not take seriously on our desktops. Some tools include the clipboard manager and applets that permit us to control our network connections or maneuver between virtual desktops. For instance, GNOME and KDE come with their applications such as terminal programs, email clients, file explorers, and calculators. So, when you install one of these environments, you will also get all of the apps that ship with it.
Below is a compiled list of the eight most popular desktop environments that you can opt for if you are a Fedora user. Along with them are the DNF commands to help you install the preferred one to your machine or instead remove them, which is entirely up to you, mate. Without further to-do, let us delve right into the list.
My conclusion is damning with faint praise: at least it wasn't any worse. And with these tweaks it works fine. If you're on F34 you have no reason not to upgrade, and if you're on F33 you won't have much longer until you have to (and you might as well just jump right to F35 at that point). But it's still carrying an odd number of regressions (even though, or perhaps despite the fact, the workarounds for F35 are the same as F34) and the installation on the T2 was bumpier than the Blackbird for reasons that remain unclear to me. If you run KDE or Xfce or anything other than GNOME, you shouldn't have any problems, but if you still use GNOME as your desktop environment you should be prepared to do more preparatory work to get it off the ground. I have higher hopes for F36 because we may finally get that float128 update that still wrecks a small but notable selection of packages like MAME, but I also hope that some of these regressions get dealt with as well because that would make these updates a bit more liveable. Any system upgrade of any OS will make you wonder what's going to break this time, but the most recent Fedora updates have come off as more fraught with peril than they ought to be.
In my previous article, I discussed what is a Homelab and why you should (or should not) have one for yourself.
Now, can anyone who wants or need, have a homelab? It depends on several things but money or resources can be worked around. In this article, I will explain how I have managed to have my own Homelab without investing a fortune in it. As a matter of fact, it costed me less than US $1,000 and it works good enough to manage my home's infrastructure requirements.
That being said, it is important to mention as a disclaimer: this article doesn't describe the best way to do things. It just describes how I manage to make it work even knowing there are some issues and risks with it but for now, I am fine to live with these.
3D printers and Octoprint have a long history together, and pre-built images for the Raspberry Pi make getting up and running pretty easy. But there’s also another easy way to get in on the Octoprint action, and that’s to run it on an Android phone with the octo4a project.
The Raspberry Pi now comes in a wide variety of versions. There are tiny little Zeros, and of course the mainstream-sized boards. Then, there’s the latest greatest Compute Module 4, ready to slot on to a carrier board to break out all its IO. The Seaberry is one such design, as demonstrated by [Jeff Geerling], giving the CM4 a Mini ITX formfactor and a ton of IO. (Video embedded after the break.)
The Seaberry sports a full-sized x16 PCI-E port, with only 1x bandwidth but capable of holding full-sized cards. There’s also four mini-PCI-E slots along the top, with four M.2 E-key slots hiding underneath. The board then has a M.2 slot in the middle for NVME drives, and x1 PCI-E slot hanging off the side.
To solve both problems, I'm doing a giveaway—to enter to win one of any of the pictured items below (and maybe a few others I can find lurking in my office), just donate or say thank you to any open source project or maintainer, then submit your entry.
But it's definitely a specialty board. People who need a low-power ARM-based development or experimentation platform could use this board like I do, to test more exotic configurations on the Pi. And it's looking like it will be the first commercially-available (though not cheapest) ways to install a Pi into a standard desktop or rackmount PC case, since it's mini ITX.
I've updated xa, André Fachat's venerable 6502 cross-assembler, to version 2.3.12. This contains a bug fix for a regression in 65816 mode which I'd meant to release earlier but got sidetracked on (thanks Samuel Falvo for the nice test case, which is also incorporated into the suite). As with prior versions it is tested on pretty much all of my Un*x-alike systems here including AIX, Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel and Apple Silicon), NetBSD/mac68k and Linux/ppc64le. I said this before for 2.3.11 but one more time for the record: this will probably be the last in the exceptionally long-lived 2.3 series before 2.4, which as I keep warning you will definitely have some minor compatibility breaks and jettison a couple long-deprecated options and syntaxes (but will have some new features to make up for it). Again, more to come on that.
Waterfox has been updated to version G4.0.3.1. This release fixes some issues that users had reported in the previous build.
Version G.4.0.2 of the web browser, which shipped at the beginning of this month, had a bug that prevented the installation of bootstrap add-ons. Waterfox would throw out an "addon is corrupt" error message, when users tried to install the legacy extensions. Waterfox G4.0.3.1 update resolves the issue. The latest version also patches a bug that was preventing previously installed bootstrap add-ons, from loading upon the next restart, they were getting disabled by the application.
You may have come across an issue in Waterfox G 4.0.2, that caused the menu bar to be displayed partially off the screen, in maximized mode. It also resulted in tabs listed on the menu bar. Both of these issues have been fixed in Waterfox G4.0.3.1. Users who wish to use bootstrap extensions, can find forked versions of some popular add-ons at this page. The update introduces a patch for a problem that was preventing the Copy Tab Link option from working. There is still no option to toggle the menu bar icons.
C.P. Snow’s chapter (with Norbert Wiener of Cybernetics as discussant) predicted a world where software would rule our lives, but the people who wrote the software would be outside the democratic process. He wrote, “A handful of people, having no relation to the will of society, having no communication with the rest of society, will be making decisions in secret which are going to affect our lives in the deepest sense.” He argued that everyone needed to learn about computer science, in order to have democratic control of these processes.
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I completely buy the necessity part and the basic skill part, and it’s true that CS can provide economic opportunity and social mobility. But that’s not what Perlis, Simon, Newell, Snow, and Forsythe were arguing for. They were proposing “CS for All” decades before Silicon Valley. There is value in learning computer science that is older and more broadly applicable than the economic benefits.
As part of the partnership, Open LMS will provide Pancare with its open-source learning platform for Pancare’s volunteer training program, helping the foundation enable, engage, and mobilize a growing volunteer workforce while providing additional support for those suffering from GI cancers.
Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost state in Germany, has plans to move almost entirely open source. By the time the dust settles, the regional government will have all but dropped Windows, Microsoft Office, Zoom and other proprietary software for Linux, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, and Jitzi. By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice…
The SocketCAN functionality, combined with the can-utils programs, enable you to view, interact and analyze the CAN bus traffic on Linux. However, these tools are no match for high-end tools such as Vector CANalyzer and CANoe under Windows. I especially miss CAPL scripts on Linux. For this reason I developed the CAPLin framework. With CAPLin you can quickly build a SocketCAN node application in the C programming language.
Remote work is the new norm there has never been a time like this, where as a SE you can make more than a decent living. This isn’t a know-it-all kind of post, I just wanted to write a bit about my experience, but it’s way too long (6 months+) so I will just share what worked and not for me. Before I forget, this is mainly for people like me doing computer science for the sake of doing it. Not because someone forced us or whatever. In short, geeks I guess. If you’re like me the perspective of spam applying and writing corresponding CVs is not very appealing. So, if CS is just a means to an end - not that there’s something wrong with that - but this might rub you off the wrong way (and you guessed right, no, I don’t look forward to enter management to “escape” coding). The job landscape in Cameroon is… saddening. While everywhere else the supply exceeds the demand, here it’s the exact opposite, which inevitably leads to abuse. Also, if you are still a student, this might not be for you directly, you can still read it to be prepared but there are many opportunities for students and I talk a bit about GSoC here. That being said, let’s get started.
I think that perfectly captures the spirit of Emacs and the nature of its (most devoted) users. I’d even go a bit farther and make the claim that (using) Emacs is essentially a lifestyle (choice).
Finally, as we observe here once more, writing C leaves us (necessarily) at the whims of the compiler: FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE happens to use clang, and gcc(1) would have failed in either of our two scenarios. So one question that arises is whether compilers should perhaps auto-initialize stack variables.
clang has a discussion around this, as does gcc, but there does not seem to be an agreed upon conclusion. Considering the possible security implications, it does seem to me that it would be a Good Thingâ⢠to at least move away from having uninitialized variables by default and instead requiring explicit requests from the programmer (say, by way of an attribute?) that a given stack variable not be initialized. But I honestly don't know what the performance impact of this would be.
Either way, I'm going to make it a habit to memset(3) my structs going forward...
I think about tests in terms of defense in depth, value-for-effort and debugging efficiency.
Debugging efficiency is not something I see discussed often and it's the only place where I disagree slightly with Aleksey's post above. The more that happens between the cause of a bug and the actual test failure, the longer it takes to track down the bug. So I tend to write unit tests for code which is: [...]
I have a file called 'ideas' where I write down potential projects or thoughts that might be worth writing about. Entries grow over time as I add more thoughts. The entry that eventually became Against SQL existed for over a year. Every time I encountered a new bizaare corner of the SQL I would make a quick note of it.
Eventually one of the ideas will feel ready and I'll try to write it up in full. This can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on what the goal of writing it is and how much research is required. Against SQL took something like 60-80 hours to write because I was trying to make a strong argument about a complicated and contentious subject. Why isn't differential dataflow more popular took maybe an hour or two because I just wanted to hear about other peoples experiences.
Property-based testing can be a bit trickier to learn, and not every problem can be well tested in this manner, but it’s a powerful technique that’s well supported by the go std-lib (testing/quick) and that is under-utilized.
In episode 91 of The Secure Developer, Guy Podjarny speaks to Dr. David A. Wheeler, an expert in both open source and developing secure software. David is the Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation and teaches a graduate course in developing secure software at George Mason University. Today’s discussion revolves around open source security (or OSS), in which David is an expert, not just from the perspective of consuming open source but also creating and even governing open source. Tuning in, you’ll learn about some of the primary security concerns in open source and the necessity to educate developers about secure software.
We start off on the topic of looking at metrics that are useful for identifying what’s going on in a Software Configuration Management system. David tells us what it is and if there’s a difference between building software and deploying it. Also, figuring out which components you’re going to bring in, to your overall system.
Developed by a team of former Google employees, Toit is a complete IoT platform with remote management, firmware updates for fleets of devices with features similar to the one offered by solutions such as balena, Microsoft Azure, or Particle edge-to-cloud platform.
Toit currently works on ESP32 microcontrollers using lightweight containers, and after seeing existing high-level languages MicroPython and Javascript were not fast enough on low-end microcontrollers platforms, the team at Toit started to develop the Toit language in 2018, and has just made it open-source with the release of the compiler, virtual machine, and standard libraries on Github under an LGPL-2.1 license.
The Laravel team released 8.73 with support for Countable objects in the string pluralizer, allowing closures for determining cache TTL, a lazyByIdDesc() query builder method, and the latest changes in the v8.x branch.
A container class as the name suggests is used to contain different values, objects, and variables, etc. in the memory or the external storage. A container class supports other classes present in the programs and it functions to hide the objects/variables used in the memory. It stores many items and all of these items are easily accessible by other members of the program.
All container classes access the elements of the container efficiently through the iterators. This class is known to hold some similar and mixed objects in the memory. A container can be of a homogeneous or heterogeneous type. If the container holds mixed objects then it is heterogeneous, while in the case of similar items it is known as homogeneous container class.
We are going to explain this concept on the Linux operating system, so you need to have Ubuntu installed and in the running form on your system. So you must install Virtual Box and after downloading and installation now configure it. Now add the Ubuntu file to it. You can access Ubuntu’s official website, and download the file according to your system requirement and operating system. It will take hours, then after installation, configure it on the virtual machine. In the configuration process, make sure you have created the user because it is essential for any operation on the Ubuntu terminal. Moreover, Ubuntu needs the authentication of the user before doing any installation.
We have used the 20.04 version of Ubuntu; you may use the latest one. For the implementation, you need to have a text editor and must have access to the Linux terminal, because we will be able to see the output of the source codes on the terminal through the query. The user must have basic knowledge of C++ and object-oriented programming to make use of classes in the program.
You may have used many logical, arithmetic, and comparison operators within mathematics and programming while working. One of the frequently used logical operators is the XOR operator. It returns exactly the opposite of the result of the OR operator. Within this article, we will be using the XOR operator on two string-type variable values while working in a Python environment. Let’s have some examples in the Ubuntu 20.04 system.
In Python, the conversion of different data types is a common problem and it is very important to do it right. Dictionary is the data type that saves the information/elements in a pair form. It is important to convert the string data type to a dictionary data type during programming. However, before going to the methods of conversion, let me explain the strings and dictionaries.
A string is a series of elements in Python. It is unchangeable. The elements or items are enclosed in single and double quotation marks. Since Python has no proper character data type. However, any character is also taken as a string in Python.
In Python, a dictionary is essentially a collection of changeable data items. This collection is present in an unordered form. Dictionaries save the data in which every element is in the form of a pair. The elements inside the brackets are present in the form of pairs and each pair is segregated by the comma. But the elements are isolated by using a colon.
The main attribute of the dictionary is that it does not accept polymorphism. We can get the data from the dictionary later by referencing the appropriate key name. Let’s discuss the techniques of converting the string to a dictionary.
The Python language is used to store the string in the form of Unicode. Within Unicode, a simple code point is utilized to represent a single character of a Unicode. We have to know two terms: encode and decode. The encoding would convert a simple string to a group of bytes while decoding will convert the group of bytes to a real string once again.
So, within this article today, we will be decoding a string to an original one with the encode() and decode() function. Be sure to configure the python3 package on your Linux system. Let’s start today’s article by launching the terminal console using the Ctrl+Alt+T.
In Python, the strings are a series of elements. These elements are surrounded by single and double quotation marks. Python has a newline symbol. It is represented by “/n”. It is utilized to track the climax of a line and the appearance of a new line. The newline character is utilized in f-strings. In addition, the print statement prints a newline character to the end.
Newline character “/n” is a special character. It is helpful to make a new line. When we utilize the newline character (/n), a new line is created spontaneously.
This article will cover a guide on converting code written in the Kotlin programming language to Java programming language and vice versa. Kotlin is a relatively new programming language being developed by JetBrains and it is fully interoperable with Java programming language. It offers some benefits over Java programming language like a more concise syntax, more built-in helper functions, stricter null type checking, data classes, and so on. Full list of differences between these two languages is available here. Kotlin is now the preferred language for developing Android apps and it has been fully integrated into Android Studio app development software suite.
You can convert Kotlin to Java and Java to Kotlin using offline tools. Some of them are explained in this article. Do note that depending on the code being converted and the type of tool being used for the conversion purpose, the converted code may not be 100% accurate and you may have to make some manual edits. You should always review converted code before using it in an application.
It is three o’clock in the afternoon. The golden sunshine tumbles through the southern window of the main reading room of the Braille Library of China (BLC), yet there is not a single reader in sight.
Make no mistake — that does not mean the custodians of this literary trove are doing nothing. On the contrary, the librarian on duty is quite busy.
She simultaneously keeps one eye on WeChat, while checking the QQ app for new messages with the other, as well as standing ready to answer the phone that might ring at any time. All calls and messages come from visually impaired people or their families seeking that most essential of societal needs access to knowledge.
It should be noted that YassifyBot is not actually a bot. Its tweets aren’t generated by software. The account is run by a 22-year-old college student in Omaha who makes art under the name Denver Adams and asked that The Times not reveal their legal name.
The process for making each image is simple: Take a face, run it through FaceApp until it looks generically or grotesquely sexy, post, repeat. Mr. Adams said in a Zoom interview that each image takes only a few minutes to create
The year WD-40 was invented by the Rocket Chemical Company. Located in San Diego, CA, the goal of the product was to create something that would prevent rust and corrosion on aircraft. After forty attempts to create the formula, they famously came up with the right one on their 40th attempt. The name WD-40 stands for water displacement, formula 40. It’s first application came as a coating for the Atlas missiles made by Corvair in the 1950s.
During an earthquake, solid ground can loosen into something like quicksand.
Under earthquake shaking some types of soil undergo liquefaction, a softening caused by groundwater pressure that becomes an evil twin to ground shaking. Liquefaction causes large ground deformations that have toppled buildings large and small, as well as crushed pipes below and taken out roads, rail, bridges, and levees.
Such was the case for the 2010 Canterbury earthquake sequence, the most damaging being the magnitude 6.2 Christchurch earthquake. The sequence of earthquakes, 21 of which were greater than magnitude 5, caused $3 billion in damage to buildings and infrastructure on the South Island of New Zealand, particularly in the city of Christchurch, which would receive the brunt of the deadlier aftershocks a year later.
While these satellite swarms are going to make life difficult for astronomers observing the universe in visible light, they are set to be even more problematic for astronomers who work with radio waves—one of the most important tools in an astronomer’s cosmic toolbox. They are emitted by all kinds of things in space, from organic molecules to dying stars. Jodie Foster in the film Contact (playing Ellie Arroway) was listening to the universe using radio waves, and to this day telescopes involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial life, use these waves to scan the sky for signs of cosmic intelligence.
All of this work is in jeopardy. Satellite swarms have to communicate with humans on Earth, and they do so using radio waves. It won’t take long before the effect of all these satellites becomes overwhelming: In 10 years time we could have 100,000 radio beacons in the sky, blasting our planet with a wall of radio noise capable of deafening even the most sensitive radio telescope.
When the family house in Devon, Pa., caught fire, Drew Endy, then 12, carried out his most cherished possession — his personal computer.
Years later, as a graduate student, Mr. Endy was accepted to Ph.D. programs in biotechnology and political science.
The episodes seem to sum up Mr. Endy, a most unusual scientist: part engineer, part philosopher, whose conversation is laced with references to Descartes and Dylan, as well as DNA.
He’s also an evangelist of sorts. Mr. Endy, a 51-year-old professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, is a star in the emerging field of synthetic biology. He is its most articulate enthusiast, inspiring others to see it as a path to a better world, a transformational technology to feed the planet, conquer disease and combat pollution.
One of the justifications for tenure is that professors who have tenure can speak more freely. Thus, in theory, they can be critical of government or corporate policies.
Do they? What would “speaking freely” entails?
So the big question we have to answer is: What messages are our kids getting about the value of a college education? Perhaps more importantly: What messages are we — parents, teachers and mentors — giving them when it comes to their future in the workforce?
The Magnus effect is a interesting and useful phenomena. [James Whomsley] from [Project Air] decided to put it to work on a small radio-controlled boat, successfully harnessing the effect. (Video, embedded after the break.)
The Magnus effect is an interesting thing, where fluid flowing over a rotating object generates an aerodynamic force at a right angle to the direction of the flow and the axis of rotation. (It’s why curveballs curve.) This can be used for propulsion on a boat, by spinning a tall cylinder called a Flettner rotor. This takes advantage of Magnus effect to generate thrust.
Do you ever sit around thinking of ways to repurpose things in your house? Well [BevCanTech] found a way to recycle some of his empty beverage cans by turning them into homemade wire.
“They don’t make them like they used to.” It might be a cliché, it might not even be entirely true, but there’s something special about owning a piece of hardware that was built to a much higher standard than most of its contemporaries, whether it’s that bulletproof Benz from 1992 or that odd fridge from 1987 that just seems to last forever. For laptop aficionados, the Thinkpad series from IBM and Lenovo is the ne plus ultra: beloved for their sturdy construction and rich feature set, they have been used anywhere from the United Nations to the International Space Station. The T60 and T61 (introduced in 2006) are especially famous, being the last generation sporting IBM logos and such classic features as 4:3 displays and infrared ports.
India’s farmers have mobilized to create one of the world’s most vibrant protests in history, camping on the outskirts of New Delhi for one year now. Friday, November 26, 2021, marked the one-year anniversary of the day when these farmers faced water cannons and tear gas at the Delhi border as they tried to reach the Capital. On November 19, they got a big win, as Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, announced that he has decided to repeal the three controversial farm laws.
As a leading World Health Organization official pleaded against "knee-jerk" reactions after the discovery in Botswana of the latest Covid-19 strain, South Africa's government on Saturday joined public health advocates in criticizing wealthy nations for imposing travel bans on African countries while failing to address "the vaccine inequity that drives new variants."
"These travel bans are based in politics, and not in science. It is wrong... Why are we locking away Africa when this virus is already on three continents?"
Wastewater samples for drug use monitoring are planned to be taken in Tallinn, Kohtla-Järve, Pärnu, Viljandi and Võru. The first samples will be taken in mid-January and the results will be available in February. In the future, wastewater samples will be analyzed for traces of drugs once every quarter.
Although the trend has been identified, it’s not yet definitive what is causing it: Are drug users knowingly using fentanyl and other drugs, or does fentanyl enter the larger drug supply via dealers and distributors?
“It really could be happening at any point and multiple points along the drug supply chain,” said Kelly Dougherty, Vermont’s deputy health commissioner for alcohol and drug abuse programs. “Some people want to use fentanyl, despite the dangers, and other people are using it without knowing — it’s scary. People are cutting it in, and it basically makes it more deadly.”
Over eight hours last Thursday night and into Friday morning, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California hit on many issues as he spoke on the House floor in an unsuccessful effort to thwart House passage of President Biden’s social safety net and climate change bill. But among his most audacious assertions was that Mr. Biden was to blame for the country’s failure to quell the pandemic.
Mr. McCarthy used this line of attack even as members of his own Republican Party have spent months flouting mask ordinances and blocking the president’s vaccine mandates, and the party’s base has undermined vaccination drives while rallying around those who refuse the vaccine. Intensive care units and morgues have been strained to capacity by the unvaccinated, a demographic dominated by those who voted last year for President Donald J. Trump.
The chief of the World Health Organization has warned that the COVID-19 pandemic is not yet over and that some people were falling into a “false sense of security” after being vaccinated against the virus.
In a news briefing in Geneva on Wednesday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said many vaccinated people were thinking – wrongly – that receiving the COVID shot meant they no longer needed to take any other precautions.
A local entrepreneur is announcing another technological innovation that will be an important tool in combating the COVID-19 pandemic. Detect, Inc., of Guilford, founded by National Medal of Technology and Innovation recipient Dr. Jonathan Rothberg, has created an accurate, fast, and easy-to-use PCR-quality molecular COVID-19 test, according to the company.
Business accelerators have long been a crucial link for taking startups from the research and prototype stage to marketing and selling their products and services to customers. But until about six years ago, there were only a couple of accelerators to serve L.A.’s medical device and health tech industries — including one exclusively focused on medical devices for pediatric care.
Starting in 2015, a pair of life science accelerators came onto the L.A. County scene seeking to serve the burgeoning health tech sector: Cedars-Sinai Accelerator in West Hollywood and MedTech Innovator in Westwood. They were soon joined by KidsX in East Hollywood — affiliated with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and USC — and a program from the South Park-based Larta Institute known as Heal.LA, along with one incubator for health tech startups, ScaleHealth in Palms.
“Public is advised not to subscribe to Starlink services being advertised,” a tweet from India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) reads. The DoT also says it asked Starlink to refrain from “booking / rendering the satellite internet services in India.” In other words, Starlink will have to put preorders on hold until it can get approval from the Indian government.
A government statement issued late on Friday said Starlink had been told to comply with regulations and refrain from "booking/rendering the satellite internet services in India with immediate effect".
Microsoft-owned GitHub experienced a more than two-hour long outage today, affecting thousands or potentially millions of developers that rely on its many services. GitHub started experiencing issues at around 3:45PM ET, with Git operations, API requests, GitHub actions, packages, pages, and pull requests all affected.
Faced with increased demand, major European and U.S. insurers and syndicates operating in the Lloyd's of London market have been able to charge higher premium rates to cover ransoms, the repair of hacked networks, business interruption losses and even PR fees to mend reputational damage.
But the increase in ransomware attacks and the growing sophistication of attackers have made insurers wary. Insurers say some attackers may even check whether potential victims have policies that would make them more likely to pay out.
Save your huzzahs and whatever you do, do not pop the champagne. Apple did not just ‘cave’ to the right to repair movement, and the fight for an actual, legal right to repair is more important now than ever.
The occasion for this reminder is, of course, the little-‘m’ momentous announcement by Apple this morning that it would make “Apple parts, tools, and manuals” available to “individual consumers” for self repair — starting with the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13.”
From their listing, Avos Locker is clearly aware that this is a tiny school district with only a few hundred students and less than two dozen teachers. And yet they are trying to ransom them. Avos writes: “If they refuse to negotiate, we will leak all the data we’ve got.”
On the same day Apple announced a lawsuit against Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group for developing [cracking] tools to help breach iOS technology, the company was notifying potential targets of those exploits.
El Faro, a news organization in San Salvador, El Salvador, reported late Tuesday that 12 of its staff members received notices from the company, which warned that that “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.” The company also sent notices to four others in San Salvador who are “leaders of Civil Society organizations and opposition political parties,” the news organization reported.
Here’s how I built a website, Profilerpedia, using a Google Sheet as the backing database.
Profilerpedia aims to map the profiling ecosystem and connect software with profilers and profilers with great analysis UIs, so we can make code faster and more efficient. More on Profilerpedia in the announcement post.
It’s interesting to explain the architecture, because it challenges some engineering dogmas, like “a spreadsheet isn’t a good database”. I think running your site from a spreadsheet is a very reasonable pattern for many sites.
The resulting architecture is my third or fourth attempt at this; I learned a lot along the way, I’m pretty happy with the result, and I want to share what I learned.
When the first Boeing 737 MAX plane came off the production line in December 2015, it was the beginning of a highly anticipated new line of aircraft for the storied company. It incorporated the latest technology and was billed by Boeing as "deliver[ing] the highest efficiency, reliability and passenger comfort in the single-aisle market." Tragically, that promise came to a glaring halt with two back-to-back disasters in which flight control software known as the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) incorrectly gauged the aircrafts' angles of ascent and prevented the pilots from manually overriding it. In total, 346 people on board Lion Air flight 610 on October 28, 2018 and Ethiopian Air flight 302 on March 10, 2019 were killed after only about 13 minutes and 6 minutes in the air, respectively.
A recent research paper by a team at University of California, Riverside, shows the existence of previously overlooked side channels in the Linux kernels that can be exploited to attack DNS servers.
According to the researchers, the issue with DNS roots in its design, that never really took security as a key concern and that made it extremely hard to retrofit strong security features into it.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 194. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Don't traceback when comparing nested directories with non-directories. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#288)
Researchers have highlighted a trio of potential attacks against printers that could allow denial of service, information theft, or botnet compromise.
The collection of attacks, labeled Printjack, appeared in a paper from researchers Giampaolo Bella and Pietro Biondi at the Universit`a di Catania and Istituto di Informatica e Telematica in Italy.
The ACLU of Northern California has concluded a year-long Freedom of Information campaign by uncovering massive spying on Black Lives Matter protests from the air. The California Highway Patrol directed aerial surveillance, mostly done by helicopters, over protests in Berkeley, Oakland, Palo Alto, Placerville, Riverside, Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Luis Obispo. The footage, which you can watch online, includes police zooming in on individual protestors, die-ins, and vigils for victims of police violence.
WhatsApp has won regulatory approval to double the number of users on its payments service in India to 40 million, a source with direct knowledge told Reuters on Friday.
The company had requested that there should be no cap on users of its payment service in India.
Instead, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI)this week told the company it could double the user base to which it can offer its payment service - currently restricted to 20 million - the source said.
WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta.
The EU supported trials of the use of “artificial intelligence” at its borders by testing a “video lie detector” on travellers. On 15 March 2019, MEP and civil liberties activist Dr Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) filed a lawsuit for the release of secret documents on the ethical justifiability, legality and the results of the technology. The European Court of Justice will deliver its judgement publicly in Luxembourg on 15 December 2021 (Case T-158/19). A landmark ruling could generally shed light on EU-funded ââ¬Å¾security research“.
Yesterday afternoon, the new German government coalition of SPD, FDP and the Greens presented its coalition agreement to the public. MEP, civil rights activist and lawyer Dr Patrick Breyer of the Pirate Party hails the new positions Germany is taking on EU digital policies: [...]
UPnP has sort of a bad reputation, and it's very common in online conversations to see people repeating "disable UPnP" as stock advice. There is some reason for this, although the concern is mostly misguided. It's still amusing, though, as it relates to the one tiny corner of UPnP functionality which has ever really had any success.
Before we dig into that, though, we need some history.
In a document filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, GoDaddy noted that the company had discovered its Managed WordPress hosting environment had been compromised by an “unauthorized third party,” resulting in emails and customers numbers of 1.2 million Managed WordPress users being exposed.
Rep. Ilhan Omar on Saturday condemned her GOP colleagues' inaction following the recent publication by Rep. Lauren Boebert of an anti-Muslim video in which the Colorado Republican lies about the Somali-American lawmaker being mistaken for a suspected suicide bomber inside the U.S. Capitol.
"These anti-Muslim attacks aren't about my ideas but about my identity and it's clear," Omar (D-Minn.) tweeted.
“We always have to sacrifice our people, our land. We always have to face the risks of war and hosting military bases… I call it dual colonialism, by the Japanese and U.S. government.”
What hangs in the balance is the survival of American democracy. Picciolini sees all the political momentum on the right, aided by disruptive foreign agents who manipulate social media to encourage hatred, division and extreme partisanship. Meanwhile, the combination of voter suppression and the "big lie" subversion of faith in fair elections has brought America, in his words, "to the edge of disaster." At the more immediate level, Picciolini joins many experts, such as genocide scholar Alexander Laban Hinton and political scientist Anthony DiMaggio, in predicting the possibility of mass violence.
The buildings have been bombed during the six-year Saudi-led air campaign against the rebel Houthi movement - which forced Yemen's government out of Sanaa - and left to decay.
Police say that Sheikh Rwangabo has agents in Nansana, Ntinda, Kagoma, Bugerere Kayunga and Kawempe Division that hoodwink parents with different promises and end up taking children.
The children who were rescued are now all in a shelter home and the process to reunite them with their families is ongoing
137,000 killed by Muslim Fulani herdsmen who have targeted Christians and Muslims who do not accept their authority. Will the Islamophobia never end?
“Over 137,000 People, 100 Security Agents Have Been Killed By Fulani Herdsmen In Benue—Governor Ortom,” Sahara Reporters, November 18, 2021: [...]
The visit of the chairman of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, one of the most important Islamic organisations in India, Maulana Arshad Madani, to the “House of Integration” in 2017 gave a first indication of the spirit in the institution. Madani is an influential Deobandi, i.e. a representative of an Islamist ideology that, mixed with some Wahhabi elements, makes up the foundation of the Taliban ideology.
Students protested at three different high schools in the Bellevue School District, all calling for change on how the district responds to reports of assault.
The demonstrations continued at Interlake, Sammamish, and Newport high schools on Tuesday after five students were expelled from Newport High School for their roles in a protest on Friday. A student who reported being physically assaulted was among the students expelled.
The IRGC'S Basij paramilitary wing releases mobile game in which players can rescue Floyd, a Black man killed by US police in 2020
The public can now access Ohio’s database listing incidents of use-of-force by law enforcement in the state.
The use of force database is operated by the Office of Criminal Justice Services. OCJS officials say they opened the database to the public in order to increase transparency.
By June Sekera, The New School and Neva Goodwin, Tufts University
After decades of sowing doubt about climate change and its causes, the fossil fuel industry is now shifting to a new strategy: presenting itself as the source of solutions. This repositioning includes rebranding itself as a “carbon management industry.”
The long-awaited report by the Interior Department stops short of recommending an end to oil and gas leasing on public lands, as many environmental groups have urged. But officials said the report would lead to a more responsible leasing process that provides a better return to U.S. taxpayers.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies will meet next week. They're expected to discuss whether to adjust plans to increase output by 400,000 barrels per day in January and beyond.
It's part of OPEC's strategy to gingerly restore deep cuts made last year, when lockdowns and travel restrictions caused demand for fuel and prices to crater.
Pinnipeds, including seals, sea lions and walruses, have whiskers that are particularly thick and long, making them easier to measure than those of smaller mammals such as mice.
They also have some of the most sensitive whiskers of any mammal – they can detect textures and shapes to the same sensitivity as human fingertips, even in cold water when our fingers would go numb.
They are also moveable. We have previously found that California sea lions make the largest and most controlled movements with their whiskers, when compared to harbour seals and Pacific walruses.
Those factors, plus their ability to perform object-discrimination tasks – where they could distinguish between objects based on size and shape – made California sea lions the ideal subject for our investigation on task-specific whisker movements.
By Dana M Bergstrom and Shavawn Donoghue – We tend to think Antarctica is isolated and far away – biologically speaking, this is true. But the continent is busier than you probably imagine, with many national programs and tourist operators crisscrossing the globe to get there.
And each vessel, each cargo item, and each person could be harbouring non-native species, hitchhiking their way south. This threat to Antarctica’s fragile ecosystem is what our new evaluation, grapples with.
On Small Business Saturday, it’s a day not only to shop small and local but also to reflect on how we can better support small businesses and our local economy for the long term.€
Facebook, Amazon and Google, have all received a significant amount of scrutiny in recent years about their tax affairs, but the last of the FANG group of companies, Netflix, has not.
One reason for this could be that that Netflix has historically not been as profitable as other digital companies, as it has spent large amounts of money building an international presence and buying film rights. However, recent years have seen the company’s profits rocket, from $123m in 2015, to $1.2bn in 2018.
In this report, we provide an analysis of Netflix’s corporate structure which shows that the company has implemented a similar tax avoidance structure to many other multi-national companies operating in the digital space. Revenues are not collected in the country where they are made. Instead, customers are charged from an offshore company. Profits appear to then be moved from the hub company to a tax haven through the use of intra-company transactions.
Netflix’s historically lower profit margins mean that the scale of any tax avoidance will be much lower than other well known companies that employ similar tactics.
However, the structure that the company operates presents a significant risk factor for the tax base of many countries as the company expands its presence, increases market share and sees an increase in profits.
In total, we estimate that the company moved between $327.8m to $430m in profits to low tax jurisdictions from its international operations. Netflix also presents another issue particular to the film and television world, which is the way in which it is able to attract tax credits. The company is now ramping up production of original content in the UK, and it is likely that this will attract substantial subsidies from the UK taxpayer. Indeed, recently the company said that it is spending over €£400m making original content in the UK this year, which means that it is likely to be eligible for tens of millions of pounds in tax relief when it next reports its UK accounts.
This demonstrates a significant loophole when it comes to the administration of tax credits for multinational companies, which can take advantage of credits by locating costs in the jurisdictions where they are on offer, whilst at the same time putting their revenues somewhere else entirely.
From leg amputations in Thailand to hijackings in Nigeria, millions of food delivery drivers around the world find themselves torn between the desperation to make a living and the fear that each ride may be their last.
The gig economy has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and brought with it a wave of concerns from drivers and researchers who say that dangerous roads and inadequate safety equipment and training are putting lives on the line daily.
By 2020 there were at least 777 digital labour platforms - from food delivery to web design - around the world, up from about 140 a decade earlier, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Katherine Rickfelder, a Florida public school teacher, is one of nearly 30,000 people who have seen their student debt balance reduced to zero since the federal government announced significant changes to a popular loan forgiveness program last month.
"I cried when I got the letter. I honestly feel like I can finally breathe again," said Rickfelder, who had another five years of payments to make under the old rules of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. She started paying off her student debt about 16 years ago.
The letter, which she received from the US Department of Education in October, said that she would get credit for 91 additional monthly payments she had made on her student loans. That meant that she had already made more than the 120 payments required for debt forgiveness under the PSLF program, which is aimed at borrowers working in government and nonprofit sectors.
The reason why the Moderna billionaires might be especially upsetting is that so much of what they did was with government funding. The development of mRNA technology, beginning in the early 1980s, was accomplished almost entirely on the government’s dime.
Legislation requiring critical infrastructure owners to report major cyber incidents to the federal government, and mandating that ransomware victims disclose when they make payments, has hit a significant snag in the Senate.
A bipartisan group of senators announced a proposal in November that would require critical infrastructure owners and operators to report within 72 hours to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency when they suffer major cyber incidents, as defined by CISA. It also would require reporting of ransomware payments to CISA from a broader set of organizations, excluding only individuals and some smaller businesses, within 24 hours.
I want to flash back to the rise and fall of a once popular storytelling website called Upworthy. It is one of a zillion examples of the power of Facebook and other technology superstars to make or break other companies’ dreams.
“The world needs rules for artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. The Recommendation on the ethics of AI is a major answer. It sets the first global normative framework while giving States the responsibility to apply it at their level. UNESCO will support its 193 Member states in its implementation and ask them to report regularly on their progress and practices”, said UNESCO chief Audrey Azoulay.
Participants will consider how AI governance and innovation networks can be enhanced to direct AI towards the common good in education, and for humanity.
This document identifies key challenges and opportunities in the government application of Open Source Software (OSS), as reported in interviews of experts, suppliers, and potential users. There are many challenges to the collaborative development and use of such software in the government. To maximize the use of limited resources, the U.S. government must address these challenges, which can be grouped into categories such as: inertia, fears about low quality and malware, concerns about commercial support, procurement issues, and certification and accreditation (C&A) issues. Interviewees reported a critical need for OSS guidance and education. Specific interviewee recommendations included requiring that software and C&A materials developed with government funding be developed collaboratively and widely shared, that the government receive full data rights for such material, and that the government release such software as OSS by default.
In April, Police in Punjab province arrested nurse Maryam Lal and third-year nursing student Navish Arooj on blasphemy charges after staff at Civil Hospital in Faisalabad city accused them of removing a sticker from a cupboard that had a verse from the Quran written on it. One of the nurses was allegedly attacked by a knife-wielding Muslim colleague.
For years, as a columnist for the New York Times, I wrote an annual giving guide, which in 2019 and 2020 included Holiday Impact awards. I recently resigned from that job to run for governor in Oregon, but I wanted to continue the tradition.
The city was a Democratic stronghold in a state Trump won to secure the presidency in 2016 and needed to win again to remain in the White House. It was also a city long dogged by Republican accusations of election fraud. Will Chamberlain had driven up from Washington, DC, to chase these allegations as a last-minute volunteer with the group Lawyers for Trump.
But Chamberlain wasn’t merely a lawyer. Although he had briefly worked at a commercial litigation firm in Los Angeles after passing the bar, he left that job in the spring of 2016, moved to DC, and spent the Trump years running MAGA Meetups, relaunching a right-wing magazine, and generally reinventing himself as a pro-Trump social media figure. When the campaign realized he had roughly 150,000 followers on Twitter, his role changed. “They figured out I’d be more useful doing stuff that wasn’t just legal,” Chamberlain told me.
How should parents react to this news, and to the books their children are reading? NPR senior editor Barrie Hardymon and Traci Thomas, host of The Stacks podcast, joined guest host Ayesha Rascoe to talk about banned book lists.
The three talk about why it's important for kids to discover books freely, even if that means starting a hard conversation with them. They also discuss their favorite — and least favorite — books that often show up on banned book lists.
The disruption registered in the southwestern city of Ahvaz comes amid protests against government water management policies which have centered around Isfahan, where outages have also been reported by users.
Born Anton Zaslavski, the Russian-German DJ and music producer made the announcement via social media. He has 8.1 million followers on Twitter alone.
“I just got permanently banned from China because I liked a @SouthPark tweet,” Zedd said via a tweet.
His reps confirmed to CNBC Zedd was notified he was banned from the country.
Sources told the site that Perry, 33, had applied for a visa but was denied by Chinese officials. Page Sixreports that the singer was informed she'd be granted access, but that changed after the government became aware of a sunflower dress she had worn during a performance in Taipei, Taiwan, in 2015.
The look had caused controversy because the sunflower was the key symbol of a 2014 movement that protested a Chinese trade agreement that was seen as unfair to Taiwan. At one point of the concert, Perry also draped a Taiwanese flag over her shoulders. Though it might not have been her intention, the outfit and the flag-waving was seen as a politically charged gesture and caused uproar in China, which has had long-running tensions with Taiwan regarding its independence.
For around $5, curious visitors can wander around and take photos of the giant holes in the cliff face where the ancient Buddha statues once stood.
Murad advocates for survivors of genocide and sexual violence and is also a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and UN Goodwill Ambassador.
Murad’s book tells how she escaped the Islamic State after being taken from her home and sold into sexual slavery when she was just 14.
Murad details how she was raped and tortured before finding her way to a refugee camp in Durhok, in northern Iraq, and then to Germany, where she lives today.
Helen Fisher, the superintendent at the Toronto District School Board, voiced her concerns over Ms Murad’s ‘The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State’ and said that her students would not participate in a sit-down event with the author scheduled for February.
For many of us who have followed the mass murder of the Yazidi people of Iraq and have marvelled at the courage of Murad, the TDSB decision came as a shock. It reeked of ignorance and subservience to an Islamist attitude that has infiltrated too many institutions of Canada, especially urban schools where cafeterias have been turned into prayer halls, with gender apartheid on full display.
Shocked by the exchange with Helen Fisher, Tanya Lee says she then sent her an email containing detailed information on the Islamic organization, coming from the BBC and CNN.
Nadia was all set to discuss her book with the students of TDSB, however, the school board president Helen Fisher pulled the event, claiming that Nadia's book might promote 'Islamophobia' amongst the students. Fisher issued an apology for the act as well.
Katey O'Connor, a teacher at Muncie Central High School, had her students read V for Vendetta, the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and create some posters reflecting on how the ideological mission of the eponymous V from the book might relate to current real-life social conditions.
In the book, V is a queer anarchist who openly admits that he's doing terrorism as performance art in the name of anti-fascist liberation. He is fighting against a racist, sexist, homophobic authoritarian government.
In 1921, the Manchester Guardian’s editor, Charles Prestwich Scott, marked the newspaper’s centenary with an essay entitled “A Hundred Years.” In it, Scott declared that a newspaper’s “primary office is the gathering of news. …Comment is free, but facts are sacred.”
The result of Assange’s appeal should be known by Christmas (though he will not be immediately released unless America formally drops its case). In the meantime, Moris, 38, has been fighting a second battle. After our meeting, she is rushing straight off to meet her lawyer about their legal action against the deputy prime minister Dominic Raab and the Belmarsh prison governor, who she claims were blocking her and Assange from getting married inside the prison. Just hours later, the news she has been battling for comes through: after five years of trying, she and the Australian-born whistleblower have been granted permission to marry. Moris is relieved that “reason has prevailed” in her marriage battle, calling the delays a “completely outrageous and illegal interference in [their] private lives”.
The authorities have attempted to introduce similar restrictions against household animals in recent years as the ownership of dogs and other pets has become more popular despite the clerical establishment's arguments that keeping them inside homes is unhygienic and un-Islamic. Instances of people being attacked by stray dogs have also fueled calls for restrictions.
But while previous attempts to curtail pet ownership through local bans on dog walking and transportation have largely failed or met resistance, the latest proposal would be nationwide and comes as hard-liners increase their influence following the election of ultraconservative President Ebrahim Raisi in June.
What's a two-tier contract? Just what it sounds like: management offers the union concessions on its key demands, but only for current workers. Future workers get a worse deal.
Management's theory is that workers may have solidarity with one another, but not with workers who haven't even been hired yet, and that a two-tier contract will lead to an ever-expanding cohort of workers who pay full union dues but don't get full union benefits. Thus, over the span of years, the union will get weaker and weaker, and eventually it will be too weak to stand up for any of its workers – even the top-tier workers, who will see all those gains clawed back in future negotiations.
Media couldn’t access the raw footage taken by filmmaker Michael Toledano until he and journalist Amber Bracken were released from prison days later. Even though the pair had identified themselves as journalists, the RCMP jailed them anyway. When they were released three days later, we then saw the dramatic arrest of unarmed land defenders at gunpoint.
Turkish police on Thursday fired tear gas to break up a protest in Istanbul by women demanding the country’s return to a landmark international treaty, signed in the same city, that is meant to protect women from violence.
It was the eve of Valentine’s Day in 2020. Inès and Sébastien, two young people from Colombes in the middle of a love affair, were planning to celebrate the day of lovers. But Inès’ brother, who viewed his sister’s relationship with suspicion, would not allow it. On this February 13, he stabbed Sébastien with a knife and is now on trial before the jury court of the Hauts-de-Seine department.Le PArisien.
The gunmen allegedly told the villagers that they were going to marry the girls. A community leader who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had earlier informed them that the girls should be withdrawn from the school because they would come to marry them, adding that they were surprised that the terrorists came yesterday (Thursday) to pick up the girls without any security check. He said the group leader, identified as Malam Sadiku led several operations in the area, preaching weird Islamic ideology unhindered for several months.
It described his sentencing in December 2015 as being the result of "a grossly unfair trial" by a court that "relied on torture-tainted 'confessions'".
Mahmood Amiry Moghaddam, head of Oslo-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR) which monitors executions in Iran, described Abdolali's execution as an "international crime".
OHCHR expressed serious concern that his case follows the pattern of child offenders being convicted after a flawed trial and on the basis of forced confessions.
“It is deeply alarming and shocking that his hanging went ahead, despite interventions by numerous parties on the case, including direct engagement by the UN Human Rights Office with the Government of Iran,” Spokesperson Liz Throssell said in a statement.
Says John Arquilla, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Defense Analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, "There's a growing emphasis among some governments to curtail political freedom by using the Internet and social media to control thought and action."
Out of Control
Internet freedom is eroding on two fronts: the sheer number of efforts to block access to legitimate information, and the level of sophistication used. According to Access Now, an organization that says it "defends and extends the digital rights of users at risk around the world," 850 intentional shutdowns have taken place over the last decade, with 768 of these events occurring over the last five years.
The proposed DSA aims to keep users safe from illegal goods, content or services and protect their fundamental rights online, on the principle that what is illegal offline should also be illegal online.
Remember how Microsoft spent years in hot water in the late '90s and early '00s by forcing Internet Explorer on its customers? European open-source cloud company Nextcloud does.
Now, with a coalition of other European Union (EU) software and cloud organizations and companies called the "Coalition for a Level Playing Field," Nextcloud has formally complained to the European Commission (EC) about Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior by aggressively bundling its OneDrive cloud, Teams, and other services with Windows 10 and 11.
Microsoft seems to have found itself in a bit of bother at the European Union (EU). This is due to a Nextcloud-led coalition that has filed a complaint against the Redmond tech firm for anti-competitive behavior. Other notable members of the coalition include Tutanota, OnlyOffice, Free Software Foundation Europe, The Document Foundation, and European Digital SME Alliance.
Together, these parties claim that Microsoft is bundling its 365 services such as OneDrive and Teams natively into Windows and is shipping the OS with them installed by default. According to the group, this pushes users to Microsoft's bundled software rather than third-party alternatives. As of now, the challenging party's demands include Microsoft unbundling its software from Windows and adopting open standards that makes it easier for users to switch software. The issue is still evolving so do keep an eye out on our coverage.
In related news, the German state of Schleswig-Holstein has announced that it is shifting 25,000 government machines running Windows to open-source alternatives like Linux by the end of 2026. This will be a multi-step process initially involving migrating to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office, and then switching to Linux entirely. One of the reasons being cited for this massive transition is licensing costs. It is important to note that Munich city attempted the same a few years ago but the experiment eventually failed, with the government going back to Windows in 2015.
The European Patent Office announces that myFC has one of its patents approved in several countries. With the help of the electrochemically operated valve that the patent protects, it is possible to distribute the hydrogen gas individually to the fuel cells.
The Unified Patent Court has already defied many a problem in its now more than 10-year development phase. Years of bitter wrangling over new procedural rules, Brexit and two constitutional complaints in Germany put extreme strain on the nerves of UPC officials and patent experts worldwide. Last Friday, the Austrian Parliament voted in favour of the ratification of the protocol on the provisional agreement (PAP) in its first reading.
Austria will most likely become the member state which will trigger the start of the preparatory phase of the Unitary Patent project. Last Friday the National Council, one of the chambers of its parliament, unanimously approved draft legislation enabling Austria to ratify Protocol for Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement.
Peloton Interactive, Inc., is urging a court to say that its sportswear does not infringe on Lululemon's patent designs by filing a lawsuit against the athletic wear brand earlier this week.
Until now, controversy has surrounded the enforceability of software patents. But a ruling by the German Federal Patent Court has fully upheld investor Zoe Life’s key patent on cloud computing. This marks a success for the software patent industry.
Virgin Media subscribers who responded to letters accusing them of piracy are now getting feedback from movie company lawyers in the UK. While initial feedback suggested that alleged pirates could be on the hook for potentially thousands in damages, it now appears the movie company is taking a broader view of the situation. Whether such claims will hold up in court remains to be seen.
There’s no doubt that the introduction of good-value streaming services like Spotify has meant that many people have stopped turning to unauthorised sources. Separate research from 2012, 2013 and 2014 showed this unequivocally: unauthorised music downloads were cut by 20% to 50% when good legal alternatives were available in a country. What’s sad is that having effectively solved the piracy problem through fairly-priced, simple-to-use services offering nearly everything in one package, the film industry is now “unsolving” it by increasing prices unreasonably, and forcing people to subscribe to multiple, fragmented services in order to access the range of material they want.
Hillborg said he inquired about the rights to Elric a couple of years ago after a chance conversation triggered the idea. He was told at the time that the ancillary rights to the video game were tied up in a movie license that failed to come through. But a year ago, he was contacted again by Moorcock’s agent, who said the rights to a game were now available.
Over time, Elric has become a huge part of fantasy culture. The band Blue Oyster Cult made songs about Elric. The Finnish version of Dungeons in Dragons in the 1980s had Elric’s sword, Stormbringer, on its cover. Elric has also been drawn countless times. (Hillborg said he wasn’t yet ready to talk about the game’s art style, but he said the contributions of fans have been amazing.)
Stockholm, Sweden-based Runatyr will work with development collective Aurora Punks and United Kingdom-based studio Upstream Arcade on the project. The independent-focused companies hope to ship a narrative action computer game in 2024.
The second paragraph above raises an important point. Nigeria’s new copyright law may well serve as a template for the MINT nations, and other rising economies, as they revise their old laws in this domain. If Nigeria brings in wide-ranging copyright exceptions, they could ripple through dozens of legal systems as governments follow suit. Indeed, if Statista’s prediction that Nigeria’s population will reach 400 million in 2050 is correct, it is possible that the country will emerge as one of the trendsetters in copyright law not just for those countries, but for the entire world. Getting it right now is therefore of critical importance.
At CC, we pride ourselves on raising issues thoughtfully and often share articles on our platforms about the digital space where we work. Many times CC staff will expand on these topics through our blog, to provide a perspective that reflects CC’s experiences around our work to support, steward and provide legal and technical assistance for the maximization of digital creativity, innovation and sharing. It is our hope that this open space of conversation will generate different viewpoints and promote civil debate.€
