The weekly Calibre release cycle continues, and Calibre 5.34 is here today to introduce support for Barnes & Noble’s recently launched Nook Glowlight 4 e-reader, which features a sleeker and smaller lightweight design, 300 dpi, 32GB of storage, USB-C charger, and retails for $149.99 USD.
Calibre 5.34 also brings various improvements to the application, including a new “Exclude Files” button in the Spell Check tool in Edit Book to allow users to exclude some file from being checked, bigger thumbnails in EPUB/MOBI catalogs up to 3 inches, and the ability to create a keyboard shortcut for pasting metadata that ignores the value of the exclude_fields tweak in Preferences > Shortcuts > Edit metadata.
This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.
PDF Mix Tool is a small utility that allows you to perform common editing operations on PDF files. It’s a Qt-based tool that’s written in C++.
One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. Linux Mint uses IP tables; however, most users will opt to use software that works as a front end with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall).
Some of the great benefits of UFW are its simplicity, user-friendly and easy-to-use command line, making it great for beginners in Linux to the most advanced power users.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install and set up UFW Firewall on Linux Mint 20 distribution series.
One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. Linux Mint uses IP tables; however, most users
In this guide we are going to install and configure Postgresql 14 in Debian 11 Using Ansible.
Postgresql is an open source object-relational database system with over 30 years of active development that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, feature robustness, and performance. Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance.
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Shotcut Video Editor on Elementary OS 6.0.
Today we are going to look at how to install the Shotcut Video Editor on Elementary OS 6.0.
Firstly we run an optional command, this command is only needed if you cant launch Flatpak applications like your default browser on your system. For some reason, we couldn't, so if you can, you can skip the first command.
Getting started gaming on Linux is tough if you’re new to the platform. To make it easier for new users, we’ll go over various tips to start gaming on Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Krita 5.0.0 beta 5 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 article shows you how to use apt command in Ubuntu, Debain, Linux Mint, or any other Debian or Ubuntu based distributions, with examples so that you can manage packages with easy.
apt is a powerful package management tool that can be used to search, install, update, upgrade, and manage the packages in a Linux operating system. It automatically manages package dependencies, installing required software as needed, and removing it when no longer required.
VLC is a well-known media player of stored audio and video files, but did you know that you can do so much more with the program? For instance, you can record your screen or listen to podcasts. In this article we look at some of the most useful tips and tricks for VLC Media Player so that you can make the most out of using it.
I tried playing a few rounds of Babble Royale, but while the concept is fun as a high-brow joke on the genre, I bounced off pretty hard on the actual gameplay. You can only play new letters off the last word that you spelled, which means that longtime Scrabble players will have to seriously think about how they play. There were also times where I just was plain stuck, walled in by existing words but unable to play any real ones of my own, leaving me to sit around until the game cleared out some of the map.
The new Steam Client update comes less than a month after the previous update, which added support for VA-API hardware encoding on Linux, to greatly improves VA-API (Video Acceleration API) hardware decoding for Linux gamers using Steam?s Remote Play feature for playing local multiplayer games online.
Also for Linux gamers, the new Steam Client release updates the Linux runtime ?scout? to version 0.20211207.0, adding support for the WebP image format in SDL2_image, fixes an issue with the starting directory, which sometimes could be incorrect when launching devkit titles, along with the ability to cleanly report an error if a devkit title is configured without a command-line.
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.5, we continue our efforts to harden performance tooling, listen to customer feedback and improve our workload tuning recommendations. Specifically in 8.5, we are announcing...
With the release of RHEL 8.5, we have rebased Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) to 5.3.1. This release allows for better scalability and we are now providing guidance on how to architect PCP environments that monitor up to 1,000 hosts. Details on how to set up a decentralised or federated configuration that enables a large setup can be found here.
Over the past couple of years, interest in Linux on the desktop has slowly increased. While running any Linux distribution on a personal computer is still uncommon, an increasing amount of people have heard of it. Thus, it would be good to talk about the steps that it takes, in case you’re interested in trying another operating system. Today we’ll talk about migrating to Fedora Linux.
A primary goal of this article is to also dispel some myths about changing your operating system. There is a tendency amongst niche audiences to over-promise their preferred product, and it would be disingenuous to claim that anybody can install Fedora Linux today.
As to why you might want to migrate to Fedora Linux, that’s a bit beyond the scope of this article. But if this is the first time you hear about Fedora, then feel free to read here Fedora’s mission statement: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.
People with type 1 diabetes navigate complex systems of devices, insurers, manufacturers, and doctors. Those systems, though, don’t always serve the patients who use them. Our latest film introduces you to the community of makers, patients, and caregivers using open source solutions to reshape those systems.
Security is often an afterthought. Something that’s done at the end of the development life cycle by the security and IT operations teams. When software updates are made once or maybe twice a year, this process is manageable. But when software developers start opting for shorter, agile software development life cycles that take a few days or even a few hours, this approach to security becomes a hindrance to launching necessary updates or even launching the application quickly to production.
IBM Corp. subsidiary Red Hat today launched a public beta test of a new hosted service called Image Builder that the company said can streamline the process of assembling customized Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system images for hybrid cloud environments.
The service addresses the tedious and error-prone process of building or installing operating systems for deployment across a hybrid infrastructure composed of public and private clouds. Images built on virtualization platforms can require different tools and risky modifications in the public cloud, Red Hat said. The same holds true for small edge data centers.
Image Builder, which requires no setup or infrastructure, provides a single and consistent platform that can be applied to all RHEL system images, Terry Bowling, a Red Hat senior technical product manager, wrote in a blog post being published today. “No more guessing about which cloud or virtual guest agents need to be installed,” he wrote. “Simply define your very own ‘gold’ template package set and build for each target deployment environment.”
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced sweeping updates throughout its portfolio of application services. These updates deliver a more seamless and unified experience for application development, delivery, integration, and automation across hybrid cloud environments.
Next in our video editing series for the Librem 14, Gardiner Bryant dives into standard frame rates and when to use which rate. You’ll learn how to make a video feel quick or slow things down for a cinematic shot. This video will help those looking to level up their overall video production.
They kept practicing and moved into a drier more comfortable garage for practising on Purism’s gitlab – close buddies like wlroots liked to stick around during their sessions and party out but that’s a different story.They soon got their first gig in PureOS with a short playlist but the audience was freaking out. So they continued to play gigs, got better over time and even played shows in pmOS and Mobian and other spots. While that was all going nicely, Calls always wanted to hang around with the other rock stars in GNOME core, do a solo album and participate in the GNOME 41 all stars project so it moved in with the GNOME folks.
The developers of Linux Mint have made the beta of their latest release available for download and installation.
The beta release of Linux Mint 20.3 (“Una”) is now available for testers to install and offer their feedback to the developers. Based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, Linux Mint 20.3 will remain with the 5.4 kernel to ensure stability and be supported for 5 years.
The biggest update to Linux Mint comes by way of the Cinnamon 5.2 desktop. With this new release comes a new app called Thingy, which is a document manager for quick access to recent and favorite documents. Thingy also keeps track of your reading progress of documents.
Other improvements/changes include dark mode support for even more apps (such as Celluloid, GNOME Terminal, Hypnotic, Pix, and XViewer). Hypnotic (the IPTV viewer) now has a search function, so it’s easier to find the TV channels, movies, and series you’re looking for. Hypnotic also supports the Xtream API.
NXP and Hailo agreed to promote the use of the Hailo-8 NPU on products using NXP’s S32G and LX1062 automotive SoCs, including several MicroSys Miriac boards and its own BlueBox and GoldBox automotive development platforms.
NXP is making Hailo’s up to 26-TOPS, 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU the favored AI chip on its S32G and Layerscape automotive SoCs, starting with the LX2160A. The partnership is aimed at bringing AI to automotive Electronic Control Units (ECUs) with requirements for sensor fusion and other AI-related automotive tasks.
“The open-source leg is now being used by over 10 other research groups to develop control strategies on a common platform, but we noticed some research groups would rather not build it themselves. To maximize the benefit to the public, a product-like solution was needed.”
First released in 2019, the open-source leg’s free-to-copy design is intended to accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics. Now, for labs that need an off-the-shelf robotic prosthesis for research and development, Humotech will provide an assembled version of the open-source leg, including warranty service and technical support.
“We see many benefits to standardizing the hardware and software used by the research community,” said Josh Caputo, president and CEO of Humotech. “The fully contained and powerful open-source leg is a natural expansion of what we can do to support our mission to transform the way the world develops wearable robotics.
I started my career as an architect, trained to design cities and buildings. I realized early in my career that software has the power to influence outcomes in architectures: some designs from the archistars are possible because of the software they use. When I started using CAD and GIS software at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, I first noticed they were hard to procure and hard to use. Managing license keys alone was a job. Also, after acquiring those packages I still had to write code in order to be productive. I realized that software was going to both allow and prevent me from doing my job well. Also, software was too hard to buy and use despite being very expensive. There had to be a better way. I started looking into alternatives and I stumbled upon the GNU project and its manifesto. Then I discovered Linux, a GIS tool called GRASS and more. Such free/libre software was not always functionally better than proprietary alternatives but felt "right" to me: a much better philosophical approach to developing the science of computing.
I started advocating for free and open source software then, and never stopped.
The benchmark was a slightly modified version of the script that serves as a tasks backend. Like said sample script it also creates a tasks database and inserts some example rows. Instead of inserting two rows, it inserts 10 million. Or a hundred million.
Following the Richard Stallman situation, board members leaving, projects seeking greater transparency from the FSF, and other issues within the Free Software Foundation the past two years, the FSF has finally adopted a new governance framework for board members.
Free Software Foundation Board Members will now need to commit to the Board Member Agreement and a Code of Ethics in order to provide for greater transparency, accountability, ethics, and responsibility.
The board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has approved and implemented two new measures designed to help make FSF governance more transparent, accountable, ethical, and responsible. They are a Board Member Agreement that enumerates the responsibilities of board members, and a Code of Ethics that lays out principles to guide their decision-making and activities.
"The FSF has always been a steady beacon for freedom and against the widespread mistreatment of computer users," said FSF president Geoffrey Knauth. "In the last year, the board realized that we faced a challenge and opportunity to improve our governance practices and recruit new leaders to the FSF board. I'm proud of this important step in that ongoing work."
The new measures are the first products of a six-month, consultant-led review. They formalize crucial aspects of the FSF's governance, and will guide board members to understand and embrace their responsibilities to the nonprofit's worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom.
The new Board Member Agreement spells out nineteen duties and responsibilities, including minimum expectations for organizational and financial oversight, participation in board activities, the recruitment of associate members, and annual performance reviews.
The Code of Ethics details thirteen specific provisions establishing how the board of directors will conduct the business affairs of the organization in good faith and with honesty, integrity, due diligence, and competence.
Text editor GNU Nano has reached version 6.0.
The app’s last x.0 release emerged in July 2020 and was just the fifth full version in the project’s history.
Version 6.0 debuted on December 15th and is named “Humor heeft ook zijn leuke kanten”.
The Register believes that’s a phrase often uttered by Dutch comedian Herman Finkers and translates as “Humor also has its nice sides”. We’re sure readers who don’t need to rely on machine translation will help us out with a better translation in the comments.
State machines are abstract computational machines that can be in only one of their finite number of states at any given time. They can change from one state to another in response to inputs. State machines can be defined by the list of their states, their initial state and the inputs that trigger the state transitions.
Why? Because it will no longer receive either bug or security fixes. What does that mean? It means if you’re using Python 3.6 past this month, you do so at your own risk.
Trust me when I say you do not want that. This is especially so with the recent discovery of the Log4j vulnerability. No, that doesn’t directly involve Python, but it makes a very loud and painful case for always staying up to date.
That’s a problem. Consider this: As of Dec. 16, 2021, at least 17.39% of packages that were downloaded from PyPI were based on Python 3.6. And that’s knowing this version of Python was about to reach end of life.
Key federal cybersecurity officials are pushing for passage of legislation to create mandates for certain organizations to report cyberattacks amid the fallout from a massive vulnerability in Apache logging package log4j, which has left organizations worldwide vulnerable.
Bipartisan legislation to establish cyber incident reporting standards was set to be included in the compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but was removed at the last minute due to concerns from Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) about the scope of the bill. Scott's concerns were addressed, but not in time for the provision to be included in the NDAA.
So far, researchers have observed attackers using the Log4j vulnerability to install ransomware on honeypot servers — machines that are made deliberately vulnerable for the purpose of tracking new threats. One cybersecurity firm reported that nearly half of corporate networks it was monitoring had seen attempts to exploit the vulnerability. The CEO of Cloudflare, a website and network security provider, announced early on that the threat was so bad the company would roll out firewall protection to all customers, including those who had not paid for it. But concrete news on exploitation in the wild remains scarce, likely because victims either don’t know or don’t yet want to acknowledge publicly that their systems have been breached.
If one did not know much about wildfire ecology, the photos accompanying the article might persuade you that thinning and prescribed burning should be widely applied to our forests.
However, there is much unstated in the article. For instance, there is abundant evidence from numerous high severity blazes around the West that “fuel reductions” typically fail. Of course, not all fuel reductions fail, but most do not significantly alter the outcome of fires.
How do you like them apples? We didn’t and poor Better paid the price.
The fire’s heat would have erased any magnetism in the minerals of this floor. Earth’s magnetic field then left its mark as those minerals cooled, magnetising them anew. Assuming the fragments have not moved since then, the alignments of their magnetic fields will point in the direction of Earth’s field as it was on that fateful day.
Looking for magnetic alignments in this way was well understood when Mr Vaknin began his investigation. But he and his colleagues also did an experiment. They heated samples of the fallen floor in their laboratory and exposed them to a magnetic field as they cooled down, thus repeating what had happened when the edifice was destroyed. By comparing the resultant magnetisation with the original one, and knowing the strength of the field they had themselves applied, they were able to estimate the strength of Earth's magnetic field on the day of the sack.
Meanwhile, there is still no sign of public universities opening. The acting minister of higher education claimed there are not sufficient funds for students to resume their studies – even the thousands of final-year undergraduates waiting to take their exams. Apparently, there is no money either to pay university lecturers; this is the fourth consecutive month they have gone without pay, Moreover, even amid high inflation in the basic staples of life, the ministry of finance recently announced reduced pay scales for Afghan civil servants, including academics – despite previous promises to maintain lecturers’ salaries.
This isn’t the only bad news for Afghan academia. Lecturers have also been dismayed by the Taliban’s appointment of people with no academic background to university chancellorships and vice-chancellorships, as well as to key positions in the Ministry of Higher Education. The fear is that such inexperience at the top will lead to the unravelling of all the hard-earned progress achieved by the sector over the past 20 years.
High ceilings can make a residence feel open and airy, but they often come with difficult-to-reach light fittings. To better deal with that, [mattwach] built a motorized light bulb changer which makes the job much easier.
Light bulb changers already exist, but they typically need to be used on-axis with the light fitting, which for chandeliers and many other lights, can be difficult. Instead, [mattwach’s] design allows the device to be used at 90-degree angles, and motorizes it for added ease of use.
A 12V gear motor does the work of turning the contraption, and has more than enough torque to get the job done. A flanged coupling is used to attach the motor to the light bulb changer itself. An ATTiny85 microcontroller is then used to control the motor via an L293D H-bridge driver. A PS2 thumbstick is hooked up for user input, and all the electronics is mounted on a broomstick along with the light bulb end effector mounted at a right angle.
Working on a breadboard, one can get used to the benefits of being able to readily plug and unplug jumper wires to reconfigure a project. One could only dream of doing so with PCBs, right? Wrong! [Stewart Russell] recently shared a tip on Twitter on how to do just that, with the help of a little fishing wire.
More than 40 labor unions and advocacy organizations representing over 14 million employees issued a petition this week demanding that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration permanently adopt Covid-19 protection standards—which are set to expire next week—for healthcare and other frontline workers.
The petition calls on OSHA to extend and expand the emergency temporary standard (ETS) enacted in June, with an expiration date of December 21. It says, in part:
For decades, a factory on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, has churned out hulking metal parts for Boeing’s commercial airplanes. Despite the steady pulse of its machinery, the plant maintains a low profile; Oregonians more readily associate Boeing with its historic headquarters up north in Seattle. Perhaps, I reasoned last spring, this helped explain why no one had noticed that the company’s satellite campus seemed to have unleashed an environmental catastrophe.
In 2016, Boeing reported to the Environmental Protection Agency that it had massively ramped up the amount of chromium compounds it was pumping into the skies of eastern Portland. For anyone who followed Erin Brockovich’s crusade against the dangerous chemical in Hinkley, California, this should have come as alarming news. Hexavalent chromium, as the highly toxic form of the metal is known, can cause lung, nasal and sinus cancers, trigger pulmonary congestion and abdominal pain, and damage the skin, eyes, kidneys and liver. Although it is widely used in the aerospace industry to protect plane parts from corrosion, hexavalent chromium is such a potent carcinogen that in 2004 Boeing’s own environmental newsletter acknowledged that “it would be most desirable to eliminate the offending agent” altogether.
With rising temperatures and two decades of drought depleting the Colorado River, some Southwestern states are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to pay homeowners to tear out their lawns and farmers to fallow their fields.
But Utah, the fastest-growing and second-driest state in the nation, is pursuing a different strategy.
Cubans have wholeheartedly carried out masking, social-distancing, testing and quarantining. Cuba’ s bio-medical research and production facilities created five anti-Covid vaccines. As of December 3, 90.1 percent of Cubans had received their first dose; 82.3 percent of them were fully vaccinated. Only seven other countries have higher rates. (1) Trials showed that Cuba’s workhorse Abdala and Soberana 02 vaccines were protective for over 90 percent of vaccine recipients.
Cuba’s Covid vaccines don’t need extremely low-temperature refrigeration as is the case for major U.S. vaccines. In that regard they are particularly useful in poorly resourced countries. Cuba has sent, or is preparing to send, vaccines to Vietnam, Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua. Cuban scientists are elaborating a version of their Soberana Plus vaccine that will protect against the Omicron variant.
This focus on the respiratory tract, instead of the lungs, may suggest that omicron could cause less severe disease compared with delta or the original version of the virus. But many scientists, including Veldhoen, say it's too soon to draw that conclusion.
Not that masking on the plane really mattered, because people could take their masks off while they were eating or drinking. I spied one man who nursed a beer for an hour and a half, just to avoid having to put his mask back on. The most frustrating thing about proper mask use is that the point is to protect other people from your potential diseases. So I was sitting there, not drinking beer, protecting the beer guy, but that guy couldn’t be bothered to return the favor.
“Throughout most of the country, there would be little controversy in saying that children should not be the subject of procedures that sterilize and mutilate their young bodies. In fact, advocating on behalf of those procedures would be considered hateful,” stated Schilling.
A 24-year-old New York man who bragged about helping to steal more than $20 million worth of cryptocurrency from a technology executive has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Nicholas Truglia was part of a group alleged to have stolen more than $100 million from cryptocurrency investors using fraudulent “SIM swaps,” scams in which identity thieves hijack a target’s mobile phone number and use that to wrest control over the victim’s online identities.
Security provider [sic] Avast claims to have found a backdoor on the Windows network of a US Government commission that is associated with international rights, but has been unable to get the body to engage in order to resolve the problem.
NAB said that code quality, collaboration and learning opportunities had all increased under innersource.
“When we write code in the open, we tend to write better code,” Cobby said.
“We’re improving discoverability and the ease of finding the source of truth for a piece of information, and we’re reusing intellectual property across the different domains.”
Cobby said that the openness made it easier to understand why certain architectural decisions were made.
“We peer review each other’s work and our discussions are in the open, so that we can always find out why a certain architectural decision was made or why this decision was made not to use a particular technology,” he said.
The Linux Foundation is launching its own virtual machine monitoring software, backed by some of the world’s biggest technology players.
In an official announcement, the Foundation said it would host the Cloud Hypervisor project, delivering a Virtual Machine Monitor for modern cloud workloads.
EFF’s brief argues that private companies should not be protected by foreign sovereign immunity, which limits when foreign governments can be sued in U.S. courts. Hundreds of technology companies sell surveillance and hacking as a product and service to governments around the world. Some companies sell surveillance tools to governments—in 45 of the 70 countries that are home to 88% of the world's internet users—and others, like DarkMatter, do the surveillance and hacking themselves.
DarkMatter’s hacking has serious consequences. In her lawsuit, Oueiss recounts being targeted by thousands of tweets attacking her, with accounts posting stolen personal photos and videos, some of which were doctored to further humiliate her. And earlier this month, EFF filed a lawsuit against DarkMatter because the company hacked Saudi human rights activist Loujain AlHathloul, leading to her kidnapping by the UAE and extradition to Saudi Arabia, where she was imprisoned and tortured.
U.S. companies are on both ends of DarkMatter’s misconduct—some are targets, like Apple and iPhone users, and other companies are vendors. Two U.S. companies sold zero-click iMessage exploits to DarkMatter, which it used to create a hacking system that could infiltrate iPhones around the world without the targets knowing a thing.
The amendment would require browsers to trust third parties designated by the government, without necessary security assurances. But trusting a third party that turns out to be insecure or careless could mean compromising user privacy, leaking personal or financial information, being targeted by malware, or having one’s web traffic snooped on.
What is a CA?
Certificate Authorities (CAs) are trusted notaries which underpin the main transport security model of the Web and other internet services. When you visit an HTTPS site, your browser needs to know that you are communicating with the site you requested, and that trust is ultimately anchored by the CA. CAs issue digital certificates that certify the ownership and authenticity of a public encryption key. The CA verifies that this key does belong to that website. For a certificate to be valid in a browser, it must be signed by a CA. The fundamental duty of the CA is to verify certificate requests submitted to it, and sign only those that it can verify as legitimate.
Customs and Border Protection continues to protect our borders against… stuff. Much like the TSA struggles to catch any terrorists (or, indeed, any items actual terrorists might use) but still issues press releases crowing about the agency's ability to identify and seize novelty items and the occasional gun someone decided not to check, the CBP is more than happy to point out how a system that relies on millions of facial images collected at ports of entry every so often stops someone from entering the country.
Meta’s metaverse is by no means the “official” version of the idea. Indeed, Stephenson tweeted:
RIP NSO Group. Cause of death: investigative reporting.
Spies for hire are secretly targeting journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents on behalf of corporations and governments to an extent not previously understood, Facebook’s parent company says in a new report, while banning six companies and a Chinese network named in the report from its social media platforms.
It said in its report that some 1,500 pages had been suspended by Meta across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp following a months-long investigation.
The companies targeted people in more than 100 countries on behalf of their clients, Meta said.
Over 100 members of Congress on Thursday urged President Joe Biden to step away from "failed policy" by taking a number of steps to reengage with Cuba and help curb a humanitarian crisis in country.
"We believe that a policy of engagement with Cuba serves U.S. interests and those of the Cuban people," the lawmakers wrote in their letter to Biden.
War spews hell in all directions. Just ask the guys at Talon Anvil, a secret U.S. "strike cell" recently exposed by the New York Times as a unit with a reputation for ignoring the rules of engagement and killing lots and lots of civilians with drone strikes as it plays war with ISIS.
A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on closing Guantanamo Bay prison coincided with Congress' approval of a $778 billion military budget that no one asked for: it was, in fact, $25 billion more than the Commander-in-Chief had requested.
As Afghanistan spirals into a humanitarian crisis after the abrupt U.S. withdrawal earlier this summer, we look at years of failed U.S. diplomacy that allowed the Taliban to seize power and leave the small nation in a state of disrepair. A New Yorker magazine investigation shows how the U.S. repeatedly undermined the Kabul-based government in a rush to leave the country. “I’ve been reporting in general and around Afghanistan for a long time. I was still shocked by the degree of cynicism that the United States often brought to this endeavor to seek peace, particularly during the Trump years,” says New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has covered Afghanistan for decades
Afghanistan under the new Taliban government faces a humanitarian catastrophe this winter as the United States and other donors have cut off financial aid. The United Nations warns nearly 23 million people in Afghanistan — or more than half the population — face potentially life-threatening food shortages, with nearly 9 million already on the brink of famine. In addition, people face lack of proper healthcare, unemployment and housing shortages. “The international aid organizations, for them, it’s just another country … where they take pictures and make their careers out of it,” says Pashtana Durrani, activist and executive director of the educational nonprofit LEARN Afghanistan. “For me, it’s my country, and people are starving in it.”
In a verdict handed down in November, a Russian court openly referred to the presence of Russian military personnel stationed in the “DNR and LNR” — the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.€
One of the biggest sources of tension has revolved around Ankara's refusal to recognise the genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I.
Starting in 1915, the crumbling Ottoman Empire's Armenian population was arrested, deported and killed, with the death toll estimated at up to 1.5 million people.
Sniffing HEX did not calm all the participants down, but had different impacts on men and women, the team reports today in Science Advances. Women exposed to the chemical behaved 19% more aggressively in the noise-blast task, whereas men were 18.5% less aggressive.
In a second experiment, the scientists compared how individuals behaved when exposed to HEX or to the control odor while monitoring their brain activity in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. HEX again increased aggression in women (by an average of 13%) and dampened male aggression (by 20%). The chemical also had different effects on brain activity, reducing neural communication between brain areas that control aggression in women, and boosting communication between those regions in men.
A member of the Proud Boys has been sentenced to nearly three years in prison after pleading guilty to threatening Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and other actions earlier this year.
Eduard Florea, 41, was sentenced Thursday by U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee to 33 months in prison for threatening Warnock and possessing ammunition after a prior felony.
Florea had pleaded guilty to the charges in August. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has said the New York man had posted on social media on Jan. 5, “We need to all come to an agreement . . . and go armed . . . and really take back Washington.”
When midnight strikes on New Year's Day of 2050, there will be little cause for celebration. There will, of course, be the usual toasts with fine wines in the climate-controlled compounds of the wealthy few. But for most of humanity, it'll just be another day of adversity bordering on misery—a desperate struggle to find food, water, shelter, and safety.
Another time warp of a year is drawing to a close, with the image of Covid-19 booster queues snaking around street corners marking a sombre end to a long 12 months.
As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc globally, climate change and its impacts again made waves around the world – with a surge in extreme weather events preventing anyone from looking away.
Half a mile south of what’s left of the old Gold Rush–era town of Greenville, Calif., Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. From the top of that grade, I’ve sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada range.
The United States on Wednesday had the most hurricane-force gusts ever recorded in a single day after an after an "off the charts" storm system tore through the central part of the country, bringing tornadoes and triggering widespread power outages, dust storms, and warnings of the climate emergency.
"This is just the kind of thing that happens when you're in the process of breaking the planet's climate system."
There’s no denying it. New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s plans to “kick start the hydrogen fuel industry” is nothing short of a scheme to subsidize oil and gas companies and keep the state dangerously reliant on fossil fuels.
“Dirtier Than Coal”
On the other hand, the experience with commercial nuclear energy generation acquired over the past seven decades points to the significant technical, economic, and social risks involved. This paper reviews arguments in the areas of “technology and risks,” “economic viability,” ’timely availability,” and “compatibility with social-ecological transformation processes.”
Technology and risks: Catastrophes involving the release of radioactive material are always a real possibility, as illustrated by the major accidents in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Also, since 1945, countless accidents have occurred wherever nuclear energy has been deployed. No significantly higher reliability is to be expected from the SMRs (“small modular reactors”) that are currently at the planning stage. Even modern mathematical techniques, such as probabilistic security analyses (PSAs), do not adequately reflect important factors, such as deficient security arrangements or rare natural disasters and thereby systematically underestimate the risks.
Canada has a climate double standard. While land and water defenders face serious criminalization, repression, and police brutality, we're continuing to witness in Wet'suwet'en territory, corporations—backed by the the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)—get away with breaking the law with impunity.
The infrastructure bill signed into law by President Biden in November includes $9.5 billion dollars to support the creation of a clean hydrogen industry — but much of the money is going to support the U.S. fracked gas industry under the guise of “clean” blue hydrogen. While being presented as a clean hydrogen plan for decarbonizing the energy system, the main focus of the hydrogen section of the bill is to continue and expand the use of natural gas (that is, methane) in the U.S. economy via what’s known as blue hydrogen.€
Blue hydrogen is the name for a fuel product that currently cannot be produced on a commercial scale. Hydrogen gets labeled different colors based on how it’s produced. There’s gray, made from fossil fuels, and green, made using renewable energy.€
Now, with the Biden administration’s mandate to slash carbon emissions “at least in half by the end of the decade,” the Pentagon has committed to using all-electric vehicles and transitioning to biofuels for all its trucks, ships and aircraft. But is only addressing emissions enough to mitigate the current climate crisis?
What does not figure into the climate calculus of the new emission-halving plan is that the Pentagon can still continue to destroy Earth’s natural systems that help sequester carbon and generate oxygen. For example, the plan ignores the Pentagon’s continuing role in the annihilation of whales, in spite of the miraculous role that large cetaceans have played in delaying climate catastrophe and “maintaining healthy marine ecosystems,” according to a report by Whale and Dolphin Conservation. This fact has mostly gone unnoticed until only recently.
Progressives are spelling out for the Democratic Party the disastrous implications that are likely to come with the government's possible failure to extend the enhanced child tax credit right as the White House plans to require tens of millions of people to restart their federal student loan payments—warning that the 2022 midterms could be "brutal" if the party imposes new financial burdens on working families.
With right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) telling the White House Wednesday he wants to "zero out" the child tax credit (CTC) in the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation package, millions of families with children may have received their final monthly payment of up to $300 per child this week.
Rev. Dr. William Barber, the co-chair of the national Poor People's Campaign, lambasted Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday for endangering both the Build Back Better Act and voting rights legislation, two central elements of the Democratic Party's popular legislative agenda.
"December is the Senate's deadline, but the deadline for the movement is when we win."
As 2021 races to a close, President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s entire domestic agenda hangs in the balance. Biden and Democratic lawmakers have been hard at work putting together a massive legislative package to address a number of key priorities, including health care, housing, caregiving, education, and climate change. But with Republicans marching in lockstep against it, Democrats can only pass the Build Back Better agenda on their own, requiring that every member vote in favor.
The House has passed its version of the legislation, but in the Senate some conservative Democrats have said that they would refuse to vote for the plan unless it’s smaller and cheaper (even as they’ve also resisted provisions in the bill that would raise revenue, such as a higher corporate tax rate and tougher IRS enforcement for the wealthy) and even proposed slowing the whole process down. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to get it passed before Christmas, but it’s still unclear if the party can meet that tight deadline.
President Joe Biden has never been a fan of serious Supreme Court reform—whether expanding its numbers, establishing term limits, or both. And he punted on the question by creating a 34-member commission to study the issue. Last week, Biden’s commission wrapped up by making no recommendations, citing “profound disagreement among commissioners,” and merely passed along a 288-page report dispassionately examining the pros and cons of various court-reform proposals.
The path forward has not been without issues. Critics of the site noted Reddit’s longtime laissez-faire approach to content moderation, often preferring a hands-off approach to some of the most noxious ideas and people on the internet. But over the years, a number of its executives — including the former chief executive Ellen Pao, and later Steve Huffman, the current chief executive — made it a priority to rein in the platform and enforce new, stricter rules on what was allowed on the site.
Amid a series of setbacks this week, Rep. Pramila Jayapal acknowledged that progressive lawmakers are currently limited in their ability to advance a pro-working class agenda—an implicit endorsement of€ Sen. Joe Manchin's advice to elect more left-leaning candidates if the goal is to win transformative policies that are popular and would benefit the vast majority.
In an interview with Politico€ published Thursday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Jayapal (D-Wash.) said that her caucus has been unable to prevent right-wing Democrats from gutting the party's Build Back Better Act (BBB) because "we don't have enough control."
Ironically Seinfeld exists as a communist utopia and this is what American viewers gravitate towards. In Slavoj Zizek’s vision of communism, it is not surplus value that determines society, but rather an envy. Likewise, Seinfeld’s characters spend little time engaged in production or consumption. Instead, they seem to live perfectly stable lives. Politics and economics have no impact on their well-being. All of this, under communism, is taken care of.
Instead, the characters end up going to extraordinary lengths to address the pettiest of concerns. This could be labeled as bourgeois but I like to think of it as utopian. Rather than sell their bodies for basic resources as the working class must do under capitalism the characters in Seinfeld have basic human (economic) rights and instead spend their time and energy navigating social norms.
With six weeks to go until tens of millions of Americans will be required to restart payments of their student debt, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday shared the stories of some of her constituents who have struggled with the "cruel impact" of the student loan system.
In an email to supporters, the New York Democrat shared the story of LeeAnn, a nurse living in Connecticut who will have to begin paying down $30,000 in student loans again starting February 1, nearly two years after Congress imposed a payment moratorium due to the coronavirus pandemic. Having grown up in poverty, LeeAnn was uncertain she could afford nursing school, but she was assured that if she took out a loan to get her education it would be forgiven once she started working.
Portraying government as a business and you as its “customer” ranks right up there with “the consent of the governed” on the list of fictions contrived to confer “legitimacy” on an institution that does its best to run every aspect of your life, at your expense, whether you consent or not.
Let’s have a look at some of the “customer experience improvements” on offer in the new executive order.
Thomas Edsall, formerly a journalist who covered politics for The Washington Post, and now a contributor to The New York Times, has written a piece that has raised eyebrows. “How to Tell When Your Country Is Past the Point of No Return” is yet another op-ed revealing that the mainstream media are finally waking up to the dire threat our democratic institutions. But chiefly, it is instructive in its demonstration that they still suffer from serious limitations.
Right-wing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema on Wednesday cast further doubt on Democrats' nascent effort to pass voting rights legislation before the end of the year by reiterating her defense of the Senate's legislative filibuster, an archaic rule that the GOP minority has used to stonewall bills aimed at protecting the franchise.
"Senator Sinema is single-handedly destroying any hope of progress on voting rights."
Headlines are screaming that inflation is here to stay.
Late last year the Congressional Progressive Caucus instituted a series of structural changes that its leaders and outside advocates hoped would turn the legislative bloc into a genuine force for change—in part by shedding members who were not fully committed to progressive policy objectives.
But a new report out Thursday claims that despite the CPC's overhaul, a number of House Democrats who are "progressive in name only" (PINOs) remain part of the nearly 100-member strong caucus, raising questions over its potential to achieve the stated aim of "standing up for progressive ideals in Washington and throughout the country."
The Canadian decision to push ahead now is puzzling given that an international consensus is precisely the approach that benefits Canada, since it provides the prospect of new revenues with the cover of a global agreement that removes the risk of tariff retaliation. There is unquestionably a need to ensure that large multinational companies – whether tech or otherwise – pay their fair share. But there is also a need for Canada to be strategic in implementing such policies. Launching into new digital services tax legislation two years before it is scheduled to take effect while there is both an international agreement on the table and mounting disputes with the U.S. seemingly invites further trade escalation with no real benefits from years to come.
A Danish court of impeachment, in finding the former minister guilty for intentionally neglecting her duties under the Ministerial Responsibility Act, sentenced her to 60 days in prison.€ Of the 26 members of the court, only one found for the ex-minister.
It was only the third time since 1910 that a politician has been referred to the impeachment court. The last was in 1993, when former Conservative justice minister Erik Ninn-Hansen faced proceedings for illegally halting the family reunification of Tamil refugees in 1987 and 1988.
The first reading of a controversial draft bill on requiring QR-code vaccine passes for accessing public places in Russia led to a scuffle between Communist Party and United Russia lawmakers in the State Duma on Thursday, December 16.€
Once again, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternative organization have beaten the political odds. Last week, she defeated a million-dollar recall campaign by real estate developers and landlords, Democratic Party leaders, big Trump donors, and newspaper editorialists, who all teamed up to evict the eight-year councilor from City Hall.
Kata Blanka Vas caught the attention of most of Hungary's spectators at the Tokyo Olympics. Even since then, she's been rushing from one race to the next, and her path has led her to the ranks of the top cyclists. We accompanied the 20-year-old competitor and her team to a race in the Czech Republic so that you may get to know her a bit better!
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is writing a book that will include “a critical examination of Facebook,” after revealing what critics say is damning information about the social media giant.
Little, Brown and Co, an imprint of the publishing house Hachette Book Group, announced on Thursday that it will be publishing Haugen’s book.
The title and release date for the book have not yet been determined, according to The Associated Press. The imprint did not reveal any financial terms of the deal.
Effective immediately, #southeastlinuxfest and #self-offtopic in IRC Freenode are no longer operated by SELF. They have been taken over by the entity that has taken over Freenode. Do not use these channels or this network any longer. We have migrated to #southeastlinuxfest and #self-offtopic on Libera.chat. We have an unofficial contingent on OFTC as well
But even if the creators do not see themselves as propaganda tools, Beijing is using them that way. Chinese diplomats and representatives have shown their videos at news conferences and promoted their creations on social media. Together, six of the most popular of these influencers have garnered more than 130 million views on YouTube and more than 1.1 million subscribers.
Sympathetic foreign voices are part of Beijing’s increasingly ambitious efforts to shape the world conversation about China. The Communist Party has marshaled diplomats and state news outlets to carry its narratives and drown out criticism, often with the help of armies of shadowy accounts that amplify their posts.
In effect, Beijing is using platforms like Twitter and YouTube, which the government blocks inside China to prevent the uncontrolled spread of information, as propaganda megaphones for the wider world.
Another weekend in America: American workers died on the job during an environmental disaster, while others literally scrambled on the floor for cash.
A monster storm system sent at least 50 tornados rampaging across Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee, killing dozens. The most recent numbers out of Kentucky, which bore the brunt of the damage, put the death toll at at least 70 people, including multiple children. Also included in the death toll are a number of people who died on the job, notably at an Amazon warehouse in Illinois and a Kentucky candle factory.
Canada, despite being our friendly neighbor to the north, has been known to have some not great laws regarding speech. Over the years, we've covered a few too many distressing lawsuits that attack speech, including by going after intermediaries rather than the speakers themselves. While sometimes (but not always), Canadian courts eventually get to the right decision, it's often many years later, and after a whole lot of censorial nonsense.
A Logically investigation has found that Pakistan-linked disinformation networks, made up of botnets, blogs and high-profile individuals, are amplifying conspiracy theories about the Dec 8 helicopter crash that killed General Rawat.
The narratives, which include false claims that Tamil rebels or Nagaland Maoists attacked the helicopter, and that PM Narendra Modi had orchestrated the attack, were aimed at fostering separatist tensions within India.
For a study of contrasting executive styles in one company, look no further than the difference between how Instagram chief Adam Mosseri performed in front of Congress last week and how his fellow Meta Platforms exec Andrew “Boz” Bosworth acquitted himself in a recorded interview with Axios on Sunday.
While Mosseri did his best to be as diplomatic as possible, Bosworth, who next year will step up to become Meta CTO, came off as if he was chugging truth serum before being asked about the way Facebook was contending with how ubiquitous COVID misinformation is on the world’s biggest social platform.
In late 18th-century America, the working assumption about slave labor in the cotton fields was that it was becoming too expensive. Here is the scenario: In the American South most slaves were used in cotton production. Yet, the use of slave labor was negatively impacting cotton’s profitability. The most labor-intensive aspect of the cotton process at this time, after planting and harvesting, was the extraction of cotton seeds from the raw cotton ball. If you ever get hold of a raw cotton ball, you can easily see why this would be so. The seeds are tightly entwined in a thick mass of cotton fibers. To increase production meant acquiring more slaves to perform this task of extraction. By the 1790s, the cost of additional slaves exceeded the expected profit from added production. Under these conditions U.S. cotton production was stagnant and losing markets to foreign production (such as in India). There was little incentive to expand American cotton production into new regions.
Then in 1793, Eli Whitney (1765–1825) invented the modern cotton gin or cotton engine. It automated the seed extraction process. Whitney’s was not the first cotton gin. Small, hand-cranked models had been in use in India since the 16th century and were introduced into the American south around the mid-18th century. However, their use was restricted to long-staple cotton and their production capacity was low. Whitney’s invention, on the other hand, simultaneously lowered a major cost of production of both long- and short- staple raw cotton, while increasing the volume yield. At this point American cotton production became more competitive and the incentive for expansion grew. Cotton producers looked westward for new land—such as the Mexican province of Texas.
Google and Meta face the threat of multi-million-dollar fines for failing to delete content that the Russian government considers illegal - but a close look at court papers reveals these are often simply posts about protests in support of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Reporters Without Borders announced Thursday that this year has featured a 20% surge in the number of journalists arbitrarily detained worldwide, documenting at least 488 cases, the highest figure since the global press freedom group began its annual roundup in 1995.
"It is a reflection of the reinforcement of dictatorial power worldwide."
In its summary of press violations in 2021, the media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) chronicled a 20% surge in the number of journalists arbitrarily detained. It is the highest figure since RSF began publishing its annual roundup in 1995.
For many years, I worked in Boston public housing with teams of residents, community organizations, public housing staff and other professors on reducing and removing the many asthma triggers that caused the highest rates of asthma and asthma attacks in the city. Living and working in the heart of the city neighborhoods, I was keenly aware of the apartheid nature of public and residential housing (black Roxbury, white South Boston, white gentrification overtaking Boston's mixed-income interracial neighborhoods, and white suburbs)
Dred Scott v. Sanford is the infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision which ruled that an African-American slave taken from slave to free territory in the US was not entitled to his freedom. At issue was the Missouri Compromise, a national law which divided America into free territory in the North, slave for the South when it came to admission for new states.€ In reaching this conclusion the Supreme Court ruled that the intent of the framers of the Constitution was that persons of African descent could never be citizens, they were simply property of their owners.€ Therefore any law, such as the Missouri Compromise that rendered individuals such as Dred Scott as free unconstitutionally violated their owners Fifth Amendment property rights.
Chief Justice Taney in writing the opinion defended states’ rights.€ He declared that issues such as who is a citizen and what rights they have should be left up to the individual states.€ In reaching this conclusion Taney hoped the Court once and for all resolved the slavery issue.€ How wrong he was.€ Less than a year later Abraham Lincoln declared a “House divided against itself cannot stand” and by 1861 the € US was involved in a divided Civil War.€ Dred Scott was not the end, but the final straw in the path to a political crisis the likes of what we have not seen…so far.
Over the last century, the U.S. has witnessed repeated efforts to break-up, if not outlaw, monopolies, cartels and trusts. The classic effort occurred in the fin de siècle era, from the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), with the breakup of Standard Oil and other companies. Nearly a century later, a similar spirit led to the break-up of American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T, the old Ma Bell) in 1984. While those promoting the current anti-monopoly efforts share much with earlier advocates, today’s efforts face a very different economic situation.
The forces driving Big Tech are just the tip of an economic restructuring that’s been brewing for years. “Since 2008 American firms have engaged in one of the largest rounds of mergers in their country’s history, worth $10 trillion,” The Economist noted in a 2016 study. “Unlike earlier acquisitions aimed at building global empires, these mergers were largely aimed at consolidating in America, allowing the merged companies to increase their market shares and cut their costs.” Consolidation is occurring in all sectors as diverse as airlines, retail, telecom, hospitals & health care, food and even eyeglasses.
While it is well-established that unions strengthen worker power on the job and reduce inequality, a new report out Wednesday shows that higher unionization rates are also associated with improved conditions outside of the workplace, including better access to healthcare, paid leave, and the ballot box.
"Unions have linked voting rights to workers' rights."
Inspired by the successful unionization of workers at two Buffalo, New York Starbucks stores last week, employees at a pair of the chain's Boston-area locations—one in the city's Allston neighborhood and the other in Brookline—requested votes this week to join the Workers United union.
"We see this as an opportunity for us to empower one another and get treated as partners by the company."
When the abolition of the slave trade finally came to pass, at least in England, the British were desperate to make amends. Parliament promptly declared that it would pay the enslavers €£20 million—40 percent of Britain’s annual budget—as compensation for the abrupt loss of their “property.” Worse still, before the still-enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbeans could muster a celebratory cheer, the colonial planters had already readied their replacements. On August 1, 1834, the very day that the Slavery Abolition Act took effect, a batch of 39 indentured laborers arrived from colonial India to work in the sugar plantations of Mauritius. They were promptly housed in barracks known as “Camp des Noirs.”
One of the richest people in Russia, prominent businessman Mikhail Fedyaev was once predicted to take over as head of Siberia’s Kemerovo region. But on Wednesday, December 15, he was jailed pending trial in connection with a methane blast that killed 51 people at the Listvyazhnaya coal mine in November.€ Investigators charged Fedyaev with abuse of authority entailing grave consequences, making him the ninth defendant in the criminal case initiated over the accident. Earlier, on December 2, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly chastised Fedyaev over the mine’s safety. The businessman’s arrest on Wednesday coincided with Investigative Committee Head Alexander Bastrykin paying a visit to the Listvyazhnaya mine and urging the investigation team to establish “the role of the mine’s owners in the tragedy.”
Bernard Webster had lived in a prison cell for a decade when he first heard about DNA technology. He started writing to everyone he knew trying to get evidence tested in his felony rape case. It took a whole other decade for him to be exonerated in 2002. Another two decades later, he may get the compensation he is due. Under a Maryland law updated this year, the state could owe him $1.7 million for the time he was wrongfully imprisoned, less the $900,000 the state has already paid him.
Webster’s case is one example of the costs of delaying DNA testing, yet the collection of microscope glass slides that was used to exonerate him remains mostly untested. The stash of physical evidence from more than 1,800 cases comes from one of the country’s oldest DNA databases of rape crimes, which is stored in a Baltimore County hospital. County and state officials renewed efforts in 2019 to finish processing it, along with more than 6,000 unsubmitted rape kits stored in police inventory rooms across the state. ProPublica’s “Cold Justice” series this year spurred additional pleas and pledges for testing after we chronicled how DNA samples that were preserved decades ago by Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker helped solve some of the county’s most brutal cold cases.
The Commission’s directive proposals on algorithmic management were one of three sets of measures announced last week, including the provision of employee status for those working with “digital labor platforms.” That group includes ride-hailing firms such as Uber and Lyft, as well as delivery companies such as Deliveroo and informal domestic service work platforms like TaskRabbit.
There are an estimated 28 million gig workers in the EU, the Commission said, a number that’s expected to rise to 43 million in 2025.
While this may feel like Washington DC insider baseball, it's fairly notable that the "big" internet trade/lobbying group, the Internet Association has announced it's shutting down (Emily Birnbaum at Politico had the scoop the night before the official announcement). There will likely be a bunch of post mortems and discussions about this happening just as the big internet companies (who came together to set up IA in the first place) are under such regulatory threats. But, to me, this is good riddance. It was an organization that more often than not made things worse for the internet, rather than better. And that's too bad, because it had a real chance to do the opposite. This is not to say there weren't good people who worked there -- there absolutely were. But as an organization, it missed a ton of opportunities to do the right thing.
As we've noted, the recent infrastructure bill will deliver a record $65 billion to be spent on improving lagging U.S. broadband access. Roughly $42 billion will be used specifically to expand broadband coverage, mostly via state grants doled out by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). By any measure this is a good thing, and the investment should result in significant improvements in patchy, expensive U.S. broadband access.
Spotify has acquired Whooshkaa, an Australian podcasting platform that allows radio broadcasters to turn their shows into monetizable podcasts.
Using Whooshkaa’s technology, broadcasters are able to record live broadcasts and edit out ads that can be replaced with dynamic, podcast-only ads. Following the acquisition, Whooshkaa’s technology will be integrated into Megaphone, the podcast advertising and publishing platform that Spotify acquired last year, and the audio giant will be able to add more third-party audio content to its library.
As the coronavirus variant Omicron spreads across the world at an unprecedented rate, a group of vaccine experts has just released a list of over 100 companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the potential to produce mRNA vaccine. They say it is the one of the most viable solutions to fight vaccine inequity around the world and combat the spread of coronavirus variants, including Omicron. We speak to Achal Prabhala, one of the vaccine experts who compiled the list. If mRNA technology could be shared with the listed companies, “we could vaccinate the world in as close to six months from now,” says Prabhala. “These are very much the people’s vaccines. It’s just that they are private property.”
We need to learn the lessons of this game and apply them to the real world. In controlling a global pandemic, we must come to the realization that no one is safe until everyone is safe. Global cooperation is the key to success.
The developed nations have received most of the vaccinations, but have been plagued by new variants such as Delta, which started in India, or the new Omicron, first reported in Southern Africa. These variants are created in areas of low vaccination, where high rates of transmission increase the odds of a new mutation that is more contagious, more deadly or able to break through the existing vaccines. Such variants, unfortunately, can circle the globe quite quickly, as we have seen. Consequently, we must develop a coordinated global response to this pandemic, if we truly want to defeat Covid 19.
It is the latest and biggest megadeal in what has been a frothy couple of years in which investors, major music companies and private equity firms — lured by the rise of streaming and a promise of growing music revenues for years to come — have poured billions of dollars into buying song catalogs.
Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Shakira, Neil Young and many other stars have sold all or parts of their work for prices reaching into the hundreds of millions. Dylan’s deal, with Universal Music Publishing Group last year, was only for his songwriting and was estimated at well over $300 million.
The Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance has announced the winner of its annual "Anti-Piracy Award." The honors go to a team at the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, which is part of the EU Intellectual Property Office. Among other things, the EU team has helped to prioritize the online piracy problem throughout Europe.
In the summer of 2020, musician Maria Schneider filed a class action lawsuit against YouTube demanding access to takedown tools and claiming that the service fails to terminate repeat copyright infringers. Almost 18 months later, YouTube wants the lawsuit dismissed, alleging that the plaintiffs are "hiding the ball" and "flouting the law".
