Carla Schroder, Linux enthusiast and advocate, and the author several well known books on Linux and open source software (including her latest, Linux Cookbook Second Edition), has teamed up with the folks who produce the annual All Things Open conference in Raleigh.
The result is a live online webinar — What’s New in Linux: the Most Significant Changes in the Past Ten Years — that’s scheduled to take place at noon Eastern Time/9 am Pacific Time on December 14. The event is completely free (actually better than free, since they’ll be giving away a number of copies of her new Linux cookbook, as well as some cool All Things Open t-shirts and stickers, all shipped postage paid), but you’ll need to register to attend.
One of the biggest benefits of Linux is its flexibility. With Linux you get to work exactly how you want. If you don't like an interface … change it out for something else. Don't like GNOME, use KDE. Don't like Ubuntu, use any of the hundreds of available distributions. Linux is very much like your laptop—it's not tied down to any one thing.
Flexibility isn't the only benefit of using Linux on a laptop. Unlike some other operating systems, Linux performs quite well on hardware that isn't exactly bleeding edge. Although Linux does run very well on modern hardware, it's just as at home on older laptops. In other words, that laptop that won't run Windows 11, will run probably every Linux distribution on the market like a champ.
Along with that flexibility, comes an unmatched reliability. Linux works. Period. And it'll continue working with very little issue for a long, long time. You won't have crashes or lose precious productivity to lengthy upgrades (that can sometimes easily go south). It's a very rare occasion that I see a single problem occur with the Linux operating system.
Another benefit of Linux on laptops is that it's free. You don't have to pay for a license to use the operating system, and you'll also find thousands upon thousands of free apps to install from whatever app store is included on your distribution of choice.
Finally (and this cannot be stressed enough), Linux is far more secure than the competition. And when you're traveling with your laptop, connecting to wireless networks of questionable security means, having a secure operating system could mean the difference between you keeping your data or it falling into the hands of the wrong people.
The release of the operating system Chrome OS 96 , based on the Linux kernel, the upstart system manager, the ebuild / portage build toolkit, open components and the web browser has been Chrome 96 published . The user environment of Chrome OS is limited to a web browser, and instead of standard programs, web applications are used, however, Chrome OS includes a full-fledged multi-window interface, desktop and taskbar. Chrome OS 96 build is available for most current Chromebooks. Enthusiasts have formed unofficial assemblies for ordinary computers with x86, x86_64 and ARM processors. Source code is distributed under the free Apache 2.0 license.
First up in the news, a German state chooses Linux, Slackware is closer to release, Cinnamon has an update, and more
In security, more ransomware for Linux, EU wants more cyber security, and apt is now safer to use
Then in our Wanderings, Joe has bluetooth problems, Norbert goes mad scientist, Josh does a flip, and Tony has some sad news
While few of my tech related tasks have been completed, I am in a position now to better be able to tackle them. So, I am believing for good things to come. Even when things go sideways, eventually, staying committed, you can get back on track.
On October 31, 2021, Linus Torvalds announced the release of version 5.15 of the Linux kernel. Of particular note is the merging of the NTFS driver into the kernel. That driver came from Paragon Software, and is their first submission to the Linux kernel. That alone caused some anxiety, marking their first voyage into what was uncharted waters for them. Torvalds provided the nudge, and the code was included into the kernel.
In other changes to the Linux kernel, according to an article on The Register:
"Samsung's SMB3 file server ksmbd has also made it in, described as "a new kernel module which implements the server-side of the SMB3 protocol."
Samsung said that it provides optimized performance, but also that "the bigger goal is to add new features more rapidly (eg, RDMA aka 'smbdirect', and recent encryption and signing improvements to the protocol) which are easier to develop on a smaller, more tightly optimized kernel server than for example in Samba." ...
Another notable feature is DAMON (Data Access Monitor) which originated from Amazon and which can be used for advanced memory management optimization.
DAMON is designed to be accurate, lightweight and scalable, and according to maintainer SeongJae Park, mitigates "problems with [core] mechanisms" currently implemented in the kernel."
Torvalds characterized the version 5.15 update as relatively calm and small.
Going into 2022 the Linux kernel's floppy driver continues to see new code improvements and fixes.
While it's been about two decades since I've last touched a floppy, that isn't the case for everyone. The Linux kernel even as we roll towards 2022 continues seeing the occasional fixes and issued discovered in its long-standing driver. Earlier this year were a few floppy patches though it ended up regressing things and has since been fixed.
Along with Intel this week sending out some of their initial graphics driver changes destined for the Linux 5.17 cycle early next year, AMD today also submitted their first batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes intended for this next kernel version.
AMD's Alex Deucher sent out the initial batch of changes for queuing in DRM-Next until the Linux 5.17 merge window. This is just the first of multiple expected pull requests over the next few weeks.
While recent Linux kernel series brought a lot of additions to AMDGPU including new hardware support and features like DisplayPort 2.0, this initial pull request at least isn't too exciting from the end-user perspective. Some of the early AMDGPU changes for Linux 5.17 include many fixes such as around Panel Self Refresh (PSR) handling for laptops, Display Stream Compression (DSC), OLED backlight handling, APU clock querying, SR-IOV, and various other fixes.
Several people have expressed interest in how I go about creating the topic branches in the -rcu tree. So when I created branches earlier this week, I actually kept track.
But why bother with topic branches? In my case, reason is to allow anyone reviewing RCU patches to focus on a particular topic and to be able to keep that topic “in cache” while reviewing all of that topic's patches. Even more important, it makes it easy for reviewers to completely ignore patches that are not of interest to them.
Over the past year there has been a lot of work for getting AMD's suspend-to-idle "s2idle" support in order under Linux and the latest is a one-line code change expected to help at least some Ryzen laptops behave properly.
Over the past year has been a lot of AMD s2idle work for increased power-savings under Linux, which has meant a lot of fixing and code handling. The latest is a "lucky fix" with a one line change that is fixing some s2idle failures.
Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.
Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic.

The table above shows our articles updated in November 2021.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
Whether it's due to snow days, a seasonal vacation, or time off for any number of holidays, December is a great time to settle down in front of your computer and get creative. One of my favorite pastimes is cutting video footage together. Sometimes I edit video to tell a story. Other times I edit video to convey a mood or a single idea, and sometimes I do it to provide visuals to music I've either discovered or composed. Maybe it's because I learned to edit film at a school while aiming for a career in the field, or maybe it's just because I like powerful open source tools. Still, my favorite video editing application to this day remains the formidable Kdenlive, a robust and professional editing software providing an intuitive workflow and plenty of effects and transitions.
FusionAuth is a platform for adding authentication and authorization to your apps. It’s practically a plug-and-play platform, allowing you to focus on your own app development and leave the security aspects to the security experts. In November 2021, FusionAuth announced that their product can now be run in a Kubernetes environment. Let’s take a look at how to do that. Our goal here is to get a simple Kubernetes setup running on your own development machine and deploy FusionAuth to a container.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is the open-source analytics and monitoring solution for every database. Grafana provides charts, graphs, and alerts, usually when it is connected to supported data sources (Graphite, Elasticsearch, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB). You can also create your own dashboard for your own apps or infrastructure performance monitoring.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Grafana monitoring on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to Change the Hostname on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, A hostname is a human-readable string that helps people refer to a computer by a familiar name. As a system administrator, it is imperative to have a short but recognizable hostname to separate the server machines from each other. Often, a hostname is set during the installation process, but there are times when it needs to be changed.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step change your hostname on a Fedora 35.
This post is a step-by-step account of how I installed Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 LTS on a MacBook Air (13-inch) and even got the wireless card to work without a hassle. This is a MacBook Air that I bought back in 2018 and whose battery is effectively dead. Over the almost 4 years I’ve been using it, I wasn’t really impressed with the operating system, though it has its bright spots.
Hello, friends. Continuing the work and operation with Webmin in this post, you will learn how to schedule tasks with Webmin.
We already know that Webmin is a great application that allows us to manage a Debian system graphically through a very neat web interface.
One of the many things we can do with Webmin is to set a task in the system. This task is powered by Cron so if you are not very agile in this, this post will fit you like a glove.
So, let’s go for it.
In this guide we are going to set up an sftp server on an OpennSUSE Leap 15.3. We will also set up a form of chroot where users can only access sftp with the shared credentials.
The File Transfer Protocol is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network.
FTP isn’t popular today because it Lacks Security. When a file is sent using this protocol, the data, username, and password are all shared in plain text, which means a hacker can access this information with little to no effort. For data to be secure, you need to use an upgraded version of FTP like SFTP.
Today we are looking at how to install OpenToonz on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to install the current stable release version of PHP 8.1 on Ubuntu 21.04.
Learn how to choose the right graphical user interface library for writing user-friendly apps.
MySQL is an open-source free relational database management system (RDBMS) released under GNU (General Public License). It is used to run multiple databases on any single server by providing multi-user access to each created database.
This article will walk through you the process of installing and updating the latest MySQL 8.0 version on RHEL/CentOS 8/7/6/ and Fedora using MySQL Yum repository via YUM utility.
In this tutorial, we are providing the steps to install WordPress with Apache web server on ALamLinux or Rocky Linux 8 running VPS, Cloud Hosting, or local Server using the command line.
WordPress doesn’t need any introduction whosoever is in blogging or web development would already know about this opens source content management system. Millions of websites are currently running on it with the help of Apache-webserver. And if you have recently purchased some cloud or virtual private hosting server where you are running Alamlinux or Rocky Linux 8 and want to install your WordPress along with LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack then here are the steps to follow.
Note: We recommend using any Web hosting control panel to install and manage WordPress such as Cpanel or any open source, here is the list of best open source hosting control panels.
I hope you enjoyed my last post about Ansible Galaxy Namespaces. In there I noted that I originally looked for something completely different and the namespace takeover was rather accidental.
Well, originally I was looking at how the different Ansible content hosting services and their client (ansible-galaxy) behave in regard to clashes in naming of the hosted content.
In Linux, Tar stands for tape archive. One of the important commands for facilitating archive functionality is this command, which creates and extracts archives. We can use the Tar command to create uncompressed and compressed files and modify as well as maintain them. Many people think that Tar is a part of Linux (Linux is Kernel), but in reality, it is a part of the GNU project. So let’s take a look at the most useful examples of Tar Commands in Linux.
A stat command displays information about a file or a file system. With the stat command, you can get information like the file size, its permissions, the IDs of the group and user that have access, and the date and time that the file was created. Another feature of the stat command is that it can also provide information about the file system. When we want to know the information about a file, we should use this tool. So in this blog, you will get to know about the Stat command in Linux with appropriate examples.
As I’ve been thinking and writing about privacy and decentralization lately, I had a conversation with a colleague this week, and he commented about how loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be master of our own attention.
In terms of telecommunications, we have never really been free, though in terms of Internet and its predecessors, there have been times where we had a lot more choice. Many are too young to remember this, and for others, that era is a distant memory.
The irony is that our present moment is one of enormous consolidation of power, and yet also one of a proliferation of technologies that let us wrest back some of that power. In this post, I hope to enlighten or remind us of some of the choices we have lost — and also talk about the ways in which we can choose to regain them, already, right now.
I will talk about the possibilities, the big dreams that are possible now, and then go into more detail about the solutions.
Want to be able to play your games through the Epic Games Store on Linux? Look no further; we have Heroic Games Launcher.
Heroic games launcher list A little over a year ago we covered Legendary. While it’s still a great tool to use, it can be somewhat intimidating for those who don’t use the terminal often. Therefore, Heroic Games Launcher is, in a sense, heroic, because it offers a nice graphical interface, without the user ever having to open up a terminal window. And it’s available, in addition to Linux, on Windows and Mac. Finally, it’s open-source (under the GPLv3 license) — make changes and pull requests as needed!
Note that Heroic is built off of Legendary — without Legendary, we wouldn’t have Heroic.
I know, right!? I still ask myself the same question today, but at this point, I'm kinda committed. Initially, it all came down to my decision NOT to code the client side. I looked into it, and it just wasn't something I wanted to do. And honestly, it seemed too far outside my comfort level with Perl. I feel much more comfortable, and interested in, working with server side code, as may be true for other Perl dev's out there. That's where Perl is quite prolific. Since I was going with ANSI graphics, they are best known these days, for me at least, to be used in telnet/terminal clients and BBS's, which are mainly telnet based now. This being said, it wasn't long searching google before I came across SyncTERM. SyncTERM is, in my opinion, the best available choice for cross-platform rendering of ANSI graphics over telnet. I've tried many different clients, on Mac, Windows, and Linux. SyncTERM works the most consistent across these platforms, it's been around for a long time and is still actively being developed. So telnet it is!
Gone are the days when Linux was synonymous with frustration when it came to games. Ahh, no, now we have so many games that, in a lifetime, I doubt anyone could finish every game available for Linux. We've come to this point thanks to companies like Valve, which believed in GNU Linux to create their new line of handhelds, SteamDeck, and thereby boost video games on Linux. Not only that, but Epic Games announced an anti-cheat module for the Linux kernel, which could enable hundreds, thousands of games that use anti-cheat features on Windows. Yes, it's an admirable new world, and 20 years ago, who would have thought that things would get where they are today?
While we sit and attempt to wait patiently for the Steam Deck to arrive next year after the delay, Valve has given out some fresh shots of their new Design Validation (DV) units.
Moving on from the initial EV2 prototype units that were sent out as devkits, DV is the last prototyping stage before it all moves into full production. There has been changes since the EV2 version of the Steam Deck, although Valve hasn't specified exactly what - it's still good news to know they've been so thoroughly tested now. As part of this process, Valve are testing their packaging too so they've given out a bunch of shots on it.
We're seeing more reports of Steam for Chromebooks coming and Luke Short writing for Android Police thinks it will be soon. This would be a long time coming, after we've seen hints of it appearing for over a year now.
It won't be particularly helpful for a lot of the lower-end devices, but Chromebooks have been steadily getting bigger storage drives, with newer processors too that are much more capable. The new system that makes all this work is named Borealis, and it appears that as of November 29 it gained new "flags" regarding a Beta mode and a way to disabled "ChromeOS-specific integrations for the borealis client".
WorldBox - God Simulator from Maxim Karpenko is a god simulator and civilization sandbox game, with a pixel-art style that allows for plenty of creativity.
Create your own world or destroy it using different powers. Watch civilizations grow, form kingdoms, colonize new lands and sail to far continents. Towns will rebel, empires will fall. It's your choice to help or watch them fight. I've put a good number of hours into previous versions that were previously available direct from their website but now just Steam. A fantastic game to play through coffee-breaks, when you end up realising an hour has vanished.
Path of Titans is slowly shaping up to be an MMO worth looking into with full cross-platform support and a big new update is out now adding in a ferocious new beast and cute little baby dinos.
SigmaStar SSD202D “Smart Display” dual-core Cortex-A7 processor has found its way into the MIYOO mini portable game console compatible with RetroArch Linux distribution.
Initially designed for industrial smart displays or other HMI applications, we’ve already seen the low-cost Arm Linux processor with 64MB (SSD201) or 128MB (SSD202D) memory has been integrated into a gateway, a single board computer, and M5Stack UnitV2 AI camera devkit, but somehow, it’s now gone into a consumer device.
O3DE is an open-source 3D engine that you can use to create high performance interactive experiences, including games and simulations.
Maybe you heard some buzz about the open source project O3DE and this probably left you with a few unanswered questions. Well, look no further.
KDDockWidgets is a development framework for custom-tailored docking systems in Qt, to use when you need advanced docking that is not supported by QDockWidgets. It was created by Sergio Martins as a time-saving alternative to QDockWidgets. The ease-of-use of KDDockWidgets can save you lots of frustration as well, in that you won’t have to deal with the myriad bugs and the difficulties and complexities faced when working with QDockWidgets.
A new version of Linux distro NixOS has been released, just one day after a contentious blogpost that asked "Will Nix overtake Docker?"
For DevOps folk, this was tantamount to clickbait: Nix and Docker are different tools for different jobs, and anyway, it's possible to use Nix to build Docker images.
The distro, which hit version 21.11 on the last day of November, was built around the purely functional Nix package manager.
Nitrux 1.7.1 from Systemd-Free is now available for download. Nitrux 1.7.1 is a minor point release to last month’s Nitrux 1.7 update. One of the cool things that you will notice on Nitrux 1.7.1 is the Linux Kernel as the 5.15.6 LTS kernel is now the default in the distribution.
Some of the features that you will see on Nitrux 1.7.1...
FF Multi Converter is a useful application that allows you to quickly and easily convert audio and video files, images, and documents into different formats. It relies on FFmpeg, ImageMagick, and unoconv for converting files, and has support for over 60 different media and document formats.
The interface is simple, but fairly well laid out and easy to use. At the top of the screen is the list of files that you've loaded in to be converted. You can import files to convert by clicking the Add button, or by simply dragging and dropping them into the box. They will all be converted one at a time.
We've done several text effects in Inkscape, but I don't think we ever did any speckled text. I found it on GoInkscape. It's kinda fun, so let's do it.
After opening your Inkscape, click the Ellipse tool, and draw a 3px by 3px circle.
With the Winter Holidays just around the corner, it's time again for the annual holiday gift guides by the staff of The PCLinuxOS Magazine.
The winter holiday season is upon us again. Around our house, most of the holiday celebrations center around the kids and making things as fun and festive as can be for them.
Of course, around our house, that means putting up a Christmas tree, decorating the outside of the house with holiday lights, lots of holiday shows on the television, making fudge and other favorite Christmas candies, and making wish lists for Santa Claus.
November provided a robust month of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots, which included 21 releases from Nov. 1 to Nov. 29.
December, which is traditionally a slower month for Tumbleweed releases due to the holiday season, has already produced a snapshot. Snapshot 20211201 gave a major update of the Linux user-space application for modifying Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) Boot Manager. The efibootmgr package updated from version 14 to 17; the changes included fixes for GNU Compiler Collection 7, better parsing and now efibootmgr uses EFIDIR / efibootmgr.efidir like fwupdate had. Scrolling issues when pressing Home and Page Down keys were fixed with the webkit2gtk3 2.34.2 update. Four patches for bash were added in the 5.1.12 version, which fixes a couple trapped signals. The 2.34.1 git version fixed an issue that arose from the 20211125 snapshot; git grep that have a non-UTF8 payload were broke when linked with certain versions of pcre2’s latest release. Other packages to update in the month’s first snapshot were glslang 11.7.1, graphviz 2.49.3, libstorage-ng 4.4.61, mtools 4.0.36 and yast2-update 4.4.5.
Snapshot 20211129 provided an update of the 5.15.5 Linux Kernel, which had some arm fixes for Broadcom’s StrataGX communications processor. Tumbleweed started the month off with the 5.14 kernel. An update of iso-codes 4.8.0 added flag emojis to countries and a new translation for Chinese. LibreOffice also had some translations with the 7.2.3.2 update. Image viewer ristretto 0.12.1 fixed pointer behavior in fullscreen mode as well as a fix for a memory leak when closing the window directly. Other packages to update in the snapshot were Microsoft’s theorem prover z3 4.8.13, libsoup 3.0.3, libsoup2 2.74.2, libwpe 1.12.0 and more.
Tumbleweed has been strong and unstoppable: for the 2nd week in a row we have published daily snapshots, i.e. 7 snapshots since the late review. Snapshots were numbered 1125…1201.
We have different preferences in using Fedora Linux. For example, there are some people who choose Fedora Linux because Fedora Workstation uses GNOME as its desktop environment by default. But there are also some people who want to use Fedora Linux but want to use a different desktop environment. Or there are also some people who use Fedora Linux with certain needs but don’t want to be bothered with system configuration and application installation. Or even some people want to install Fedora Linux freely according to their needs. Therefore Fedora Linux provides several editions according to your needs. This article will introduce the different Fedora Linux editions.
Following its initial launch earlier this year, Red Hat has released Red Hat OpenShift Data Science as a “field trial”. The managed cloud service provides enterprises with an environment tailored for artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) on Red Hat OpenShift.
When IT operations fail, it would be great if our infrastructure could use automation and machine learning to simply fix itself. Self-healing infrastructure is a lofty goal, but how practical is it? In this episode, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright is joined by Mike Dobozy to talk about building an event driven automation solution that lays the foundation for more complex self-healing infrastructure. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, DevOps has evolved, and adding self-healing capabilities to the organization's existing infrastructure can have immediate benefits. But once we start to look at more complicated problems that require more data and more timing-based or complex event processing, how do we cut through the noise and make it simpler to solve problems? Join us for another Technically Speaking with Chris Wright to learn more about how event-driven automation is being used to build self-healing solutions and is helping us realize a future with truly closed-loop automation and autonomic systems.
Red Hat, IBM and Celonis today announced the general availability of Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) on Red Hat OpenShift Service on Amazon Web Services (AWS) (ROSA) as a managed cloud service. This enables organizations to take full advantage of the collaboration and unique expertise of each company in a multicloud environment.
Paul Cormier, president and CEO of Red Hat, joins 'The Exchange' to discuss the future of cloud computing.
Today's IT leaders and managers be fluent in an ever-growing list of technology fundamentals, plus think and operate as part of the business, creating connections and building trust with key stakeholders. “IT leaders need to become even more facile with the language of business, and they have to go deeper than that to strengthen their empathy muscle — recognizing how [technology] impacts a stakeholder, recognizing the pain around it, and communicating that they recognize it,” says Elizabeth Freedman, head of consulting at executive coaching and assessment firm Bates.
Unfortunately, the next generation of tech leaders may lack some of the related skills — and it’s not necessarily their own fault. They’ve been busy during the past two years, to say the least. “That next level of leader is just not ready to lead in [these] ways,” Freedman says. “Their heads are down.”
One-on-one coaching is critical to grooming more fully-formed IT leaders. Rising IT professionals need clear direction, correction, and encouragement to mature into the multi-faceted business leaders that their organizations require. While training and classes may help, one-on-one coaching is critical to grooming more fully-formed IT leaders.
November 2021 was another excellent month for Enable Sysadmin. During the month, we published 23 new articles and received nearly 720,000 reads from more than 488,000 readers across the site.
Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles of November to give you a chance to catch up on any of the great content you might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
CentOS Stream is a continuous-delivery distribution providing each point-release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Before a package is formally introduced to CentOS Stream, it undergoes a battery of tests and checks—both automated and manual—to ensure it meets the stringent standards for inclusion in RHEL. Updates posted to Stream are identical to those posted to the unreleased minor version of RHEL. The aim? For CentOS Stream to be as fundamentally stable as RHEL itself.
To achieve this stability, each major release of Stream starts from a stable release of Fedora Linux—In CentOS Stream 9, this begins with Fedora 34, which is the same code base from which RHEL 9 is built. As updated packages pass testing and meet standards for stability, they are pushed into CentOS Stream as well as the nightly build of RHEL. What CentOS Stream looks like now is what RHEL will look like in the near future.
While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9.
[...]
Or there is this visualization from the CentOS Project showing the trajectory of CentOS Stream 9 from its branching off Fedora 34 through the future in being the leading edge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 development.
Fedora 36 may support using the Linux kernel's fs-verity code for allowing some interesting integrity and authenticity use-cases around RPM packages.
The Linux kernel's fs-verity module provides authenticity protection for read-only files for transparently verifying their integrity and authenticity when those files are on supported file-systems. FS-VERITY allows bulding a Merkle tree for a given file and that to persist with the file and later on the file can then be verified against that Merkle tree. This can allow for detecting corrupted files whether accidental or intentional of malicious nature, auditing of files, and other similar security use-cases.
One of the key choices you make when building an enterprise Node.js application is the web framework that will serve as its foundation. As part of our Node.js reference architecture effort, we've pulled together many internal Red Hat and IBM teams to discuss the web frameworks they've had success with. From our meetings, we've learned that most of the developers we spoke to are still happy with Express.js. This web framework has long been considered the default for Node.js, and it holds that place in our reference architecture as well.
However, Express.js is considered to be in maintenance mode. Thus, as part of the process of developing the reference architecture, we analyzed some data on web framework usage to try to get an idea of what might come next. In this article, you'll learn why Express.js is still a good fit for many Node.js developers and what the future could hold.
By the time Red Hat customers run one of our products, it already has had a long history of development, testing, review, and other assorted refinements, both internally and across its many related upstream projects.
Most of our customers are happy to stay at their end of this long road, but for the curious, here's a high-level end-to-end overview. While this process will vary from upstream project to upstream project, the following is specific to glibc, including glibc's new CI/CD automated patch review system!
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 8.1.1RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-php81-test repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux.
RPM of PHP version 8.0.14RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 35 or in the remi-php80-test repository for Fedora 33-34 and Enterprise Linux.
Last week, Outreachy announced the interns selected for duration December 2021 to March 2022, and we have three interns with us. This blog introduces them to the community. If you see them around, please welcome them and share some virtual cookies.
Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program that helps traditionally underrepresented people in tech make their first contributions to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Fedora Project is participating in this round of Outreachy as a mentoring organization. We asked our Outreachy interns to tell us some things about themselves!
This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team.
Data privacy and data protection have become increasingly important globally. More and more jurisdictions have passed data privacy protection laws to regulate operators that process, transfer, and store data. Data pseudonymization and anonymization are two common practices that the IT industry turns to in order to comply with such laws.
In this article, you'll learn about an open source cloud-native solution architecture we developed that allows managed data service providers to anonymize data automatically and in real time.
Many Ansible users know about Ansible Galaxy—the Ansible project’s community repository for sharing Ansible content. While Ansible Galaxy is great for testing the latest and greatest developer content, it’s difficult to know which content is supported, and which content is people just uploading stuff. In a lot of ways, it’s like an app store with no rules.
This is where Ansible Automation Hub comes in.
In all industries, data lies at the heart of an organization, and data needs stringent, consistent and restricted access controls for risk reduction and protection against cybersecurity threats.
It’s important to secure all sensitive data, of course, but extra care must be taken to ensure that personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI) are properly protected. At the same time, that information also has to be available for use by authorized people and applications.
There are a number of different strategies healthcare organizations can use to avoid data leaks. Here we present a prioritized list of measures for hardening Red Hat OpenShift using information from the OpenShift Security Guidelines and other sources.
Over the past nine years, Raspberry Pi has only ever supported a single release of the Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian). This can cause significant problems when we move to a new upstream branch (for example when we moved from Jessie to Stretch or from Stretch to Buster, or the recent move from Buster to Bullseye). With the new branches come new versions of libraries and new interfaces. Old software and interfaces become unsupported, and the way to do specific things changes. Some of those come from the upstream and some from our own desire to move to open-source interfaces.
Of course, we understand this isn’t always the right decision for particular users. For example, some of you are educational users who would like to follow instructions and tutorials online. Others are industrial users, who’ve developed software to use particular library versions; or who value a stable unchanging operating system. Some of you have asked for an option to roll back certain parts of the OS to restore some functionality that you have been relying on.
It’s a new-but-old OS aimed at giving developers a platform that won’t see major changes quite as often as the main branch of the operating system. Legacy will be based on the Debian oldstable release — which is currently Debian 10 Buster.
An oldstable remains in place “for about one year after the next stable distribution has been released,” according to Debian docs. That’s done to provide developers with enough time to address any application issues that arise because of a new stable release.
Legacy will also use the Linux kernel 5.10, which is slated for support until December of 2026. Security updates will be provided to Legacy installs as long as the kernel and Debian oldstable release receive them.
Canonical, the company that sponsors the development of Ubuntu, has revealed that the popular Linux distro helps power Xiaomi’s recently released CyberDog.
While unveiling the Mi Pad 5, Mi Mix 4, and some new smart home products earlier this year in August, Xiaomi launched a robotic version of man’s best friend. Dubbed CyberDog, Xiaomi’s mechanical canine looks a lot like Boston Dynamics' famous robotic dog, Spot.
Unlike Spot however, the CyberDog has an open source core, Ubuntu 18.04 to be exact.
ADLINK Technology LEC-RB5 is a SMARC compliant system-on-module powered by the Qualcomm QRB5165 octa-core Cortex-A77 class processor which we’ve already seen in Qualcomm Flight RB5 high-end drone reference design and Lantronix Open-Q 5165RB system-on-module designed for robotics applications.
The LEC-RB5 SMARC module ships with up to 8GB PoP LPDDR4 memory, 256GB UFS storage, provides on-device artificial intelligence capabilities (up to 15 TOPS), support for up to 6 cameras, and low power consumption. The main target applications are high-end robots and drones in the consumer, enterprise, defense, industrial, and logistics sectors.
This Giving Tuesday, Eben Upton talked about why we work with the Raspberry Pi Foundation in their mission to give every young person the chance to tinker and explore with computers, both in and out of school.
There’s just something so pleasing about scaled-down electronic replicas, and this adorable 3D printed pedestrian crossing light by [sjm4306] is no exception.
Although a little smaller than its real-world counterpart, the bright yellow housing and illuminated indicators on this pedestrian lamp are instantly recognizable due to their ubiquitous use throughout the United States. The handful of printed parts are held together using friction alone, which makes assembly a literal snap. The ‘safety grill’ with its many angles ended up being one of the most tedious parts of the build process, but the effort was definitely justified, as it just wouldn’t look right without it.
Back in October SiFive teased a new performance-optimized RISC-V core and today they finally shared more public details on this Performance P650 core.
SiFive's Performance P650 licenseable processor IP core will debut to lead partners in Q1'2022 while the general availability is expected in "summer" 2022. Whether the Performance P650 will make its way into any public SiFive developer boards or the like remain unknown, but hopefully they will come out next year with some performant successor to the HiFive Unmatched.
If you’re a maker, engineer or any other kind of tech-head, there’s a vast number of great electronics gifts you can choose from. But if you’re not as immersed in maker culture as your partner, kids, friends or family, and you’re looking for the perfect gifts for the makers in your life, we’ve got you covered.
Over on the Arduino Store is a selection of gift guides to help you pick up the perfect stocking stuffers.
At the recent online Software Freedom Camp, an event organised by Indian free software supporters, Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation gave a talk about the LibreOffice community.
The election for The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors is running, and we have live Q+A sessions with the candidates.
The election for The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors is running, and we have live Q+A sessions with the candidates.
Thunderbird (since version 78 first released 2020-07) implements its own OpenPGP/MIME support, using the libraries RNP (https://github.com/rnpgp/rnp) and Botan.
The main advantage for Thunderbird users is that they do not have to install an additional application like Gpg4win on Windows. The main drawback is that Thunderbird has its own handling of key material which is separated from the rest of the operating system and other applications that are using GnuPG. They have an FAQ. Some abilities that GnuPG provides are missing, e.g. handling of hardware tokens like smardcards or usb devices.
Thunderbird can still enable to use the system's GnuPG installation for private key operations see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Thunderbird:OpenPGP:Smartcards .
This is a comprehensive article catering to LibreOffice 7.3 (upcoming) release. We give you all the details about the new features, download and release info. Bookmark this page for reference as it is continually updated until final release.
As always, contributors across various teams are working hard to ensure the upcoming release of WordPress 5.9 doesn’t disappoint. With State of the Word 2021 coming up soon, there are many exciting things in the works. Read the November 2021 edition of the Month in WordPress to learn more about what’s happening.
I am happy to announce a new release of GNU poke, version 1.4. This is what expect to be the last bug fix release in the poke 1.x maintenance series. We are working very hard in what will become poke 2.0, expected to be released in February 2022. See the file NEWS in the released tarball for a detailed list of changes in this release.
To avoid a lawsuit, Donald Trump’s social media site is quietly acknowledging the computer code powering the platform comes from Mastodon.
Trump’s “Truth Social” site now features a dedicated section labeled “open source,” which contains a Zip archive to Mastodon’s source code. “Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That's why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not ‘Big Tech,’” the site adds.
Graphic on page 11. UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. CC BY IGO 3.0
I decided to solve this year’s Advent of Code problems using awk(1), a woefully underutilised unix tool and programming language. The below solutions may be run using the command: [..]
We have been working intensely for months for the Conan package manager to distribute Qt packages. Today, we are happy to provide you a technology preview.
When I speak of curl in this post, I lump curl the command line tool and libcurl the library into one, and I just call them curl. Related: my webinar titled “Why everyone is using curl and you should too“.
I believe just about every curl user has their own story and explanation about why they use curl in their product or device. I think there are several good reasons why users, including many of the world’s largest and most successful tech giants, decide they can lean on curl for Internet transfers.
curl is used in mobile phone and tablet apps, it is used in TVs, cars, motorcycles, fridges, settop boxes, printers, smart watches, medical devices and computer games, both on desktop and in game consoles and of course in just about every web or Internet server out there. It was also used to land on mars. Put simpler: in almost every internet-connected device.
Recently at Endless we had a week of focused working on projects which are not our day-to-day work. It was called ‘Endless Orange Week’, and everyone was encouraged to explore a topic of their choosing.
I chose to look at two projects, both of which included a D-Bus/API component. My thinking was that review of the new interfaces on each project might take a while, so it would make sense to have two projects running in parallel so I could switch between them when blocked.
I’m going to blog about the two projects separately, to avoid one mega-long post.
The first project was to add a D-Bus debug interface for applications. This would allow debug output from an application to be turned on and off at runtime, rather than just being set with a command line argument or environment variable when the application is first started.
This would allow users and developers to get debug output from long-running applications without having to restart them, as quite often restarting a process will destroy the state you were hoping to debug.
For those wanting to add some "bling" to your command-line programs to make some "rad" terminal apps, Notcurses 3.0 was released today for designing colorful and complex text-user interfaces. Notcurses allows adding a range of multimedia, Unicode, and other graphics capabilities to command-line applications across Linux / macOS / Windows.
Notcurses isn't designed to be a drop-in replacement to Ncurses or the likes but is trying to bling up the terminal but not necessarily most practical or efficient for long-time power users of the terminal. It does though have many cool effects if that's your thing and some of the functionality would spice up terminal apps if desiring a more modern TUI.
A debugger is a wonderful tool for understanding what actually happens in a piece of code. Donald Knuth’s coding in TAOCP is archaic enough that I do not understand it just by reading through. This is due to a combination of my unfamiliarity with MIXAL, as well as some of the coding conventions he’s chosen. So, I’m going to step through the MIXAL code in mixvm, and annotate what I find.
Now that I can run the Knuth version of the Insertion sort via MIXAL, I want to convert it to AARCH64 Assembly. What I am going to try to do here is a line by line translation. This is not necessarily how I would write the insertion sort in AARCH64 assembly, but rather a direct translation of the MIXAL version.
I started by defining constants for the output parameters. This is the equivalent to the TERM definition in the MIXAL version.
I print out the completed buffer. You can see some trial and error here; I was trying to calculate N, the length of the buffer, bases on the addreses, just as I had done for Hello World messages, but the fact that I needed to put a blank in the first position made that logic more complex than I wanted. So, while I hand caluclated the leng of the bufffer (26) I add 2 to account for the lead blank and the trailing \n.
IUn MIXAL, Many of the comparisons are done between registers and memory. AARCH64 does not support this. You also cannot add two integers without first loading one of them into a register. Thus, many single commands in MIXAL become multiple.
Santa was working on some programs to handle all of the intracacies of modern-day just-in-time package delivering, and got annoyed by some parts of the program getting noisy because some elf had left some debug statements in there. Ah, the joys of collaboration!
So Santa wondered whether there could be a way to be less distracted by what otherwise seemed to be a perfectly running program. Looking at the Wonderful Winter Raku Land, after a little bit of searching, Santa found the silently module. That was great! It’s a module that exports a single subroutine silently that takes a block to execute, and will capture all output made by the code running in that block.
Welcome to the first entry in this Python for non-programmers series.
If you’re reading this, you probably have developed a curiosity about programming and are looking for a good place to start. I have good news for you. Python is one of the best languages with which to start that journey. Why? We’ll get into that in a minute. But first, let’s discover exactly what this language is and can do.
Python is what’s called a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Let’s break that definition down.
First, what is a high-level language? Let’s consider this:
At the bottom, you have the computer hardware, which only understands what’s called “machine language.” Because machine language (or machine code) is so close to the hardware, it’s considered a low-level language (because it exists at such a low level).
As you rise up away from the low level, languages become high-level, because they are abstracted away from the hardware. High-level languages do not need to view or access the details of the computer. If they did, they’d be considerably harder to use.
When I like a song and learn that it is actually a soundtrack of a movie, I usually look it up on IMDB. Often it belongs to a romantic movie, a super hero movie from Marvel or a TV show. In these cases I do not look any further. But sometimes I get curious while reading the plot or watching the trailer. I’ve found many good movies based on the soundtrack. And of course many others, which I could not watch to the end. Here I list a few examples from both categories.
[...]
Did you ever watch a movie because you already knew the soundtrack?
Mission extensions for interplanetary robot explorers are usually continuations of their primary mission. But sometimes the hardware already on board are put to novel uses. European Space Agency has started using radio equipment on board two Mars orbiters to probe the Martian atmosphere.
The scientific basis is straightforward: radio signals are affected by whatever they had traveled through. When transmitting data, such effects are noises to be minimized. But we can also leverage it for atmospheric science here on Earth. ESA applied the same concept at Mars: by transmitting a known signal from one Mars orbiter to another, changes in the received signal tells scientists something about the Martian atmosphere between them.
This is the sentiment of Pano Kanelos, who left his position as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis to, in his words, “build a university in Austin dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”€ What riles Kanelos is the “gaping chasm between the promise and reality of higher education.”€ Harvard proclaims a dedication to veritas.€ Stanford students are told Die Luft der Freiheit weht: The wind of freedom blows. € € Nice to have such “soaring words” – but he is not convinced that the “pursuit of truth – once the central purpose of a university” is the “highest virtue”.€ Campus life is now characterised by “illiberalism”.
The picture painted of the American academy is one riven, culturally torn, and intellectually insecure.€ A quarter of American colleagues, Panelos states, favour removing colleagues for holding “a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.”
Concerns about students’ health and wellbeing while returning to school have sparked attention-grabbing reactions by public authorities. Through an educational lens, Way details the systemic obstacles that students of color face, including lack of access to technology and support resources. Failure to address the adversity faced by students of color contributes to achievement and opportunity gaps in the American education system, especially at a time when remote education, intended to prevent the spread of COVID-19, renders already-vulnerable student populations even more susceptible to falling behind or failing in school. As Way emphasizes, the inequities faced by students across the nation were not caused by school closures; they were already present in these institutions.
The resolution called for the state to provide implicit bias training for board members, examine school curricula for racial bias, and develop new practices for staff development, hiring, and student discipline. As the Intercept reported, Fessler “inaccurately referred to the resolution in question as a measure on critical race theory.”
According to NASPA, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, student affairs is “a critical component of the higher education experience,” helping students “begin a lifetime journey of growth and self-exploration.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has only worsened these disparities. According to a survey conducted by a consortium of research universities, first-generation students have faced “greater financial and family strains during the pandemic and were more likely to have lost on- or off-campus wages than their counterparts who aren’t first-generation.” This study also found that, with the shift to online instruction, first-generation students were more likely to lack adequate study spaces or necessary technology, compared with continuing-generation students.
Nvidia is reportedly going to double down on its use of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) tech for all its new graphics processing units (GPUs), leaving Samsung’s components behind.
Nvidia — the world’s largest semiconductor company by market valuation — will release two all-new GPU architectures in 2022. Industry sources say they will utilize TSMC's 5nm process technology in lieu of Samsung’s 8LPP fabrication process, according to a Tom’s Hardware report.
Arguing that innovation and competition would be harmed, the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday sued to scuttle a proposed purchase of Arm by graphics-giant Nvidia.
The federal agency charged with anti-trust enforcement said it made its decision to intervene in order to protect key technologies for data centers and driver-assisted cars, among other essential semiconductors.
Did you ever see one of those videos that causes you to look at an everyday object in a new light? This is one of those videos (embedded below). And fortunately for us, there’s a write-up to go along with it in case you don’t always understand what’s going on.
In this case, what’s going on is that [AMbros Custom] is masterfully turning a stainless steel M20 bolt into a pneumatic engraving tool. Yeah, you read that correctly. But the most amazing thing about this hack is the minimum of tools used to do it. For one thing, there’s not a lathe in sight — [AMbros Custom] just chucked it into the drill or added a few nuts and clamped it in a vise.
[...]
What else can you do with a bolt? If you have the tools, you can do plenty. You could even turn one into a secret cash stash for buying more large bolts.
Do you have a hundred bucks and some time to kill? [Peter Sripol] invites you to come along with him and build a remotely operated submarine with only the most basic, easily accessible parts, as you can see in the video below the break.
Using nothing more than PVC pipe, an Ethernet cable, and a very basic electrical system, [Peter] has built a real MVP of a submarine. No, not Most Valuable Player; Minimum Viable Product. You see, there’s not a microcontroller, motor controller, sensor, or MOSFET to be found except for that which might reside inside the knock-off GoPro style camera which is encased in a candle wax sealed enclosure.
Restoring vintage computers is the favorite task of many hardware hackers. Retrocomputing probably makes you think of home computer brands like Commodore, Amiga, or Apple but [Erik Baigar] is deeply into collecting early military computers from the UK-based Elliott company. Earlier this year he made a detailed video that shows how he successfully brought an Elliott 920M from the 1960s back to life.
It is quite amazing that the Elliott company already managed to fit their 1960s computer into a shoebox-sized footprint. As computers had not yet settled on the common 8bit word size back then the Elliott 900 series are rather exotic 18bit or 12bit machines. The 920M was used as a guidance computer for European space rockets in the 1960s and ’70s but also for navigational purposes in fighter jets until as late as 2010.
Opening up the innards of this machine reveals some exotic quirks of early electronics manufacturing. The logic modules contain multilayer PCBs where components were welded instead of soldered onto thin sheets of mylar foil that were then potted in Araldite.
Building your own computer has many possible paths. One can fabricate their own Z80 or MOS 6502 computers and then run a period correct OS. Or a person could start from scratch as [James Stanely] did. [James] has invented a completely unique computer and CPU he calls SCAMP. SCAMP runs a custom OS called SCAMP/os which you can check out in the video below the break.
[James] describes the CPU and computer as purposefully primitive. Built out of discrete 74xx series logic chips, it runs at a fast-enough-for-homebrew 1 MHz. Plus, it has a lot of blinking lights that can’t help but remind us of the original Imsai 8080. But instead of a panel of switches for programming, the SCAMP/os boots to a shell, which is presented through a serial terminal. Programs are written in a bespoke language with its own compiler. The OS is described as a having a Unix-like feel with CP/M-like functionality. That’s quite a combination!
A group of civil rights advocates on Thursday urged members of Congress to reject a Biden administration proposal to permanently reclassify fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I drugs, calling the approach toward the synthetic opioids a dangerous continuation of the so-called war on drugs that will do little to quell what is a public health issue.
"If Congress accepts President Biden's misguided recommendations, it will undermine the movement for criminal justice reform."
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case revolves around a Mississippi ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation and represents such a direct challenge to abortion rights that Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart opened his argument by asking the court to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two chief cases that enshrine abortion rights in this country. Stewart claimed that these cases “haunt our nation.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court indicated it would uphold a restrictive Mississippi law that bans abortion starting at just 15 weeks of pregnancy. The case threatens to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. We feature excerpts from the two hours of oral arguments and speak with lawyer and bioethics professor Katie Watson. “The statute itself simply says abortion after 15 weeks is 'barbaric.' What’s barbaric, in my opinion, is forced childbearing,” says Watson. “There’s no explanation why, at any point, the potential interest of the fetus or the state’s interest in that fetus … would supersede the actual person in which it lives.”
Jessy Rosales stood in front of the Supreme Court Building on Wednesday, holding a yellow circle printed with the words “I had an abortion” in one hand and a homemade poster that read “Me and all my homies heart abortion” in the other. Inside, the justices were considering whether to grant Mississippi’s request to uphold its ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy—and to end the right to legal abortion in the process.
Advocates for a single-payer healthcare system that would provide universal coverage at a lower cost than the current for-profit model celebrated this week after the Sacramento City Council passed€ a resolution supporting federal Medicare for All legislation and the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act, known as CalCare.
"All of us, even if you have 'good insurance,' are one illness away from bankruptcy."
InternetLab evaluated six providers in this edition, all of whom hold at least 1 percent of the telephony market in Brazil and looked at both broadband and mobile services. Brisanet, a leading independent provider, was evaluated for the first time, while Sky was dropped, as well as Nextel, which was incorporated into Claro after being acquired by América Móvil, Claro’s parent company.
Telecom provider TIM, owned by Telecom Italia SpA, received the highest score this year, as it did last year. Its broadband and mobile services received full credit for meeting standards in four of the six categories and 75 percent credit for a fifth category. Claro Mobil and NET, both part of América Móvil, were a close second, with full stars in four categories and a quarter star in a fifth, while Vivo achieved full stars in three categories, three-quarters star in a fourth, and half star in a fifth.€ Algar made slight improvements over last year’s scores, with one full star, a €¾ star, and a half star, while Brisanet Mobil and Brisanet Broadband came in last, earning a half star in just one category.
As highlighted by Bárbara Simão, InternetLab’s Head of Research, the report shows Internet Service Providers (ISPs) improving disclosure of relevant information on how they handle user data. “Some companies, such as TIM, Vivo, and Algar, started to publish specific protocols with rules for handing over data to public authorities,” Simão said. However, there is still plenty of room for providers to strengthen privacy-protective best practices. One key issue relates to companies’ public response about security breaches. According to Simão, “some major data breaches related to ISPs were reported last year, and the companies involved failed to respond adequately.
The Texas GOP delegation in Congress, led by Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Ted Cruz, are threatening to shut down the federal government over vaccine mandates, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The same day I had read a steady stream of news stories about the Delta variant of the coronavirus ripping through the US population as huge numbers of people remain unvaccinated. While confusing government public health messages—doubtless the result of medical experts being overruled by politicians—have resulted in most people ditching masks in all situations. Causing more “breakthrough”cases of the incredibly contagious Delta in fully-vaccinated people than evidently expected and many more cases overall.
Notably here in Massachusetts, where a series of Provincetown festivities from July 4 onward have led directly to over 400 cases of COVID and rising—including in two fully-vaccinated people I know personally. A situation I predicted in my June 14 column “The Pandemic Is Not Over Yet: Mass residents need to stop running amok in public spaces.” Not because I am in possession of any psychic, mystic, or spiritual powers, but by dint of simply keeping up with the latest medical science in the mainstream press. For which I was mocked by readers who don’t do the same in times of crisis. Although most people are perfectly capable of doing so. Preferring instead to listen to their own selfish inner monologues, cherrypick what little they hear from experts on social media, and mistakenly believe they are free to resume their pre-pandemic lives—maskless and clueless. Spreading a coronavirus variant many times as contagious as the original virus as they go about their rounds of family reunions, dance parties, and booze cruises.
To begin with, if you’re old enough (or wise enough) to have arranged for a will, then your executor (the person who is assigned to see that the terms of the will are carried out) will also have legal standing to access your digital assets: online accounts, websites, etc. This is specified by the revised Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, which has been enacted by the majority of the states in the US. (As of this writing, it had not been passed by California, Oklahoma, or Louisiana; it has been introduced by not yet passed in Massachusetts.)
Haugen’s testimony, delivered at Wednesday’s subcommittee hearing, urged lawmakers to impose accountability and transparency safeguards on Facebook to prevent it from misleading the public. It comes on the heels of her first testimony in October in front of the subcommittee on consumer protection, product safety and data security in which she urged Congress to force Facebook to make its internal research public allegedly because it can’t be trusted to act on it.
That testimony came after she leaked documents to the Wall Street Journal and the Securities and Exchange Commission that suggested Facebook knew about the negative mental health impacts of photo-sharing app Instagram had on its teen users but allegedly did nothing to combat it.
Today, the Indoctrinologists are officially in. These health professionals argued early in the COVID pandemic that, if hospitals were forced to ration ventilators, they should ration based partly on minority status rather than exclusively by standard criteria, such as clinical need or prognosis. They urged vaccine priority for black Americans to compensate for “historical injustice.” And 1,200 of them cheered, via open letter, the message of an epidemiologist from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health who told would-be marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that “the public health risks of not protesting to demand an end to systemic racism greatly exceed the harms of the virus.” In each instance, the experts allowed their own moral commitments, not objective metrics of risk, to shape their advice.
The WHO warned Wednesday that the world was creating toxic conditions for new Covid-19 variants like Omicron to emerge and then spread around the globe.
Omicron could become the dominant COVID-19 variant in France by the end of January, the top scientific adviser said on Thursday, after both France and the United States reported their first cases and countries around the world tightened curbs.
The first known U.S. case was a fully vaccinated person in California who returned to the United States from South Africa on Nov. 22 and tested positive seven days later. France reported a case in the Ile de France region of greater Paris.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that there are between 6m and 10m lead service lines in America but does not publish a breakdown of where. In 2018 it requested, for the first time, that all states report by 2022 on the quantity of lead pipes still in use. Efforts by another organisation to collect this data show how difficult this is. Earlier this year the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), an environmental charity, asked states to provide estimates for their lead pipes. Just ten states and the District of Columbia were able to provide full estimates. Another 23 states said they did not track the number of lead pipes. Three were in the middle of surveys. The rest failed to respond or submitted incomplete data. (Using supplementary data from a 2016 survey by the American Water Works Association, an industry body, the NRDC estimates that there are between 9.7m and 12.8m lead pipes in America serving as many as 22m people.)
Amazon had at least 20,000 employees test positive for Covid-19 last year. But it reported that only 27 of those cases were contracted while the employees were at work.
The company's reporting amounts to a "hidden pandemic," according to a coalition of four unions interested in establishing representation for Amazon workers.
"The company systematically failed to record Covid-19 cases in its warehouses, recording only 27 work-related illnesses for all of 2020 in the category that includes Covid-19 infections," said the report from the Strategic Organizing Center, which is made up of the Teamsters union, the Service Employees Union, the Communication Workers of America and the United Farm Workers of America.
The group notes that Amazon put out a statement to employees on October 1, 2020, in which it said that 19,816 US employees had tested positive for Covid through September 19 of that year, prior to the late-year surge that increased the number of cases nationwide.
The labor group has sent a complaint to Assistant Secretary of Labor Douglas Parker, urging the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to investigate Amazon's "disturbing pattern of misleading or grossly incomplete information provided to authorities around Covid-19 cases in its warehouses."
Nextcloud and 29 other companies have signed onto a complaint against Microsoft's bundling of its OneDrive file-sharing app with both Windows 10 and 11, saying it's nearly impossible for users to choose other file-sharing services.
In January 2021, technology vendor Ubiquiti Inc. [NYSE:UI] disclosed that a breach at a third party cloud provider had exposed customer account credentials. In March, a Ubiquiti employee warned that the company had drastically understated the scope of the incident, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication. On Wednesday, a former Ubiquiti developer was arrested and charged with stealing data and trying to extort his employer while pretending to be a whistleblower.
Zoom has reached a settlement (PDF) in a class-action lawsuit over alleged privacy and security issues, and if you used the videoconferencing app before July, then you could be eligible to receive money as a result. The company has agreed to pay $85 million while continuing to deny the allegations and any liability.
There are two groups eligible to file a claim. If you paid for a Zoom Meetings App subscription between March 30th, 2016, and July 30th, 2021, you can file a claim for $25 or 15 percent of what you paid for that subscription (excluding optional add-ons). You’re entitled to whichever is greater.
Looks like Microsoft Edge is showing weird messages to Windows 11 users. This is not cool. Couple of days back, during Thanksgiving 2021, Microsoft Edge introduced a Finance app that is integrated to Edge browser itself. The finance app itself, giving you popup deals while visiting e-commerce websites.
Less than one percent of PCs scanned are currently running Windows 11
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (krb5 and mailman), Debian (gmp and librecad), Fedora (php-symfony4 and wireshark), Mageia (bluez, busybox, docker-containerd, gfbgraph, hivex, nss, perl/perl-Encode, and udisks2/libblockdev), openSUSE (permissions), Oracle (mailman and mailman:2.1), Red Hat (mailman, mailman:2.1, and nss), Scientific Linux (mailman and nss), and SUSE (nodejs14).
E-commerce platforms in the U.S., Germany, and France have come under attack from a new form of malware that targets Nginx servers in an attempt to masquerade its presence and slip past detection by security solutions.
"This novel code injects itself into a host Nginx application and is nearly invisible," Sansec Threat Research team said in a new report. "The parasite is used to steal data from eCommerce servers, also known as 'server-side Magecart.'"
Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization has been common on Linux for a decade and a half now while more recently has been Function-Granular (or sometimes referred to as Finer-Grained) KASLR for further upping the security benefits by making it much harder to predict kernel address positions for attacks.
Posted in early 2020 by Intel's Kristen Carlson Accardi was the initial FGKASLR code for improving security. While KASLR helps make memory addresses less predictable, once an attacker determines the base address it's not as effective. Function-Granular/Finer-Grained KASLR applies function-reordering on top of KASLR. The functions are reordered at boot time and thus much harder for attacks relying on known kernel memory locations.
After the Thanksgiving break, we have two weeks of news to cover, so hang on for an extra-long entry. First up is GoDaddy, who suffered a breach starting on September 6th. According to an SEC filing, they noticed the problem on November 17th, and determined that there was unauthorized access to their provisioning system for their WordPress hosting service. For those keeping track at home, that’s two months and eleven days that a malicious actor had access. And what all was compromised? The email address and customer number of the approximate 1.2 million GoDaddy WordPress users; the initial WordPress password, in the clear; the SFTP and database passwords, also in the clear; and for some customers, their private SSL key.
The saving grace is that it seems that GoDaddy’s systems are segregated well enough that this breach doesn’t seem to have led to further widespread compromise. It’s unclear why passwords were stored in the clear beyond the initial setup procedure. To be safe, if you have a WordPress instance hosted by GoDaddy, you should examine it very carefully for signs of compromise, and rotate associated passwords. The SSL keys may be the most troubling, as this would allow an attacker to impersonate the domain. Given the length of time the attack had access, it would not surprise me to learn that more of GoDaddy’s infrastructure was actually compromised.
Netcraft recently confirmed that a Bangladesh Army site was hosting an Outlook Web Access (OWA) web shell. Additionally, an OWA web shell was found on the Department of Arts and Culture site for the South-African Kwazulu-Natal province and an Iraqi government site was found to be hosting a PHP shell. Web shells are a common tool used by attackers to maintain control of a compromised web server, providing a web interface from which arbitrary commands can be executed on the server hosting the shell. OWA provides remote access to Microsoft Exchange mailboxes; since the disclosure of the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities in March, Microsoft Exchange has become a popular target for cyberattacks.
When using a browser to visit the web shell installed on the Department of Arts and Culture’s site, the malicious activity was not immediately obvious, with the shell masquerading as a variable dump. Web shells are often buried in the filesystem alongside benign files, making it difficult for webmasters to detect and take them down. Even after patching the vulnerabilities used to install a shell, the shell itself also needs to be removed to stop further malicious activity. Sites containing web shells can often remain compromised for long periods of time.
There is no "going dark." Consecutive FBI heads may insist there is, but a document created by their own agency contradicts their dire claims that end-to-end encryption lets the criminals and terrorists win.
While the FBI document raises no questions about the apps’ abilities to keep out hackers and snoops-for-hire, the paper does describe how law-enforcement agencies have multiple legal pathways to extract sensitive user data from the most popular secure messaging tools. The document — titled “Lawful Access” and prepared jointly by the bureau’s Science and Technology Branch and Operational Technology Division — offers a window into the FBI’s ability to legally obtain vast amounts of data from the world’s most popular messaging apps, many of which hype the security and encryption of their services.
The document, dated Jan. 7, 2021, is an internal FBI guide to what kinds of data state and federal law-enforcement agencies can request from nine of the largest messaging apps. Legal experts and technologists who reviewed the FBI document say that it’s rare to get such detailed information from the government’s point-of-view about law enforcement’s access to messaging services. “I follow this stuff fairly closely and work on these issues,” says Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil-liberties team. “I don’t think I’ve seen this information laid out quite this way, certainly not from the law-enforcement perspective.”
New rules approved by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that took effect on Tuesday dictate how collection agencies can email and text people as well as message them on social media to seek repayment for unpaid debts.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) was a strong privacy law when originally enacted by Congress in 1974. It forbid any educational agency, institution or school from disclosing personally identifiable information (PII) from a student’s educational records to any non-school official — even other governmental agencies — without parental notification or consent. Up to this point, many schools were denying parents access to their child’s records – which often contained erroneous or damaging information — while at the same time granting access to numerous third parties, including in some cases, the police or other governmental officials without parental knowledge or consent.
FERPA was intended to address these concerns by requiring that any educational institution or agency that receives federal funds must grant parents (or students if 18 or older) access to their educational records, and allow them to amend them if the information it contains is factually incorrect. The law also withheld federal funds from any school that released personally identifiable information (PII) contained in educational records to third parties, unless the parent or adult student consented. FERPA applies to any educational institution that receives federal funding, which includes all public schools and many private educational institutions as well.
But in 2008 and again in 2011, FERPA was radically revised by the US Department of Education – without any vote or authorization from Congress.
The long citizen protest underscoring the dangers from the U.S. Navy's 80-year-old leaking 20 jet fuel tanks at Red Hill each tank 20 stories tall and holding a total of 225 million gallons of jet fuel came to a head over the weekend with Navy families around the large Pearl Harbor Naval Base being sickened by fuel in their home tap water. The Navy's huge jet fuel tank complex is only 100 feet above Honolulu's water supply and has been leaking with regularity.
As the ongoing Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen's civil war continues to kill, maim, and displace civilians—over 300,000 of whom have died during more than seven years of fighting—a report published Thursday urges the Biden administration to end critical U.S. support for the atrocity-laden campaign by blocking pending arms sales and stopping future weapons transfers.
"Without U.S. arms, maintenance, and spare parts, the Saudi military would not be able to prosecute its brutal war in Yemen."
One day prior to Thanksgiving, newspapers reported that Ian Fishback, a graduate of West Point and veteran of America’s “forever wars,” had died at the age of 42. No cause of death was given.
Days after U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a new investigation into a clandestine airstrike that killed scores of Syrian noncombatants whose deaths were subsequently covered up, 24 advocacy groups on Wednesday published an open letter calling on the Pentagon to "reckon with U.S.-caused civilian casualties and commit to urgent reforms."
"We urge you to... commit to finally implementing structural changes to prioritize civilian protection and accountability for civilian harm."
When the Department of Defense released its annual report on Chinese military strength in early November, one claim generated headlines around the world. By 2030, it suggested, China would probably have 1,000 nuclear warheads—three times more than at present and enough to pose a substantial threat to the United States. As a Washington Post headline put it, typically enough: "China accelerates nuclear weapons expansion, seeks 1,000 warheads or more, Pentagon says."
"The European Commission obviously does not want to say so, but the main objective behind the Global Gateway is to respond to China's Belt and Road Initiative, China's new Silk Road," Holslag told VOA. "A lot of European companies have encountered huge competition from their Chinese rivals. They have also seen that countries are sliding into China's orbit."
Francesca Ghiretti, an analyst at Germany's Mercator Institute for China Studies, told VOA the European Union should be strategic about which projects it selects, but foresees investment headed toward Africa and India.
Freeman and Moss did not grant interviews for this report. This account of the campaign against them – including previously unreported details of their ordeal – is based on interviews with Barron, another colleague and a person with direct knowledge of their ordeal, along with an examination of police reports, state records, 911 call records, internal county emails and social media posts. Reuters also reviewed the video footage that Trump and his allies used to attack Freeman and Moss and hours of testimony by the former president’s surrogates at state hearings.
The threats hurled at Freeman and Moss are part of a broader campaign of fear against election administrators that has been chronicled by Reuters this year. Previous reports detailed how Trump supporters, inspired by his false stolen-election claims, have terrorized election officials and workers in battleground states. In all, Reuters has documented more than 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 14 states, including about 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts.
Wall Street insiders say that among the top agenda items at this annual confab are strategy sessions on how to keep Congress from enacting legislation that would bring an end to Wall Street’s privatized justice system called mandatory arbitration. This system allows the most serially corrupt industry in America to effectively lock the nation’s courthouse doors to claims of fraud from its workers and customers. This private justice system also keeps the details of many of Wall Street’s systemic crimes out of the press.
Wall Street’s McJustice system is just one element of a fully-loaded dirty tricks playbook that Wall Street uses to crush an honest worker who is intent on holding the firm to account. The playbook includes gaslighting; a campaign of ordered ostracizing by coworkers; demotion; an internal investigation with a preordained outcome to malign the reputation of the whistleblower; blackballing in the industry; and, frequently, the ultimate humiliation of being escorted out of the building by security guards. As the dirty campaign unfolds in front of colleagues, it achieves the intended additional goal of silencing any coworkers who might be thinking about reporting illegal activities.
The pinging story was shopped to journalists by some of the same people who marketed the Steele dossier, including Fusion GPS, the investigative firm that hired Steele on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to dig up dirt in Russia about Trump. Now information and documents coming to light through the Durham investigation and lawsuits filed by Alfa Bank and its owners against Fusion GPS and others are providing a much clearer picture of how the firm operated.
After Congress lifted a ban on crude exports in late 2015, oil and gas production in the Permian Basin soared while domestic consumption remained flat—leading to a massive build-out of pipelines and other infrastructure that culminated in the U.S. “flooding global markets” with fossil fuels at the expense of humanity, in general, and vulnerable Gulf Coast communities already overburdened by pollution, in particular.
Climate campaigners in the United Kingdom applauded Thursday as oil giant Shell signaled it would not drill for oil in the proposed Cambo oil field off the coast of Scotland's Shetland Islands, following a grassroots effort to halt the project.
"Governments and oil and gas companies will—and are—being held accountable by people all over the world who know exactly who is to blame for the climate crisis."
A trio of climate and conservation organizations on Thursday filed a public records request regarding the development of a report about leasing federal lands and waters to fossil fuel companies that the Biden administration released the day after Thanksgiving.
"We want to know what went wrong."
Conservation advocates welcomed a Wednesday ruling from the Constitutional Court of Ecuador that determined mining in a protected forest violates the rights of nature established by the nation's constitution.
"The endangered frogs, the spectacled bears, the spider monkey, the birds, and nature as a whole have won an unprecedented battle.”
A Norwegian technology company has found a way to stop livestock slurry from releasing methane -- by zapping it with artificial lightning.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas emitted from sources including leaky fossil fuel infrastructure, landfill sites and livestock farming. Oslo-based N2 Applied is testing its plasma technology at several sites in Europe, including on three farms in the UK. "In essence, we're harnessing lightning to zap livestock slurry and lock in harmful emissions," N2's Chris Puttick told Reuters at one of the test farms in Buckinghamshire, England. At this site, 200 dairy cows are providing the raw material: dung.
Human beings today face climate challenges on an incomprehensibly enormous scale. Given the gravity of the situation we're in, the guilt we carry about our part in creating it, and infuriating, long-standing government inaction, it's no surprise that feelings of hopelessness and despair abound. This dark cloud has become so widely felt and acknowledged in recent years that it's even been given a name: "eco-anxiety," defined by the American Public Health Association (APHA) as "a chronic fear of environmental doom." While eco-anxiety can be ignited in anyone by events as small as watching the nightly news, those deeply involved in the climate space are more vulnerable than others. As climate activists, our work is needed now more than ever: we must begin learning to live with our eco fear by talking with each other, forging connections within our communities, and taking direct action to combat the climate crisis.
From coast to coast, many colleges and universities are taking a close look at sustainability on their campuses. They are recycling, cutting emissions and reconsidering their purchases. But fewer institutions are choosing to prepare for the real oncoming effects of climate change, even though climate impacts are at this point irreversible. To better understand these risks, we asked students from around the country to tell us how climate change is impacting their campus, college experience, and communities.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].
At the time we spoke, it was already clear that the powerful governments and corporations represented at the conference would turn their backs on humanity and the Earth, because their primary aim was not to halt the heating of the Earth but to sustain and accelerate capital accumulation.
Sure enough, the United States obstructed efforts in Glasgow toward both climate mitigation—by joining China and India in blocking agreement on a phaseout of fossil fuels—and climate justice, by choking off any effort to compensate low-income nations for damage from disasters caused by affluent nations’ past greenhouse emissions.
The purpose of expanding port hours, according to the New York Times, was “to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.” Reading this, you might be forgiven for imagining that an array of crucial items like medicines or their ingredients or face masks and other personal protective equipment had been languishing in shipping containers anchored off the West Coast. You might also be forgiven for imagining that workers, too lazy for the moment at hand, had chosen a good night’s sleep over the vital business of unloading such goods from boats lined up in their dozens offshore onto trucks, and getting them into the hands of the Americans desperately in need of them. Reading further, however, you’d learn that those “critical goods” are actually things like “exercise bikes, laptops, toys, [and] patio furniture.”
Fair enough. After all, as my city, San Francisco, enters what’s likely to be yet another almost rainless winter on a planet in ever more trouble, I can imagine my desire for patio furniture rising to a critical level. So, I’m relieved to know that dock workers will now be laboring through the night at the command of the president of the United States to guarantee that my needs are met. To be sure, shortages of at least somewhat more important items are indeed rising, including disposable diapers and the aluminum necessary for packaging some pharmaceuticals. Still, a major focus in the media has been on the specter of “slim pickings this Christmas and Hanukkah.”
Nevertheless, it has hardly ever been so important as now to get forests, deforestation, restoration onto our climate change agenda. And it’s good news that President Biden’s infrastructure bill includes millions for trees – for “tree equity.”€ In the House “Social Safety Net and Climate” bill just passed; $26 billion is earmarked for forest restoration.
The simple point here is that trees are good for the environment. Trees store carbon. Here’s John Reid and Thomas Lovejoy in a New York Times op-ed:
On Wednesday night, someone drained funds from multiple cryptocurrency wallets connected to the decentralized finance platform BadgerDAO. According to the blockchain security and data analytics Peckshield, which is working with Badger to investigate the heist, the various tokens stolen in the attack are worth about $120 million.
During recent years, several of the ski resorts up there have really started developing their winter cycling offerings. They have planned and created a comprehensive network of maintained winter cycling trails and gathered a complete fleet of rental fatbikes to get visitors out there.
Ãâ¦land is a group of Finnish islands halfway across the sea between Finland and Sweden. With population of less than 30 000 it sounds quiet enough for my attempt to stay isolated. The main island is a sizeable one after all. And no hassle with smaller ferries scooting around the archipelago – there’s a direct ship to Ãâ¦land from Turku and one happens to be departing later today.
As the world grapples with the issue of climate change, there’s a huge pressure to move transport away from carbon-based fuels across the board. Whether it’s turning to electric cars for commuting or improving the efficiency of the trucking industry, there’s much work to be done.
It’s a drop in the ocean in comparison, but the world of motorsports has not escaped attention when it comes to cleaning up its act. As a result, many motorsports are beginning to explore the use of alternative fuels in order to reduce their impact on the environment.
The most insidious threat to humankind is something called “extinction debt.” There comes a time in the progress of any species, even ones that seem to be thriving, when extinction will be inevitable, no matter what they might do to avert it. The cause of extinction is usually a delayed reaction to habitat loss. The species most at risk are those that dominate particular habitat patches at the expense of others, who tend to migrate elsewhere, and are therefore spread more thinly. Humans occupy more or less the whole planet, and with our sequestration of a large wedge of the productivity of this planetwide habitat patch, we are dominant within it. H. sapiens might therefore already be a dead species walking.
Amid reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer may put the House-approved Build Back Better Act up for a vote in mid-December, a coalition of over 100 progressive groups on Thursday urged the New York Democrat to prevent any further cuts to the budget reconciliation package.
"The Build Back Better Act has already been cut drastically."
In October 2021, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released the Pandora Papers, a collection of leaked tax haven files exposing the secret offshore holdings of more than 400 heads of state, political officials, and celebrities. It was one small window into the secretive world of wealth and power of the people who actually run the world, including the likes of former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
Carmen Jones nudged me in the arm, then pointed down at her cell phone screen. A text had just come in from a company that manages several rental properties on the far east side of Indianapolis.
As state-level Republicans intensify their attacks on the franchise with extreme gerrymandering and other tactics nationwide, more than 200 advocacy groups on Thursday urged Democratic congressional leaders to postpone an upcoming holiday recess in order to pass key voting rights legislation.
"The 2021 holiday recess scheduled to begin on December 13, 2021 should be delayed if the bills are not passed," reads a letter signed by the Declaration for American Democracy (DFAD), the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and dozens of other organizations. "This provides ample time to ensure the Senate has the necessary time to debate and vote on these critically important pieces of voting rights legislation."
Democratic House caucus leaders are demanding that Rep. Lauren Boebert be removed from her committee assignments following racist remarks she made about Rep. Ilhan Omar, condemning the Colorado Republican for putting the progressive Democrat and Muslims across the U.S. in danger.
In a statement released Wednesday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Congressional Black Caucus Chair Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Congressional Asian Pacific American Chair Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Congressional Equality Caucus Chair David Cicilline (D-R.I.), and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) condemned both Boebert's conduct and the refusal of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to hold members of his caucus accountable for bigotry.
With a 70 percent voter turnout, Castro accumulated almost 54 percent of the total, leaving National Party candidate Nasry Asfura with 34 percent of the vote, followed by Liberal Party candidate Yani Rosenthal with 9.2 percent; 13 other political parties together gained one percent of the vote. A few left-leaning parties joined in coalition with the Libre Party. It seems – there’s no official verification – that Libre has gained a majority in the National Congress.
Speaking on television after the voting, Castro promised “direct, participative democracy. There would be “no more hate, war, corruption, narco-trafficking, organized crime, and no more ZEDES, poverty, or misery.”€ Tweeting, she celebrated “12 years of a people in resistance, 12 years that were not in vain because the people … have verified that phrase “Only the people can save the people!’”
According to the Daily Beast (11/28/21), Politico‘s newsroom may have a “flashy exterior,” but it hides a “series of burgeoning conflicts.”
Following the Honduran election on November 28, leftist opposition candidate Xiomara Castro, is currently in the lead, according to the preliminary results from the Honduran Supreme Electoral Council.€
Congressional Republicans on Wednesday refused to drop their threat to shut down the federal government over President Joe Biden's coronavirus vaccination requirements for employers, even after the first case of the Omicron variant was detected in the United States—intensifying concerns of another winter surge.
The House of Representatives has been forced to push back plans for a vote after lawmakers failed to agree on a temporary stopgap measure that would keep the government open beyond Friday, when federal funding expires.
We speak to Alexis McGill Johnson, President and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, about the Supreme Court hearing Wednesday, in which the conservative majority on the court seemed to indicate that they support upholding the restrictive Mississippi law that bans abortion starting at just 15 weeks of pregnancy, and potentially overturn Roe v. Wade. Justice Amy Comey Barrett suggested during questioning that giving up children for adoption would resolve the pro-choice argument that anti-abortion laws force women into motherhood. “Our very right to determine when and if we become pregnant, our self determination, is predicated on our ability to be seen as free and equal citizens in this country,” says Johnson. She says if the ban is upheld, the people most impacted will be “low income, Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, people who are trans and nonbinary, people who might not have support at home.”
With the U.S. Supreme Court one day into hearing a Mississippi case in which right-wing state officials are asking the justices to overturn Roe v. Wade, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted Wednesday that the fate of millions of Americans' reproductive rights has been left partially up to a man who's been credibly accused of sexual assault.
"Brett Kavanaugh still remains credibly accused of sexual assault on multiple accounts with corroborated details."
The Supreme Court justices signaled a potential major shift on abortion law on Dec. 1, 2021. Hearing arguments in a case that could fundamentally alter abortion rights and regulations throughout the nation, the six conservative justices who hold the majority in the highest court seemed divided: Would they overturn the core right to abortion entirely or would they allow abortion to be limited by the states to the early stages of pregnancy?
The bill, introduced by top Energy and Commerce Democrats, removes Section 230 liability protections from tech platforms that recommend “personalized” content contributing to “physical or severe emotional injury” of a user, thereby allowing “injured” users to sue. Rep. Frank Pallone, who co-sponsored the bill, said the legislation would stop social media platforms from promoting “extremism” and “disinformation.”
Technology trade groups that represent the major social media companies challenged the law signed in September by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, saying it would chill the First Amendment rights of corporations to “exercise their own editorial discretion and to be free from state-compelled speech."
Hungarian opposition parties filed a criminal complaint against László Kövér, the speaker of the Parliament.
"A report has been filed to the Central Chief Prosecution Office of Investigation concerning secret information gathering and the unauthorized use of concealed methods,” Tímea Szabó, group leader of small green opposition party Párbeszéd said Tuesday.
Although the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) claims not to work on elections, it had elections – and the U.S. Constitution – squarely in its crosshairs when it launched its annual States and Nation Policy Summit at a four-star hotel in San Diego this morning, according to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Jet-lagged legislators who wanted to get up to speed on ALEC‘s latest plans to limit voting, rig election districts to favor Republicans, and conduct fake 2020 election “audits” needed to be up and caffeinated by 8 a.m. Pacific time to attend a secret “Process Working Group” meeting and hear from a who’s who of GOP and pro-Trump election strategists.
Neither the Process Working Group nor a simultaneous “Academy” on convening a constitutional convention to consider numerous right-wing amendments were posted in any of ALEC’s publicly available materials on its policy summit.
A far-right website known for spreading 2020 election conspiracies is being sued by election workers in Georgia who say they became the target of harassment and death threats as a result of the outlet's campaign to sow doubt about the legitimacy of President Joe Biden's victory.
The Gateway Pundit, a fringe political site run by two brothers named Jim and Joe Hoft, falsely claimed last year that Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shayne Moss, had manipulated ballots last November as part of their duties as poll workers for the Fulton County elections board, which covers the Atlanta metropolitan area. The conspiracies quickly spread after then President Donald Trump himself called them out by name last December — mentioning Freeman at least 18 times during his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The Twitter accounts that were removed were linked to operations attributed to six countries, including Mexico, China and Russia, Twitter said in a blog post.
It also announced Thursday that it will launch a Twitter Moderation Research Consortium early next year, bringing together "experts from across academia, civil society, NGOs and journalism" to study possible improvements.
Last week, a TikTok video analyzing some of Prater’s content was posted on the subreddit r/oddlyterrifying, which has more than 1.5 million followers. The video, which was posted by a creator named Dalton Thayer (the account has since been deleted) and features creepy music in the background, focused on a clip from one of Prater’s videos, in which she appears to dance in front of a computer monitor showing a slideshow of people’s faces. Thayer then scrolls through the comments, all of which are speculating that the images on the screen show women being held captive in a basement (the actual facial features are unidentifiable, and it’s difficult to discern the gender of the subjects, let alone their location). “This dude honestly creeps me out,” Thayer writes in the caption.
Facebook on Thursday rolled out a new set of measures designed to further protect accounts more often targeted by hackers, including those of human rights activists, journalists and government officials, among others.
As part of this effort, Facebook is expanding its “Facebook Protect” program, first tested in 2018 ahead of U.S. elections, to countries around the world in order to protect highly targeted accounts from being compromised.
In a article from this Sunday's New York Times, media columnist Ben Smith seems to misread a Scientific American article from a year ago, asserting that the author "traces the modern practice of 'disinformation'... to the anti-corporate activists the Yes Men, famous for hoaxed corporate announcements and other stunts."
This is false. The author, Joan Donovan, in fact begins her excellent piece by contrasting the Yes Men's work with that of trolls. "Crucially for activists such as the Yes Men, the big reveal was the raison d’être for the hoax," she writes.
Nor does Donovan suggest that our "tools... have been adopted by 'foreign operatives, partisan pundits, white supremacists, violent misogynists, grifters and scammers,'" as Smith writes. Those parties may use "impersonation," as we do (and as do many others), but they certainly didn't adopt it from us.
[...]
When we began stealing PR tricks in the late 1990s, we used them not to mislead, but to expose information that was insufficiently known. This is an important distinction, because in today's battles against vastly wealthier forces, we need all the non-violent tools at our disposal, including creative trickiness — not to lead people to do things they wouldn't do otherwise, but to expose the truth, and trust that exposure to motivate change.
Janine Jackson interviewed Elon University’s Enrique Armijo about the Alex Jones lawsuit for the November 19, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
I've been working on a post about a whole bunch of interesting (and good!) things that Twitter has been doing over the last few months. I'm not sure when that post will be ready, but I need to interrupt that process to note a truly head-scratching change in Twitter's moderation policy announced this week. Specifically, Twitter announced that its "private information policy" has now been expanded to include "media." Specifically, Twitter says that it will remove photos and videos that are posted "without the permission of the person(s) depicted." In other words, Twitter has taken the old, meme-ified, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it" into official policy for taking down content.
Twitter has updated its privacy policy so that it can remove images of people that have been posted without their consent, the company said in a blog post Tuesday.
Under its current policy, the social media giant prohibits the publication of people's private information, including addresses, phone numbers, identity documents and medical records.
Jack Dorsey is stepping down as CEO of Twitter Now, it says it has added "private media" to the list, because the sharing of such material could be used to "harass, intimidate, and reveal the identities of individuals."
On the same day France celebrated the induction of American-born singer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker into the Pantheon, far-right xenophobic writer and pundit Ãâ°ric Zemmour announced he will run for president of France in the upcoming April 2022 election. Many have pointed out the contradiction in these opposing events, even in President Emmanuel Macron’s speech that painted Baker as a model of colorblind unity, when in reality she was outspoken about racial justice. “Celebrating Josephine Baker who was an immigrant … while making things difficult for immigrants of today to access to France is a contradiction,” says French journalist Rokhaya Diallo. “France attempts to use the fact that it has been very welcoming to African Americans throughout the 20th century to picture itself as an open and welcoming country.”
After the U.S. government announced Thursday that it has reached an agreement with Mexico to restart the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" program,€ immigrant rights advocates criticized the Biden administration for "hiding behind a flawed court order to justify" reviving a policy that€ forces asylum seekers to wait in makeshift camps along the southern border pending legal review of their cases.
"Biden didn't just bring back Remain in Mexico. He's made it even worse."
"Protecting the border" is essentially the same thing as protecting your own property, right? You've got to protect it from invaders, thieves—lawless jerks who want what you have.
This campaign employs a well-worn script designed to sow racial division, galvanize voters and shield economic elites – and the systems they enable – from meaningful critique.
This campaign appears to be working. Anti-CRT messaging has emerged as a signature – and potent – GOP political talking point. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, for example, repeated a common refrain when she asserted the falsehood that “critical race theory teaches people to judge others based on race, gender, or sexual identity, rather than the content of their character.” More recently in Virginia, Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin closed his campaign with a pledge to “ban critical race theory on Day One.”
Drug war foes welcomed the introduction Thursday in the U.S. House of Representatives of a bipartisan bill to help states expunge cannabis convictions by reducing costs and red tape through a new federal program.
"There is no justification for continuing to prevent tens of millions of Americans from fully participating in their community and workforce simply because they bear the burden of a past marijuana conviction."
Near the start of the pandemic, in a gentrifying neighborhood of Salt Lake City, Utah, visitors from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints arrived at Danielle Bellamy’s doorstep. They were there to have her read out loud from the Book of Mormon, watch LDS videos and set a date to get baptized, all of which she says the church was requiring her to do in exchange for giving her food.
Bellamy, desperate for help, had tried applying for cash assistance from the state of Utah. But she’d been denied for not being low-income enough, an outcome that has become increasingly common ever since then-President Bill Clinton signed a law, 25 years ago, that he said would end “welfare as we know it.”
Compare this to the Acton Children’s Business Fairs, where children ages 6-14 become entrepreneurs for a day. Often held on Saturdays, from 10 am-1pm, the fairs are like a farmers market for kids, with tables and white pop-up tents overhead. This is NOT a classroom exercise!
We've long illustrated how U.S. broadband is dominated by regional monopolies, which, in turn, are often coddled by state and federal governments (aka corruption). That broken market (and regulatory capture) results in all manner of problems, from spotty coverage and slow speeds, to repeated privacy violations, net neutrality violations, and some of the worst customer service of any industry in America (no small feat if you think about it).
Back in June we reported on how Florida's social media moderation bill was tossed out as unconstitutional in a Florida court. The ruling itself was a little bit weird, but an easy call on 1st Amendment grounds. It was perhaps not surprising, but still stupid, to see Texas immediately step up and propose its own version of such a bill, which was signed in September. We again predicted that a court would quickly toss it out as unconstitutional.
5G is replacing the “macrocells” used in 4G networks because it is relatively smaller in size and cheaper to deploy.€ 5G wireless cellular signals are transmitted through small cell towers or base station, miniature access points that transmit low radio frequencies.
Look up and you are likely to see small cells perched on top of buildings as well as atop street lights and stop signals.€ In 2020, 1,945 5G small cells had been deployed, mostly in dense, urban settings. But by 2027, 1.56 million private 5G small cells are projected to be deployed.
The terms ‘public safety’ and ‘public emergency’ are not clearly defined in the Indian Telegraph Act, the Ministry of Home Affairs has said – though these are the reasons used by the Union and state governments to justify frequent internet shutdowns in the country.
It is left to the “appropriate authority to form an opinion” on whether an internet shutdown is required, the MHA has told Parliament’s Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, according to the Indian Express.
“The expression public emergency has not been defined in the statute, but contours broadly delineating its scope and features are discernible from the section which has to be read as a whole. Appropriate authority has to form an opinion with regard to the occurrence of a public emergency with a view to taking further action under this section,” the MHA said.
When the case began, Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox Film, but that division was sold off to Disney, which then inherited the legal battle with Netflix. Represented by Daniel Petrocelli and Molly Lens, Fox held tight to its position that the benefits of contractual certitude were on the line at the dawn of the gig economy. What was important, according to Fox, was Netflix’s knowing interference in the contractual relationship between employer and employee.
As I just made clear, I'm no fan of Twitter's new "private media" policy, which I think comes from a well-meaning place, but will lead to widespread abuse by malicious actors seeking to hide evidence of bad behavior (indeed, there's evidence this is already happening). But that's no excuse for Senator Josh Hawley (supporter of the January 6th insurrection, and who seems to think his job as Senator from the confused state of Missouri is to product manage internet services). Hawley reacted to this new policy by saying that it's a reason to break up Twitter. He says "we oughta break them up" at the end of a very bizarre interview with Fox News host Pete Hegseth.
The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals let stand an administrative panel's findings that Arbutus' patents - which may cover technology used in the vaccines - are valid, as the science involved was not previously known.
Moderna and Arbutus did not respond to requests for comment.
More than 275 artists, celebrities, and other creative professionals have signed on to an open letter endorsing a patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines and slamming the "flimsy" arguments made by industry lobbyists defending the global intellectual property regime, which has fueled massive inequities in vaccine access.
Signed by actor Mark Ruffalo, author and filmmaker Naomi Klein, producer Lilly Wachowski, poet Anindita Sengupta, and hundreds of others, the letter expresses dismay that prominent film, publishing, and music associations have joined Big Pharma in lobbying against a World Trade Organization proposal that would temporarily suspend patents covering Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics.
He argues that this may be the case because the drugs use two fundamentally different mechanisms for attacking the virus. By using the two in combination, we would be maximizing the likelihood that at least one would be effective. This has been the approach followed with effective H.I.V. drugs, as well as Hepatitis C treatments.
McNeil argues that the reason combinations are not pursued is because of antitrust laws. If, instead of competing with their different drugs, two giant drug manufacturers, like Pfizer and Merck, were to collaborate to produce the best possible treatment for COVID-19, they would be risking an antitrust action from the government or competing drug companies. McNeil recommends waiving antitrust rules when lifesaving medications are involved.
Whether your a baseball fan, or a sports fan in general, or not, regular readers here will know that we've covered aspects of many sports leagues and Major League Baseball in particular. As you'd expect with any major business like MLB, some of those posts have dealt with some nonsense intellectual property actions the league has undertaken, but many more of them have been positive articles about the forward-thinking folks at MLB when it comes to how they make their products available using modern technology. The league's website work has always been particularly good, whether it's been the fantastic MLB.TV streaming site the league operates, or even simply the base MLB.com site itself.
A new section on the site dedicated to celebrating works entering the public domain.
Several Hollywood studios and Netflix have teamed up in a new copyright infringement lawsuit against PrimeWire, a long-standing pirate streaming portal with millions of visitors per month. After forcing blocking measures in numerous countries around the world, the MPA is now seeking to bring the portal to its knees, demanding hefty monetary damages and a broad injunction.
The young operator of a small YouTube channel that showed the Jake Paul vs Ben Askren fight to less than 300 viewers has lost his case against Triller after failing to show up. Triller is celebrating the default judgment as a big win but the case shows that even when defendants fail to appear, a judge is still able to cut through excessive claims for damages.
