Want a fancy new laptop with great Linux support? Check out the StarBook Mk V, which just added an AMD Ryzen option.
Kubernetes, everyone's favorite container orchestrator, in its latest release, Kubernetes 1.24 Stargazer, has made two major changes: The developers dropped support for the Docker Engine container runtime and added supply chain security via Sigstore.
First, don't start hyperventilating because Dockershim has been deprecated. While Dockershim enabled you to use the Docker containerd runtime within Kubernetes, it was never designed to be embedded inside Kubernetes. Further, it's incompatible with Kubernetes' Container Runtime Interface (CRI). The fix was for dockershim to bridge the gap between Docker's containerd and CRI.
The day has come. At long last Dockershim is dead.
The removal was one of several notable changes that came with today's Kubernetes 1.24 release. The shift on Dockershim has broad albeit well-documented implications for those running Kubernetes in production, James Laverack, lead solutions engineer for the release, told The Register.
The news shouldn't, however, come as a surprise, he noted. Dockershim was deprecated with Kubernetes 1.20 in late 2020.
Volume expansion was introduced as a alpha feature in Kubernetes 1.8 and it went beta in 1.11 and with Kubernetes 1.24 we are excited to announce general availability(GA) of volume expansion.
This feature allows Kubernetes users to simply edit their PersistentVolumeClaim objects and specify new size in PVC Spec and Kubernetes will automatically expand the volume using storage backend and also expand the underlying file system in-use by the Pod without requiring any downtime at all if possible.
Kubernetes has standardised on the Linux Foundation’s free software signing service, “sigstore”, to protect against supply chain attacks. sigstore, first released in March 2021, includes a number of signing, verification and provenance techniques that let developers securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images and binaries with signatures stored in a tamper-proof public log. The service is free to use and designed to help prevent what are increasingly regular and sophisticated upstream software supply chain attacks.
sigstore’s founders include Red Hat, Google and Purdue University. Its adoption by Kubernetes — one of the world’s most active open source communities, with close to six million developers (a huge number given that CNCF data from December 2021 suggests that there are 6.8 million cloud native developers in total)– is a significant vote of trust in the standard for verifying software components. (nb The Linux Foundation hosts both sigstore and Kubernetes, as well as Linux, Node.js and a host of other ubiquitous critical software projects.)
Amit Taylor of TrueUp.io joins Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett for a deep dive booming market for open source talent. TrueUp has an amazing array of data and ready connections between demand and supply in the marketplace for dream tech jobs.
Since kernel 5.15 there has been a native NTFS driver in the Linux kernel but it turns out that nobody has been maintaining it for the past 6 months
 CNC (also known as numerical control or computer numerical control) is the automated control of machining tools (such as milling machines, lathes, 3d printers, laser cutters, plasma cutters, robot arms, hexapods) by means of a computer.
A CNC machine processes a piece of material (metal, plastic, wood, ceramic, or composite) to meet specifications by following coded programmed instructions and without a manual operator directly controlling the machining operation.
In modern CNC systems, the design of a mechanical part and its manufacturing program are highly automated. The part’s mechanical dimensions are defined using CAD software and then translated into manufacturing directives by computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software.
Tor has released 0.4.7.7, the first stable Tor release with support for congestion control. Congestion control will eliminate the speed limit of current Tor, as well as reduce latency by minimizing queue lengths at relays. It will result in significant performance improvements in Tor, as well as increased utilization of our network capacity. In order for users to experience these benefits, we need Exit relay operators to upgrade as soon as possible. This post covers a bit of congestion control history, describes technical details, and contains important information for all relay and onion service operators.
Congestion Control is an adaptive property of distributed networks, whereby a network and its endpoints operate such that utilization is maximized, while minimizing a constraint property, and ensuring fairness between connections. When this optimization problem is solved, the optimal outcome is that all connections transmit an equal fraction of the bandwidth of the slowest router in their shared path, for every path through the network.
Ardour is a simple, easy-to-use, and powerful audio recording and processing tool for Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, and Windows. Ardour is a freeware application that comes with its own set of built-in features to record and organize sound. As a sophisticated tool, Ardour requires a little bit of experience with recording and processing sound.
Ardour’s main feature is its status as a professional digital audio workstation (DAW) that works on Linux while still being cross-platform overall. It’s the standard in the industry and it’s used by thousands of people every day.
This is because it’s stable, flexible, and modular with a massive community behind it whenever you need help. It’s open-source, so everyone can modify it to their own needs. This means you can customize it to your liking, whether you work on one or ten tracks.
Google Chrome is for many the best web browser and I think it is for its speed, stability, synchronization with Google and the large number of extensions that we can install. So many users ask how to install it on Linux, especially if they come from Windows.
So let’s quickly install it on our system.
How to Install LEMP Stack Nginx, MySQL, PHP on Ubuntu 22.04. In this guide you will learn how to install Nginx, MySQL 8.0 and PHP 8.1.
You will also install some common PHP extensions and adjust the PHP configurations. Finally you will secure your setup with Let’s Encrypt SSL and configure HTTPS redirection.
This setup is tested on Google cloud, so it will work on all cloud hosting services like AWS, Azure or any VPS or any dedicated servers running Ubuntu 22.04.
The SSH tool allows you to log in and run commands on a remote machine just as if you were sitting in front of it.
If you have started your journey to become an experienced developer, you already know that you have to describe what you have done when you change the code and submit it to be merged in the master branch. In git and many other source code management systems, this description is called a commit message.
The commit message has a title, and can have a detailed description. You should separate the description from the title by adding a blank line after the title.
Instead of running many pkg_add or pkg_delete commands to manage my packages, now I can use a configuration file (allowing includes) to define which package should be installed, and the installed but not listed packages should be removed.
After using NixOS too long, it's a must have for me to manage packages this way.
If you're looking to employ a solid VPN service for remote workers, NordLayer VPN is an outstanding option. Find out how to install and use the client on both Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora 36.
Like every other solo developer and sysadmin, I do stuff using ssh. Some stuff is automated using scripts, and others require ssh login. For example, one of my scripts logs into my Linux and FreeBSD server using public ssh keys and does a particular type of work for me.
In this video, we are looking at how to install OpenTTD on Debian 11.
Today we are looking at how to install Jump Force Mugen 3 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Finding a device or app that isn’t a web browser doesn’t seem easy. These days, it is either connected to the web (looking at you ESP32) or is just a web browser pretending to be something else (a la electron, PWAs, or React Native). So, of course, it is on us to create more and more exciting things to browse. [Connor Clark] is one of those people, and he brought Zelda Classic to the browser.
Kodi (originally XBMC), is a free and open source media center and entertainment hub, and the latest release up on Flathub adds in support for the Steam Deck controller.
Another big milestone has been hit for the Steam Deck from Valve. There's now at least 2,500 games that have been through Deck Verified to be classed as either fully Verified or Playable.
Love some retro action-platformer to fill your time? Janosik quite a popular one, likely because it's free, and it just got a big upgrade.
MangoHud is something that Valve use on the Steam Deck, specifically for the performance HUD that shows various details like FPS, frame timing, temperatures and more. It just had a new release with plenty of changes.
While Valve has yet to actually release a proper iso for SteamOS 3 used on the Steam Deck, others have been taking it into their own hands to provide, like with the new HoloISO.
You like OpenBSD? Then, I'm quite sure you can contribute to it! Let me explain the many ways your skills can be used to improve the project and contribute back.
In -current, the performance of pkg_add(1) has been greatly enhanced by the enabling of caching by default: [...]
Following much development and testing, parallel IP forwarding has been enabled in -current. The most recent of the relevant commits are: [...]
The openSUSE.Asia Summit is an annual openSUSE Asian conference, attended by contributors and enthusiasts from all over Asia. The event focuses primarily on the openSUSE distribution and community, its applications for personal and enterprise use, and open source culture. Since 2014, openSUSE.Asia Summit events had been held offline and thus, a great opportunity for the community to meet.
However, due to COVID-19, the summit was canceled in 2020.In 2021,the online summit was organized by the team India.
When I attended the openSUSE Asia Summit in 2019, I my friends in Indonesia about their experience in setting up the mirror for Indonesian users.
Earlier this year, when Luboš Kocman visited Mauritius, we spoke about it again.
Then, a few weeks ago, I heard from cloud.mu, who were willing to sponsor a server for mirror purposes. That was just perfect timing. I had started discussions with an ISP but then cloud.mu was not just willing to provide the server & bandwidth resources but their speed to deploy and assist was even more commendable.
Once the server was ready, the next step was to contact openSUSE admins to update the DNS records for opensuse.mu. I sent my request to the openSUSE Board for the purchase the domain a long time ago. Until now I used to run a small blog for openSUSE tips & tutorials on opensuse.mu. The domain is owned by SUSE and mananged by the openSUSE admins, i.e the Heroes team.
Since its inception, AlmaLinux has very quickly risen to become one of the best drop-in replacements for both CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Of course, being based on RHEL, AlmaLinux benefits from a fairly high bar set by the Red Hat pedigree. And although on the surface there aren’t any user-facing features that will blow anyone’s mind out of the Linux water, AlmaLinux 9 still manages to seriously impress … even as a beta.
Due to some last-minute bugs discovered, Fedora Linux 36 has been postponed again with a new release date of May 10.
The postponement of Fedora’s release is not something new that can surprise the devotees of this popular Linux distro. Many feel like Fedora is always late, but this is a misinterpretation of the process.
Remember that rather than building software exclusively under the authority of the Fedora developers, they integrate thousands of components generated and maintained throughout the vast open source world, and getting everything aligned and polished is a significant effort.
As a result, this makes adhering to a rigid calendar-based release schedule extremely challenging.
The Debian project has been voting on a general resolution that would allow secret voting on future issues. The results have been posted in unofficial form, and the winner was "proposal B": "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification". One might think that closes the discussion, but Debian project leader candidate Felix Lechner is questioning the election and calling for it to be redone — something that the Debian constitution lacks provisions for.
While there's plenty of software available out of the box for Ubuntu (and all the derivatives), some developers only provide .deb downloads from their websites - that's where deb-get comes in.
 The Debian Project announced this week a massive Linux kernel security update for its Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series to address 19 security vulnerabilities discovered by various security researchers in the upstream Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, which may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service or information leaks.
A review of Xebian Linux Distribution which brings the Debian rolling release with lightweight Xfce desktop environment - together.
Tails is a popular Linux distribution that focuses on protecting against censorship and surveillance. It is one of the privacy-focused Linux distributions.
Without worrying about exposing your information, you can use it anywhere using a USB stick and get your work done.
Its latest release, Tails 5.0, utilizes Debian 11 (Bullseye) as its base. So, you should expect all the improvements in Debian 11 in Tails 5.0.
I have updated my OBS builds to contain the new KDE Gears 22.04 as well as the last point release of KDE Plasma 5.24.5.
As usual, the packages are provided via my OBS builds. If you have used my packages till now, then you only need to change the apps2112 line to read apps2204. To give full details, I repeat (and update) instructions for all here: First of all, you need to add my OBS key say in /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/obs-npreining.asc and add a file /etc/apt/sources.lists.d/obs-npreining-kde.list, containing the following lines, replacing the DISTRIBUTION part with one of Debian_11 (for Bullseye), Debian_Testing, or Debian_Unstable...
A large amount of vulnerabilities are addressed in the latest upgrade of Debian Bullseye.
When I migrated my server I took the opportunity to split my setup into two servers: one for running public services and one for keeping my files and backups.
The reason I didn't separate them from the beginning was because for a very long time I didn't even have any public facing services. Then I tried a few things out and just as every temporary thing in IT they became permanent.
Apart from improved data security my new setup incidentally provides another opportunity in that I can now try new upgrades on my file server before subjecting my services to possible long disruptions. I'm very grateful to my past self for that.
 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ubuntu are two of the most popular Linux distributions in the open-source world.
Of course, they are different and commercially successful, but in what aspects? Who uses Ubuntu? And, should you consider using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for anything?
Let’s explore the differences in this article. Here, I present a detailed breakdown that may help you choose one for your use case.
I’ve been a fan of distrobox for a while - it really makes it easy to experiment with different Linux distributions, and also to do packaging work for different distributions regardless of what’s running on the physical machine.
It’s not only ridiculously flexible, compared to the Toolbx project that inspires it - the latter requires specially modified containers - but it also just consists of Bash scripts, with a simple installation script. Perfect for getting to grips with the idiosyncracies of a different distribution’s packaging methodologies!
As such, I’ve decided to use this for my first Debian package on the road to hopefully becoming a Debian Maintainer or even a full-fledged DD. Will probably branch out to C and Python packages after this - which will then be useful at work for getting our open source projects packaged for a wider audience.
The Ubuntu PPA is now ready to use; it is also uploaded to Debian Mentors and I’ll work on finding a mentor to review and sponsor its upload.
Qualcomm says the new WiFi 7 Networking Pro SoCs can run Openwrt with Linux Kernel 5.4. With up to 2000 clients, the Networking Pro 1620 is designed for highly-congested venues (e.g. stadiums), enterprise, small-to-medium business, and prosumer home environments. The Networking Pro 1220 and 820 both target enterprise, SMB, prosumer, and premium home mesh systems, while the Networking Pro 620 is better suited for enterprise, SMB, gaming, and home mesh systems.
Qualcomm Technologies is currently sampling their Wi-Fi 7 networking SoC, and commercial products should become available in the next couple of quarters from companies like eero. Additional information can be found on the product page and press release.
 Syslogic’s RPC RSL A3 is a robust AI computer equipped with the Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier Industrial module and optional 4G/5G support. The RPC RSL A3 was designed for applications that require vision computing, real time sensor fusion and sophisticated control of autonomous machines used in agricultural settings.
To complement its industrial processor module, the RPC RSL A3 successfully meets the requirements for IP67 and IP69 protection ratings. The IP67 and IP69 are one of the highest protection levels against dust, airborne particles, high pressure water and high pressure temperature. Syslogic’s states that their ultra rugged PC is suitable for operation in temperatures that range between –40 €°C to +70 €°C.
I suspect most people who have collected and kept these wouldn't want to part with them, but just in case ..
The most interesting thing going on with GIMP right now is the work by new contributor NikC and Jehan. They recently added CMYK JPEGs exporting and have three more related patches in the pipeline: correct CMYK TIFFs loading, CMYK TIFFs exporting, and a rewrite of the CMYK color selector to use the babl library.
Please note that instead of using the preferred CMYK profile the CMYK JPEG exporter will use whatever softproofing profile you told GIMP to use (not sure why you would want two different CMYK profiles, but not using the preferred profile seems like an omission anyway).
PGConf.be 2022 will be held in Haasrode, Leuven, about 25km from Brussels.
The conference will take place on May 19th, 2022. Registrations are open until May 12th, after that you can still register, but you will have to provide your own food.
LibreOffice 7.3.3 Community, the third minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. In addition to the LibreOffice website, starting from tomorrow it will be possible to download LibreOffice from SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/libreoffice/files/libreoffice/stable/.
 LibreOffice 7.3.3 is here five weeks after LibreOffice 7.3.2 as the third minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family to address more bugs and further improve interoperability with proprietary document formats. A total of 88 bugs were fixed in this update, as you can see from the RC1 and RC2 changelogs.
These bug fixes strengthen the LibreOffice 7.3 office suite to provide users with better stability and reliability, as well as to offer them the highest level of compatibility with proprietary document formats from the MS Office office suite.
For 30+ years, software developers have been taught a mantra that over time has turned into more or less the declaration of faith required to believe in to be able to land a job as a software developer, and this mantra is as follows.
"Object Oriented Programming is a good thing"
When in fact 30+ years of history has taught us the exact opposite. For instance ...
The project PyScript, which allows you to integrate Python handlers into web pages and create interactive web applications in Python. Applications are given access to the DOM and an interface for bidirectional interaction with JavaScript objects. The web application development logic is preserved, and the differences come down to the possibility of using the Python language instead of JavaScrpt. The PyScript sources are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.
Unlike the Brython project , which compiles Python code to JavaScript, PyScript uses Pyodide , a browser-side port of CPython compiled to WebAssembly, to execute Python code. Using Pyodide allows you to achieve full compatibility with Python 3 and use all the features of the language and library, including for scientific computing, such as numpy, pandas and scikit-learn. From the PyScript side, a layer is provided for integrating Python code with JavaScript, inserting code into web pages, importing modules, organizing I / O, and solving other related tasks. The project provides a set of widgets (buttons, text blocks, etc.) for creating a web interface in Python.
On June 4, 2017, nearly 200 people descended on a quiet block in Albuquerque, N.M. While the Jir Project, a band from Cochiti Pueblo, played in the shade, visitors from across the state poured into Red Planet Books and Comics, which claims to be the only Native comic book store in the world. Outside, artists exhibited their work and signed books, and inside, comic fans browsed the graphic novels, children’s books, and nonfiction works—mostly by Indigenous creators. The store’s founder, Lee Francis IV, a member of the Laguna Pueblo, hadn’t expected such a turnout and said that he sold nearly all the books shop had. The warm, festival-like atmosphere and scores of fans had welcomed the bookstore to the community.
We’ve all seen 3D printed zoetropes, and drawn flip book animations in the corner of notebooks.€ The shifting, fluid shape of the layers forming on a 3D printer is satisfying. And we all know the joy of hidden, nested objects.
For about a year, international news headlines were dominated by mentions of Hong Kong and the massive protests that unfolded all across the city against a now-shelved extradition bill and for universal suffrage. Then the pandemic hit, and the Hong Kong government introduced a new set of national security laws that criminalized most forms of dissent, and the city all but disappeared from public consciousness. Karen Cheung, who is a veteran Hong Kong-based journalist, found herself not reporting on the movement, as such, but writing moving personal op-eds and essays for major international papers about what it was like to come out, consistently, day after day, to scream at a government you did not vote for, against policies you never wanted.
It is October , 1887, Chicago. Through the courthouse windows August Spies, defendant, watches The great leaves slicing down, down, through the still air And ponders hanging. He is used to making speeches: knows how to drag words over the friction of truth Until it sparks, sweeps him away with a flame of fury, And sets the crowd on fire. Is this now different? Death sits in the Courtroom. He can hear a branch striking the courthouse bricks Or perhaps it was a stone. He shivers.
Then, after swiftly scanning his notes,_ His Arbeiter-Zeitung articles: Strikes, police attacks on carpenters, Railroad workers, streetcar walkouts, Steel workers, the deaths –Dynamite! He spots brave black Lucy, wife Of co-defendant Albert Parsons Sitting on a back bench, and her words ring in his ears: “It is the only voice which tyranny has ever understood!” He rises to his feet.
Simek is the lead author of a research paper on the carvings published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity. It describes five of the largest figures found on the cave ceiling by a photographic study that originally aimed to record the cave’s carvings in case they became damaged or invisible.
Four of the figures seem to be people wearing regalia, while the fifth is a coiled snake, possibly a diamondback rattlesnake.
The Tibet Autonomous Region in southwest China has unveiled new archaeological discoveries, offering some insights into the prehistoric civilization on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, also known as "the roof of the world."
The 46 findings were released during an event held in the capital city of Lhasa in early April. Dingqiong cave, located at an altitude of 5,000 meters in Zhongba County, Shigatse City, is considered one of the most significant discoveries from the Neolithic Age.
We have outlined a hypothesis that planetary civilizations, virtually connected by their dataomes, may grow along trajectories toward asymptotic burnout. As burnout approaches, civilizations may attain the cognitive horizon to understand their trajectory and affect a reprioritization towards homeostasis. Either outcome—homeostatic awakening or civilization collapse—would be consistent with the observed absence of Type III civilizations.
Correlation does not imply causation. A phrase that seemingly refutes most casual-non-causal statistical observations. The divorce rate in Maine had a 99.26% correlation with the per capita consumption of margarine from 2000-2009. Surely eating margarine doesn't cause divorces.
But is there a more specific reasoning other than correlation does not imply causation? Here are a few reasons why we might observe two correlated data that are not causal.
So, I entered graduate school with progressive political views, but a naïvely optimistic understanding of how academia functions. At the same time, my enthusiasm was tempered by the speeches and writings of several prominent scholars who argued that academia’s leftwing political bias was starting to menace its own self-conceived mission. My prior experiences in the humanities had taught me that political bias could be a problem. When applying for graduate school, mentors even warned me that my keen interest in evolutionary psychology was potentially self-destructive. However, I remained galvanized by the potential of the university as an institute of knowledge, discovery, and learning. The dire warnings I was reading simply did not match my experience as an undergraduate in psychology. It would take only two years of graduate school for me to realize that the alarmists were right.
Just as a man may not recognize that he is in a prison until he tries to break free, a scholar may not understand the taboos that confine him until he transgresses them. I saw the prison, but I did not really feel it until I tried to escape. Academia is much more pleasant than a literal prison, of course, and anybody in a position to complain about the encroachment of political biases on scholarship has lived a charmed life. Nevertheless, academia has become an intellectual prison, and many of the incarcerated professors were therefore compelled to live a dual existence. In public, they either endorsed the prevailing dogmas about race and sex or they kept their thoughts to themselves. In private, they could be more candid, and would sometimes even complain about the more extreme beliefs of their colleagues and pundits who would write about science in the prestige media.
A new navigation system enables a swarm of 10 lightweight drones to fly together without crashing into one another or obstacles, even in challenging places such as forests.
Drones can compute their location and find a path to follow using a panoply of sensors, which can be expensive and unwieldy. Shrinking down a drone often involves getting rid of key components, impacting its ability to travel safely.
Xin Zhou at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues have developed a new method that reduces the size and hardware requirements of a drone while keeping its computing nous.
Once upon a time, even a simple cut or scrape could be a death sentence. Before germ theory and today’s scientific understanding of medicine, infections ran rampant and took many lives.
The Commodore 64 remains one of the most influential of the 8-bit home computers four decades after its launch, so not surprisingly there is a huge enthusiast community surrounding it. With so many produced over the years it was available one might think that there would be no shortage of surviving specimens, but sadly time and component failure have taken their toll and the classic micro is not always the most reliable kid on the block. Thus a cottage industry has sprung up supplying C64 parts, leading [The Retro Shack] to have a go at making a new one entirely from scratch.
Research revealed Wednesday that many tested children's products, including those labeled "green" or "nontoxic," contain "forever chemicals."
"Children's bodies are still developing and are especially sensitive to chemical exposures."
The number of people suffering from extreme hunger reached an all-time high in 2021 and is on track to increase further this year—unless wealthy countries ramp up efforts to "tackle the root causes of food crises rather than just responding after they occur."
"This is not a matter of charity, but rather a question of justice."
We've heard this line before—our medical system, as it currently stands, is very unreliable and expensive for the average person. You pay thousands to for-profit insurance companies, and you still have to pay hundreds out-of-pocket for medications and services not covered by our plans.
"Devastating." "Tragic." "Unthinkable."
Those were some of the reactions Wednesday after NBC News reported that the number of deaths from Covid-19 in the United States has surpassed a million, less than a quarter of the way through the third year of the pandemic.
The firm said almost all of the loss was a result of the fall in the value of investments in businesses including two Asian ride-hailing giants - China's Didi and South East Asia's Grab.
Twitter’s biggest news was a new partnership with Fox Sports, which will produce and distribute exclusive content on the platform for all matches in the upcoming FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 (Nov. 21-Dec. 18) and FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand 2023 (July 20-Aug. 20, 2023) tournaments. The company also announced new and expanded deals with E! News, the WNBA, Condé Nast, Essence and Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt for the expanded lineup of newly announced programming (all available for marketers to buy against).
In Australia and New Zealand, 52% of organisations have experienced one to four security breaches in the last 12 months and 18% have experienced five or more breaches in that time, according to the 2022 cyber skills gap report from security firm Fortinet.
Asked for his take on the second attack, seasoned ransomware threat researcher Brett Callow, who works for the security firm Emsisoft, said: "Transport for NSW was previously breached as a result of using a vulnerable file transfer appliance, and the data stolen in that incident is still available online.
Contributing to any open-source project is a great way to spend a few hours each month. I started more than 10 years ago, and it has ultimately shaped my career in ways I couldn’t have imagined!
We have a whole series of posts going back several years about Intuit, maker of TurboTax software, and its bullshit and misleading practices for fooling the public into thinking they can file taxes for free under the government’s free-to-file program only to deceptively convince them to pay for services instead. The highlights are that the company has people go through the full tax prepwork after luring them in with promises of free services only to claim they don’t qualify for free filing, and that the company does everything it can to actually hide the options for free filing, and then siphons fees from low-income taxpayers and military veterans. Just great people all around.
Millions of Americans will receive money from Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, as part of a $141 million settlement between the Silicon Valley company and all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The company will send up to $90 apiece to more than 4 million people who paid for TurboTax software even though they were eligible to receive it for free.
Intuit will cough up $141 million in settlement costs and has promised to not make any misleading claims about its supposedly free tax-filing software, prosecutors in the US announced on Wednesday.
Attorneys General Letitia James in New York and Herbert Slatery III 1in Tennessee led efforts to sue Intuit for allegedly scamming taxpayers with false advertising. All 50 US states plus the District of Columbia joined the lawsuit, and accused the tech giant of luring people into using its TurboTax software on the false pretense it would be free.
Microsoft has open -sourced 3D Movie Maker, a program that allows kids to create movies by placing 3D characters and props in pre-configured environments, as well as adding sound effects, music, and dialogue. The code is written in C++ and published under the MIT license. The program was developed in 1995, but remains in demand by enthusiasts who continue to publish films in 3mm format, as well as develop mods and expansions with the implementation of new scenes, characters and props.
Infosec outfit Cybereason says it's discovered a multi-year – and very successful – Chinese effort to steal intellectual property.
The company has named the campaign "Operation CuckooBees" and attributed it, with a high degree of confidence, to a Beijing-backed advanced persistent threat-slinger going by Winnti – aka APT 41, BARIUM, and Blackfly.
Whatever the group is called, it uses several strains of malware and is happy to construct complex chains of activity. In the attack Cybereason claims to have spotted, Winnti starts by finding what Cybereason has described as "a popular ERP solution" that had "multiple vulnerabilities, some known and some that were unknown at the time of the exploitation."
Once ERP was compromised, Winnti sought out a file named gthread-3.6.dll, which can be found in the VMware Tools folder. The DLL was used to inject other payloads into svchost.exe, with installation of a webshell and credential dumping tools high on the crims' to-do list.
Cisco has introduced a major new release of the free antivirus package ClamAV 0.105.0 and has also published patch releases of ClamAV 0.104.3 and 0.103.6 with vulnerabilities and bug fixes. Recall that the project passed into the hands of Cisco in 2013 after the purchase of Sourcefire, which develops ClamAV and Snort. The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 license.
Those targeted by anti-abortion laws can, if they choose, take steps to better protect their privacy and security. Though there is no one-size-fits-all digital security solution, some likely risks are clear. One set of concerns involves law enforcement and state actors, who may have expensive and sophisticated surveillance technology at their disposal, as well as warrants and subpoenas. Because of this, using non-technical approaches in combination with technical ones may be more effective at protecting yourself. Private actors in states with "bounty laws" may also try to enlist a court's subpoena power (to seek information associated with your ISP address, for example, or other data that might be collected by the services you use). But it may still be easier to protect yourself from this “private surveillance” using technical approaches. This guide will cover some of each.€
Developing risk awareness and a routine of keeping your data private and secure takes practice. Whether the concern is over digital surveillance, like tracking what websites you’ve visited, or attempts to obtain personal communications using the courts, it’s good to begin by thinking at a high level about ways you can improve your overall security and keep your online activities private. Then, as you come to understand the potential scope of risks you may face, you can narrow in on the tools and techniques that are the best fit for your concerns. Here are some high-level tips to help you get started. We recommend pairing them with some specific guides we’ve highlighted here. To be clear, it is virtually impossible to devise a perfect security strategy—but good practices can help.
The Maritime Safety Agency EMSA has signed a four-year contract for new drone flights. But operational locations are still unclear because required flight permits and approvals are causing problems.
The company selling the data is SafeGraph. SafeGraph ultimately obtains location data from ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones. Often app developers install code, called software development kits (SDKs), into their apps that sends users’ location data to companies in exchange for the developer receiving payment. Sometimes app users don’t know that their phone—be that via a prayer app, or a weather app—is collecting and sending location data to third parties, let alone some of the more dangerous use cases that Motherboard has reported on, including transferring data to U.S. military contractors. Planned Parenthood is not the organization performing the data collection nor benefiting from it financially.
SafeGraph then repackages that location data and other data into various products. On Tuesday Motherboard reported that the CDC bought $420,000 worth of SafeGraph data for a laundry list of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 use cases. Google banned SafeGraph from the Google Play Store in June.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has directed Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers, crypto exchanges, and other service providers to maintain customer records for at least five years.
The body, which operates under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, added that service providers will have to hand over user information within a specified timeline, if it orders them to do so.
The new directions will be applicable from late June, it said.
The new order comes from the country's Computer Emergency Response Team, otherwise called CERT-in. According to CNET, this policy is likely to make using VPNs more difficult there. But it's not just VPN companies covered by this new directive: it also includes data centers and cloud service providers.
As for the type of user data that these companies are ordered to store for at least half a decade, it includes customer names, validated IP and home addresses, personal usage patterns, and all other information that could be used to identify people. Anybody who doesn't comply with the law will serve up to a year of prison time.
The body, under the country's Ministry of Electronics and IT, announced Thursday that VPNs in the country will have to keep customer names, validated physical and IP addresses, usage patterns and other forms of personally identifiable information. As first reported by Entrackr, those who don't comply could potentially face up to a year in prison under the governing law cited in the new directive.
The directive isn't limited to VPN providers. Data centers and cloud service providers are both listed under the same provision. The companies will have to keep customer information even after the customer has canceled their subscription or account. And, in all case, CERT-in will require the companies to report on their users' "unauthorized access to social media accounts."
Many of these colonies, while professing to be “anti-colonial” or even “post-colonial” have retained the death penalty after independence from the UK. To quote the Death Penalty Project:
Singapore is one such former British colony retaining the death penalty. Last week it executed man– Nagaenthran K Dharmalingam, a Malaysian national with learning difficulties– for attempting to smuggle 3 tablespoons of heroin in 2009, when he was aged 21. Nagaenthran was sentenced to death the following year, and spent more than a decade on death row before his execution.
The European Commission announced Wednesday a proposed phaseout of all Russian oil imports over a six-month period as part of a fresh package of sanctions to make President Vladimir Putin "pay a high price for his brutal aggression" in Ukraine.
The announcement came as climate campaigners continue to urge the U.S. and E.U. to respond to the invasion with policies and investments that boost renewable energy—a strategy that would address both the planetary crisis of global heating and Europe's heavy reliance on Russian fuels.
For two months, the response of the sports world to basketball star Brittney Griner’s disappearance and then jailing in a Russian prison for allegedly possessing hashish oil has been near silence. For two months, we heard that the State Department was going to handle it. For two months, we heard that we were going to let the Russian justice system run its course, despite the shredded political amicability between the Putin regime and the United States. For two months, we heard from the WNBA that it was respecting the wishes of Griner’s family and staying quiet. For two months, we’ve seen most of the sports world, which would have been holding daily candlelight vigils if Tom Brady were facing years in a Russian labor camp, seem blasé about the whole affair. For two months, people have been begging the league to stop telling its players not to comment, that we needed to raise up Griner’s name and not stick our heads in the sand. For two months, the argument has been that without pressure, the US government would have Griner’s freedom low on its priority list. Now, with Griner’s trial on May 19 looming, at long last there’s been a change in strategy. There is finally a modicum of hope.
Just knowing that so many simple, common people are suffering so terribly is appalling. I was lucky in life, just months too young to get caught up in World War Two, then drafted in 1951 but sent not to Korea but, by pure luck,€ € to war-damaged yet peaceful Germany, then living for 38 years in East Germany, which never sent troops into combat anywhere. Yet I have always hated war emotionally, even when I felt sadly that taking up and using arms was sometimes necessary against severe oppression, in the US Civil War, in Spain 1936-1939, against Hitler, against invaders in Vietnam.
But now, like so many others, I am sickened at what I see on my TV screen from Kharkiv, Mariupol – and from earlier attacks along the borders of the regions, or republics, of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Vladimir Putin may announce Russia’s full military mobilization at this year’s Victory Day parade in Moscow on May 9, according to multiple state officials and media analysts in Europe and the United States. Only mobilization, in their view, would permit the Russian army to replenish its reserves and break the current stalemate in Ukraine. On May 4, however, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called this speculation “untrue” and “nonsense.” Meduza has assembled a timeline of statements made about mobilization in Russia, noting who said what and when they said it.
According to media reports, both Finland and Sweden are set to join NATO as early as this summer. If these two countries become part of the alliance, the total length of the borders Russia shares with NATO member states will double. To find out what Finland and Sweden’s NATO accession could mean for the alliance and for the Kremlin, Meduza turned to Kirill Shamiev, a political scientist specializing in civil-military relations.€
The office of the Permanent Representative of the Ukrainian President in Crimea has been around since 1992. Before 2014, the agency’s main job was to make sure the Crimean authorities were adhering to the Ukrainian Constitution. Now, of course, its role has changed; its current main purpose is to maintain contact between Ukraine and residents of Crimea, providing services such as document assistance and consulting. Meduza spoke with the current Representative, Tamila Tasheva, about the agency’s work, Crimea's history and future, and whether the sanctions that followed the Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea have been effective.
On the evening of April 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Russia’s assault on the Donbas had begun. Several days later, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that Russia plans to “establish complete control over the Donbas.” Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova traveled to Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, and other parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions to get a better understanding of how the war’s pivotal battle is playing out — and how it looks through the eyes of Donbas residents.
On the evening of May 3, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine Osnat Lubrani announced that evacuees from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol had successfully made it to Zaporizhzhia. The operation to rescue the civilians, who spent weeks hiding in the plant without basic necessities, was a high priority for Ukraine’s leadership; on May 1, Ukrainian officials referred to it as a great success that they had achieved in cooperation with the UN and the International Red Cross. Organizing the evacuation entailed UN Secretary General António Guterres speaking with the Presidents of both Ukraine and Russia; eventually, according to the Ukrainian side, Russia agreed to a ceasefire.
In late March, the commander of Russia’s Central Military District, Colonel General Alexander Lapin, awarded his son Denis, the commander of the 1st Guards Tank Regiment, with a medal for courage and valor during the war in Ukraine. Journalists at BBC Russia described the ceremony in an investigative report published on May 4.
The EU police agency gets a new legal basis after six years. The expansion of its powers is hardly matched by new possibilities for supervision. A parliamentary control group even proves to be a driver for the expansion of an already powerful agency.
A North Carolina man pleaded guilty on Wednesday to conspiring with other members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group to forcefully halt the peaceful transfer of power after President Joe Biden's 2020 electoral victory.
The conflict over access to land and water has further worsened the sectarian division between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with its 206 million people deeply divided along religious lines.
Those armed groups are now working with the jihadi extremists who have been waging a 10-year insurgency in the country's northeast, according to the Nigerian military.
The Fulani herdsmen, also known as the Fulani militia, are often radical Muslims who target Christians in their relentless attacks on villages across the West African country.
They were early adopters of Islam, participating in holy wars, or jihads, in the 16th century that established them as a dominant social and economic force in Western Africa, according to WorldWatch Monitor.
As CBN News has reported for the last several years, Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian.
Before Eid 2022, two communities indulged in stone-pelting late on Monday night in Rajasthan's Jodhpur, near the Jalori gate. According to a report in Zee News, a dispute arose between two groups over the issue of hoisting the Islamic flag on the statue of a freedom fighter, which escalated to stone-pelting. Many people have been injured in the process.
Areas within the jurisdiction of 10 police stations in the desert city spent the day of the festival under a curfew and a mobile [Internet] ban as the Ashok Gehlot government scurried to douse the flames in Rajasthan’s latest communal flashpoint. By evening, the police had arrested 97 suspects for the violence that had started around midnight on Monday. “Adequate forces have been deployed in the main areas as well as the narrow lanes of the violence-affected zones of Jodhpur," said minister of state for home Rajendra Singh Yadav, part of a four-member team deputed by CM Gehlot to oversee the administration's effort to restore normalcy.
According to Indian publication Scroll.in, the fresh round of clashes first erupted on Monday night as "members of the Hindu and Muslim communities threw stones at each other over hoisting of a religious flag in the Jalori Gate area".
On Monday, a dispute started over replacing one community's religious flag at Balmukand Bissa at the Jalori Gate intersection circle with that of another. People from the other community objected to this move, which resulted in clashes.
The African Union says a number of Burundian peacekeepers were killed in Tuesday's attack by Islamic extremist rebels who targeted a remote military base in Somalia.
The African Union condemned the attack and paid "tribute to the Burundian peacekeepers who lost their lives helping to bring peace and stability to Somalia," in a statement issued Wednesday.
"Once I saw the evidence and reviewed the case, it was pretty clear that a mistake had occurred, and I was pretty flabbergasted that he submitted that many appeals and they didn't see the same thing… when you hear that it's just mistaken identity due to a name. How can somebody be wrongfully convicted just based on having the same name?" Figgers told ABC News.
That process requires sifting through tens of thousands of public comments and amassing enough scientific evidence to justify the regulation. The Obama EPA showed what happens when an administration gets around to finalizing these rules too late in a term; the climate rules finalized in his last two years were reversed by Trump and the courts because they were either still in draft form or not yet implemented.
All this becomes much easier if Biden gets a second term, but given his polling numbers, there’s no guarantees. Addressing climate change can’t wait out another decade of policy reversals by presidents from opposing parties. So Biden’s got to get as much done as permanently as he can while Democrats still hold power.
That’s why, 15 months into the Biden administration, the EPA is at an extremely important turning point — especially if Biden is serious about his goal of halving US pollution from peak levels in the next eight years. The agency needs to finalize as much as possible by the end of 2022, and needs to do so carefully, allowing it to mount the strongest defense possible in conservative-tilting courts.
To make matter worse, only the tiniest portions have been dedicated to anything linked to solving climate displacement. The world’s governments continue to spend minuscule proportions of their national budgets on climate displacement if anything at all. When they do allocate funds all too often the most costly of all possible plans are selected, much to the joy of the well-connected contractors who will haul in most of that. The world’s climate-displaced persons are already suffering and this is only going to get worse, much worse.
Though many rightly look to the UN for climate displacement salvation, this has not and will not come. The vital role of the UN’s IPCC and many other engagements in the climate change field are indispensable to our understanding and then tackling climate change, but in practical terms, the UN has lagged far behind on concrete initiatives addressing climate displacement and thus far done virtually nothing concrete to assist climate displaced persons. The total number of UNHCR staff, for instance, dedicated to this issue can probably be counted on one hand, with few of those with any field experience working with climate-displaced communities. With some notable exceptions, private donors have equally failed thus far to put their money into projects designed to assist what is by far the largest group of displaced people across the world. Most international organizations ostensibly working on climate displacement issues have done little to nothing of real consequence to support actual climate displaced people, and tend to take highly academic approaches to these real-world issues, holding meeting after meeting and issuing report after report with little actual impact on the people forced by climate to leave their homes forever.
This is absolutely the right time for a new Energy Strategy. Unfortunately, we’ve got absolutely the wrong politicians in charge of it. In the UK, the combination of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak all but guarantees that the new Energy Security Strategy will fail on most counts.
Careless Johnson and callous Sunak is a devastating double-act – with the inconsequential figure of Kwasi Kwarteng (UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy)€ lurking around to pick up the pieces.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed an executive order Wednesday that aims to set up a regulatory framework for the cryptocurrency industry.
The statement says California is the first state “to begin creating a comprehensive and harmonized framework for responsible web3 technology to thrive.”
The birds can live for 60 years and fly vast distances in search of carrion, so their range could extend into several states.
Federal and local fish and wildlife agencies are involved in the restoration project headed by the Yurok tribe, which traditionally has considered the California condor a sacred animal and has been working for years to return the species to the tribe's ancestral territory.
Having chaired the Governor’s Drought Task Force back in the 80s and early 90s, it’s grim business to hear the damage reports come in. River and reservoir levels dropping, wells going dry, crops desiccated, wildlife driven onto the last remaining green fields, and destruction of dewatered aquatic ecosystems.
Extreme drought’s effects are widespread, as are the economic and environmental damages. When there’s minimal snowpack and little precipitation the entire cycle of use and recharge is disrupted. The “use” goes on— irrigators continue to dewater rivers, even going so far as to bulldoze stream beds into their own diversion dams to funnel what’s left of our world-famous trout streams into inefficient, unlined ditches. The fish, of course, follow the water; they have no choice. And when the rivers are finally so low there’s no more water for diversion, those fish die in the ditches.
The problem with our so-called "free market" is that it's not free for you and me. It's largely controlled by monopolies, which are free to inflate prices just because they can, without worrying that consumers will be able to flee to cheaper sellers. In turn, this market punch lets the noncompetitive gougers gleefully extract unwarranted monopoly profits. It's a phenomenon that corporatists euphemistically label "pricing power."
J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist who garnered national acclaim with his book Hillbilly Elegy, won the Republican U.S. Senate primary in Ohio on Tuesday, riding an endorsement from former President Donald Trump and a large infusion of campaign cash from billionaire Peter Thiel.
Having decisively beaten Republican rival Josh Mandel, a fervent Trump loyalist who vied unsuccessfully for the former president's backing, Vance will face off against Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) in November, a key race in the fight for control of the closely divided Senate.
Beasley implores billionaires to dig deep into their pockets (which are very deep indeed) to help reduce world hunger.€ Beasley called out Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk by name during his interview with Becky Anderson of CNN’s Connect the World on October 26, 2022.€ Beasley said he was making a “one-time” appeal for $6 billion which would save the lives of 42 million people in 43 nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America who otherwise would starve to death.€ Beasley said that six billion dollars is what Musk made in a single day from appreciation of his Tesla stock.[1]€ Six billion dollars is a huge sum, but only 2% of Musk’s $300 billion fortune.
Beasley heard from Musk a few days later.€ On October 31, 2021, Musk tweeted to Beasley that “if WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
New York State’s recently passed $220 billion budget has me thinking about the broad acceptance of the idea that the wealthy are best equipped to make the decisions that are supposed to benefit the public at large. The state decided that it was a wise decision to give $650 million to the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills while turning a blind eye to the crumbling infrastructure, lack of decent housing, and struggling education system in cities like Buffalo. We have now reached the stage of capitalism where corporate-dominated governments are more willing to invest public dollars into entertainment than in the public good.
Last month I attended a “debtors assembly” in Washington, D.C., hosted by€ The Debt Collective. It was the first time I publicly acknowledged how much student debt I carry – along with millions of other people. I am not alone and I have no reason to be ashamed. Not only was it liberating, but it got me thinking: what would municipal, state, and even federal budgets look like if we elect people who have had to decide between medication and student loan payments? Furthermore, what kind of talented and compassionate people would run for office if not forced into the shadows under the stigma and shame of medical, consumer or student debt?
President Biden campaigned on a promise to help relieve student debt. Now, after over a year of punting on the issue, he says he's finally thinking about doing it.
The raid comes just four days after the body of Valentin (Val) Broeksmit, 46, was discovered at about 7 a.m. Monday at Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno, just outside of Los Angeles. Val Broeksmit was the son of William Broeksmit who was found hanged in his London home on January 26, 2014. The senior Boreksmit was a senior executive at Deutsche Bank involved in assessing risk on the bank’s balance sheet. (See€ our report: Documents Emerge in Senate Hearing from William Broeksmit, Deutsche Exec Alleged to Have Hanged Himself in January.)
According to a profile of Val Broeksmit written by David Enrich in the New York Times on October 1, 2019, the younger Broeksmit had obtained “a cache of confidential bank documents” left by his father that provided a “tantalizing” look into the internal workings of Deutsche Bank. Val Broeksmit was sharing the documents with the FBI.
Rep. Shontel Brown, an establishment incumbent whose campaign was boosted by torrents of super PAC spending, handily defeated progressive champion Nina Turner on Tuesday in the Democratic primary for Ohio's 11th Congressional District.
Outside organizations spent heavily on Brown's behalf in the U.S. House race, a rematch of a heated special election that drew national attention less than a year ago. Tuesday's contest wasn't nearly as close as last year's: Brown prevailed this time around with just over 66% of the vote.
One of the psychologists paid tens of millions of dollars by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to oversee the interrogation of prisoners in the so-called War on Terror provided new details on Monday about the torture of a Guantánamo Bay detainee at CIA "black site" in Thailand.
"Imagine the hell Mr. Nashiri experienced outside of that box that made him prefer being inside it."
“The United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee reported on Thursday (28) that former President Lula (PT) was not guaranteed a fair trial, privacy, with political rights violated in Operation Lava Jato.
The commission also considered that the ‘procedural violations’ of Lava Jato made ‘arbitrary the ban on Lula to run for president’. With this, the UN understood that there was a violation of the former president’s political rights, including the right to run for elections.”
Katie Taylor’s career is almost unbelievable. In 2001, she competed in the first officially sanctioned women’s boxing match in Ireland. In 2012, she brought a gold medal home from the Olympic Games in London. In 2016, she turned pro and by 2019 she had five world titles. Further still, she spearheaded a renaissance in women’s boxing in Ireland and the United Kingdom, ushering in a new era.
Taylor went into the fight on Saturday with a record of 20-0-0 with 6 knockouts. Serrano had a record of 42-1-1 with 30 knockouts. I predicted a draw in the lead-up to the fight and, though Taylor edged a victory on the cards, a draw would not have been an unjust outcome. In any case, the bout will likely be fight of the year. It is a fight that will go down in history as one of the greats, context aside.
The crowd was whipped into a frenzy, the Big Lie about the election was red meat—it was their main course.
Mandel described the work of the deep state, they weren’t coming after Trump and Flynn. Trump and Flynn were just caught in the middle, “the deep state is coming after all of us!”
The Trump-backed candidate J.D. Vance won the Ohio Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, while former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign co-chair Nina Turner lost the Democratic primary election for Ohio’s 11th Congressional District after massive outside spending and attacks by super PACs. We speak with Andrew Perez of The Lever about what Ohio’s elections mean for the future of the Democratic Party if it actively suppresses candidates like Turner who are critical of the establishment. Given that a majority Democratic Congress and sitting Democratic president have not delivered on campaign promises such as canceling student debt, protecting Roe v. Wade and passing Build Back Better, the party will be in jeopardy in the upcoming elections, says Perez.
Top Democratic leaders, who have failed to deliver on their promises on everything from climate action to student debt, didn’t seem prepared for Monday night’s bombshell report that the Supreme Court is preparing to revoke abortion rights nationwide. The ruling would strike down nearly half a century of judicial precedent, in the latest escalation of the GOP’s decades-long assault on reproductive rights. The next morning, New York Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, tweeted: “Democrats: We’re angry and hurt, I know. But it’s not about filibuster, size of the court or what the Senate hasn’t passed. It’s about Republicans, not us. We can save our freedoms. But, it’s November, stupid.” Despite their forceful rhetoric, not to mention their control of the House, Senate, and presidency, Democrats say it’s up to voters to vote even harder.
The beginning of May before midterm elections marks the start of primary season and six months of fall campaigning. The conventional view this year is Democrats will be clobbered in November. Why? Because midterms are usually referendums on a president's performance, and Biden's approval ratings are in the cellar.
But the conventional view doesn’t account for the Trump factor, which gives Democrats a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers.
“Twitter has become the de facto town square,” proclaims Elon Musk. “So, it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” When pressed by TED’s Chris Anderson, he hedged: “I’m not saying that I have all the answers here.” Now, after buying Twitter, his position is less clear: “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.” Does he mean either position literally?
The White House on Wednesday will announce a slate of measures to support quantum technology in the United States while laying out steps to boost cybersecurity to defend against the next generation of supercomputers.
The U.S. and other nations are in a race to develop quantum technology, which could fuel advances in artificial intelligence, materials science and chemistry. Quantum computers, a main focus of the effort, can operate millions of times faster than today's advanced supercomputers.
Unlike a classic computer, which performs calculations one at a time, a quantum computer can perform many calculations at the same time.
That rhetoric might sound like sheer fantasy, but it’s increasingly becoming the dominant worldview of many right-wing US conservatives, especially white evangelicals. It’s also the literal plot of two novels by Christian fantasy author Frank Peretti, This Present Darkness (1986) and its sequel Piercing the Darkness (1989). Although not household names to many, these are very likely two of the most culturally influential novels in recent history.
We need a new way forward that goes beyond the tired traditional campaign playbook. One of the primary lessons of how we won is through a new type of campaigning. It is on the campaign trail that we can and will build movements that shift our culture toward a more respectful, inclusive, and just path.
"For years, Esakov has publicly incited national hatred, spread Kremlin propaganda, collaborated with Kremlin propaganda channels, been one of the leaders of the immortal route, justified Russian aggression in Ukraine, participated in smuggling in eastern Ukraine," Kapo added.
A total of four Finnish media outlets were mentioned in the Telegram messages.
In addition to [YLE], the news outlets included the publications Keskisuomalainen and Etelä-Saimaa, as well as the Selkokeskus service, which provides news in easily understandable Finnish.
The top ten firms employing rafts of spin-doctors are companies, for which most of us have probably never heard of, namely: Edelman, Weber Shandwick, BCW, FleishmanHillard, Ketchum, Brunswick, MSL, BlueFocus, Real Chemistry, (and my personal favorite) Hill+Knowlton. They are ready to give the pathologies of capitalism a nice face.
These propaganda companies – euphemistically re-labeled “PR firms” – employ thousands of communication experts. These firms seek to achieve what PR’s Godfather, the aforementioned Edward Bernays, had set out for them to do when he said:
In Part I, we explained why the First Amendment doesn’t get Musk to where he seemingly wants to be: If Twitter were truly, legally the “town square” (i.e., public forum) he wants it to be, it couldn’t do certain things Musk wants (cracking down on spam, authenticating users, banning things equivalent to “shouting fire in a crowded theatre,” etc.). Twitter also couldn’t do the things it clearly needs to do to continue to attract the critical mass of users that make the site worth buying, let alone attract those—eight times as many Americans—who don’t use Twitter every day.€
Less than a week later and a greedy lawyer, Jonathan Cohen, a partner at Charles Fussell in London, has started formally harassing the volunteers. The WIPO UDRP arbitration service is the weapon in use. You can see Cohen's vendetta in the WIPO database.
Earlier this year a ruling from the ADR Forum confirmed that these attacks on volunteers are harassment and abuse of the UDRP. Rather than respecting that verdict, the lawyers have simply gone to a different UDRP arbitrator, WIPO, hoping to get another knife into the volunteers.
The Google employees in Debian are currently searching for young women in Kosovo to work for free as volunteers at DebConf22. Most of these women earn less in a month than Jonathan Cohen is being paid for one hour writing harassment and defamation of volunteers.
With a growing crackdown on creative expression that doesn’t align with Xi and the CCP’s worldview, the sci-fi industry is seeking ways to tell stories without getting censored.
The Beijing central government has backed some aspects of the sci-fi genre, mainly the thematic focus on AI and the future of technology which aligns with the CCP’s agenda to ensure China’s rejuvenation.
China is stepping up censorship of U.S. films as producers make movies with an eye toward pleasing Beijing yet without isolating the global audience, industry insiders say.
The roughly 25-year-old practice of cutting scenes that don't conform to Communist Party ideals from Hollywood movies has expanded.
Paludan, a citizen of Denmark and Sweden, says he has the right to carry out the demonstration but acknowledges that it is a risky, even life-threatening, plan. Not only must Paludan face threats to his life by Muslims living in Sweden, but police do not want to risk their own safety protecting him: [...]
Dave Chappelle was apparently unharmed after an audience member rushed the stage and physically attacked the comedian in the middle of his performance in Los Angeles Tuesday night.
The ABC appears unlikely to publicise any decision it makes about the future of news presenter Fauziah Ibrahim — who has disappeared from public view after she was outed for hosting public Twitter lists on her personal account of those she categorised as Labor Trolls and Lobotomised Shitheads — before the federal election is over.
In theory I should be grateful rather than annoyed. The incessant pop-ups are the result of regulation introduced by the European Union in 2018 to protect the privacy of citizens online. The clunkily named General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was hailed by privacy advocates as an “incredible breakthrough” for ordinary people in the face of predatory tech giants.
After learning how GDPR is used in practice, however, I am neither grateful nor annoyed: I’m terrified. Over the past four years resourceful London lawyers have sharpened the legislation into a weapon against journalists and anyone else who wants to subject their rich clients to scrutiny.
How can defenders of press freedom fight back? An easy place to start would be for liberal governments to scrap archaic laws that criminalise defamation, which are still surprisingly common. They should also curb bogus lawsuits, as the European Commission is currently contemplating. Next, independent media need to find new sources of funding. Charities can chip in, as can crowdfunding and rich proprietors who care about free speech. Public broadcasters can play a useful role, but only if they have enough safeguards to be truly independent.
In more repressive places the task is harder, but technology can help. Where reporting on the ground is too risky, satellite imagery and big data sets allow journalists to pull together stor€ies from afar. Free countries should offer them asylum, and a safe place to keep working. Where censorship is tight, citizens can use virtual private networks to access blocked content and online tools to capture webpages before they are censored.
Journalists in free countries can help those in autocracies. Cross-border collaborations have exposed scandals such as Pegasus and the Panama Papers. The Washington Post’s cloud-based publishing system allowed Apple Daily, a beleaguered pro-democracy tabloid in Hong Kong, to keep publishing for longer than it otherwise could have.
On 3 May 2022, World Press Freedom Day, journalists around the world make it their duty to pay tribute to Julian Assange. Through his struggle, determination and example, Assange hasbeen instrumental to advancing knowledge and protecting the right to information around the world.
I met Kathy Boudin in the visiting room at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in the 1990s. Her lawyer, the legendary defense attorney Len Weinglass, was working on her clemency petition and wanted me to write a letter assuring the Clemency Board that if it granted her petition, I would offer employment at the organization I led (the Osborne Association, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming prisons for the people who live in them, work in them, and visit them). I said I could offer Kathy a job only if I spoke with her directly to understand the work she wanted to do. Although Kathy’s parents and mine were friends—and we had many friends in common, and our kids went to the same summer camp—I had never met her.
Starbucks' billionaire CEO Howard Schultz announced during a quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that the coffee giant will soon be raising wages and improving benefits for employees across the United States—except for the workers at dozens of stores who have voted to unionize or filed for a union election in recent months.
"We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union or where union organizing is underway," Schultz told Starbucks shareholders Tuesday, noting that management must bargain with unionized locations over wage and benefit changes.
As the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority appears poised to overturn landmark decisions protecting reproductive rights, researchers are sounding the alarm about how looming abortion bans threaten to undo decades of economic gains made by women, with especially devastating consequences for those who are low-income workers.
"Reproductive and gender justice are central to bodily autonomy and economic security."
Progressive congressional candidate Jessica Cisneros urged the House Democratic leadership on Wednesday to withdraw its support for incumbent Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar over his continued opposition to abortion rights as the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority appears set to overturn Roe v. Wade.
"I hope Democratic Party leadership won't stand in the way of delivering for South Texans."
While reproductive rights advocates across the U.S. Tuesday called on the Democratic Party to do everything in its power to codify abortion rights into federal law, President Joe Biden called on Congress to approve more military aid for Ukraine after visiting a Lockheed Martin facility to praise its supply of weaponry.
Biden headed to Troy, Alabama to visit the factory where 600 workers have the capacity to produce more than 2,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles per year, applauding the facility for helping to defend "freedom and democracy itself" in Ukraine.
Men must understand that denying access to safe abortion is a form of gender-based violence. Controlling women’s reproductive choices is state-sponsored control over a woman’s body. If we speak out against all other forms of violence against women, we should speak out against this form of violence, too.
Nevertheless, for many men who believe in gender equality, myself included, there’s been little of a consistent, sustained, male prochoice effort. We heard the maxim, “women’s bodies; women’s choices” and vigorously nodded. Then, many of us backed off from actively working to protect Roe, believing we could always reengage if circumstances became dire—if Roe was being threatened, right? Well, what the hell are we waiting for?
For the past seven years, I have been working to make abortion accessible across the country.
What role did dark money play in the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade? We speak with reporter Andrew Perez about how conservative anti-abortion groups and right-wing extremists have funneled millions of dollars into promoting politicians and Supreme Court justices to ultimately curtail reproductive rights. A dark money network led by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo has spent at least $10 million promoting each of President Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court and another $10 million blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016, says Perez, senior editor and investigative reporter at The Lever.
If the U.S. Supreme Court does as its leaked draft opinion says and strikes down Roe v. Wade, researchers expect that in the following year, roughly 75,000 people who want, but can’t get, abortions will give birth instead.
I cannot imagine what it is like to be a woman in the United States of America today. If I feel the blow of Samuel Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade in the pit of my stomach—and I do—I can only try to imagine how it must feel to have one's own body assaulted, occupied, colonized in this way.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted women an essential degree of reproductive freedom on on Jan. 22, 1973, by supporting the right to terminate a pregnancy under specific conditions.
As a sociologist who studies women, work and families, I’ve closely examined how the landmark ruling affected women’s educational and occupational opportunities over the past 45 years.
“Hard is what we do,” new Emily’s List president Laphonza Butler told the hundreds of supporters gathered at the group’s annual gala—the first in three years thanks to Covid. It was supposed to be a celebration for this organization devoted to electing pro-choice Democratic women—of surviving Covid, of Butler’s new role, and of our first female vice president, Kamala Harris, the night’s keynote speaker. But after news leaked the night before that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade€ and crush abortion rights any day now, it also became a wake.
As the leaked opinion showing the Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade sparks protests across the United States, we speak to an abortion doctor and a reproductive rights activist facing deportation about what is next. “We will keep fighting for us to have abortions that are safe, legal and accessible to everyone, no matter where you are, no matter where you’re coming from and no matter what your income,” says community organizer Alejandra Pablos, noting the decision could have particularly disastrous effects on already vulnerable undocumented immigrants and border communities in Arizona. “People should be able to access abortion care as part of the general healthcare that a pregnant person or any other person would seek,” says gynecologist Dr. DeShawn Taylor about how criminalizing abortion affects medical professionals in the field, especially her clinic Desert Star Family Planning, one of the only abortion clinics in Arizona.
When the draft opinion of the Supreme Court’s anticipated 5-4 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked Monday night, Democratic members of the US Senate, along with challengers to Republican senators, rushed to call for the codification of abortion rights. US Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) immediately announced, “If the Senate is going to legislate from the bench and turn back the clock 50 years on #RoeVWade, then the Senate needs to pass my Women’s Health Protection Act, and if we need to eliminate the filibuster to get it done, we should do that too.” Pennsylvania Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, a leading contender for the Democratic US Senate nomination in that state, declared, “Let’s be clear: The right to an abortion is sacred. Democrats have to act quickly—get rid of the filibuster to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act + finally codify Roe into law. We cannot afford to wait.”
Some EU members still control their internal borders excessively. However, exceeding the time limit of six months is incompatible with the Schengen Borders Code. Governments and the EU Commission must now react.
Cops love laws when they’re using them against people, no matter how esoteric or misunderstood (by cops) the laws are. When laws are applied to them, they’re far less concerned about being law-abiding.
A location data firm said Wednesday that it would no longer sell information about people who visit abortion clinics after reporting on the company's sales raised alarm, but privacy advocates warned that strict regulation is needed to protect patients from such sales—particularly in light of news that abortion rights are likely to be rolled back by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Vice reported Tuesday that data firm SafeGraph has sold sets of aggregated location data regarding people who have visited abortion clinics including Planned Parenthood, showing where patients travel from, how much time they spend at the healthcare centers, and where they go afterwards.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal said Wednesday that the leaked draft opinion suggesting the Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade must be met with nationwide mobilizations as well legislative action to protect reproductive rights.
Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, offered that strategy in an interview with MSNBC in which she called the Justice Samuel Alito-authored draft "terrifying."
At this very moment, protestors are gathering in cities across the country to decry the Supreme Court's looming decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that established a€ person's constitutional right to have an€ abortion.€
A brief video released as the right-wing U.S Supreme Court plans to overturn Roe v. Wade and GOP lawmakers plot a nationwide six-week abortion ban has been viewed over half a million times on Twitter since Monday, when Justice Samuel Alito's draft majority opinion leaked.
MeidasTouch, a self-described "pro-democracy, next-generation super PAC," is responsible for the one-minute video, which takes inspiration from The Handmaid's Tale—a famous novel by Margaret Atwood that's been turned into an award-winning television series.
Following this week's bombshell leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion signifying the likely reversal of Roe v. Wade, abortion providers said they are fearful yet resolute as they prepare to navigate an uncertain looming legal landscape where simply doing their job could carry profound risks.
"We're past a red alert moment. The house is burning right now. I feel exhausted and fucking angry."
With the leaked Supreme Court ruling indicating the court is poised to effectively overturn Roe V. Wade, you can expect a new wave of worry about the weaponization and abuse of consumer location data, as states increasingly seek to criminalize abortion — and those aiding others seeking such services.
Central Tibetan Administration president Penpa Tsering, on Friday said that India has changed its stance over Tibet since 2014 by not repeating that Tibet is a part of China. Talking to reporters in Washington, Tsering said that contrary to the belief of many people, that Jawaharlal Nehru made a blunder by recognizing China's sovereignty over Tibet, India's first Prime Minister did what was best for his country. "I don't blame only Pandit Nehru for doing that. We understand that the national interest comes first for every nation and he did what he thought was best for India at that time," Tsering said, news agency PTI quoted.
“With the benefit of hindsight, now many think that Pandit Nehru made a blunder. In fact, he trusted China so much that when China invaded India in 1962, some believe that he was so hurt that it’s one of the reasons for his death,” he said.
However, Penpa Tsering told reporters that things changed in India since 2014.
Fletcher is the oldest living survivor of the destruction that ensued when white mobs attacked the prominent Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Incensed crowds flooded the streets of what is often referred to as Black Wall Street, killing the prosperous neighborhood’s Black residents and demolishing their homes over two days.
Fletcher said she and her family never returned to Tulsa after they fled the night of May 31, 1921. Her home had been ravaged by fire, leaving her and hundreds of others without any of their possessions and livelihoods.
Taliban officials in Afghanistan's most progressive city have told driving instructors to stop issuing licences to women, professionals from the sector told AFP.
While Afghanistan is a deeply conservative, patriarchal country, it is not uncommon for women to drive in larger cities -- particularly Herat in the northwest, which has long been considered liberal by Afghan standards.
Freight worker's union Nakliyat-Ã°à Ÿ has announced that Turkish private airline company Pegasus had fired one of its employees after they drank rakñ with other company employees on “Kadir Gecesi” (a night considered holy by Muslims) and shared a photo of the dinner on social media.
Almost exactly a decade ago, a few months after the US Congress rejected the site blocking setup of the SOPA copyright bill, which would enable copyright holders to force ISPs to block access entirely to websites deemed as being dedicated to “piracy,” we wrote a post about how it wasn’t even clear SOPA was needed when courts were willing to issue such blocking orders already. That was in a case around counterfeiting, where Louis Vuitton sought, and obtained, an order from a judge that demanded that domain registrars and ICANN effectively wipe certain website domains off the internet entirely.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in California federal court, investors sued the streamer for being overly optimistic about its business prospects by misleading them about losing subscribers. “As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” reads the complaint.
Since Windows 11 has announced its TPM module requirement, the prices for previously abundant and underappreciated TPM add-on boards for PC motherboards have skyrocketed. We’ve been getting chips and soldering them onto boards of our own design, instead – and€ [viktor]’s project is one more example of that. [Viktor] has checked online marketplace listings for a TPM module for his Gigabyte AORUS GAMING 3 motherboard, and found out they started at around 150EUR – which is almost as much as the motherboard itself costs. So, as any self-respecting hacker, he went the DIY way, and it went with hardly a hitch.
To mark the anniversary of the Biden administration's support for an Indian and South African proposal to temporarily waive patent protections on lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, activists on Wednesday geared up for a candlelit vigil outside the White House to urge President Joe Biden to do more to deliver the waiver and press Congress to increase funding for global inoculation efforts.
Following sustained international activist pressure, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced the Biden administration's support for a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last May 5.
The RIAA and anti-piracy partner Rightscorp have successfully countered allegations that they sent 'false and fraudulent' piracy notices. A New Jersey federal court dismissed the renewed counterclaims of Internet provider RCN, which failed to show that it was financially hurt by any incorrect or incomplete DMCA notices.
A popular anime piracy site has thrown in the towel after issues with its funding mechanism could not be resolved. AnimeKisa had been receiving up to 20 million visits per month but its users preferred not to view lots of ads. The site switched to a donation model but when users failed to donate, the site was forced to switch itself off.
The aim of the open call was to help generate a more global, inclusive, and equitable picture and understanding of open GLAM, highlighting the needs and expectations of a variety of communities and institutions from diverse regions and backgrounds. Eight successful case studies were selected, and in this blog post, we are pleased to share key highlights from each of them.
Under Article 17 of the EU’s controversial Copyright Directive, large tech companies must ensure that infringing content is not available on their platforms or they could be held liable for it. Given that legal risk, platforms will inevitably rely on error-prone upload filters that undermine lawful online speech – as Poland pointed out in the legal challenge that led to the judgment.
The Court acknowledged that Article 17’s obligation to review content constitutes a de facto requirement to use automatic recognition and filtering tools, and held that such mechanisms would indeed constitute an interference with users’ freedom of expression rights. However, as with last year’s opinion of the Court of Justice’s Advocate General, the judges concluded that the safeguards provided by Article 17 were adequate. Because those safeguards include an obligation to ensure the availability of lawful uploads, an automated system that cannot “distinguish adequately between unlawful content and lawful content” won’t pass muster under EU law.
The Court also highlighted the responsibility of rightsholders to provide platforms with “undoubtedly relevant and necessary information” of an unlawful use of copyrighted material. Platform providers cannot be forced to “generally monitor” user content to check the legality of content; that also means that they cannot be required to conduct an “independent assessment” of the content. If a platform ends up removing lawful content, users can invoke the Directive’s “complaint and redress” mechanisms.
