Linux PC maker Star Labs is now taking pre-orders for its first mini desktop computer powered by an AMD Ryzen processor.
The Star Labs Byte is a 4.9ââ¬Â³ x 4.4ââ¬Â³ x 2ââ¬Â³ computer with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800U processor, at least 8GB of RAM and 240GB of storage and plenty of upgrade options. It’s expected to begin shipping in late June, 2022 when the little computer will sell for $793 and up. But folks who pre-order can score a 5% discount that brings the starting price down to $753.
Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Managing Editor Tom Nardi as they review the most interesting hacks and stories of the previous week. This time we’ll start things off by talking about the return of in-person events, and go over several major conventions and festivals that you should add to your calendar now. Then we’ll look at a NASA training film from the Space Race, an interesting radio-controlled quirk that Tesla has built into their cars for some reason, a very promising autonomous boat platform, and some high performance visuals generated by an ATtiny85. Stick around to find out what happens with an interplanetary probe looses its ride to space, and why the best new enclosure for your Raspberry Pi 4 might be a surveillance camera.
Recently, Linux 5.19 kernel received an addition to its varying support for the open-source operating system. One such addition was Raptor Lake-S graphics driver support in the kernel's PCI ID section. Now, Raptor Lake-P support has been added to version 5.19 too.
Clearly we can do more and improve things.
I noted in the beginning that git is not a transparency log, sadly the kernel.org transparency log is a git repository. It’s not a true transparency log and trying to prove the that a commit is present on the log needs one to replay the entire log before comparing the state of the main log and the monitor. This isn’t ideal.
A big improvement would be to move this over to an actual transparency log. Sigstore attempts to be a general purpose transparency log for build artifacts. I did start working on a patch to include git-push certificates in Rekor, their transparency log implementation. But this has stalled because I lack the time and I think it would need a bit of code on the remote end to function properly.
If you are into OpenSSF projects, the SLSA project lists several requirements to protect a supply chain. A Transparency Log for git-push certificates neatly fits into the B Threat, “Compromise source control platform”. However mitigations like transparency logs are not widely cited as being possible mitigation to this threat. One can speculate why this is the case, but I think the lack of support in Git forges is the main issue.
Gitlab supports server hooks and I think you could implement a git-push monitor with a bit of manual maintenance. Github does not support this, and I think that is something Github should improve on. Generally these sort of server-side configurations are not very accessible but very much needed. I’d love to have my own
Another improvement on the monitor would be to look more into the code the Trillian team at Google has been doing. Currently they have written a few concepts for a standardized Witness protocol for different transparency logs, and I think it would be neat to provide the same interface for the kernel.org log. This would make it easier to have standardized clients across different logs to validate entries.
Prometheus and Zabbix are network service monitoring and alerting tools for devices and systems. These network monitoring solutions provide scalable, reliable monitoring services, but the products differ in technology, tools, integrations and ease of use.
[...]
Zabbix is an enterprise-level open source monitoring solution that can monitor anything from small environments to large, distributed systems. Scalable and accessible, Zabbix can monitor millions of metrics with ease. Zabbix has been around longer than Prometheus and provides broader community documentation and support.
I recently discussed a variety of subjects relating the configuration of various web servers and the operation of PHP applications such as WordPress. Web servers, such as OpenLiteSpeed, allow you to change the version using the WebAdmin Console, but if you’re using Apache, here’s how to switch the PHP version on Linux.
Google Drive is the most popular cloud storage service, offering 15GB of free cloud storage. However, despite being such a popular cloud storage service, there is no official Google Drive client for Linux. There were even rumours that Google was planning to release an official Google Drive client for Linux, but nothing came to fruition.
Due to the lack of an official Google Drive client for Linux, FOSS developers created outstanding unofficial solutions for managing Google Drive from Linux. In this article, I will not only demonstrate how to use Google Drive on Linux, but I will also cover potential alternatives to Google Drive.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Brasero on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Brasero is a free and open-source lightweight disk-burning application software for Linux. It has some unique features which enable users to create discs easily and quickly, also it serves as a graphical front-end for backend tools like cdrtools, cdrskin, and growisofs.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Brasero Disc Burner on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
FrostWire is an open-source BitTorrent client first released in September 2004 that was initially very similar to Lime Wire. Over time, developers added more features, including support for the protocol known as “BitTorrent.” In version 5 of this software, it dropped its Gnutella network integration and became only available through BitTorrent. Another benefit for users that use FrostWire is that it can also act as a Media Player.
Renaming/altering the name of a MySQL database was a no-brainer in the past as all it took was a simple command prefix for the database name to be successfully changed. You just needed to execute the command:
Living in the Linux operating system world gives you the computing power and exposure to achieve computing perfection either as a superuser or a Linux administrator. One aspect of Linux operating system administration and computation that we must all strive to conquer is resource management.
Resource management in Linux operating systems irrevocably intertwines with process management. When we run/install application packages in a Linux OS environment, resources such as CPU cores for computation and memory are assigned to that running application via system/application processes.
Therefore, it is often important to know which running process is using which resource and for how long. This article will take a closer look at two Linux commands (ps and top) that are sufficient enough in retrieving the CPU usage per system process either instantaneously or periodically.
It is a no-brainer that the various Linux operating system distributions that provide irreplaceable performance prowess in a development or production environment will lose their performance identity in the absence of processors/cores.
These processors/cores are hardware entities of a computer system responsible for computing how fast the Linux operating system and its hosted programs complete user/system assigned tasks.
The evolution/innovation of various computer hardware infrastructures has led to the production of modern CPUs whose processors/cores embrace features like hyper-threading and multiple cores.
LogSeq is a gem of an application that is becoming more and more important on Linux. Of course, we can also install it on Debian 11. However, today we will show you how to install LogSeq on Debian 11 using AppImage. It’s easy. Let’s go for it.
Who would have thought that Microsoft is now developing its applications for Linux! Let’s be honest, this was unthinkable a few years ago but fortunately for our system, we have a paradigm shift in large companies towards Linux. That’s why today you will learn how to install Microsoft PowerShell on Manjaro.
Delegation is an OpenZFS feature which allows the system administrator to grant the permission to perform various ZFS operations to unprivileged (read: non-root) users. This sounds more complicated than it really is—in a nutshell, we’re talking about filesystem-like permissions, but applied at the underlying ZFS level.
There are as many use cases for OpenZFS delegation as there are for the direct filesystem permissions we’re all familiar with—for example, you could allow a user to snapshot their own home directory, but not the home directories of other users.
But rather than indulge in an academic treatise on every possible use of delegation, we’re going to focus on one in particular: unprivileged ZFS replication between machines.
For the past year, I've slowly upgraded parts of my network to 10 Gigabit. But 10 Gigabit switches, NICs, and even cabling is a bit more expensive and sometimes annoying to deal with than the very-cheap 1 Gbps equipment most homelabbers are used to.
I dipped my toes into the 2.5 Gbps waters once I got a NAS with 2.5G ports—you can use standard USB NICs that cost less than $50, or PCIe cards for even less. And cabling is easier, since 2.5G works fine over Cat5e (which I already have run to most of my house).
Really Simple Syndication - portable, extensible, light on network resources. Also, I’ve blocked the regular HTML+JS sites in my browser - more on that later.
Currently my newsboat feed is populated with indie sites, blogs, wiki pages, updates to documentation & new software releases, podcasts, YouTube channels, WordPress sites, Telegram Channels, Odysee / LBRY channels, SoundCloud , Bandcamp, Pixelfed, Mastodon & other Fediverse feeds. Unlike most people I don’t use email for newsletters or follow people on social media just for the sake of it, or have notifications in my browser.
For many years now, I've lamented about how much of my time is spent attempting to disclose data breaches to impacted companies. It's by far the single most time-consuming activity in processing breaches for Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and frankly, it's about the most thankless task I can imagine. Finding contact details is hard. Getting responses is hard. Not having an organisation just automatically assume you're trying to shake them down for cash is hard. So hard, in fact, I thought I'd record the process end-to-end and share it publicly to help demonstrate just how painful the process is.
Magento is a open source e-commerce platform written in PHP and uses the Zend Framework. It is highly popular ecommerce platform and it is owned and managed by Adobe Inc. The platform is flexible and has a large variety of features to build an online store.
In this tutorial we will show you how to install the Open Source version of Magento 2.4.4 on Debian 11.
Today we are looking at how to install Puzzle Pirates 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.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Adminer on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Adminer (formerly known as phpMinAdmin) is an open-source and free web-based database management tool. You can use Adminer with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and others. It is simple, lightweight, and designed with strong security and user experience in mind.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Adminer Database Management Tool on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, and Rocky Linux distributions.
Discord is a substantial way to interact via voice and text chat with your gaming allies for free. While using Discord, you will encounter circumstances whereby someone says something offensive against you. In such instances, you will require to report these people for action to be taken against them.
The reporting process is not as straightforward as you might think, but in this article guide, we shall show you simple steps to report someone who violates Discord’s code of conduct.
If you are a regular internet user, it is easy to ram into issues with others, especially when in groups such as Discord. You might receive offensive messages that might force you to take action. Therefore, depending on the message’s severity, you may report the user directly to Discord for disciplinary action against them.
Alternatively, if you don’t intend to directly report the violator to Discord, you can involve a moderator. A moderator in a Discord server is someone responsible for managing different aspects of the server they operate. Therefore, you can report issues to a moderator to help you get a solution. This is because server moderators are familiar with the users in question and can, in turn, mediate disputes.
GNOME is a free and open-source desktop environment. It was first developed and released back in 1999. The name GNOME is an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment. The project aimed to build a free desktop environment to be able to develop different applications on it. In this article, we shall see how to install GNOME DE on Kali Linux. But, before heading to that, let’s take a quick look at why GNOME?
RHEL or Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more than just an operating system or server solution. It is rather an ecosystem built for and around enterprises. From conglomerates to critical infrastructures such as banks and government bodies, all rest their faith in the Red Hat system.
Though it may purely be enterprise-grade software, it doesn't mean one can't get a taste of it without belonging to a corporation. You can download a free copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with a no-cost subscription and give it a shot today!
This guide will walk you through how to download and install Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Gaming on Linux has taken a massive leap forward over the past few years. With more games being added to the “supported games” list each day, some of which are working better on Linux than on Windows, over 80% of top AAA games in the Steam library are playable.
I recently ran into an issue where some Steam games wouldn’t launch and reported the error that the game would not run without DirectX 11. I was befuddled and could not find a solution. I chatted with people, search through forums and didn’t find a solution. I was left with the belief that the hardware was just too old for the newer games and would have to be demoted to the role of “work only”, which was an overall disappointment to the kids and me.
We're getting closer to the Godot 3.5 stable release with a fourth beta snapshot! Like with 4.0 alpha builds, we're trying to release 3.5 beta builds every other week to ensure that new features can be tested, bugs can be reported and bugfixes can be validated.
This beta 4 is a small update with just 83 commits excluding merges, focusing on fixing bugs to stabilize the current feature set for 3.5 stable.
The previous beta 3 introduced a brand new Android editor port! In this build, we also built it for 32-bit platforms (armv7 and x86) as there was some demand for it, so you'll find the APK is a bit heavier.
Within SoK 2022 project, I worked on an in-app alert queueing system for KDE Connect iOS
Since my previous blog post I’ve been working on migrating all alerts to the new system, iOS 14 support and modernization of manual IP input screen.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 08 to April 15.
I quite like Void! It uses a rolling release model, but the packages tend to track stable releases and lag behind a bit compared to say Arch. There's a few novel things such as using runit as the init system (instead of systemd) and having a musl libc version which can be used instead of glibc. I'm running glibc at the moment though as I still play video games sometimes.
Yesterday SUSE released a new version in one of its lines of SUSE Linux Enterprise operating systems — SUSE Linux Enterprise-Micro 5.2
Make UEFI a hardware requirement for new Fedora installations on platforms that support it (x86_64). Legacy BIOS support is not removed, but new non-UEFI installation is not supported on those platforms. This is a first step toward eventually removing legacy BIOS support entirely.
In January 2021, Red Hat announced a new -- free of cost -- subscription that was aimed at individuals wanting to use RHEL.
Before that, it was necessary to have a paid subscription to use RHEL.
Now that this has changed, let's see how to get RHEL for free.
I'll also go over how to register and attach your system to an active subscription.
New iso images of Sparky 2022.04 of the (semi-)rolling released.
Changes between Sparky 2022.03 and 2022.04: – fixed an issue of wrong DNS configuration; even the live system of Sparky 2022.03 is configured ok, but the DNS is not set properly after installing the 2022.03 on a hard drive; so works fine now; – as usually, all packages upgraded from Debian and Sparky testing repos, as of April 14, 2022; – Firefox (latest) has been replaced by Firefox Mozilla Build (‘firefox-sparky’ package).
No reinstallation is required if you have Sparky rolling installed, simply keep it up to date.
The Tails team announced that the upcoming Tails 5.0 Beta (1) is now available and is ready for testing.
To celebrate the new release of the popular free and open source GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu 22.04, we are going to hold a release party. The event will take place on the 1st of May. Due to continued COVID uncertainties, the event will be held in a live virtual format with moderated Q&A.
The Call for Participation is now open for Ubuntu 22.04 Release Party.
There will be 2 session types this year, General session and Workshop session. For the general session each speaker will be allowed 30 minutes to speak on the topic and a 15 minutes discussion and Q&A. For the workshop session each speaker will be allowed 45 minutes for the topic and to do hands-on with the participants together and a 15 minutes discussion and Q&A.
Many of you will know first-hand that in this case we find one of the most used and popular distros out there. Precisely for all this there are many users who are constantly waiting for the news and improvements that are coming to this open source operating system. This is the case that concerns us right now and that we want to talk about in these lines. Specifically, we want to focus on the possibility of testing the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS right away if you wish.
We are telling you all this because the developer of the aforementioned software, Canonical, has already announced the availability of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS in its Beta version . As you can imagine and mainly due to the fact that it is not a final version, it may still contain some bugs. However, this Beta version is very close to the definitive one and will help us to test in the first instance everything that will come to us in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Moreover, the company itself urges us to notify you of the possible errors that we find in this release that has just been made public.
Another calm week, where improvement happens by many tiny steps, done one at a time.
Let's have a quick and dirty blog post listing all the additions to the app list in the first quarter of 2022!
You may have read Pine64’s April’s Fools spoof about the PineBuds and PinePod earlier this month. It turns out those will be real, and the Pine64 PineSound development board will be used to bring the PineBuds earbuds and PinePod digital audio player to market.
The PineSound board features Bestechnic BES2300 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chip, two coaxial & optical input and output, a 3.5mm headphone jack, 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced jacks, an SMA connector, a USB Type-C connector, plus interfaces for a touchscreen display.
ASROCK Industrial has recently unveiled three 4X4 BOX-5000 mini PCs(4X4 BOX-5800U, 4X4 BOX-5600U, and 4X4 BOX-5400U) equipped with AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 U-series processors. By using AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, ASRock plans to capture business and home applications such as Kiosks, digital signage and other remote access applications.
ASRock’s newest mini-PCs incorporate AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800U, Ryzen 5 5600U, and Ryzen 3 5400U processors which feature up to 8 cores/16 threads to enhance computing performance. The newest architecture also features an improved AMD Radeon Graphics controller to increase the visual experience. According to ASRock, the mini-PCs integrated with Zen 3 processors achieve up to 17% single-thread and multi-thread performance compared to the previous Zen 2 processor architecture.
Last month we outlined our plans for the next generation of Pro-grade PINE64 hardware – the QuartzPro64. In case you missed the original announcement, the QuartzPro64 is a powerful development board featuring an 8 core SoC which comes paired with 16GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable eMMC flash storage as well as an impressive array of IO options. I’m not going to repeat the entire spec list below since it was covered in detail last month – if this is news to you, then I suggest you go back and read the March update and pick up reading this section after.
As cringy as those phrases sound like, no one’s to blame, words keep evolving. Hacking can mean many different things, there’s no real definition. A quick Google search returns news articles often associating hacking with ‘security breaching’ or ‘stealing’. I beg to differ hacking isn’t about security breaking; when I use the word hacking or say I’m a hacker ~ I mean hacker as in a hacksmith
A hacksmith, a toolsmith?, a person who has total control over their tools. A musician is a hacker, your mother who cooks for you is a hacker, a painter, a mechanic, anyone can be a hacker. Someone who does it for the fun of it, not for money or other worldly needs.
This is to announce coreutils-9.1, a stable release. See the NEWS below for details.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed! There have been 210 commits by 10 people in the 29 weeks since 9.0
Bernhard Voelker (3) Max Filippov (1) Bruno Haible (1) Paul Eggert (136) Christian Hesse (1) Pádraig Brady (64) Daniel Knittl-Frank (1) Rohan Sable (1) Jim Meyering (4) Ville Skyttä (1)
Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================
Here is the GNU coreutils home page: https://gnu.org/software/coreutils/
For a summary of changes and contributors, see: https://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v9.1 or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory: git shortlog v9.0..v9.1
To summarize the 259 gnulib-related changes, run these commands from a git-cloned coreutils directory: git checkout v9.1 git submodule summary v9.0
==================================================================
Here are the compressed sources: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.1.tar.gz (14MB) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.1.tar.xz (5.5MB)
Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.1.tar.gz.sig https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.1.tar.xz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:
cab498ddc655fd3c7da553d80436d28bc9b17283 coreutils-9.1.tar.gz YFXfkmhgPoI5pcnB1kyyW5qZJTDfZuM7jXimYO2zezU coreutils-9.1.tar.gz aa7bf0be95eef29d98eb5c76d4455698b3b705b3 coreutils-9.1.tar.xz YaH0ENeLp+fzelpPUObRMgrKMzdUhKMlXt3xejhYBCM coreutils-9.1.tar.xz
The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.
[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify coreutils-9.1.tar.gz.sig
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, or that public key has expired, try the following commands to update or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
gpg --locate-external-key P@draigBrady.com
gpg --recv-keys DF6FD971306037D9
wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=coreutils&download=1' | gpg --import -
This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.71 Automake 1.16.4 Gnulib v0.1-5194-g58c597d13 Bison 3.7.4
NEWS
* Noteworthy changes in release 9.1 (2022-04-15) [stable]
** Bug fixes
chmod -R no longer exits with error status when encountering symlinks. All files would be processed correctly, but the exit status was incorrect. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
If 'cp -Z A B' checks B's status and some other process then removes B, cp no longer creates B with a too-generous SELinux security context before adjusting it to the correct value. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.17]
'cp --preserve=ownership A B' no longer ignores the umask when creating B. Also, 'cp --preserve-xattr A B' is less likely to temporarily chmod u+w B. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.7]
On macOS, 'cp A B' no longer miscopies when A is in an APFS file system and B is in some other file system. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
On macOS, fmt no longer corrupts multi-byte characters by misdetecting their component bytes as spaces. [This bug was present in "the beginning".]
'id xyz' now uses the name 'xyz' to determine groups, instead of xyz's uid. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.22]
'ls -v' and 'sort -V' no longer mishandle corner cases like "a..a" vs "a.+" or lines containing NULs. Their behavior now matches the documentation for file names like ".m4" that consist entirely of an extension, and the documentation has been clarified for unusual cases. [bug introduced in coreutils-7.0]
On macOS, 'mv A B' no longer fails with "Operation not supported" when A and B are in the same tmpfs file system. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.0]
'mv -T --backup=numbered A B/' no longer miscalculates the backup number for B when A is a directory, possibly inflooping. [bug introduced in coreutils-6.3]
** Changes in behavior
cat now uses the copy_file_range syscall if available, when doing simple copies between regular files. This may be more efficient, by avoiding user space copies, and possibly employing copy offloading or reflinking.
chown and chroot now warn about usages like "chown root.root f", which have the nonstandard and long-obsolete "." separator that causes problems on platforms where user names contain ".". Applications should use ":" instead of ".".
cksum no longer allows abbreviated algorithm names, so that forward compatibility and robustness is improved.
date +'%-N' now suppresses excess trailing digits, instead of always padding them with zeros to 9 digits. It uses clock_getres and clock_gettime to infer the clock resolution.
dd conv=fsync now synchronizes output even after a write error, and similarly for dd conv=fdatasync.
dd now counts bytes instead of blocks if a block count ends in "B". For example, 'dd count=100KiB' now copies 100 KiB of data, not 102,400 blocks of data. The flags count_bytes, skip_bytes and seek_bytes are therefore obsolescent and are no longer documented, though they still work.
ls no longer colors files with capabilities by default, as file-based capabilties are very rarely used, and lookup increases processing per file by about 30%. It's best to use getcap [-r] to identify files with capabilities.
ls no longer tries to automount files, reverting to the behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32.
stat no longer tries to automount files by default, reverting to the behavior before the statx() call was introduced in coreutils-8.32. Only `stat --cached=never` will continue to automount files.
timeout --foreground --kill-after=... will now exit with status 137 if the kill signal was sent, which is consistent with the behavior when the --foreground option is not specified. This allows users to distinguish if the command was more forcefully terminated.
** New Features
dd now supports the aliases iseek=N for skip=N, and oseek=N for seek=N, like FreeBSD and other operating systems.
dircolors takes a new --print-ls-colors option to display LS_COLORS entries, on separate lines, colored according to the entry color code.
dircolors will now also match COLORTERM in addition to TERM environment variables. The default config will apply colors with any COLORTERM set.
** Improvements
cp, mv, and install now use openat-like syscalls when copying to a directory. This avoids some race conditions and should be more efficient.
On macOS, cp creates a copy-on-write clone if source and destination are regular files on the same APFS file system, the destination does not already exist, and cp is preserving mode and timestamps (e.g., 'cp -p', 'cp -a').
The new 'date' option --resolution outputs the timestamp resolution.
With conv=fdatasync or conv=fsync, dd status=progress now reports any extra final progress just before synchronizing output data, since synchronizing can take a long time.
printf now supports printing the numeric value of multi-byte characters.
sort --debug now diagnoses issues with --field-separator characters that conflict with characters possibly used in numbers.
'tail -f file | filter' now exits on Solaris when filter exits.
root invoked coreutils, that are built and run in single binary mode, now adjust /proc/$pid/cmdline to be more specific to the utility being run, rather than using the general "coreutils" binary name.
** Build-related
AIX builds no longer fail because some library functions are not found. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.32]
I had a strong feeling that I had written a post at some point in the past that touched on license-free radio services and bands. I can't find it now, so maybe it was all a dream. I wanted to expand on the topic, so here we are either way.
As a general principle, radio licensing in the United States started out being based on the operator. As an individual or organization, you could obtain a license that entitled you to transmit within certain specifications. You could use whatever equipment you wanted, something that was particularly important since early on most radio equipment was at least semi-custom.
This is data I wish I had when I was applying for Ph.D. programs. My students and I have slowly put the source data together over time, so that it's now a compilation of computer science data:
professors [source]
rankings [source]
best papers [source]
stipends [source]
The writing on this page is not advice. Rather, I've described on this page what I find most provocative in the data, but you are encourage to review the data yourself. We have spent hundreds of hours of work putting together the source data, subscribe here for updates.
In layman's terms, a system is Turing-complete if that system can compute as much as any general-purpose computer or computer language. It means that you can model things like conditional logic (if/else), arithmetic, state, transitions, looping and recursion, input and output.
Most computer languages are intentionally Turing-complete – Java, C++, JavaScript are designed so that they can run arbitrary programs. But some systems are surprisingly Turing complete. Through some feature or escape hatch, they can be made to run any program (of course, there's no guarantee that they will run them in a reasonable time). Here are some accidentally Turing-complete systems.
Shell script and AWK are very complementary languages. AWK was designed from its very beginnings at Bell Labs as a pattern-action language for short programs, ideally one or two lines long. It was intended to be used on the Unix shell interactive command line, or in shell scripts. Its feature set filled out some functionality that shell script at the time lacked, and often still lacks, as is the case with floating point numbers; it thereby (indirectly) brings much of the C language’s expressive power to the shell.
In programming languages like JavaScript or Python, numbers are typically represented using 64-bit IEEE number types (binary64). For these numbers, we have 15 digits of accuracy. It means that you can pick a 15-digit number, such as 1.23456789012345e100 and it can be represented exactly: there exists a floating-point number that has exactly these 15-most significant digits. In this particular case, it is the number 6355009312518497 * 2280. Having 15-digit of accuracy is excellent: few engineering processes can ever exceed this accuracy.
One thing that really interests me in the Lagrange project is exploring the boundaries of native cross-platform programming, because I fundamentally dislike the notion that modern cross-platform apps need to be based on a web browser for things to make sense. With the major desktop and mobile platforms now supported by the app — at least in Beta form — I'm setting sights on more exotic frontiers, and the terminal is a logical next step.
Porting a GUI toolkit to a text-based terminal isn't as outlandish as it may initially seem, because the terminal is feature-rich enough to support "pseudo-graphical" rendering: one can hide the blinking cursor, use traditional box-drawing and Unicode characters, and change the foreground and background colors to create the illusion of complicated visual elements. Some terminals can even support mouse pointer input. If the GUI design is not overly complex, rendering it with text characters yields a perfectly usable result with only minor tweaks here and there.
One of the things I’m most proud of about my work on the Librem 5 team is the productive collaborations we have with upstream free software projects, and the contributions to the broader ecosystem we’ve been able to make as a result.
Over the past four years the Librem 5 software team has worked on dozens of upstream GNOME modules, resulting in many cool new features and improvements for people using GNOME across all devices, not just on mobile. These include helping to modernize apps such as Software, Contacts, Calculator, or Geary, adding and improving Settings panels, and of course the massive leap in consistency and developer experience that came with Libhandy/Libadwaita.
Bash (bourne again shell) has been around since 1989 and owes its longevity to its usefulness and flexibility. While it’s the default login and command shell for most Linux distros, its value extends beyond that.
Bash can be used as a fully-fledged programming language and as a tool to automate repetitive and complex computational tasks. However, as with any other programming language, you need to understand how to manage Bash’s control flow to truly get the most out of it.
The poet Allen Ginsburg said€ “poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.”€ I’d argue organizers fighting the rich and powerful are equally damned with the sight of seeing not only what is happening, but where we want to go and being stuck in damage control of these crises.
Confronting€ Joe Manchin€ is a prime example of damage control in these strange and troubling times. While elected by 300,000 West Virginians he wields power over the other 329 million of us. He’s literally shut down the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) agenda in December.
But who?€ Who is going to not only make the rules, “the liberal world order,” and who is going to “enforce” them?€ Sadly, Applebaum doesn’t answer these questions.
However, Applebaum hints at answers to the questions.€ She argues:
Although pundits have joked that Java’s “write once, run everywhere” slogan might be better expressed as “write once, debug everywhere,” a relative of Java — JavaScript — has delivered on both promises better than its namesake. Thanks to its proliferation in browsers, JavaScript is a veritable lingua franca of computer languages which has led to entire applications being written in it using tools like Node.js and Electron, and not just browsers. But what if you are still using MSDOS or Windows 98? We know some of you do, at least on retro machines. Don’t feel left out, the DOjS project has jSH, a JavaScript engine for DOS and related operating systems.
Seventy-five years ago today (April 15), Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in the modern era to play for a Major League Baseball team. Every player and coach today will wear number 42 on their backs in honor of Robinson. Since 2004, “Jackie Robinson Day” has served as an opportunity to celebrate Jackie Robinson’s pathbreaking career and, more recently, his contributions to the American civil rights movement.
F(x)tec announced yesterday that mass manufacturing of the Pro1 X has finally begun. The first batch is expected to ship before the end of May.
One of the key factors in my decision to buy the Pro1 X is its support for Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS, as well as LineageOS and stock Android. This excites me greatly: the former two operating systems are much more customizable and give the user greater control over low-level functions than the latter two, and thus operate more like a full Linux desktop computer with a mobile-oriented interface.
The lack of access to low-level functionality is my biggest problem with smartphones as they exist today. Manufacturers, cellular service providers, app makers, content providers, and "valued business partners" are all interested in pulling as much of my attention (and my money) as they possibly can. To facilitate that goal, they need to have sweeping control over what I do with my device, how, and when, so that I can be steadily guided to their ends. My data is regularly extracted and collated. Apps are locked down to only use proprietary, company-controlled APIs. I cannot control what network requests my apps make.
Often the mechanisms to enforce this free-flow of corporate traffic is handled by system-level apps. In the name of "security", I am blocked from gaining root or administrative access to the OS, barring me from being able to remove these subversive apps. The majority of the time, the goal of this pervasive data gathering and backdooring is to serve me advertisements.
You ever read an issue of this newsletter, spot an interesting quote, and think to yourself, “Man, it’d sure be great if there were more quotes in this newsletter?” Odds are, you represent a relative rarity among our readership. But the truth of the matter is, we do a lot with quotes to break up our many issues, but we’ve never delivered a piece that was based around quotes. And because I like setting precedents, here’s a pretty new precedent: a newsletter about quotations. Is the newsletter going to be nothing but quotes? Well, you’ll have to keep reading to find out. Today’s Tedium takes on the quotation.
In part 1 of this series, we disclosed critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems. This class of vulnerability, which we dubbed Frozen Heart, is caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements. The vulnerability is general and can be applied to any proof system that implements the Fiat-Shamir transformation insecurely. In this post, I will show how to exploit a Frozen Heart vulnerability in Girault’s proof of knowledge.
Trail of Bits is publicly disclosing critical vulnerabilities that break the soundness of multiple implementations of zero-knowledge proof systems, including PlonK and Bulletproofs. These vulnerabilities are caused by insecure implementations of the Fiat-Shamir transformation that allow malicious users to forge proofs for random statements.
Roland Fryer Jr.’s life is a movie script: A man abandoned by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard University.
After ascending to the academic elite, Fryer didn’t resign himself to irrelevant technical puzzles; he put his genius to work investigating the most hotly contested issues of race in America, and translating his findings into concrete programs that dramatically improved the lives of poor black kids. He’s been praised as a genius, winning a MacArthur prize, a Time 100 listing, and the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to the best under-40 economist in the world.
And then, all of a sudden, his career was derailed by an opaque sexual-harassment investigation. And no one seemed to want to say anything about it. Until now.
Drawing on previously unreported documents and interviews with his colleagues and friends, my new documentary makes the argument that Professor Fryer was targeted for ideological reasons. Despite the best efforts of some of the university’s elite, Fryer is still at Harvard, but with severely downgraded status, denied the resources he once had, and marked with a sexual-harassment stigma.
It is evident that more and more people want to learn the language, with Meisch pointing out that over the past ten years, the number of people enrolling in classes has "practically doubled". The figure the Minister refers to accounts for both classes offered by the INL and those offered by the Department of Adult Education, the latter of which are available across the country.
These days we are blessed with multicore 64-bit monster CPUs that can calculate an entire moon mission’s worth of instructions in the blink of an eye. Once upon a time, though, the state of the art was much less capable; Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, was built on a humble 4-bit architecture with limited instructions. [Mark] decided calculating pi on this platform would be a good challenge.€
Plotters and drawing robots are fun projects that let you create art with all the precision and perfection that computer numerical control can deliver. [TUENHIDIY] demonstrates that ably with the Multicolor DrawBot.
But routers are WEEE (waste from electrical and electronic equipment) which cannot be disposed of in household waste. Luckily, broadband providers have schemes in place so they can reuse and recycle on your behalf.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Enact Group’s Mike Liszewski about marijuana justice for the April 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
About five months ago, I had an event that resulted in a hospital admission. I’m going to avoid some details, in the interest of brevity.
I must admit that I’m getting a little tired of writing about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) and its “spiritual child,” the Brownstone Institute, which was founded by Jeffery Tucker, former editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the right wing think tank that brought together the authors of the GBD together. (I did, after all, just write about the GBD and one of its authors Jay Bhattacharya on Wednesday.) Unfortunately, however, the GBD, its authors, its supporters, and its “spiritual child” just keep providing me such a “target-rich” environment for a blogger that I can’t ignore them, whether they’re parroting antivax tropes like fantasizing about a “Nuremberg 2.0” in which “lockdowners” and supporters of vaccine mandates and other public health interventions will be called to account for their “crimes”; likening public health interventions to slow the spread of COVID-19 to slavery, religion, or a Communist dictatorship; or just plain spreading pure, unadulterated antivax misinformation.
So, why hasn’t Putin sent his ransomware hounds swarming over European and American networks in an unbridled orgy of encryption, chaos and crypto? An important first step to answering this question is to understand where ransomware fits within the Russian state’s cyber arsenal. And here is where I think we have collectively misjudged the dynamics of ransomware and the state. I am guilty of this myself. We have overestimated the control, underestimated the greed/financial motivation for the hackers, and we have misconstrued Putin’s understanding of his strategic cyber assets.
In this video for Help Net Security, Chris Westphal, Cybersecurity Evangelist at Ordr, talks about an alert that came out recently from CISA and the Department of Energy (DOE), about potential threats to uninterruptible power supply (UPS) devices that are connected to the internet.
UPS devices are used to provide emergency power, they’re usually connected to critical infrastructure. They’re basically batteries that provide temporary power when the power goes out and until a generator kicks in to provide longer term temporary power.
Let’s Encrypt is part of the effort to encrypt the entire internet as a means of maximizing privacy and security online. In 2013, 28 percent of page loads happened with HTTPS protection; today, at least 80 percent are protected—a significant cultural shift away from the outmoded belief that only banks and password-access sites need encryption.
EFF participates in the Let’s Encrypt project by maintaining and improving Certbot, the most popular software for getting and installing security certificates, designed to help people who run their own websites. EFF also works alongside Let’s Encrypt staff to develop Boulder, the software that runs Let’s Encrypt.
“Receiving the Levchin Prize was an honor and great recognition for Let’s Encrypt and the work we’ve done to improve the internet,” said Josh Aas, Executive Director of ISRG and Let’s Encrypt. “We’re grateful to longtime collaborators like EFF for helping us get here!”
There is only a political announcement, not a text that can be analyzed. As far as noyb is informed, such a text does not exist yet and will take a couple of months to be drafted.
Stunning stat: 92% of executives at medium to large firms think workers who turn cameras off during meetings don't have long-term futures at the company, according to a new survey from Vyopta, a software company.
Serbia remains one of the few countries that haven’t passed sanctions against Russia. President Alexander VuÃÂić, who voters re-elected on April 3, has been complaining for over a month that the West is trying to force him to disown his “brother nation.” Russia’s not the only thing preventing him from doing this —€ a large portion of Serbian people themselves support Russia’s war against Ukraine. Meanwhile, since the beginning of March, more and more emigrants have been coming to Serbia from Russia to escape Russia's collapsing economy and political repression. Journalist Ilya Azar went to Belgrade to speak to Serbs about Russia —€ and to Russians about Serbia.
With the Jewish museum closing, I decided to see if I could find the literary museum now located in the former Moscow apartment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, just off Tverskaya, one of the principal boulevards that leads to the Kremlin and Red Square.
I thought it might speak to the world of Soviet dissidence in Putin’s Russia.
Indeed, on April 9, the Israeli army has stormed the Jenin refugee camp, killing a Palestinian and wounding ten others. However, Israel’s problem is much bigger than Jenin.
If we examine the events starting with the March 22 stabbing attack in the southern city of Beersheba (Bir Al Saba’) – which resulted in the death of four – and ending with the killing of three Israelis in Tel Aviv – including two army officers – we will reach an obvious conclusion: these attacks must have been, to some extent, coordinated.
Hours in front of their screens, hearing former spies compare Putin to Hitler, has had a most unfortunate effect on U.S. viewers: It has rendered millions of Americans incapable of comprehending the most elementary and obvious truths, so that they actually support policies that would lead at once to their fiery incineration. How do we know this would happen? Multiple statements from Moscow over decades that Ukraine joining NATO is an existential threat that would lead to war and that if NATO involved itself in that war, Russians would go out in a global nuclear holocaust, “like martyrs.” But most Americans know nothing of this, which has been carefully kept from them, and so they support their own and indeed the human species’ suicide. It’s doubtful that at any time in human history, the population of a world empire ever degenerated into such a parlous, brainless state. And you don’t have to look far to see who’s to blame: our media in concert with our politicos, in this case, because they hold the white house and congress – primarily the Democrats.
You doubt our government and media lie to us? Then consider this NBC news story from April 6. It cites President Biden’s proclamation that Russia would use chemical weapons in Ukraine. Later, however, “three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine.” They explained that the U.S. lied “to deter Russia from using banned munitions.” The article then reveals this was one “of a string of examples” of such deceit “as part of an information war against Russia. To keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.” So our media now treat us like kindergarteners, openly disseminating CIA black propaganda. And barely a week later, on April 12, new claims surfaced that Russia deployed chemical weapons, amid musings about how the U.S. should respond. But this time we’re supposed to believe them?
As the Russian invasion in Ukraine enters its 50th day, we look at the war’s impact around the world with Vijay Prashad, author and director of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. “When food prices go up, the political crisis is almost immediate,” says Prashad, who calls the U.S. pressure on Global South countries to cut off essential imports from Russia after a 30-year globalization campaign a double standard. He says if the U.S. encourages greater global division in order to isolate Russia and China, they will implicitly plunge developing countries “into even greater catastrophe.” He also says the West — led by the Biden administration — is pursuing a “casual weaponization of human rights and the word genocide.”
I wonder, do people still read The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz’s dissection of totalitarianism? I wasn’t sure, when I picked up our yellowed 1981 Vintage Books paperback copy, a reprint from the 1951 original, if the work wasn’t dated. It was, after all, a Cold War indictment of Stalinist or Communist totalitarianism long since gone with glasnost. But dated it is not! For us who must now wonder if it’s possible to free liberal minds from our captivity in neoliberal totalitarian reality, even my crumbling 42-year-old copy fairly sang with relevance.
After weeks of front page photos in the NY Times of dead bodies and bombed out structures in Ukraine, we learn – not to great surprise – that many lefties view the war in Ukraine as “just” – that is justified. (Ron Jacobs, “Supporting Militarism will not Bring Justice, Only Death” CP, 4/6/22). What hope can be left that people – liberals in particular – will remember there is no good war, that we can stop being led around by the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, et al, as if our wanting them to report the truth were the same as their doing so? Once again, the media constructs, with invaluable help from Russian atrocities, a plausible evil side such that there can be a good side (for us white hats to be on) to which armaments may be righteously sold. ka-ching ka-ching.
From Kazakhstan to Myanmar, from the Solomon Islands to the Kuril Islands, from North Korea to Cambodia, from China to India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the fault lines are appearing in different parts of Asia.
To be sure, extra-regional powers had a hand in the failed color revolution recently to overthrow the established government in Kazakhstan, a hotly contested geopolitical landmass bordering China and Russia, both of whom are Washington’s sworn adversaries. Thanks to swift Russian intervention, supported by China, a regime change was averted in Kazakhstan.
“Harris Tells Americans They Will Have to Pay More for Gas To Punish Russia,” proclaimed the New York Times headline recently.€ € So spoke no less an authority on economics than the Vice President of the United States.€ Harris was on a visit to Poland to reassure a nervous NATO member and to egg on the war in Ukraine at the cost of ever more Ukrainian and Russian lives and higher inflation in the US and the world.
Inflation, Already Bad, is Worsened by the War in Ukraine and US Sanctions.
– George Santayana, 1922
Russia methodically is destroying a neighboring independent democratic country and is accused of committing mass€ atrocities, war crimes that include evidence of executions of hundreds of civilians. Yet American far-right radicals€ applaud Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the same time, the Russians, defeated by stiff Ukrainian resistance in their unsuccessful siege of the capital of Kyiv,€ switched tactics and are massing armor, aircraft and thousands of infantry for an assault against the eastern Donbas€ region that has been occupied by pro-Kremlin forces. It borders Russia, which makes resupply easy.
As the United States reels from an epidemic of mass shootings in schools, trains and other public places, we speak with Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, where he covers gun violence. Follman says mass shootings are typically planned over a period of time and follow a “robust trail of behavioral warning signs” that offer opportunities in community-based violence prevention to stop the crime before it happens. His new piece, “Horror on the NYC Subway — and How to Prevent the Next Attack,” draws on insights from his new book, “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.”
This week the Pentagon met with leading U.S. weapons manufacturers as Russia warned the Biden administration to stop arming Ukraine, claiming it was “adding fuel” to the conflict. This comes as a Russian warship sank in the Black Sea hours after Ukraine claimed to have attacked it with cruise missiles, and as Sweden and Finland say they may join NATO, which would require more weapons spending. We speak with William Hartung, national security and foreign policy expert at the Quincy Institute, author of “Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.”
The family of Patrick Lyoya, the 26-year-old Black man who was fatally shot by a police officer in Grand Rapids, Michigan on April 4, expressed shock that their son was killed in the United States in a press conference on Thursday as they called for the officer to face prosecution.
"There can be no justice, but there must be accountability."
The BBC reports that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, during an interview, accused Germany and Hungary of paying "blood money" for Russian petroleum.
The payment in rubles for Russian gas is not a violation of EU sanctions, government spokesman Zoltán Kovács said on Saturday.
“The EU so far has no common procurement of gas and oil for European countries. So as we speak, we still go by alongside those contracts we have with Russians regarding gas and oil, and according to those contracts, it is a technical issue, in what currency we have to pay,” Kovács said, in an interview given to CNN.
On February 2, 2022, Minneapolis PD officers executed a no-knock raid on an apartment. Officer Mark Hanneman then summarily executed Amir Locke within seconds of his entry into the apartment.
Cops lie. It’s a statement more factual than statements cops — the people given the biggest benefit of a doubt in “your word against mine” courtroom showdowns — tend to make when testifying or filling out reports.
The outbreak of hostilities was a fatal step that irreversibly changed the situation, but not in the way that the Kremlin expected. It was a gamble that only could have worked if Ukraine had been defeated in 96 hours, which, apparently, they were counting on.€ But, Ukraine is no longer the same as it was 8 years ago. There was clearly no plan B. They did not prepare for a prolonged armed struggle in hostile territory.
Even if the occupation of the neighboring country was successful, it would be impossible to hold on to. In Germany, at the end of World War II, the Allied and Soviet forces had a ratio of approximately 90 soldiers per 1,000 local residents. In the case of Ukraine, the Russians have no more than 4 soldiers per 1,000 local residents. In order to effectively occupy Ukraine, this must be increased at least 20 times! The Russian army does not have such forces.
It’s about a racial double standard but it’s also about an imperial single standard whereby the West recognizes “worthy victims” only on the US/Western and pro-US/Western side of the global political and moral divide defined by Washington and the mass consent-manufacturing US war and empire media. Victims (including white Serbians and Russians killed by US/NATO weapons and US-led Western sanctions) of the American Empire and its allies, agents, and clients are officially “unworthy” in dominant Western media-politics culture.
The United States wants Putin tried for war crimes but exempts its own leaders from indictment for such epic US transgressions as the arch-criminal US-imperialist invasion of Iraq (which killed more than a million Iraqis), the US-led destruction of Libya, thousands of US drone strikes that have killed thousands of innocents (including children) in Muslim nations, and countless barbarian acts of torture conducted by US military and intelligence personnel around the world.
Bill Clinton was whip smart when it came to domestic politics.€ In the run-up to his 1996 campaign for re-election, he determined that the Republican candidate would be Senator Robert Dole (R-KS), who would exploit the fact that in the mid-1990s the Clinton administration was shying away from NATO expansion.€ One of the keys to the success of the Democratic Party over the years had been the support of East European ethnic communities in such important states in the mid-West as Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.€ Various ethnic delegations began arriving in Washington to lobby the Congress and the White House to overlook the opposition to expansion from European experts at the Department of State as well as such influential senators as Sam Nunn (D-GE).€ For domestic political reasons, particularly the 1996 election, Clinton decided to ignore this opposition and to satisfy the East European ethnic demands for NATO membership.€ In so doing, Clinton moved to expand a Cold War alliance that many believed had outlived its mission.
Clinton believed that he could appease Moscow by offering the Russians a special consultative voice in NATO.€ Six months before the election, Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Russia-NATO Founding Act on Mutual Relations to share knowledge and intelligence, particularly on military weaponry.€ The Founding Act failed to lead to the promised consultation, cooperation, and coordination, let alone joint decision making, and there was increased Russian opposition to Yeltsin himself.€ This was predictable in view of the high-level opposition to Yeltsin’s predecessor, Mikhail Gorbachev, for “allowing” the reunification of Germany and its entry into NATO.
The toll in lost human life exceeds Durban’s prior record of 64 deaths from the “Rain Bomb” of April 2019, when 168 millimeters fell in 24 hours, doing at least $75 million in damage. In October 2017, 108 mm fell in one day, killing 11.
Going back further, in 2011 Durban hosted the annual United Nations COP17 climate summit, generally considered a global policy failure (though not according to U.S. State Department negotiator Todd Stern who celebrated to Hillary Clinton what he termed a “significant success for the United States”). Still, city officials appeared numb to the imminent threat, not bothering to make basic infrastructure repairs after 2017 even in high-profile sites like the violence-afflicted Glebelands migrant labor hostel whose roof was not repaired two years later.
+ White phosphorus munitions, like those reportedly deployed by Russia in Mariupol, have been repeatedly used by the IDF in Gaza and the Saudis in Yemen with ghastly consequences. I don’t recall any objections from the US State Department. But now that the US is “woke” to the dangers of white phosphorus, they might track down those in Pentagon who ordered its use in Fallujah.
+ The US is trying to amend the Security Council veto process at the UN. The changes would € automatically convene a meeting of the General Assembly after a veto has been cast in the Security Council. This could easily backfire on some US client states.€ The US has used the veto to block Israel from UN censures at least 42 times since 1972.
Israeli forces on Friday launched a raid on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, injuring more than 150 Palestinians as they gathered to worship on the second week of Ramadan.
Sheikh Omar al-Kiswani, the director of the Al-Aqsa Mosque—one of Islam's holiest sites—told Middle East Eye that "what happened today is an attack on all peaceful worshipers."
I recently participated in a commemoration of Martin Luther King's address "Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence," originally delivered on April 2, 1967, at New York City's Riverside Church. King used the occasion to announce his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Although a long time coming in the eyes of some in the antiwar movement, his decision was one for which he was roundly criticized, even by supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.€ He was straying out of his prescribed lane, they charged, and needed to get back where he belonged.
David Beasley, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, is sounding the alarm about people being "starved to death" in Mariupol, a city in southeastern Ukraine surrounded by Russian troops.
"We will not give up on the people of Mariupol and other people that we cannot reach."
World-renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky highlighted the hypocrisy of U.S. government leaders denouncing and demanding accountability for war crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces waging war on Ukraine during an interview published Thursday.
For just over an hour, Chomsky spoke with The Intercept's Jeremy Scahill about Russian President Vladimir Putin's February invasion of Ukraine, media coverage of the war, how governments around the world have responded, and the need to move toward "a diplomatic settlement."
These days, Peters is back in Mesa County. She has to be. She can’t leave the state after being recently indicted by a grand jury on 10 counts, including seven felony charges, for allegedly using a false identity and lying to state employees while allowing an unauthorized individual to make copies of the election equipment hard drive. When I visited last month, I found her at the Hilton DoubleTree in Grand Junction — the county seat — where she was attending the county GOP Assembly to campaign for her spot on the primary ballot. She’s now running for secretary of state. There, sitting on a patio with her bright white bob sparkling in the sun, she told me that her decision to copy the election equipment hard drives was not only allowed but required. And she believes those copies have revealed serious vulnerabilities in the county’s election equipment.
Prosecutors say Salah Abdeslam, 32, is the only surviving member of the so-called Islamic State cell that targeted Paris that night, killing 130 people.
Despite the Kremlin calling back an international network of national and foreign mercenaries to fight in Ukraine, some of whom are leaving battlefields in Syria and Africa to do so, Russia has largely maintained its presence in Mali, where a force of about 1,000 Russian officials and instructors from the Russian mercenary outfit, popularly known as the Wagner Group, is deployed, according to United Nations-based diplomats. Some 200 Malian service members and nine police officers are currently receiving training in Russia, a Russian diplomat recently told the U.N. Security Council.
The Biden administration said it will resume selling leases to drill for oil and gas on federal lands starting next week, but with a major reduction in the number of acres offered and an increase in the royalties companies must pay to drill.
The Interior Department announced that on Monday it will release a sale notice for leases to drill on 144,000 acres of government land — 80 percent less than what was initially being evaluated for potential leasing.
A month after climate campaigners condemned Sen. Joe Manchin for refusing to support the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to a top Federal Reserve post, government watchdogs are warning that the president's choice of a replacement nominee, Michael Barr, has close ties to industries that could be responsible for "the next financial crisis."
"When it comes to the cryptocurrency and fintech industries, which some believe could be responsible for the next crash, concerns about the revolving door have too often been waved away."
President Joe Biden's top domestic climate adviser is reportedly planning to resign in the coming weeks as much of the White House's green energy agenda remains stalled in the Senate—and as the administration moves to boost U.S. oil production and gas exports in response to Russia's war on Ukraine.
According to the New York Times, White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy "has told confidants that she has been frustrated by the slow pace of climate progress." Reuters cites one unnamed source as claiming that McCarthy—who served as head of the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama presidency—intends to leave her position "as soon as next month," a timeline the White House denies.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment shows the world is unnecessarily headed toward climate catastrophe, and all it would take to resolve the crisis is decisive global action. That means no new fossil fuel development or infrastructure.
Scientist Emma Smart went on a hunger strike Thursday after she was denied bail by London authorities while awaiting a court hearing on charges of "criminal damage," which were filed after Smart and others glued scientific papers and themselves to a U.K. government building to protest destructive climate policies.
"Emma knows what's at stake if we don't stop fossil fuel investments and she is taking a stand."
The satellite imagery is staggering: an Antarctic ice shelf roughly the size of New York City collapsing into the ocean. Its demise, captured and reported by NASA scientists in mid-March, was only the latest startling news from a region where temperatures have soared up to 40€° Celsius (72€° Fahrenheit) above average.
Activists condemned Friday's announcement by the Biden administration that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management will resume oil and gas lease sales on public lands as yet another betrayal of President Joe Biden's promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle the climate emergency.
"Biden is choosing to stand with polluters over people at the expense of frontline communities and the future of the planet."
This April,€ scientists observed a record annual increase in methane levels€ in the atmosphere for the second year in a row. It’s the largest increase since record-keeping began.
Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It’s a major contributor to global warming.
Republican state leaders are on the warpath against BlackRock, the largest financial asset manager in the nation.
Climate campaigners on Friday shut down four major bridges in London as part of a wave of actions across the United Kingdom to demand an end to fossil fuels.
The U.K. arm of Extinction Rebellion (XR) confirmed members of the group blocked the Blackfriars, Lambeth, Waterloo, and Westminster bridges.
I first wrote about the problem of bots front-running transactions a year and a half ago in The Order Flow, citing Dan Robinson and Georgios Konstantopoulos' Ethereum is a Dark Forest from August 2020 and samczsun's Escaping the Dark Forest. But I should have paid more attention. It turns out that front-running is the tip of an iceberg of fundamental problems that Ethereum and similar systems suffer. In replicating the functions of Wall Street they have replicated, and in some ways enhanced, its pathologies, Below the fold I survey these and related issues.
"The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers," Newell said. "We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50% of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn't want to have."
Newell reiterated that Bitcoin's fluctuations were "a complete nightmare"—people weren't happy when a game could cost $10 one day and $100 the next.
But while the process may solve one issue, it creates another. Waste coal is the dirtiest coal because of its high levels of mercury, sulfur, chromium, and lead. In a circulating fluidized bed, more refuse is needed to produce the same amount of energy as regular coal, so the toxic byproducts are multiplied.
Stronghold used a loophole for Scrubgrass—classifying it as a mining operation—to survive Obama-era emissions restrictions that would have shut down the plant and similar refuse-burning enterprises. During the Trump administration, those EPA rules were loosened, meaning the crypto miners can continue generating immense amounts of power "behind the meter" without much restriction or oversight. And even if removing and burning coal refuse does help stem water-quality problems and prevent inextinguishable underground blazes, the waste piles aren't an unlimited resource, raising the question of what will happen when they're gone.
If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank in the top 30 worldwide for energy use. That’s roughly enough electricity to power countries with populations in the tens of millions, with an environmental burden of an estimated 34 megatons of carbon emissions or more, according to Digiconomist’s Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index.
Of course, Bitcoin isn’t unique among cryptocurrencies in terms of its environmental burden, but its high profile and uniquely inefficient transaction approval system make it an easy scapegoat. The blockchain technology that underlies it, meanwhile, could be the key to a greener future.
Amazon.com Inc Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said the e-commerce giant is not close to adding cryptocurrency as a payment option to its retail business, in an interview with CNBC on Thursday.
On a recent deep dive into the twilight zone, a submersible hundreds of feet underwater filmed an unusual fruit-colored creature: a bright-red strawberry squid with eerie eyes — one small and black and the other large, bulbous and yellow.
Oblivious to the video camera, the strawberry squid (Histioteuthis heteropsis) cruised through its dark ocean home, occasionally twisting and curling its eight arms and two tentacles as its ghostly white fins rippled.
The sighting, which happened last month, wasn't totally unexpected, but it was still a pleasant surprise. "We see them often (maybe one dive in four), but they are far from abundant," Bruce Robison, a senior scientist with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), told Live Science in an email. Robison, who wasn't part of the expedition that spotted this squid, leads the midwater ecology group at MBARI.
The Working Group III report provides an updated global assessment of climate change mitigation progress and pledges, and examines the sources of global emissions. It explains developments in emission reduction and mitigation efforts, assessing the impact of national climate pledges in relation to long-term emissions goals.
On Tuesday (April 12), New York’s lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, resigned from office after federal prosecutors indicted him for allegedly spearheading a scheme to fund two of his recent campaigns with illegal donations. Though Benjamin pleaded not guilty, his political career is over.
In the beginning, many thought the pandemic would be “a great equalizer,” since the virus doesn’t distinguish between rich and poor. But the tragic reality is that our economic and public health systems€ do€ discriminate.
A coalition of researchers convened by the Poor People’s Campaign recently published a€ report€ making this reality plain.
Nikki Spretnak loved being an IRS agent. Being able to examine the books of different businesses gave her an intimate view of the economy. But over the years, she became more and more conscious of a chasm between the business owners she was auditing and herself. It wasn't so much that they were rich and she, a revenue agent in the IRS office in Columbus, Ohio, was not. It was that, when it came to taxes, they lived a privileged existence, one that she, a mere W-2 recipient, did not share.
Over the past year, along with a team of my colleagues at ProPublica, I’ve spent countless hours scrutinizing the tax information of thousands of the wealthiest Americans. Like Spretnak, I’ve seen behind the veil and witnessed the same chasm. Doing my own taxes in the past was never a thrill, but only this spring did I fully realize what a colorless and confined tax world I inhabit.
The great pamphleteer of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, had much more on his mind than independence from the British.
Fortunately, my taxes aren't that hard and it only took about half an hour for me to fill out the 1040 form (I'm not a fan of electronic filing, but that's only because I know how the electronic sausage is made [3]), take the form to the post office and have it hand cancelled by the post master (okay, that last bit was done by Bunny since she was out running errands at the time).
Google (including YouTube), Koo, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), ShareChat, Snap, Twitter and WhatsApp have released their reports in compliance with Rule 4(1)(d) of the IT Rules 2021 for the month of February, 2022. The latest of these was published by WhatsApp and was published on April 1, 2022. The reports contain similar shortcomings, which exhibit lack of effort on the part of the social media intermediaries and the government to further transparency and accountability in platform governance. The intermediaries have yet again, not reported on government requests, used misleading metrics and have not disclosed how they use algorithms for proactive monitoring. You can read our analysis of the previous reports here.
Two years ago, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) bet heavily on four ex- military officers running for US Senate seats against right-wing Republicans in Arizona, Texas, Kentucky, and North Carolina. Despite much Super-PAC spending on their behalf, only one of them, former astronaut Mark Kelly, actually got elected.
In North Carolina, nearly€ $300 million was raised and spent either by incumbent Senator Thom Tillis, his challenger, Cal Cunningham, or outside groups backing them. A lawyer and former state legislator, Cunningham was commissioned in the Army Reserve, Judge Advocate General’s Corps, after Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. He then served on active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel and earning a Bronze Star.€ As the New York Times reported,€ the Democratic nominee “leaned heavily on his character and biography, playing up his military service and presenting himself as an inoffensive moderate.”
If we were a truly democratic country, we would be asked whether we would like to spend the budget on war or on education, whether we would like to give the priority to disarmament and peace negotiations rather than to attend to the arms race.€ We would be able to vote on specific aspects of the budget.€ We would not rely on our system of so-called “representative democracy”, which in reality does not represent us.€ The reality is that we have a “dysfunctional” democracy, which allows us only to vote for candidate A or candidate B, both of whom are committed to the military-industrial complex, both of whom want huge military budgets, both of whom prefer sabre-rattling and military adventures over dialogue, tension over détente, predator competition over international cooperation.
In a world threatened by pandemics, climate change, earthquakes, tsunamis and other natural disasters, it is time to practice international solidarity to solve global problems.€ Our governments should begin by respecting the sovereignty of other states, refrain from interfering in their international affairs as stipulated in General Assembly Resolutions 2131, 2625, 3314, stop provocations, silence the drums of war, stop the enormously costly arms race and observe article 2(3) of the UN Charter, which commits all member states to solve their differences by negotiation, peaceful means, and in good faith.
Allison-Natale seems to be the kind of earnest young professional we are all familiar with: an East coast educated lawyer who toils for do-gooder nonprofit law firms like The Bronx Defenders, and is extremely concerned about everyone’s feelings.
In other words, he would fit extremely well in the liberal wing of today’s Democratic Party. But Allison-Natale considers himself a proud socialist, therefore—and I am basing this on the treatment Sen. Bernie Sanders has received—he is not really welcome in today’s Democratic Party.
You’ve probably heard a lot about corporations not paying taxes. Last year, individuals like you contributed€ six times more€ in income tax than corporations did.
But have you heard about how many of your tax dollars then end up in corporate pockets? It’s a lot — especially for corporations that contract with the Pentagon. They collect nearly half of all military spending.
The most racist of Trump’s base constitute whites whose racism backfires on them, in ways they never, and still don’t, anticipate or understand.
The United States residents seem to be proud of what they call their ‘rugged individuality’, and don’t want any help from the government. They seem to overlook the public school system, roads, Social Security and a myriad of other entitlements provided ostensibly for all residents. But many of them seem to have a horror of anyone who is not white receiving any benefits. So they oppose such things as government-provided health care (something that I have in Canada), food stamps, aid to dependent children and other related benefits, believing that they are all going to non-whites who just want handouts. They don’t seem to recognize that by depriving non-whites of these benefits, they deny themselves as well.
This year’s 55th anniversary event, also held in Riverside Church’s magnificent sanctuary, featured inspiring Christian music and a thoughtful discussion of King’s remarks. Most powerful of all, however, was a public reading of the address itself.€ “Beyond Vietnam” contains many famously moving passages. € King, for example, cited “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools”€ and would not allow them to live “on the same block in Chicago.”€ And he reflected on the incongruity of young Black men being sent “eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”
For me, at least, what that commemorative moment brought into sharp focus was his lacerating critique of American freedom. And there, to my mind, lies its lasting value.
To its credit the Biden presidency has so far resisted pressure to escalate this geopolitical war by fusing its prosecution with that of Ukrainian resistance forces through such steps as establishing a no-fly-zone in Ukraine, supplying offensive weaponry, and deploying NATO forces and weaponry. This is not enough because its tendency is to prolong the war at the expense not only of the Ukrainian people, but of millions on non-Ukrainians already suffering from the spillover effects of the war and sanctions on food and energy supplies and prices, and worse will come to Ukraine and internationally, the longer the ground war goes on.
A diplomatic path to conflict resolution is completely absent, in effect negated, given the political language of demonization relied upon by Biden from the outset of the Russian aggression on February 24th. To accuse Russian and its leaders of war crimes that should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague is both awkwardly hypocritical given the past U.S. repudiation of the tribunal’s authority and an inflammatory attempt to politicize a fragile international institution struggling for legitimacy since it was established more than 20 years ago. To suggest, even to demand, regime change in Moscow, as Biden has done, is something the West wisely refrained from doing even with respect to Stalin and Stalinism at the height of the Cold War. Such a statement unless attributed to an emotional outburst that a nuclear armed world can ill afford, must be regarded as calculated to enrage Putin and his entourage, and thus inhibit any willingness to explore prospects for ending the violence now.
At issue at the April 6 hearing was Saab’s claim to diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomat Relations. This international law, to which the US is a signatory, affords accredited diplomats absolute protection from arrest and prosecution even in time of war. Referring to the war in Ukraine, Saab’s attorney reminded the court that the principle at stake is “vital to the effective functioning of diplomacy for all states…[which] is all the more imperative these days.”
Charges against Alex Saab
However, humans are still the primary agents of history, despite the matrix of machinery, computers and the sheer momentum of events that can easily overwhelm us in this modern world. Whether those agents are those with billions of dollars worth of wealth, unparalleled armies and weapons of war or just us common folk, humans remain important in the ongoing narrative of human history. Indeed, not a day goes by that even a casual but cognizant observer would fail to acknowledge this.
Author Gary Gerstle reflects on all of these in his newly-published history The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. Unlike many other books on the neolibral period of capitalism, Gerstle’s work spends most of its time examining the politics, the political movement and the politicians who made neoliberalism the political order of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century. By political order, Gerstle means something that has the “ability to organize the core ideas of political life.” It is his contention that the New Deal defined the political order of the mid-twentieth century and it was its failure to sustain its promise that ushered in the neoliberal order. Of course, as noted above, this transition was not pre-ordained, but was instead the result of political and eocnomic pressures by monied interests and those politicians that served them that bought this change about. Although many of those political pressures were of the domestic variety, Gerstle argues that the most important element in the last one hundred years was the Russian revolution and its aftermath—all the way to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Janine Jackson interviewed legal expert Marjorie Cohn for the April 8, 2022, episode of CounterSpin about prosecuting Donald Trump. This is a lightly edited transcript.
The evidence that Donald Trump committed crimes is all around us. We have evidence that the Trump Organization manipulated financial disclosures to inflate or deflate his assets as needed, because his former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, testified to that scheme. We have evidence that his company engaged in financial crimes, because his company’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, has been indicted on those charges. We have evidence that he tried to tamper with a federal election, because Trump is on tape asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes to put him over the top. We have evidence that he engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct Congress on January 6, 2021, because he urged people to do so on live television and spent weeks beforehand trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. We have evidence that Trump knew what he did was wrong, because he and his lawyers ordered his collaborators to not cooperate with congressional investigators.
On the face of it, Sunday’s results look like a carbon copy of 2017. Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president, came first with 28%, followed by Marine Le Pen for the far-Right Rassemblement National (23%), then Jean-Luc Mélenchon for the radical Left France Insoumise (22%). Just like in 2017, Le Pen defeated Mélenchon by a whisker, denying the latter a place in the second round.
In reality, these results are surprising and even unsettling. Abstention was high: at 26%, it came close to the record 28% set in 2002. In French democracy, large numbers of young, poor and racialised people now permanently abstain from voting.
Noisy-le-Sec, France—Fatima, 44, works in sales. She doesn’t follow politics much and didn’t vote in the first round of France’s presidential election, but she knows there’s an important choice to make on April 24. President Emmanuel Macron is facing reelection against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen—and it’s a much tighter race than in 2017, when he trounced her by 32 percentage points. Current polls show him leading by just about six points.
Before Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine in February, the argument that NATO expansion over the previous 30 years had been a policy failure and a provocation was neither new nor partisan. It had been put forward by right-leaning realists in the US foreign policy mainstream, including George Kennan, William Burns, Fiona Hill, and John Mearsheimer, and it was also a common position among doves on the left, including me. Among Russia experts, it’s become conventional wisdom that President George W. Bush erred in 2008 when he insisted on an open-ended commitment to someday bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, likely triggering Russia’s war with Georgia a few months later and eventually its conflict with Ukraine, which began in 2014 and escalated this year. And among left-wing critics of US foreign policy, it’s conventional wisdom that NATO is a Cold War relic—a defense industry boondoggle that sucks up resources that could be invested in the social safety net.1
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday warned that the world should prepare for Russia to use nuclear weapons as part of its ongoing assault.
When asked if he is worried that Russian President Vladimir Putin might use a so-called tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine, Zelenskyy told CNN's Jake Tapper: "Not only me—I think all of the world, all the countries, have to be worried because... it can be not real information, but it can be truth."
In former President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to dismantle democracy, his people gave Jim Marchant an important assignment. Marchant embraced it.
Congressional candidate Nina Turner declared Friday that she is "not for sale" and suggested her primary opponent, Democratic Rep. Shontel Brown, is after federal filings revealed that a billionaire-funded super PAC has spent more than $1 million in support of the incumbent in Ohio's 11th District.
"Let's be clear, those corporate interests don't make donations, they make investments."
Vanguard disclosed on April 8 that it now owns 82.4 million shares of Twitter, or 10.3% of the company, according to the most recent publicly available filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The asset-manager increased its stake in the company at some point during the first quarter, according to the filings. Vanguard’s holdings are now worth $3.78 billion, based on Twitter stock’s closing price on Wednesday.
How much do the super rich really pay? Until now, the answer was unknown — thanks to privacy laws. Recently, tax returns of the super rich was leaked to ProPublica. I thought of exploring the billionaires and their tax rates.
The suit could become an example of a powerful way to claw back some of the power of Section 230, a target on both sides of the aisle, by noting that it does not protect unfettered speech in every instance and that there is a responsibility not to encourage possible falsehoods. This is one to keep an eye on.
By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy.
The exodus will fundamentally change the Russian tech industry, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who are part of the tightknit community of Russian tech workers around the world, including many who left the country in recent weeks. An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers. It is losing many of the bright young minds building companies for the future.
Now, however, its officials talk as if it were a tech hub. Hundreds of artificial-intelligence (AI), robotics and data companies have sprung up in the past year. Local planning documents reflect the exuberance of a boomtown in the making, something Zhuzhou could only watch from afar in the 1990s as eastern ports became rich.
The documents refer to “great changes not seen in 100 years”, a phrase that has been used by Xi Jinping, China’s president, to signify the start of a new era. He believes China is on the verge of a revolution in which dozens of cities will begin producing breakthroughs in robotics, cloud computing and automation. Zhuzhou’s officials also believe they are poised to reap the rewards of Mr Xi’s “common prosperity” campaign—a plan to redistribute wealth from richer regions to poorer ones, and from the dominant [Internet] platforms to consumers and workers.
As the world focuses on Russia’s war on Ukraine, another conflict is raging — on people’s phones.
In the information war, TikTok has become a battlefield. Popular among younger audiences, the platform known for dance videos has, for some, become an information source on the war in Ukraine.
With new, unverified content appearing on TikTok by the second, some analysts worry that the platform often serves to mislead its users, numbering 1 billion worldwide.
Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech. But soon after the bid was made public, Musk went on stage at TED to be interviewed by Chris Anderson and spoke more about his thoughts on Twitter and content moderation.
First, the bill increases dependence on the Internet companies, both in terms of reliance on the new revenues and by virtue of the fact that the Internet companies – not Canadian media – effectively dictate how the new revenues will be spent. This is the inevitable result of a system in which the Internet companies must prove to the CRTC that their deals with Canadian media will allocate a significant portion of the compensation to support local production of news content.
Second, press independence is threatened by the self-censorship that Canadian media companies supportive of the bill are likely to pursue. I raised this concern last week, noting:
I know of cases where opinion pieces have been spiked by mainstream media outlets because they criticized the previous Heritage Minister at a time when he was being actively lobbied on a potential media bill. Those decisions come on top of blank front pages and advertorials designed to curry support for the measures. The blurring of editorial and financial may be a fact of life, but it ultimately diminishes the credibility of the media.
Ukrainian authorities should thoroughly investigate the deaths of journalists Roman Nezhyborets and Zoreslav Zamoysky, determine if they were targeted for their work, and hold those responsible to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Wednesday.
“I was working as editor in Doxa before the war, doing the usual stuff editors do, but after the war, it became very dangerous. All of Russian media was censored into stopping publishing – the minority of publications that continue to exist manage because all their journalists left Russia. Many Russians feel like we’re on the brink of a full totalitarian nightmare.”
Doxa, which Mr Aramyan is no longer allowed to edit, is keeping track of the nightmare as it unfolds, reporting on student arrests and violations of their rights. Its newly launched initiative, “Z-Rating” – named in a nod to the infamous letter painted on Russian tanks, which has since become a symbol of the war – tracks instances of oppression by Russian universities, including efforts to silence students and public positions supporting the Kremlin.
Seventy-five years ago, a World War II veteran named Jack Roosevelt Robinson smashed baseball’s color line and officially desegregated America’s pastime. A near full decade before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, Jackie Robinson was a one-man cvil rights movement, a living symbol in 1947 against racism, segregation, and white supremacy wherever his Brooklyn Dodgers played ball. This is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would come to famously call Robinson “a sit-inner before sit-ins. A freedom rider before freedom rides.”
Many of these types of jobs are becoming not only more poorly paid considering the rampant inflation, but also a path to criminal conviction and financial ruin. Those that were termed heroes during early covid, individuals like teachers, nurses, and others keeping people fed have now entered a new decidedly non-heroic phase. They are entering the let’s try to convict them phase. It’s not an accident that many of these professions have disproportionate numbers of women. The far-right sure loves seeing a woman being punished. Always have, always will.
Just ask RaDonda Vaught. She’s a nurse who admittedly screwed up about as bad as you can–a medication error killed someone when she was floated to an unfamiliar area at Vanderbilt where she worked. She administered the wrong medication after a truly breathtaking number of errors. She lost her nursing license, which truly seems appropriate in this case, but something extra was placed upon her–that being a conviction for negligent homicide. Her error was colossal, but nobody involved seems to be advancing that she had any intent to harm. The level of stress and demand for speed make errors of the most unimaginable type likely and nursing is in a particularly dark place right now. Work conditions are not good. The fact that she had no intent to harm whatsoever and admitted to the mistake…..that didn’t stop her conviction in a cultural landscape of authoritarians largely not paying for the intentional cruelties they inflict upon vulnerable populations daily. We are back to the accepted narrative, that being the cops, the soldiers and the powerful have a blank check on intentionally destructive behavior while the nurses, the teachers, and the librarians just keep paying, working and serving others.
Human rights activists on Friday applauded the Biden administration's decision to allow tens of thousands of immigrants from war-torn Cameroon to temporarily live and work in the United States as a victory won by years of Black-led organizing.
"We rejoice and celebrate with our Cameroonian siblings who after a long-fought battle can finally breathe a sigh of relief."
In the objections it filed with the NLRB, Amazon requested additional time to gather evidence—remarkable for a business that surveils its workers more than Orwell could ever have imagined. Amazon alleges what employers always allege: that the union intimidated workers to vote yes. Given the massive fearmongering campaign that Amazon has conducted inside JFK8, those claims are a joke. But there’s nothing funny about the salvo Jeff Bezos has launched.
Sean Wiggs, 21, decided to learn to code after a high school teacher told him coding would be the future. He says he taught himself through a combination of free online resources like Harvard’s Computer Science Introduction course, learning the coding languages Python and Javascript, and mastering his first project, a simple “hello world” code.
But Wiggs found his projects expanding as the world contracted with the pandemic. As he took to TikTok to discuss social issues like systemic racism and police brutality, he made contact with a mutual, Victoria Hammett, who asked if he could help with a project. After Texas instituted a near-total ban on abortions, Texas Right to Life created a “whistleblower” site allowing Texans to report neighbors or relatives they suspected might be trying to access the procedure. So the plan was to create a bot to spam the site with fake tips. At that point, Wiggs had been coding for only three years, but he gave it a shot — and the code worked, leaving the abortion site flooded with fake tips. With that success, Wiggs became a fixture in the TikTok world as the coder who could help Gen-Z troll their enemies.
If there’s anything I don’t respect, it’s being rude and pushy with a customer that paid you his hard earned money for a product and then doesn’t stand behind their work and makes you wait because he has customers that probably also are getting ripped off with inferior craftsmanship. You may just want to save your money and go to the dealer so at least it works right.
Then he managed to screw up my remote that he sold me so that doesn’t work right either now. Now he hangs up on me and refuses to refund my money, so I am filing a credit card dispute with the company to get my money back. Just now, Bhushan called and threatened me that he would call the police!
What a lousy and crooked store. It’s one thing to mess something up a little, but it’s something else completely to not stand behind your work, blame the customer, yell at the customer, hang up on the customer, then refuse to refund them even though you’re obviously too incompetent to make the transaction right, and then get mad when you see that there’s a credit card dispute over your shoddy workmanship and threaten them with the police. Over what? Me asking him to fix this or give me my money back? This is harassment!
To make things even worse, the dealer doesn’t charge much more than Batteries Plus and I’m pretty sure their merchandise actually works. Now I get to go there anyway and pay for all of this all over again while the dispute is sorted out with the card company over this clown. We’ll just see about “Sorry, no refunds!” when the bank gets finished with this joker.
If you are browsing from HTTP. You really should get youself a Gemini Browser and browse this on Gemini. I recommend Lagrange. Or feel free to keep using HTTP.
While the press and some policy circles have made a large stink the last few years about massive new “bipartisan support for antitrust reform,” we’ve noted that the push isn’t quite what’s being advertised. While some of the bills being proposed might help correct some competitive imbalances online, the push in general is bizarrely narrow and only targets some tech companies under some circumstances.
In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share.
Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.
YouTube has responded to the piracy lawsuit filed last year by movie tycoon Carlos Vasallo. The streaming platform denies all copyright infringement allegations and sees the case as an attempt to get special Content ID treatment. YouTube also warns that its copyright management tool should not fall into the wrong hands since that could lead to misuse and censorship.
Privacy-centered search engine DuckDuckGo has completely removed the search results for many popular pirates sites including The Pirate Bay, 1337x, and Fmovies. Several YouTube ripping services have disappeared, too and even the homepage of the open-source software youtube-mp3 is unfindable.
In the pantheon of aggressive intellectual property bullies, Disney certainly would be one of the companies that would be competing to be Zeus. Disney has simply never seen an opportunity for IP enforcement that it hasn’t acted upon, be it copyright, trademark, or anywhere in between. More to the point for this post, Disney also has this fun mindset that even if it isn’t going to use an IP it owns, it doesn’t like it if anyone else does, either. On the topic of copyright specifically, this would represent a full departure from the purpose of copyright law: to encourage the creation and release of content in exchange for a temporary monopoly on that content.
Last week, federal agents took down two alleged baddies for doing the thing: impersonating federal agents.
A few months after the snippet tax was agreed to as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there planned to make Internet companies pay newspapers for sending the latter extra traffic, by imposing something called the News Media Bargaining Code. In a blog post from December 2020, Mel Silva, VP, Google Australia & New Zealand, gave a good analysis of why Australia’s proposed Code was€ antithetical to the way the Web worked, including the following:
