The Steam Deck is almost here so Valve has released a tool to check which games in your library are currently known to be supported, but keep in mind this is not all the games that work just the ons Valve is telling you about.
The Linux kernel has an internal system to assign (or let people assign) a log level for all kernel messages, ranging from 'debug' at the bottom up through 'emerg' at the top. You can read about it in syslog(2), and these kernel log levels become syslog(3) log levels, can be reported (and thus manually filtered) by dmesg(1) and so on. Given this, you might wonder if it's useful to do anything different for different log levels, like route some log levels to a special syslog file. Cynical system administrators already know the answer from their experiences with syslog priorities, and it is "not really".
I’ve recently needed to do some porting work for a PPC32 CPU running Linux. At the time I didn’t have any PPC hardware (I’ve since acquired a PowerMac G5). Of course when we don’t have hardware, we can normally emulate it. Here is how I set up the emulation so I can remember for next time.
But why? Ok, sure: to get rid of the annoying cert error. But putting aside that not all errors here can even be ignored or "resolved" by passing -k, let us pretend that we actually cared and wanted to find out what the problem is. Some of the errors encountered when accessing an HTTPS service using e.g., curl(1) are self-explanatory, but for many others we are often left trying to determine just why our tool can't validate the remote certificate.
Here are a few debugging techniques that may help you better make sense of the errors: [...]
Gigabit ethernet has been around for a long time, it’s so ubiquitous that there is a very strong chance that if you have a RJ-45 port on your computer, it’s going to be a gigabit ethernet network interface.
Even if you look at computers that are over 20 years old, the only thing that stands out on their spec sheets as still being current is gigabit ethernet.
Specifically, for a long time Unix didn't have any sort of service management as such, beyond init restarting getty processes. All services were simply started as part of the boot process in what started as a very simple script and grew only somewhat from there in BSD Unixes. If you needed to check the status of services, you ran ps; if you needed to restart a service, you terminated it with kill and started the new version by hand. The System V init system moved this forward somewhat by creating scripts that encapsulated the knowledge of how to start, stop, and sometimes check the status of each service, but it did nothing to manage the services as such; it still merely booted (and shut down) the system. Noticing that a service's daemons had died and starting them again was up to you.
What that means is that both the challenging problems and the state of the art in an init system have moved on from just booting your Unix system in a static configuration. What really matters in init systems today and what distinguishes one from another is largely how they deal with operating the system and changing the system configuration. Changing the system configuration is the easier of the two sides to talk about; it's the area of how you change what happens in the next boot. How you add things, remove things, change exactly what happens, reorder things, and so on. Init systems can make this anywhere from easy to very difficult, and mostly they fall somewhere in the middle.
Axzez even builds a custom OS that can run either on eMMC storage, a USB flash drive, or over one of the SATA drives (though the latter option still requires a flash drive for the early boot stage).
I tested their OS, and tested every feature on the board—an RTC, front panel ATX power switch and power LED, all five SATA ports, two full-size HDMI ports, four 12v 3-pin fan headers, a USB 2.0 internal header and 2x rear USB 2.0 ports, and the 24-pin ATX power connector to power the board itself. Everything worked great out of the box, and the software (even at its early stage) seemed to perform adequately.
Emails have played a significant role in each association because of their convenience, and accessibility. A few plugins are accessible in the market that work wonders in order to configuring each part of email notifications. In Jenkins, we will see one of them. Jenkins email notification is based on Java plugin tool and it plays an important role in continuous Integration as it is used to send the notification alert automatically when an email is received.
In this video, we are looking at how to install LeoCAD on Zorin OS 16.
Today we are looking at how to install Sonic Robo Blast 2 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.
VMware Workstation Pro (known as VMware Workstation until release of VMware Workstation 12 in 2015) is a hosted hypervisor that runs on x64 versions of Windows and Linux operating systems (an x86-32 version of earlier releases was available); it enables users to set up virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine and use them simultaneously along with the host machine. Each virtual machine can execute its own operating system, including versions of Microsoft Windows, Linux, BSD, and MS-DOS.
In this installation guide, we will show you how to install InvoicePlane on Ubuntu systems
InvoicePlane is a self-hosted open source application for managing your quotes, invoices, clients and payments.
It is specially designed for business owners to create and manage their invoices and client payments.
In this small guide, we will show you how to install MakeMKV on Ubuntu 20.04 with two methods.
MakeMKV is a DVD and Blu-ray ripping software. It is a free MKV video maker for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Using this you can convert your favorite videos from DVD and Blu-ray discs to MKV aka Matroska Video format.
A Blu-ray ripper is a computer program that facilitates copying a Blu-ray disc or HD DVDs to a hard disk drive.
In this small guide, we will show you how to install MakeMKV on Ubuntu 20.04 with two methods.
The secure socket shell (SSH) is preferred connection mechanism, especially when compared to HTTPS, when connections are made from Git to a remote server like GitLab, GitHub or BitBucket.
In this Git tutorial, we will show you how to configure SSH keys in order to securely connect your local Git instance with your remote repositories.
Nigel's Monitor (nmon) is a system performance monitoring tool originally developed by IBM for the AIX operating system and later ported for Linux on several CPU architectures.
The main benefit of nmon is that it allows you to monitor different aspects of your system, such as CPU utilization, memory, disk busy, network utilization, and more, in a single, concise view. Without nmon, you have to use specialized monitoring tools like top for processes, iostat for disks, and ifstat for the network to monitor various resources. Each of them presents the data differently.
I used nmon for the first time about 10 years ago as an AIX sysadmin. By using nmon, I was able to troubleshoot some hard-to-spot issues, including one that initially seemed like a network bottleneck. By inspecting several resources simultaneously using nmon, I discovered it was an application issue caused by opening too many files.
In addition to interactively monitoring your system, you can also use nmon in batch mode to collect and save performance data for analysis. For more information about nmon for Linux, consult the project's official page.
This article looks at this powerful monitoring tool. Start by installing it.
We have recently covered an article on the UUID of disk storage, where we discussed why we need UUID, how to retrieve it, and all. It is important to have a UUID when you want to automount your drive. If you don’t know what UUID is, then I highly recommend you read that article first. How to find the UUID of disk storage with a simple command.
And in this article, you will see how to automount disk or USB in Linux, and I believe these steps will work in all Linux distributions(Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Almalinux) without any hustle.
Wine 7.x has just been released! Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine on Debian 11. Wine 7 is the current stable release as of this writing, hence this guide is about how to install 7.x on Debian 11. Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a program which allows running Microsoft Windows programs (including DOS, Windows 3.x, Win32, and Win64 executables) on Unix. It consists of a program loader which loads and executes a Microsoft Windows binary, and a library (called Winelib) that implements Windows API calls using their Unix, X11 or Mac equivalents. The library may also be used for porting Windows code into native Unix executables.
Follow this tutorial to learn how to install Wine on Ubuntu 22.04. Wine is a free and open-source software which provides the ability to run Microsoft Windows applications and computer games to run on POSIX-compliant Operating Systems, such as Linux, MacOS and BSD.
Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused internet browser that sets itself apart from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings.
Brave claims that its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome. Even with multiple tabs open at once, the new Brave Software uses 66% less memory and has 50 million more active users than before – a growth of 2X in 5 years!
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
Memcached is a free, open-source project that anyone can use to speed up response times for dynamic websites. As the software lives in RAM and not on external storage devices like hard drives or SSDs, does it allow you to take advantage when your website needs information quickly without having to wait anywhere from seconds until to almost minutes on high traffic websites that are not optimized correctly with software such as Memcached.
In the following tutorial, you will know how to install and configure Memcached on your Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, along with some basic configuration examples.
Ubuntu Kylin is the official Chinese version of Ubuntu however supports English. It has been described as a “loose continuation” to its parent operating system with some differences in appearance and functionality. Still, most importantly, it’s explicitly designed for approval in mainland China, but international users are welcome to use it.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Kylin Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
Note installing Kylin desktop will be hard to remove and restore your original desktop however you can swap back to the default GNOME desktop and keep it installed. The recommendation is to install Kylin or any alternative desktop environment on a Virtual Machine to test before a complete upgrade.
GNOME Flashback is a free open-source session for GNOME 3, initially called “GNOME Fallback” and shipped as a stand-alone session in Debian and Ubuntu. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2 desktop but uses the newer GTK+ 3 toolkit and associated technologies. The project aims to keep the functionality of GNOME 2 available until all significant applications have been ported to GTK+ 3.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the GNOME Flashback desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish.
Dirt Rally is a racing simulator developed and published by Code Masters for Microsoft Windows and PS4, and Xbox One. Later on, after its release, it made its way to Linux and Mac OS. Here’s how you can play it on your Linux PC.
In this article we will learn How To Visualize Disk Space Usage With Vizex. Vizex is a command line program to display disk usage for all partitions and media in graphical layout. Output of Vizex shows the total size, total used space, free space and percentage of used space of each partition in a horizontal bar chart-like diagrams.
We can customize the output as per our liking using various options. For example, we can display the visualized disk usage of a specific path. We can exclude specific partition details from the output. We can save the partitions full information in a csv or json file. It is even possible to display the battery information of a Laptop using Vizex. Vizex also has a feature to print the directory contents with size, file types, and last modified date.
This post is about WebLogic don’t start. So we are going to fix it.
I hate java and its ecosystem. Some days ago one of our WebLogic run out of disk space and the process died.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
Like previous LTS series, 20.04.4 includes hardware enablement stacks for use on newer hardware. This support is offered on all architectures.
Ubuntu Server defaults to installing the GA kernel; however you may select the HWE kernel from the installer bootloader.
As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Kubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Budgie 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu MATE 20.04.4 LTS, Lubuntu 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Kylin 20.04.4 LTS, Ubuntu Studio 20.04.4 LTS, and Xubuntu 20.04.4 LTS are also now available. More details can be found in their individual release notes:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours
Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years. Additional security support is available with ESM (Extended Security Maintenance).
The fourth point release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is available to download.
Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS is a newly-spun installer image that contains all core security patches, bug fixes, and app updates released to Ubuntu 21.04 since the release of Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS back in August of last year.
Periodic refreshes to the install media is a necessary task for a long-term support release as it cuts down on the number of post-install updates a user needs to install.
If you use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and you install all issues updates as and when they’re releases you do not need to reinstall. You’re not missing out on anything. You already have everything included in these new images.
Linux 5.13 is the big lure of this point release, carried over from October’s Ubuntu 21.10 release. Linux 5.13 introduces a bunch of tweaks including better EXT4 support, a new cooling driver for modern Intel CPUs, and better support for peripherals including the Apple Magic Mouse 2 and the GK6X mechanical keyboard.
Other updates bundled with the new ISO include GNOME Shell 3.36.8, LibreOffice 6.4.7.2, and Mozilla Firefox 97.
Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 20.04.4 LTS has been released!
We have a serial console server that we have connected to all of our important servers, and we have our servers set up so that the serial console is one of the places that Linux kernel messages go when they're printed to the 'console'. Since we log all of the console output, we want all kernel messages to reliably go to the (serial) console. Recently we discovered that our Ubuntu servers were not doing this. Instead, Ubuntu limits the console to log level '4' and higher priority messages, covering what syslog(2) describes as 'warning', 'err', 'crit', 'alert', and 'emerg', and excluding what it describes as 'notice', 'info', and 'debug'. Unfortunately this is not what you want because kernel log levels are relatively meaningless.
The MSP430 is a 16bit microcontroller made by Texas Instruments. As with many other embedded platforms I’ve been doing some work with it recently. In particular I started with the MSP-EXP430F5529LP development board which is what this blog post will be about.
Wordle mania (trademark, probably, of the New York Times) continues. My wife and I, who bonded over word games and later got married because that's how you pick a good life partner, play daily on a private instance, except that she's 19 hours ahead so she has to be careful not to give out spoilers. Retro has gotten into the action. There are Wordle ports for Windows 3.1, Palm Pilots, Game Boys and at least three versions for the Commodore 64, such as this, this and this poop themed one called Turdle, ha ha ha.
Still, however, while these ports ditch dependence on JavaScript and HTML, they still rely on other modern conveniences such as, you know, a screen, a keyboard, and multiple kilobytes of RAM.
You see where I'm going with this.
Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I’ve occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.
If I happen to be programming on my Mac right now, you can watch here at my website.
Chimera Linux, an upcoming Linux distro with a FreeBSD userland so you don't have to choose, now has downloadable test images for ppc64le and x86_64. The little-endian Power images, which we care about here obviously, are available both as straight-up console (which can be redirected to the onboard serial port) and GNOME-or-console flavours, and require a POWER8 or higher. The GNOME spins (screenshot at right) use Wayland by default but also allow X11 with a bootloader configuration. There's still a lot in flux, but it's impressive the OS is this far along, and certainly offers something more substantial to the Power community than the usual distro dance. For more info, see the FAQ, or download ISO images from the download page.
In case you missed it, I've always maintained that the most logical upgrade path from a PowerPC-based computer is to ... another PowerPC-based computer. SheepShaver, the well-known classic Mac OS emulator (which many of you use to run Classic apps in Leopard), is now ported to OpenPOWER, so you can run it on a POWER9-based workstation like the Raptor Talos II or Blackbird. Myself, with this port working, I've migrated almost entirely from QEMU to SheepShaver except for a few apps that still have compatibility issues. Come on in: Power ISA isn't dead, not by a long shot.
You’re probably a digital designer or work in some publishing capacity (otherwise it would be pretty strange to have a fascination with fonts); and you appreciate the aesthetic power of exceptional typography.
So what do you do when you encounter a wonderful font in the wild that you might want to use in your own design work? Well, if you have a font finder browser extension you can learn all about it within a couple mouse clicks. Here are some of our favorite font discovery extensions…
Docker is a powerful development platform that enables users to containerize software. These containers can be run on any machine, as well as in a public or private cloud. Thanks to Docker’s lightweight runtime and ability to run processes in isolation, multiple containers can run at the same time on the same VM or server.
MySQL is one of the most popular relational databases of all time. Using MySQL with Docker and docker-compose makes it very easy and fast to test out any changes in any application using MySQL as the database. In this tutorial, we will detail how to use MySQL with Docker and docker-compose step-by-step keeping things easy to comprehend. Let’s get rolling!
CSV (RFC 4180) is quite good solution when we want to store or share relational data in a simple text format – both, human-readable and well supported by many existing applications and libraries. We have even ready-to-use GUI editors, so called spreadsheets (e.g. LibreOffice Calc). However, such simple formats have usually some drawbacks. CSV may contain only a single relation (table, sheet). This is not a big issue – we can use several files. A more serious problem is the absence of data types – in CSV, everything is just a text string. Thus it was impossible to have loss-less conversion to CSV and back.
I’m not sure if this title is clickbaity, but it certainly summarizes some of the impressions I wanted to write about.
Yesterday I watched Andrew Kelley’s fun talk on Practical Data Oriented Design — do check it out! — and this post will contain some “spoilers” (as in, I will discuss his takeaways). I was drawn to the talk for two reasons: first, because I wanted to check if I was up-to-date on my programming TLAs, but also because he starts by talking about how he felt he had been stuck in a plateau as a programmer for the past decade — a feeling I’m sure many of us have felt at times! — and how this new knowledge got him out of it.
The bulk of the talk, and his takeways on refactoring his Zig compiler to use Data Oriented Design, is on how to get better runtime performance by making data structures smaller, so they are easier on the cache.
The orange site is currently discussing an article about Server-Sent Events, especially as compared with WebSockets (and the emerging WebTransport). Both the article and discussion are well-informed, but I think they miss out on one aspect that has fairly deep implications.
This is somewhat of a response to Uncle Bob's post of similar nature, which I would say has gotten a mixed to positive reception. I had planned a similar post a week or two before the release of his, but archived the idea upon reading his post. But after having read it over a couple of times I have now decided that I still have something meaningful to write. What follows are the purely subjective reasons for which I enjoy using Clojure. Some have criticised Bob for being very absolute and not giving up any screen estate for more nuanced viewpoints, something I will try to avoid.
First a term: by “treatise”, I’m not saying this newsletter is comprehensive, persuasive, or even correct. I’m using it to mean a very specific type of writing, one that presents an idea and its consequences without trying to convince people of that idea. I don’t even know if I’m convinced by the idea. I just want to see if I can communicate a specific idea, and if people understand it but reject it, I’m happy.1
Yesterday, I put forth a bunch of API possibilities for the problem of needing to return a value but also indicating the lack of a value and being able to comment on why. In it, the notion of a "wrapper" around a string was presented, such that it might look like "Result<string>", and those brackets started looking like a pain. There was also the possibility of having something like "ResultString", but didn't that open the door to having a bunch of code duplication?
If you agree with the notion that you need to be able to tell the difference between the absence of a value and a value itself, then this has some impacts on the code you write. If you want to keep 'em separated (so they can come out and play), then it gets you looking at your API designs in certain ways.
These are my reactions to some of the ways a value can be returned (or not).
These days, I've come to feel that the Global Interpreter Lock is not really for Python programmers. Who the GIL is for is the authors of CPython packages that are written in C (or in general any compiled language). The GIL broadly allows authors of those packages to not implement any sort of locking in their own code, even when they're manipulating C level data structures, because they're guaranteed that their code will never be called concurrently or in parallel. This extends to the Python standard objects themselves, so that (in theory) Python dicts don't need any sort of internal locks in order to avoid your CPython process dumping core or otherwise malfunctioning spectacularly. Concurrency only enters into your CPython extension if you explicitly release the GIL, and the rules of the CPython API make you re-take the GIL before doing much with interpreter state.
I first began to work with CSV files when taking the backend portion of my software engineering bootcamp curriculum. It wasn’t until I began to dive more into the data science portion of my continued learning that I began to use them on a regular basis.
Regular expressions are a common feature of computer languages, especially higher-level languages like Ruby, Perl, Python, and others, for doing fairly sophisticated text-pattern matching. Some languages, including Perl, incorporate regular expressions into the language itself, while others have classes or libraries that come with the language installation. Python's standard library has the re module, which provides facilities for working with regular expressions; as a recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing shows, though, that module has somewhat fallen by the wayside in recent times.
Hi friends, we are back with episode eight of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Giovanna Fontenelle — she’s a journalist, historian, and Wikimedian. She’s also a master’s student in social history at the University of São Paulo.€ Giovanna works as a Program Officer, GLAM and Culture, at the Wikimedia Foundation. She’s also a member of Creative Commons Brasil (CCBR), Creative Commons Global Network, Wiki Movimento Brasil User Group, and ICOM Brazil. At CCBR, she coordinates the areas of Open GLAM and Wikimedia. Her current work activities are related to GLAM-Wiki, Open GLAM, linked open data, in addition to carrying out projects on diversity and knowledge equity.
Anyway, I’m not going to try to convince anyone to do then think. I can’t prove nor even properly conceptualize why you should start doing that. But I want to try and at least think about a few reasons why doing before thinking, or at least doing something that seems like doing before thinking, is so unreasonably ineffective.
In my ongoing, inadvertent quest to alienate myself from the design industry, I must now tell you all that Comic Sans is a good typeface.
Software engineers sometimes have a reputation of being overly critical when it comes to tools and programming languages. The web is full of rants, heated debates and articles about what technology is "better" and which is "crap". It was thus refreshing to read an post titled Software I'm thankful for, that shone a light on some pieces of software in a positive light. In honor of this article, I've decided to go through the same exercise.
I found Schulte's explanation convincing though. The !!A_\infty!! that Schulte suggested is not a mere conjunction of axioms. The usual form of !!A_\infty!! states that the infinite set !!S!! must include !!\varnothing!!, whatever that means. The rewritten form has the same content, but more explicit: !!S!! must include some element !!Z!! that has the emptiness property (!!\forall y. y\notin Z!!) that we want !!\varnothing!! to have.
I am satisfied. I hereby recant the mistaken conclusion of that article.
What are lightning talks?
The Florida Legislature would have you think it invented parental rights last year when it passed the Parents’ Bill of Rights. It did not. Most of those rights have been in the books for decades. The ploy aims bigger: to continue the GOP’s assault and destruction of public education. Parents are being weaponized into mercenary service by a legislature that needs docile foot soldiers who have no clue they’re being manipulated. Making them look like heroes is part of the scam. The parental bill of rights is intended to bring out the worst in parents. It’s doing an awesome job.
A large part of being a professor at a research university is writing grant proposals.
But it is hard to learn how to write proposals. Very few proposal documents are ever shared publicly. You basically have to ask colleagues to share theirs or give feedback on your drafts. You might get the chance to review proposals for a funding agency, which lets you see part of how the decisions are made. You do get feedback after submitting a proposal, though it comes many months later and can be hard to decipher.
So I'm sharing my NSF CAREER proposal document (pdf) and why I wrote it the way I did.
Board space is a premium on small circuit board designs, and [Alvaro] knows it. So instead of adding a separate programming port, he’s found a niche USB-C feature that lets him use the port that he’s already added both for its primary application and for programming the target microcontroller over JTAG. The result is that he no longer needs to worry about spending precious board space for a tiny programming port; the USB-C port timeshares for both!
In a Twitter thread (Unrolled Link), [Alvaro] walks us through his discovery and progress towards an encapsulated solution. It turns out that the USB-C spec supports a “Debug-Accessory Mode” specification, where some pins are allowed to be repurposed if pins CC1 and CC2 are pulled up to Logic-1. Under these circumstances, the pin functions are released, and a JTAG programmer can step in to borrow them. To expose the port to a programmer, [Alvaro] cooked up a small breakout board with a USB-C plug and separate microcontroller populated on it.
At Maison Nico, I’ve met the French-born chef/ proprietor, Nicholas Delaroque and his American wife, Andrea. They introduced me to Paul Einbund, Maison Nico’s sommelier who doubles as the owner of The Morris, a San Francisco bistro named after Paul’s father. I think of Paul as Maison Nico’s “wine guy.” He’s the stellar master of the wine cellar housed in the basement at 710 Montgomery. “I go to Europe for wine as often as possible,” Paul tells me. “The last time I went was in November 2021. I’m itching to go again.”
Centuries ago, pâtés originated with European peasants who made them from what we’d call “leftovers” and from scraps of pork, chicken and duck. Gradually, pâtés became luxury items prized by the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Now they’re on the menus of restaurants around the world and available to the masses in supermarkets. The history of the pâté is emblematic of the larger history of food, which reflects the movement of social and economic classes and cultural paradigms, though that’s not why I devour them. Still, the history adds to the appeal.
A German anti-vaxxer called Rita Bock (not her real name), still hopes that Omicron will end the vaccination issue. Rita Bock is one of the unvaccinated 25% and she wants to stay that way. The conversation with Rita took place outside a local café. Rita lives in Findorff, a suburb of the north German port city of Bremen. She is in her mid-40s with two children and she used to work in the cultural sector, but plans to become a school teacher.
After a quiet summer, Covid-19 cases have increased significantly in those weeks, not only in former East-Germany’s Saxony and Thuringia, but also in Bavaria. The lack of understanding towards people like Rita Bock remains a problem in Germany. There are lots of discussion on Germany’s ever-favourite political talk shows about the anti-vaccination issues. This extends to hate messages on (anti-)social media and covidiots – a merger of Covid-19 and idiots.
For more than six months, Hong Kong detected zero imported COVID-19 cases; however, since the Lunar New Year, the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus has led to an exponential growth in the caseload, with clusters developing throughout the city.
The majority of threats related to the authentication process are associated with passwords and password-based authentication methods. But broken authentication also causes a significant amount of vulnerabilities. Broken authentication occurs when the implementation of the authentication process is flawed. Unfortunately, this is usually hard to discover, and can be more severe than the risks associated with passwords.
This blog post explores the security vulnerabilities that are commonly found in the authentication and password process of a software application. It will also discuss common attack vectors that are used to exploit weak authentication processes.
Researchers with Check Point, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company, published the findings Friday based on what it said were files and other forensic evidence connected to the hack. Iranian officials acknowledged the attack at the time, saying that “disruptions” also occurred on another television channel and two radio stations, and called the hack “complex.” The breach occurred the day before Iran began its multi-day celebration of the 1979 revolution.
The US government said today that Russian state-sponsored threat actors have targeted and breached multiple defense contractors between January 2020 and February 2022.
“Compromised entities have included CDCs [cleared defense contractors] supporting the US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, US Space Force, and DoD and Intelligence programs,” US officials said in a joint security alert published today by the NSA, CISA, and the FBI.
A new bug discovered on Windows 11 and Windows 10 version 21H2 is leaving data of few users unprotected. The bug has been discovered by Rudy Ooms and he has revealed information about the bug in the Call4Cloud blog. As per the blog, the operating systems are leaving data on a disk even after a factory reset.
This means the data stored on your PC may still be accessible even if you sell it or give it away after resetting. The blog suggests that the bug may be specifically files on OneDrive that are locally synced with the PC.
Oh, NSO Group, is there anything you won't do? (And then clumsily deny later?). If I were the type to sigh about such things, I surely would. But that would indicate something between exasperation and surprise, which are emotions I don't actually feel when bringing you this latest revelation about the NSO's shady dealings.
Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.
The third-party service provider in question is the end-user’s bank.
A representative YouGov survey conducted in nine EU countries confirms serious chilling effects of indiscriminately collecting information on the contacts and the location of the entire population. More than a third of the respondents (34%) would refrain from seeking counselling from a marriage counsellor, a psychotherapist or a rehab clinic by phone, mobile phone or email if they knew that their contact was being recorded. (Germany: 45% Austria: 42%, France: 38%, Belgium: 35%, The Netherlands: 34%, Sweden: 33%, Czech Republic: 26% and Spain: 13%)
I’m not saying this isn’t true for Krueger’s specific case, but a 10-fold increase in customer acquisition cost doesn’t sound right in general. It feels like we’re talking about Facebook’s business model having utterly collapsed. Their “bad” results last quarter showed an 8 percent year over year drop in profit, yes, and investors very much were spooked by that, yesââ¬â°—ââ¬â°but they still reported over $10 billion in profit and almost $34 billion in revenue for the quarter.
Putting aside the company’s claim to be shifting its attention to a “metaverse” future, it’s a mistakeââ¬â°—ââ¬â°or at least very prematureââ¬â°—ââ¬â°to speak in the past tense about Facebook as we know it.
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), U.S. Cyber Command Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF), the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK), and the National Security Agency (NSA) have issued a joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA) detailing malicious cyber operations by Iranian government-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors known as MuddyWater.
We have released LibreSSL 3.5.0, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is a development release for the 3.5.x branch, and we appreciate additional testing and feedback before the final release coming soon with OpenBSD 7.1.
MAD is the apt acronym for the situation that obtains when two rival nations have enough nuclear weapons to reasonably threaten unacceptable nuclear devastation in retaliation for an initial nuclear strike on the other.
There is, after all, a reason why no nuclear bomb has been exploded in a war during the 77 years since the second US operational nuclear bomb, the plutonium-based “Fat Boy,” was dropped on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945.
In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the West now has no choice but to impose the toughest possible economic sanctions on Russia and to seek to unite as much of the world as possible in pressing Russia to end the attack. All scholars and analysts of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union must add their voices to the unqualified condemnation of Russia's action, and their support for massive economic retaliation.€
This recurring and inevitable conflict is evident in Russia’s diplomatic recognitions of the two separatist Russian-majority republics of the Donbass, in which, as in the former Soviet regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea, all diplomatically recognized as independent states by Russia (in Crimea’s case, prior to its reintegration into the Russian Federation), as well as in Kosovo, most of the people clearly wished to separate from the country to which they had been internationally recognized as belonging.
No one should be surprised that the principle which any government will proclaim to be absolute — or at least to take precedence and be controlling — in any particular instance is the principle which is consistent with the result which it prefers in that instance.
It meant kids returning home from school with flyers asking their parents to donate a tooth to Washington University.
It meant articles and photos in newspapers, giving updates and appealing for more donations.
Human rights groups responded with alarm to Russia's military assault on Ukraine and called for the protection of civilians and adherence to international law as the invading army's far-flung bombing campaign wreaks havoc in multiple cities and forces refugees to flee for their lives.
"Our worst fears have been realized," Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnès Callamard said Thursday in a statement. "After weeks of escalation, a Russian invasion that is likely to lead to the most horrific consequences for human lives and human rights has begun."
Escalating tensions between Ukraine, NATO and Russia caused after Russia recognised the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk has seen the Cold War spectre of nuclear war between Russia and the United States return to haunt public consciousness. While public opinion is divided on whether Russia plans to invade Ukraine proper, the fear that a nuclear war will erupt should the US or NATO intervene to assist the Ukrainians directly, by sending troops to Ukraine for example, is universal.€
Progressive lawmakers in the U.S. House joined human rights organizations, anti-war groups, and thousands of Russians in vehemently condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine Thursday and called on the Biden administration to avoid further harm to Ukrainians as the U.S. responds.
"The Progressive Caucus stands with the Ukrainian people and the international community in condemning the violent invasion of Ukraine by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This war of aggression is a blatant violation of international law, despite Putin's baseless justifications," said Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), chair of the Caucus Peace and Security Task Force, in a statement.
The chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday elevated questions about whether a Russian cyberattack could trigger an Article 5 "collective defense" response from NATO and thus set off a broader war.
"We are in totally unpredictable territory."—Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)
Sen. Bernie Sanders condemned former President Donald Trump on Thursday for praising Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine as "genius" and citing it as a potential model for U.S. border policy.
"It is outrageous, if unsurprising, that Trump would praise Putin's murderous invasion of Ukraine as an act of 'genius,'" Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday as Russian forces continued their assault on the neighboring country of 44 million, sparking fears of mass displacement, death, and potential nuclear catastrophe.
Critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin's long-awaited invasion of Ukraine on Thursday joined open letters and took to Russia's streets to protest the ongoing air and ground assault—resulting in more than 1,000 arrests.
The protests within and beyond Russia came as Moscow claimed Russian strikes took out at least "74 ground facilities of Ukraine's military infrastructure."
For decades, I’ve been moved by Hanh’s witness and his writings, which shined such a light on the destructive consequences of our country’s militarism. As he said, “To prepare for war, to give millions of men and women the opportunity to practice killing day and night in their hearts, is to plant millions of seeds of violence, anger, frustration, and fear that will be passed on for generations to come.”
We reap what we sow. It seems so obvious, but in these endless years of U.S. war-making across the globe, this simple truth seems to have escaped most Americans.
We speak about the looming humanitarian crisis in Ukraine with Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who recently met with civilians on the frontlines in eastern Ukraine and urges world leaders to consider the human cost of war and work toward a ceasefire and diplomatic solution. “A cruel military onslaught is engulfing millions,” says Egeland. “It will lead to untold suffering in Ukraine but also refugee flows in the region.”
In response to the Russian military's invasion and bombing of Ukraine, United€ Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday reiterated his call for peace, pleading with the Kremlin to withdraw its troops and avoid a full-blown war that would have devastating consequences worldwide.
"The decisions of the coming days will shape our world and directly affect the lives of millions upon millions of people."
Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prompting condemnation and the threat of new sanctions from the U.S. and allies. Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to the move early Thursday morning in Moscow as a “special military operation,” coming just days after Putin recognized two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states. The sound of explosions was reported across the country, and authorities have reported scores of deaths in the early hours of the attack. As Russian forces appear to have invaded from the north and headed for Kyiv, Putin may try to take over all of Ukraine and replace its government, says Anatol Lieven, senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, who adds, “The implications are truly, truly appalling.”
The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be.€ On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war.€ The standard reference?€ The outbreak of the Second World War.€ September 1939.€ Poor Poland, and benighted UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
The blind, the daft and the reality television viewer may have missed the programming point, but others could not have.€ Russian forces are posed on the borders of Ukraine.€ In the presses of Australasia, Europe and the United States, there is more talk of war than that of diplomacy.€ There is the prospect of much death and many body bags.€ Instead of running documentaries, statements or messages on how war might be averted, thereby yielding the floor to diplomacy, the message of conflict has become inexorably clear.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: I don't typically use this space to weigh in on US foreign policy without connecting it somehow to whistleblowers, but as the establishment news media limits acceptable views to a very narrow spectrum of reactions, I felt the need to weigh in on Russia's attack on Ukraine.]***Wrong does not really cover it. I was naive. Naively, I convinced myself that Russian President Vladimir Putin would not launch a massive military offensive against all parts of Ukraine. I allowed myself to believe that the extent of an attack would be limited to seizing territory contested between Ukraine and the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine. But Putin and Russian military officials opted to no longer show restraint in the face of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance. The most painful part may be that the “Russia plans,” which Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined before the United Nations Security Council, mostly unfolded. Russia levied multiple accusations against the Ukrainian government. A proclamation came in the form of recognizing the breakaway republics in the Donbas region. Not long after, Russian missiles and bombs were dropped. Communications were jammed. Cyber attacks were launched, and some Russian tanks and soldiers advanced on cities within Ukraine, including Kiev. Over many weeks, U.S. intelligence officials frequently claimed there would be an “imminent” attack, even providing dates. Those dates came and went and nothing happened. It seemed officials would be wrong, and yet as Russia presumably held off on invading, there was little space for diplomacy to avoid further conflict because of the constant pronouncements from Western countries that an attack was all but certain. The focus on intelligence claims, in other words, reinforced an escalation on the U.S.-NATO side in preparation for war with Russia and supplanted the efforts of countries like France and Germany to hold negotiations with leaders from Russia, Ukraine, and various NATO members. U.S. officials also kept Russia's long-held grievances against NATO out of any so-called "good faith efforts" to avert war.While Russian military aircraft entered Ukrainian airspace, I shared an excerpt from a column that the distinguished U.S. foreign policymaker and historian George Kennan wrote in 1997, where he warned “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” (Credit is owed to journalist Spencer Ackerman for highlighting Kennan’s words days earlier.) “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western, and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking,” Kennan added. Everything Kennan feared appears to have occurred over the past 25 years. President Joe Biden has embraced Washington policymakers, who are aligned with the Pentagon and believe in “Great Power competition” with Russia (and China). This has restored a Cold War atmosphere.
From the annexation of Crimea to the conflict in Syria to support for Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Putin’s foreign policy has been decidedly not to the liking of the Blob, or D.C.’s foreign policy establishment.
What does the Russian invasion of Ukraine mean for the rest of Europe? We speak with Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister, about the failure of international bodies like the European Union and United Nations in preventing war. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres implored Russia to withdraw all troops in a speech immediately following Thursday’s attack, and the U.S. and allies are moving swiftly to impose sanctions as retaliation against the aggression. Varoufakis warns these threats are “like a pea shooter trying to stop a tank.” The only hope for a peaceful resolution is for NATO to declare Ukraine will not become a member, says Varoufakis.
This is because the well-publicised prospect of an all-out military conflict – as opposed to a real shooting war actually breaking out – has advantages for both Russia and the United States.
A credible threat to invade Ukraine is Vladimir Putin’s most powerful political lever, aside from his arsenal of nuclear weapons. Western leaders trooped to Moscow as the Ukraine confrontation escalated over the last month in a way not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. A possible Putin-Biden summit is only the latest tribute to Russia’s partly-restored superpower status.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case.€ € Alas, too many non-union workers not only don’t admire or respect labor unions, they revile them.€ € They fear them.€ € They resent them.€ They consider them irrelevant. € It’s as if America’s corporate masters had gathered all the underpaid, under-benefited non-union workers together in the same room, and done some hideous Manchurian Candidate brain-washing number on them, convincing them that they could trust the profit-motive more than they could trust a workers collective.
As a college student, I worked part-time as a cook.€ € I’m not exaggerating when I say that, back in those days, it was the dream of every fry cook to get a job in a union manufacturing plant.€ € That was their life’s goal.€ € They didn’t dream of being millionaires or lottery winners or entrepreneurs; they dreamed of working in a big-time industrial setting where the wages, benefits, and working conditions were union-scale.
Photos and videos circulating on social media and news networks across the globe Thursday showed Ukrainian civilians using subway stations as emergency shelters, lining up to cross into Poland, and taking in the wreckage from Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
"You wake up in a totally new reality at 5:00 am and you find out the world is no longer the safe place you imagined," one Ukrainian woman told CNN's Clarissa Ward in a crowd subway station. "We don't want to be a part of Russia or any other country."
As Vladimir Putin ramps up his military offensive against Ukraine, not everyone is upset that the Russian bear is mauling its European neighbor.
Across the American right, prominent figures from Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones to senate candidate J.D. Vance and CPAC star Tulsi Gabbard, have been cheering Putin on, broadcasting their disdain for Ukraine — or both.
The drones themselves were only a part of the curriculum. The rest looked at the command, control and communications systems that gathered information on what needed to be hit, decided priorities and brought them about. Satellite communications let tactical commanders see what the drones saw and feed them targets identified by other means. In Azerbaijan Turkish radar-spotting spy planes seem to have provided some spotting; Turkey’s ground-based KORAL system, which detects and jams enemy radars, helped the tank-busting drones over Idlib.
The EU police agency has reported at least 455 accounts on social media ââ¬Å¾promoting illegal immigration services from Belarus to Europe“ to internet companies for deletion. The information comes from a Europol press release from December last year and can now also be found in the current annual report of the Europol-based Centre against Migrant Smuggling (EMSC). The extent to which companies have complied with the reports is not known; Europol gives the number as ââ¬Å¾many“. Their compliance remains voluntary, even after the transposition deadline of the EU regulation on combating the spread of terrorist content online starts on 7 June.
The deletion requests related to fleeing via Belarus were made in cooperation with Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) in The Hague, which is based at the anti-terrorism centre there. Shortly afterwards, EU governments agreed to extend its remit to include prohibited support for irregular migration. However, reports on ââ¬Å¾terrorism“ continue to make up the majority of the content objected to by Europol.
Metrics show a loss of connectivity on the Triolan network, corroborating user reports of loss of fixed-line service. The disruption began amid reports of huge explosions in the region as Russia announces a military mobilization, and have intensified over the course of the day.
In the last week the Pentagon has received two different requests for National Guard support, the first coming last Wednesday from the District of Columbia (DC) Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. The agency requested 400 members of the DC National Guard and 50 large tactical vehicles. Some of the unarmed soldiers and vehicles have already been deployed around Washington D.C., creating militarized traffic control points.
The second request, for some 300 soldiers, came from the U.S. Capitol Police department this past Sunday. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved the deployment of soldiers from West Virginia, New Jersey and Vermont who will arrive “no later than February 26,” according to CBS News.
Driving the news: "Our defenders are giving their lives so that the tragedy of 1986 will not be repeated ... This is a declaration of war against the whole of Europe," Zelensky wrote in a tweet.
The Ukrainians have reportedly lost control of the Chernobyl site after fighting broke out there.
Russia launched a far-reaching military attack on Ukraine on Thursday, invading the country through multiple border sites and bombing more than a dozen cities as civilians attempted to flee their homes in panic.
One Ukrainian official reported that "hundreds" have likely been killed thus far as explosions and artillery fire were heard throughout the country, including in the capital Kyiv. Ukraine's military said it shot down six Russian warplanes and one helicopter, but Russia denied that any of its aircraft were struck.
Peace advocates across the globe reacted with horror and outrage Thursday to Russia's military assault on Ukraine, a full-scale invasion that sparked anti-war demonstrations in Spain, Norway, Japan, and elsewhere—including downtown Moscow.
"Diplomacy is the only way out of this madness. We urge our leaders to remember that."
Janine Jackson interviewed Bryce Greene about Ukraine for the February 18, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
On Thursday morning Russia attacked Ukraine. At this news multiple countries announced that they are ready to receive Ukrainians fleeing the conflict. Poland is setting up reception centres near its border with Ukraine. At the same time, people in the Transcarpathian region (which has a significant-sized Hungarian national minority population) have stormed the shops and gas stations, and many have set out towards Hungary. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai.
On February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin delivered a 56-minute televised national address that ended with his announcement that Russia would recognize the independence of eastern Ukraine’s self-declared separatist “republics.” The president spent most of the speech, however, contesting Ukrainian statehood and arguing that the government in Kyiv owes its territory today to the supposed generosity of the Bolsheviks, particularly Vladimir Lenin. To understand the scholarly merits of Ukrainian and Soviet history as presented by Mr. Putin, Meduza turned to Dr. Victoria Smolkin, a historian at Wesleyan University who studies Communism, the Cold War, as well as atheism and religion in the former Soviet Union. She is also the author of the 2018 book “A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism.”
The leaders of the Hungarian opposition are standing with Ukraine and are criticizing the Hungarian government’s Russia-friendly politics. Here’s how they are responding to the news that early morning on Thursday, Russia attacked Ukraine. Translation by Andrea Horváth Kávai.
Russian forces have seized the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a representative of the Ukrainian President’s Office confirmed on Thursday evening.€
Last night, Vladimir Putin announced the start of a “special military operation” in the Donbas. The Russian authorities often use these kinds of euphemisms to hide the obvious, calling their mansions “hotels,” dubbing members of the political opposition “extremists,” and labeling independent journalists “foreign agents.” We, however, believe in calling things what they are: Russia has begun a full-scale war against Ukraine.
A University of Victoria economics professor who has spent years questioning whether global warming is “a real thing” is doing research supported by hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the Canadian government.€
Gerrit Cornelis van Kooten holds the prestigious title of Canada Research Chair in Environmental Studies and Climate Change, a distinction reserved for “outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields.”
Consider us at the edge of the sort of epochal change not seen for centuries, even millennia. By the middle of this century, we will be living under such radically altered circumstances that the present decade, the 2020s, will undoubtedly seem like another era entirely, akin perhaps to the Middle Ages. And I'm not talking about the future development of flying cars, cryogenics, or even as-yet-unimaginable versions of space travel.
Scientists had known for decades that carbon dioxide could trap heat and warm the planet. But Guy Callendar was the first to connect human activities to global warming.
He showed that land temperatures had increased over the previous half-century, and he theorized that people were unwittingly raising Earth’s temperature by burning fossil fuels in furnaces, factories and even his beloved motorcycles.
"Fully deliver on your climate and environmental justice promises by using your executive authority to keep fossil fuels in the ground and build a resilient and affordable renewable energy system."
"The Biden administration cannot pin the blame for its climate failures on congressional inaction."
With three co-plaintiffs, I assert that more than 150 tule elk died in Point Reyes National Seashore’s “tule elk reserve” from 2019 to 2020 — as a direct result of National Park Service mismanagement. We believe more than one-third of an entire tule elk herd was killed intentionally.
Park Service officials not only ignored its mandate to protect this rare, wild, native California species inside a national park unit, but caused the deaths by confining the elk behind fences, on land lacking adequate food and water. The Park Service has become a de facto zookeeper refusing to adequately feed and water its captive animals. It did this before labeling the resulting deaths “natural.”
On the other hand, the TCO of [cryptocurrency] and web3 technologies isn't well understood (yet). But observers can start to piece together the ownership costs. Why do most decentralized web3 applications use Alchemy or Infura instead of running their own Ethereum or Bitcoin nodes to get transaction data? Why do so many users have custodial wallets with Coinbase instead of managing their own? Why do NFT buyers and sellers prefer a centralized service like OpenSea to direct transactions?
Federal officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation did not initially allocate any water to farmers and irrigation contractors in California for 2022 as the state enters its third year of a severe drought.
The Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the Central Valley Project (CVP) — one of two major complexes of irrigations, dams and canals in California — explained in a news release that water levels in the CVP's reservoir were below a historic average for this time of year, resulting in irrigation contractors north and south of the river Delta starting out with no water allocation this year.
A government that serves U.S. capitalism first and foremost borrowed trillions and enabled trillions more of new debt (corporate and household) that was used to fight long, losing wars and shore up a faltering economy. Now, after two terrible years of COVID plus an economic crash, with 3 million fewer jobs in 2022 than before COVID hit, a sharp inflation looms. Meanwhile, aided partly by profit-driven U.S. capitalists who moved their operations to China, the Asian country is now in a position where it is challenging U.S. capitalism globally.
Above the troubled ground sit two old political parties, the GOP and the Democratic Party, which are formed by and are stuck in the old political economy before all these problems accumulated into crises. From 1820 to 1970, U.S. capitalism experienced cycles, but these cycles were securely anchored in a long-term upward trend. Real wages rose every decade, at least for white workers. Recessionary downturns only interrupted the long trend up (and even then not for long). The Republican Party and the Democratic Party rarely went beyond the routine rituals of orderly contests over who deserved the credit for economic growth and who deserved the blame for the interruptions during recessions.
Today, people who are earning $1 million in 2022 stop contributing to Social Security. Those who are earning $2 million stopped contributing in January. Those earning $500,000 will stop contributing this spring.
Amid Moscow's ongoing€ military attack on Ukraine, U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced that Washington is imposing additional sanctions to limit exports to Russia, freeze assets held by powerful banks, and restrict the economic activities of oligarchs in the country.
"The Russian military has begun a brutal assault on Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity," Biden said from the White House. "This is a premeditated attack."
Legendary broadcast journalist Bill Moyers has said: "We've got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country's going to die of too many lies.”
Moyers was asked what the corporate media means for our democracy...
He ended this month’s influential Conservative Political Action Conference saying,€ “Who knows, I may even decide to beat them for a third time.”€ Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is most often mentioned as the emerging€ Trump€ primary opponent. Fifty-one percent of€ the nationwide Republican base view him favorably — up from 43 percent€ in mid-May.
But the real threat to a future Trump-dominated Republican Party comes from€ his former Vice President Mike Pence, not DeSantis. That’s because Pence might just have enough sense to realize that he will not get the Republican nomination.
Much has been said about what she did and why she did it — in court and in the press. But the story we learned was far more complicated. Nearly five years have passed since she sent a five-page classified document about Russian election meddling to The Intercept. She pleaded guilty, spent four years in a federal prison and has come out the other side.
We sat down with her for a rare interview this month to try to answer two fundamental questions: did she do exceptionally grave damage to this country, as prosecutors alleged, or,as her supporters contend, was she trying to defend America’s democratic institutions from our adversaries? And how is it that a low-ranking 25-year-old National Security Agency contractor ended up with the longest sentence of any civilian leaker ever?
At the time of writing, what could well be the biggest working class protest the western world has seen in decades looks to be coming to a close in Canada. Truckers have caused so much trouble for the Canadian government that the latter has basically declared martial law and instructed banks to seize the assets of ordinary citizens on mere whims. A spectacular measure, considering it comes from a bunch of people who ordinarily can't get enough of praising tolerance, democracy, human rights charters, due process and even long-running protests. Yet, despite the trucker protest having gone on peacefully (if loudly) for weeks with no signs of statue toppling, molotov cocktail tossing, wanton destruction of property or other black bloc tactics, riot police has now been deployed to disperse the protesters.
The Ukrainian Security Service said on Tuesday that it shut down a bot farm that was spreading panic on social media and had also been used to send out bomb threats.
Authorities said the bot farm was used to manage more than 18,000 bot accounts and that “organizers from Russia supervised the administrators of the bot farms.”
Officials detained three suspects from the Lviv region.
Earlier this week we took a look at Donald Trump and Devin Nunes' Truth Social's terms of service, noting that they -- despite claiming that Section 230 should be "repealed" -- had explicitly copied Section 230 into their terms of service. In the comments, one of our more reliably silly commenters, who inevitably insists that no website should ever moderate, and that "conservatives" are regularly removed for their political views on the major social networks (and refusing to provide any evidence to support his claims, because he cannot), insisted that Truth Social wouldn't ban people for political speech, only for "obscenity."
Network data from NetBlocks confirm a significant slowing of internet service for many users in Zimbabwe on Sunday 20 February 2022, as a major political opposition rally is held in Harare. The incident impacts multiple operators and has prevented live streaming from the Yellow Sunday demonstration by the Citizens Coalition For Change party, which seeks to unseat the ruling ZANU–PF.
Late Wednesday night, Russian troops invaded Ukrainian territories across the country’s northern, southern, and eastern borders, kicking off the largest troop mobilization in Europe in a generation. As Russian media attempts to cast the invasion as a response to Ukrainian aggression, on-the-ground reporting has played a crucial role in countering the propaganda, with footage coming from both professional journalists and amateurs on social media.
But as the conflict intensifies, many civil society groups are increasingly concerned about the possibility of direct attacks on the country’s internet infrastructure. Russia has previously been linked to DDoS attacks against Ukrainian government sites — but a full blackout would mean going further, using physical or cyber weaponry to disable telecommunications infrastructure at the network level, and silencing Ukrainians in the process.
The NYT report of early anti-war protests in Russia linked to a video showing police in St. Petersburg outfitted in helmets and riot gear to break up protestors who had gathered in support of Ukraine. While reports like these are growing in number, social media is flooded with live reports from various protests around the area.
Today I was the “petitioner” as my appeal was heard in Court No. 1 of the Court of Session by the nobile officium. This sounds like something from Harry Potter, perhaps an annex of the Ministry of Magic, but is actually the Scottish legal system’s appeal court of last resort.
In another interview, police interrogated a computer scientist interviewed by Renaud. The officer who interviewed the computer scientist repeatedly asked if what Renaud did was "hacking."
Throughout the investigation, it's obvious that Renaud did the best he could to warn the state government about the data exposure, and to limit the potential damage by not disclosing the existence of the vulnerability before it was patched. In the end, though, Renaud and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were put through a seemingly unpleasant criminal investigation for simply reporting the news.
Forty years on, the paper’s weekly circulation is in the thousands, but its small size belies its significance as one of the few independent Chinese-language outlets to offer local news in the United States.
Mandarin and other Chinese dialects combine to make up the third-most-common language in the U.S., with some 3.5 million speakers, according to a Census Bureau report.
And while major papers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal publish in Chinese, they typically don’t provide hyper-local news.
That is where outlets like the Seattle Chinese Post and the New York-based website NYChinaRen come in.
There are things people expect the government to do. And then there are the things the government actually does. The government assumes many people are comfortable with things it does that are technically legal, but certainly not how the average government user expects the system to behave.
At a bustling makeshift flea market on a street corner in San Francisco’s Mission District, Ladybird sells her wares. One afternoon in December, wearing a black hoodie, faded black jeans embroidered with roses and carefully applied makeup, she biked three blocks from the city-sanctioned tent encampment where she lives, carrying a bag with a still-sealed Minnie Mouse stationery kit and a brand-new pair of brown high heels. Almost immediately, she was approached by a man interested in buying the stationery kit to give to his daughter for Christmas. “Eight dollars,” she said. He talked her down to five, and a deal was made.
During a pause in bartering, a text message appeared on her phone. “I’ve been assigned a case manager! It happened this morning,” she exclaimed, calling over her friend Johnny to tell him the news. “I’m going to be moving indoors in the next couple weeks.”
Opponents condemn them as prisons masquerading as refuges, but advocates say that they are teaching tools in the fight to conserve dolphins across the globe and that it’s not a question of where cetaceans are kept but the amount of training and enrichment they’re given for adequate mental stimulation. But at the heart of the issue is a simple ethical question: is it right to keep sentient creatures in captivity for our own purposes?
“The short answer [for] many,” says Alaniz, “is no.”
A push for legal reform is having some success. In recent years at least 27 states have passed laws to limit child marriages. In the past four years Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have all eliminated the exemptions that allow minors to marry.
Yet resistance to such reforms remains, on both the right and the left. In 2017 an attempt to set a minimum marrying age of 18 in California (which has no lower age limit) failed after opposition from advocacy groups including the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union. The same year Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey, vetoed a similar bill, saying it did not “comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this state”. More generally, lawmakers have failed to press for reform because the number of marrying minors has fallen dramatically. In 1960, 6.8% of American girls aged 15-17 were married; today less than 1% are.
But a new threat to the free flow of East Maui’s water has now emerged: one of Canada’s largest pension funds.
The Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments)—which invests on behalf of employees in Canada’s federal public service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian Forces, and the Reserve Force—recently invested $600 million in a major farming operation that is trying to secure a long-term lease on the same waters that locals say they have a constitutionally-protected right to access.
Churches, seminaries and other ministries have been shaken by the government announcement on Dec. 20 that all religious information on the internet will be forbidden unless organizations obtain government permission – an option not open to unregistered house churches.
Only the five government-approved religious organizations may apply for such permission: The Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM, representing officially-approved Protestant churches), the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the officially recognized organizations of Buddhism, Islam and Taosm.
The amendment’s mala fide intent is clear: it seeks to protect any government or state functionary from criticism, and enables swift action against those who criticise or voice dissent, in a major attack on the right to freedom of speech and press freedom.
The fact that this amendment was introduced as an ordinance, without any stakeholder consultation, no debate in parliament nor in any of its committees, and simply announced by the cabinet is highly undemocratic and unconstitutional. Under Article 89 of the Constitution, the president can pass an ordinance in times of emergency when parliament is not in session, but in this case, parliament was in session just two days before, and another session of the National Assembly was cancelled at the last minute. Also, there is no impending emergency that requires the government to start arresting, jailing and sentencing dissidents.
Read the whole sad story. What’s amazing is how shallow all the fakery was, and how quickly it all unraveled once people started digging. But until there’s suspicion enough to dig, we take all of these things at face value. And in COVID times, there’s no face-to-face anything.
The Zoom call had about 40 people on it - or that's what the people who had logged on thought. The all-staff meeting at the glamorous design agency had been called to welcome the growing company's newest recruits. Its name was Madbird and its dynamic and inspirational boss, Ali Ayad, wanted everyone on the call to be ambitious hustlers - just like him.
But what those who had turned on their cameras didn't know was that some of the others in the meeting weren't real people. Yes, they were listed as participants. Some even had active email accounts and LinkedIn profiles. But their names were made up and their headshots belonged to other people.
The whole thing was fake - the real employees had been "jobfished". The BBC has spent a year investigating what happened.
NBC (now Comcast NBC Universal) has enjoyed the rights to broadcast the US Olympics since 1998. In 2011, the company paid $4.4 billion for exclusive US broadcast rights to air the Olympics through 2020. In 2014, Comcast NBC Universal shelled out another $7.75 billion for the rights to broadcast the summer and winter Olympics in the US... until the year 2032.
Nearly a year ago, we talked about a trademark battle between Caryn Mandabach Productions, the company that produces Netflix's Peaky Blinders hit show, and Sadler's Brewhouse, a combined distillery that applied for a "Peaky Blinders" trademark for several spirits brands. Important to keep in mind is that "Peaky Blinders" isn't some made up gang in a fictional story. That name was taken from very real history in England, as evidenced by the folks that own Sadler's being descendants from one of the gang's members. It's also important to remember that television shows and alcohol are not the same marketplace when it comes to trademark law. Despite that, there has been a years-long dispute raging between Mandabach and Sadler's.
In November, we wrote about a very bizarre case in which someone was using a highly questionable copyright claim to try to identify an anonymous Twitter user with the username @CallMeMoneyBags. The account had made fun of various rich people, including a hedge fund billionaire named Brian Sheth. In some of those tweets, Money Bags posted images that appeared to be standard social media type images of a woman, and the account claimed that she was Sheth's mistress. Some time later, an operation called Bayside Advisory LLC, that has very little other presence in the world, registered the copyright on those images, and sent a DMCA 512(h) subpoena to Twitter, seeking to identify the user.
Scene cracking group CODEX is officially shutting down. The iconic tag has taken the cracking world by storm over the past eight years. The group was able to crack even the toughest copy protections, which instilled fear in many game publishers and respect among many of its peers.
As promised by the Commission, the Data Act is part of the broader EU digital strategy and 2030 digital objectives. The Commission is keen for the EU to retain its global leadership role, driving robust standards for a digital age. The Data Act is designed to rebalance control and power over data and hands more control back to consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) to more broadly unlock industrial data.
Andy Parker has experienced something that no one should ever have to go through: having a child murdered. Even worse, his daughter, Alison, was murdered on live TV, while she was doing a live news broadcast, as an ex-colleague shot her and the news station's cameraman dead. It got a lot of news coverage, and you probably remember the story. Maybe you even watched the video (I avoided it on purpose, as I have no desire to see such a gruesome sight). Almost none of us can even fathom what that experience must be like, and I can completely understand how that has turned Parker into something of an activist. We wrote about him a year ago, when he appeared in a very weird and misleading 60 Minutes story attacking Section 230.
