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Links 29/05/2022: PulseAudio 16.0 and Fresh Complaints About COVID-19 Patents



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Applications

      • PulseAudio 16.0 release notes

        The audio sent with module-rtp-send can now be compressed with the Opus codec. To use it, pass enable_opus=true as a module argument to module-rtp-send. This feature works only when PulseAudio is compiled with GStreamer enabled (both sending and receiving end).

      • 9to5Linux ☛ PulseAudio 16 Released with Bluetooth Improvements, Opus Support in RTP Modules

        GNU/Linux distro users still using PulseAudio would be happy to learn that PulseAudio 16 is here with battery level reporting for Bluetooth devices to other software, stereo output support for the EPOS/Sennheiser GSP 670 wireless gaming headset and SteelSeries GameDAC Hi-Res sound card DAC (Digital Audio Converter), as well as profiles for the Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 MKII premium 6-channel audio interface.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • LinuxOpSys ☛ How to Set Up a Firewall with UFW on Ubuntu 22.04
      • How to Install RHEL 9 Step by Step with Screenshots

        Red Hat has released its latest and stable operating system RHEL 9 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). RHEL 9 meets the requirements of hybrid cloud environment as it can be installed on a physical server, virtual machine and in a container built from Red Hat Universal images (UBIs).

        In this guide, we will cover how to install RHEL 9 step by step along with screenshots. Before jumping into the installation steps, let’s look at new features and improvements in RHEL 9.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Zsh on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zsh on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Z shell (ZSH) Zsh is a UNIX command interpreter (shell) usable as an interactive login shell and as a shell script command processor. ZSH is the default shell of MacOS, also available for Linux and Windows users. Just like the Linux-native Bash shell, Zsh is also a scripting language that allows you to write your own scripts and automate tasks.

        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 Zsh powerful Unix command interpreter on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • FOSSLinux ☛ How to add sudoers in Debian | FOSS Linux

        Sudo stands for superuser do. It is a command-line utility that permits trusted users to run commands as another user by default root. When prefixed with any command, the superuser temporarily gives another user rights as an alternative root. If you, for instance, want to access any system-related setting or, rather say, update a system or edit system files, you must log in as a “root” user in Linux.

        Ideally, root users have the right to perform any system task. However, sudo privileges can also be assigned to other users to act as a root. The basic philosophy is to give as few privileges as possible but still permit users to complete their work. Additionally, sudo is an effective way to log who ran which command and when.

        It is also advised to utilize this command carefully as it contains all the admin rights. As such, any misuse of the command may lead to severe damage to the system. In the latest release of Debian, version 11 (Bullseye), the sudo user’s info is stored in the sudoers file, located in the “/etc/sudoers” directory.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install Notepad++ on Fedora 34/35/36

        Notepad++ is a text and source code editor. It supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in a single window. The product’s name comes from the C increment operator.

        It provides a large number of options to work with it including syntax highlighting. Also it keeps smaller program sizes and faster execution with lower CPU uses.

      • ID Root ☛ How To Install Vivaldi Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vivaldi Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Vivaldi is a multi-platform, open-source Chromium-based web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It has a minimalistic user interface with basic icons and fonts and, an optionally color scheme that changes based on the background and design of the web page being visited.

        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 Vivaldi web browser on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

      • How to Install Kali Linux on VirtualBox

        In this tutorial you will learn how to install Kali Linux on Virtualbox on Linux. Kali Linux is a Linux distro mainly used for Security Research, Penetration testing, Computer forensics and Reverse Engineering.

      • Linuxiac ☛ How to Change the Colors of Your Bash Shell Prompt on Linux

        This article will show you how to change the colors for user, host, and directory information of the Linux terminal prompt.

        By default, many Linux installations come with simple black-and-white color prompts. However, because a Linux user spends a lot of time in the terminal emulator, it would be nice if we could visually improve our experience.

        So, in keeping with the “A picture is worth a thousand words” maxim, let us show what we mean.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How To Install WPS Office on Fedora 34/35/36

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WPS office on Fedora systems.

        WPS office is a lightweight, feature-rich comprehensive office suite with high compatibility. It also comes pre-installed on Fire tablets.

        WPS Office allows you to edit files in Writer, Presentation, Spreadsheet, and PDF to improve your work efficiency.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to create Users in Kolab - Unix / Linux the admins Tutorials

        Today you will learn How to create Users in Kolab

        Kolab is an open-source Email server I have configured in my previous tutorial. In this tutorial, we will configure further steps of creating users and the configuration of the email clients.

      • UNIX Cop ☛ How to install a free open source IT asset management server (SNIPE-IT)

        This post is about How to install a free open source IT asset management server (SNIPE-IT)

        Snipe-IT was made for IT asset management to enable IT departments to track who has which laptop, when it was purchased, and other IT assets management, which software licenses and accessories are available, etc.

      • kpcyrd: auth-tarball-from-git: Verifying tarballs with signed git tags

        I noticed there’s a common anti-pattern in some PKGBUILDs, the short scripts that are used to build Arch Linux packages. Specifically we’re looking at the part that references the source code used when building a package:

    • Games

      • Idiomdrottning ☛ Daily logging on al-Toril

        What I’m gonna add in is a cheapo A5 notebook. The notebook is a daily log (and by daily, I mean days on al-Toril in the year 1494) that’s strictly for post-hoc. Keeping track of torches & shoes, but also take note of what happens (gonna make writing session reports a li’l easier). A symbol to capture extra-diegetical (real-life) todo-items for me (a square box probably), for example “remember to make a new crafting table for potions” or whatever (sort of like a bujo), and another symbol (maybe just underline) for references to the A7 & A4 loose sheets. So that non-post-hoc, actual prep prep can live there. Things that are actual stuff, forward references, will become cards instead.

        This is also great because I can use shorthand in the daily log (I need to use longhand for prep so that the players can verify stuff, but logs aren’t prep).

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • HaikuOS ☛ [GSoC 2022] Ham: A Jam Replacement

      Haiku currently uses a fork of Perforce Jam as its build system. While Jam is a great build system, its legacy codebase makes it difficult to fix bugs or introduce new features.

      Ham is a complete Jam rewrite that was started by Ingo Weinhold, but wasn’t completed. This project starts where Ingo left off to bring Ham to where it can be used as Haiku’s official build system. The new repository can be found here.

    • BSD

      • Ted Unangst ☛ reversing an openbsd kernel syspatch

        OpenBSD has provided binary patches for a select few architectures for a while now, to save users from the daunting task of running make on their own. Alas, this means you might now apply a patch without first reviewing it. In the olden times, you had a source patch, so obviously you meticulously studied every line before application, just like you advised new users on IRC to do. But now, who will believe you do this when the binary syspatch is right there, so easy, so tempting.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Stacy on IoT ☛ The smart home is stuck in stasis (and I’m stuck in Dallas)

        It was clear back then that interoperability was going to be an issue. Making smart hardware necessitated new thinking about business models due to the cost of continued software updates and cloud computing. We were even talking about security and the lack of compelling use cases back then.

        These topics came up again and again this week, a decade later. Half a dozen panels mentioned the challenge of figuring out a business model that offsets the ongoing cost of smart devices.

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • SparkFun Electronics ☛ Single Pair Ethernet with MicroMod

        The SparkFun MicroMod Single Pair Ethernet Function Board introduces 10BASE-T1L Two-Wire Ethernet protocol into the SparkFun MicroMod ecosystem. Using the ADIN1110 Ethernet transceiver from Analog Devices Inc., this Function Board provides a development tool for long-range, 10Mb/s single-pair 10BASE-T1L Ethernet applications.

      • Jeff Geerling ☛ Watching the Earth move with a Raspberry Pi

        As someone who has spent a bit too much time nerding out over space and atmospheric weather, but never touched seismology, I decided it was time to dig deep and learn a bit more about the Earth.

      • Andrew Hutchings ☛ Amiga 1000 Restoration: Audio Repair

        The first thing to check is the audio amp and filter. The unique thing about this is that it requires a -5v to generate some of the waveform. Guess what? -5v wasn’t there, instead it was +0.75v. That would probably explain a few things.

        Tracing it back the power supply was at fault here, and that may explain the audio chirp I heard every time the system was powered on.

      • Michael Lynch ☛ Building a Budget Homelab NAS Server (2022 Edition)

        The server itself cost $531, and I bought four disks for $732, bringing the total cost to $1,263. It’s similar in price to off-the-shelf storage servers, but it offers more power and customizability.

        In this post, I’ll walk through how I chose the parts, what mistakes I made, and my recommendations for anyone interested in building their own.

      • Arduino ☛ Using The Force to open a door | Arduino Blog

        In the Star Wars Universe, the Jedi and Sith use The Force for battle and mayhem. But in the real world, people would use The Force for much more mundane everyday tasks. Obi Wan even does this in the prequel trilogy when he closes a door using the force. Star Wars fanatic Nick O’Hara leveraged an Arduino to replicate that trick.

        Despite his wishes, O’Hara lacks the midochlorians to actually wield The Force. But he has technology and that is almost as good. Automatic doors are already a thing, but they conveniently open anytime someone walks up—whether or not they possess The Force. O’Hara wanted his door to only open when he waves his hand. To accomplish that, he needed two things: some way to recognize the hand wave gesture and a method for opening the door.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Earthly ☛ Using Homebrew on M1 Mac

      If you’re coming to M1 Mac fresh, without any old projects or profiles, you probably won’t notice; Homebrew will work as it always has. But if you’re trying to migrate from an Intel Mac you won’t be able to just move packages that were once in /usr/local over to /opt/homebrew. No need to worry though, reinstalling everything on M1 is easy, it just may take a bit of time.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Prematurely labelling RSS feeds as inactive

      Please don’t let this be another hang up if you’ve considered writing but are worried about how often you could post. A well written post about a project every other year is already hugely valuable.

    • Medevel ☛ LinTO: An open-source end-to-end platform for voice-operated solutions

      LinTO a great and efficient assistant, very interesting and intelligent product with many features that have no other any product. It has much grate privacy and security features for businesses meeting and also calling to grow the business.

      [...]

      LinTO is released under the GNU Affero General Public Licence V3.

    • Events

      • OpenPGP Email Summit

        During the trip I suddenly remembered that Swiss was not part of the EU, so the roaming rules that apply to all EU countries and that allow EU citizens to use mobile internet and telephony abroad while not having to worry about astronomical bills from their provider would not count. I quickly did some research on how bad it would be.

        7cts/10KB. What. The. Fuck. I quickly disabled roaming and mobile internet. Guess I’ll be dependent on the availability of Wifi for the next days.

        [...]

        After quickly refreshing, I took the bus to the other end of Geneva to the offices of Proton (formerly Protonmail). They hosted the 6. OpenPGP Email Summit which I was going to attend. When I got to the building, I had to call the office upstairs and one member of the Proton team came down to fetch me. On Thursday we only had an informal meeting of participants that already arrived. The real discussions would take place on Friday and Saturday, although when I entered the office room people already had discussions going.

        After the meeting we went to a small bar to get some drinks and a small dinner. This being my first OpenPGP meetup (apart from the Sequoia meeting I was invited to some time ago), it was nice getting to know many of the people I already knew from the internet in person.

    • Web Browsers

      • Mozilla

        • PC World ☛ 8 reasons to ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox

          One such option is Firefox. It’s a rare browser not based on Chromium, the project that powers Chrome, unlike other rivals like Edge or Opera. It’s also backed by a team with a long, storied history in browser development and a deep interest in online privacy. As a result, using Firefox can boost your PC’s performance, better protect you on the web, and also make life more convenient, too. You’ll find it offers built-in features that don’t exist in Chrome or otherwise require third-party add-ons.

          Just like we’ve recently done with Vivaldi, the enthusiast’s browser, we’ve highlighted the top 8 reasons to quit Chrome and make the switch to Firefox. Let’s dig in.

    • Programming/Development

      • Jan Piet Mens ☛ A backup is only as good as ...

        Today, while looking at previously-logged data in preparation for consumption of future similar data, I discovered to my horror, that tinylog(8) truncates lines at what I first assumed was 1024 but actually is 1000 bytes.

      • DJ Adams ☛ Multiple level filters in jq

        Here's another note-to-self on using jq to shape JSON representations of OData to match what's returned using system query options. Thsi time it's all filtering at two levels.

        In the Back to basics: OData - the Open Data Protocol - Part 3 - System query options live stream last Friday we looked at OData's system query options.

        There was a question at the end about whether it was possible to use the $filter system query option at multiple levels, in an $expand context. I wrote up the question, and a detailed answer (summary: yes) with an example here: Can $filter be applied at multiple levels in an expand?.

      • Jamie Brandon ☛ 0024: HYTRADBOI postmortem, HYTWACFI?, preimp, emergent ventures, data and reality, merkle search trees, readyset, julia compilation times

        Now that all that HYTRADBOI craziness is over I'm focusing on preimp. The goal is to work towards the programming experience that I envisioned for imp, but hack it together in clojure to avoid getting bottlenecked forever on language design.

        So far I have a simple clojure notebook with coarse-grained incremental maintenance. There are data cells that can be mutated by other code, with the changes being persisted back into the cell. The notebook is backed by a simple crdt, so once I finish hooking it up to the server it will allow collaborative editing of code and data. Next step after that is rendering the output values as interactive widgets, and then adding bidirectional editing so that interacting with the widgets for derived views can push changes to upstream data.

      • Daniel Lemire ☛ Parsing JSON faster with Intel AVX-512

        A few years ago, we released a really fast C++ JSON parser called simdjson. It is somewhat unique as a parser in the fact that it relies critically on SIMD instructions. On several metrics, it was and still is the fastest JSON parser though other interesting competitors have emerged.

        Initially, I had written a quick and dirty AVX-512 kernel for simdjson. We never merged it and after a time, I just deleted it. I then forgot about it.

      • Python

        • Rlang ☛ Best Books on Data Science with Python

          Best Books on Data Science with Python, In the subject of data science, Python is one of the most extensively used programming languages.

          Pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, Matplotlib, and SciPy are just a few of the Python packages and libraries that are specifically suited for specific functions.

        • Hackaday ☛ AI Attempts Converting Python Code To C++

          [Alexander] created codex_py2cpp as a way of experimenting with Codex, an AI intended to translate natural language into code. [Alexander] had slightly different ideas, however, and created codex_py2cpp as a way to play with the idea of automagically converting Python into C++. It’s not really intended to create robust code conversions, but as far as experiments go, it’s pretty neat.

      • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Leftovers

    • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Email Mania

      You know what I also love? Playing with various email providers and client applications. Currently I maintain accounts with the following vendors (listed in order of preference): [...]

    • Hackaday ☛ Soap Mouse Is A Slippery Interface For Mid-Air Input

      We all have those gnarly hacks that we still think about years after we first saw them. For serial tipster [Inne], one of those is [Patrick Baudisch]’s soap mouse, which is a DIY device for mousing in mid-air that uses components from off the shelf and around the house.

    • Hackaday ☛ 3D Print Glass With A Laser Cutter

      We’re all familiar with FDM 3D printing, and some of the more well-heeled or adventurous among us may even have taken a faltering step into the world of SLA printers. But for most of us there’s a step further in 3D printing that remains beyond our reach. SLS, or Selective Laser Sintering, creates prints from powder by melting it layer by layer using a laser, and has the advantage of opening up more useful materials than the polymer stock of the other methods. It’s not entirely unreachable though, as [Kenneth Hawthorn] shows us by using a laser cutter to produce SLS prints from powdered glass.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Box: Think Outside Of It

      There’s no single recipe for creativity, as far as I know. But this week on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were talking about a number of hacks that were particularly inventive, out-of-the-box, or just simply “how did they think of that?”. One possible route to something new is learning from other disciplines.

    • Education

      • Geeks For Geeks ☛ 5 Most High-Demand Skillsets For Remote Jobs

        This pandemic has raised the ratio of remote jobs in the past few years and the ticket to success lies within it. Though getting a remote job is not as tough as it might sound, all it requires for you to have some of these certain skillsets just like if you’re good at writing then you might consider yourself in content writing and if you’ve strong analytical capability and good knowledge of social media then Digital marketing is the one for you.

    • Hardware

      • Andre Franca ☛ Is there a perfect keyboard?

        Buying a keyboard, should be like buying an office chair. You’ve got to test it, find whether you like it or not, and only then buy it. Some questions should be asked, such as: do I suffer from a problem like tendinitis, or which layout best suits my use, or which keyboard will promote better ergonomics, or how many hours a day will I spend typing?

      • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2022: Reuse Those DIP Chips To Make A 1980s-Style Single-Board Computer

        With the Great Chip Shortage still delaying deliveries of new components, now might be a good time to look around your lab and inspect those piles of chips that you thought “might come in handy one day”. Chances are you’ll find a good stack of 74xx series logic, once ubiquitous but today mostly obsolete thanks to powerful microcontrollers and FPGAs. It would be a shame to let them go to waste, so why not use them to make a neat 1980s-style computer?

      • RE: Goodbye Raspberry Pi: Some of my thoughts

        Briefly want to sidetrack and tell you something. Computers were built different back then. I never experienced the craftsmanship that went into some of these older machines until the thinkcentre. 'The dinostation' is a IBM certifed 50 pound hunk of solid stainless steel. The case is the most solid and well-built of its kind that Ive personally handled.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Atlantic ☛ Is Online Presence a Turnoff?

        Of course, heavy social-media use really can threaten a relationship. Tensions can arise if one partner shares photos or personal news without the other’s consent. Cyber-cheating can lead to heartbreak. A person aspiring to grow a following may become an inattentive partner with an objectionable dedication to clout. Someone who posts a lot might come across as desperate to be seen and heard; if they rack up followers, it might go to their head.

    • Security

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • How to Store an SSH Key on a Yubikey
        • Undeadly ☛ OpenIKED 7.1 released

          OpenIKED 7.1 was released on May 23rd, 2022.

        • Hackaday ☛ Track Down Ghosts In Your WiFi With The Pwnton Pack

          If there’s something weird in your Network Neighborhood, who you gonna call? If you want your WiFi troubles diagnosed in style, try calling [Travis Kaun] — he might just show up wearing the amazing Pwnton Pack. Built from a replica Proton Pack similar to those used in the 1984 classic Ghostbusters, it’s a portable wireless security diagnostics kit that should be able to pinpoint any weaknesses in your wireless network.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • [Old] Rohan Kumar ☛ Misinfo about Permissions Policy and FLoC

          What adding this header does is exclude your website from being used when calcualting a user’s cohort. A cohort is an identifier shared with a few thousand other users, calculated locally from browsing history; sites that send this header will be excluded from this calculation. The EFF estimates that a cohort ID can add up to 8 bits of of entropy to a user’s fingerprint.

        • Kev Quirk ☛ Is DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckDone?

          DuckDuckGo, the privacy centric search firm have been found to be allowing Microsoft trackers through their browser. It’s dishonest, and I’m really disappointed.

          Last night the news broke that DuckDuckGo have been effectively whitelisting Microsoft trackers in their browser as a result of their agreement with the tech giant. Brilliant.

        • Drew DeVault ☛ Google has been DDoSing SourceHut for over a year

          I did narrow it down: it turns out that the Go Module Mirror runs some crawlers that periodically clone Git repositories with Go modules in them to check for updates. Once we had narrowed this down, I filed a second ticket to address the problem.

          I came to understand that the design of this feature is questionable. For a start, I never really appreciated the fact that Go secretly calls home to Google to fetch modules through a proxy (you can set GOPROXY=direct to fix this). Even taking the utility at face value, however, the implementation leaves much to be desired. The service is distributed across many nodes which all crawl modules independently of one another, resulting in very redundant git traffic.

        • Techdirt ☛ San Francisco Cops Are Accessing Autonomous Vehicle Recordings To Collect Evidence

          This report, by Aaron Gordon for Motherboard, looks like a hypothetical dreamed up by a particularly cruel constitutional law professor:

    • Defence/Aggression

      • NBC ☛ Europe's lost 'breadbasket': How Russia's war in Ukraine is stoking a global food crisis

        Farmers across this country are unable to sow their land, missing a critical planting window while also struggling to ship harvested crops out due to a Russian blockade of Ukraine’s critical Black Sea ports. Meanwhile, a gas crisis and ongoing tank and artillery battles makes it a challenge to simply maintain the little land they have left.

        “We’re not talking about profit anymore,” said Skornyakov, who added that his company had also tracked farm equipment stolen by Russian forces via GPS to mainland Russia and annexed Crimea. “We’re talking about survival.”

      • RTL ☛ As Sweden woos Turkey, fears mount over what it will cede

        "Let's not fall into Erdogan's trap", argued an op-ed signed by 17 cultural and literary figures in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter this week, referring to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

        Any NATO membership deal must be unanimously approved by all 30 members of the alliance.

        But Turkey has refused to agree to the opening of negotiations with Stockholm.

      • TruthOut ☛ After Mass Shootings, Republicans Shield White Supremacists From Scrutiny
    • Environment

      • Energy

        • David Rosenthal ☛ Cryptocurrency Catch-22

          A major criticism of Bitcoin is that its blockchain processes only around 230K transactions/day, of which only about 10% are "economically meaningful. That is less than 5 "economically meaningful" transactions between individuals' wallets per minute. 90% are wash trades, and 7.5% transactions between exchanges.

        • TruthOut ☛ Liberty Mutual Board Member Just Became the New Lead Director of ExxonMobil
        • Bert Hubert ☛ Presentation at the European Energy Law Seminar 2022

          These days, I am a member of the ex-ante regulator of the Dutch intelligence and security services. This regulator is staffed with judges and legal people, but I am the special technical member. My role there is to rule on the legitimacy of hacking and surveillance operations but perhaps more important, to make sure that the entire committee understands all the issues, so they know how to weigh the proportionality and subsidiarity of the proposed surveillance or hacking measures.

          In this way, I spend a lot of time on information security and cyber operations, but I also live in your world of legislation and laws.

          Lately, I’ve been delving deeper into gas and electricity, and perhaps indirectly that has led to me contributing to your conference.

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • Russ Allbery: Review: Kleptopia

        Kleptopia is a nonfiction chronicle of international financial corruption and money laundering told via a focus on the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. The primary characters are a British banker named Nigel Wilkins (at the start of the story, the head of compliance in the London office of the Swiss bank BSI), a group of businessmen from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan called the Trio, and a Kazakh oligarch and later political dissident named Mukhtar Ablyazov, although the story spreads beyond them. It is partly a detailed example of what money laundering looks like in practice: where the money comes from, who has it, what they want to do with it, who they hire to move it, and what countries welcome it. But it is more broadly about the use of politics for financial plunder, and what stories we tell about the results.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Wall Street Got Theirs—Now Bail Out Regular People by Cancelling Student Debt

        I borrowed money to pay for college. Like 45 million other Americans who did the same, I owe student loan debt.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Walled Culture ☛ Even algospeak won’t save us from upload filter overblocking

        In one important respect, upload filtering is worse than content moderation. The latter can be circumvented by the use of algospeak that constantly evolves to stay one step ahead of the filtering. Although people might experiment in order to establish what kind of copyright material would be blocked by upload filters, that doesn’t answer the question as to whether it should be blocked under the relevant law. Only the courts can decide on complex copyright cases that filters cannot and will never manage to grasp. This will inevitably be a long and expensive process, which will discourage most people from even trying.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Nuland-Pyatt Video Restored to YouTube

        The video, with more than 181,000 views, in which top U.S. officials in 2014 discuss changing the Ukrainian government, had been removed from YouTube after more than 8 years.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | Real Change Will Bubble Up Not Trickle Down

        Golden State head coach Steve Kerr's comments went viral when in visible frustration he appropriately called out Republican Senators for holding the American public hostage on the background check bill supported by 90 percent of Americans. Yet, we have been here again, again, and again and the grisly brutality of 20 Sandy Hook children didn't move Republican NRA supported leaders then and the 2 adults and 19 children slaughtered at Robb Elementary School€ in Uvalde Texas will likely not today.

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The Corporate Cash Backing These 'Great Replacement' Republicans

        Number of deadly racist terror attacks that have been carried out across the U.S. to date by white men motivated by the "great replacement," a racist, antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims elites are trying to replace the white population with people of color, especially immigrants: at least 5

      • TruthOut ☛ Texas Reps Have Taken Over $14 Million From Gun Rights Groups
      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | An American Nightmare: Uvalde School Massacre

        In his official remarks on the May 24 elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas—during which 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos killed 19 children and two adults—United States President Joe Biden demanded: "When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?"

      • Common Dreams ☛ Opinion | The White Christian Nationalists Leading America's Children to Slaughter

        As I write this column on Wednesday 25 May, the death toll from the US's latest mass shooting, at Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde, Texas, has climbed to 21—19 children aged between eight and ten, and two adults.

      • Common Dreams ☛ 'Grotesque': Disgust as Trump Reads Names of Uvalde Victims at NRA Convention

        Former President Donald Trump and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday doubled down on a pro-gun response to gun violence as they addressed the National Rifle Association's conference in Houston—a gathering that opened just three days after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 elementary school students and two teachers dead.

        Among the elements of Trump's apparently poorly attended speech that drew criticism on social media was his reading of the Uvalde victims' names, each of which was followed by a bell sound, and a brief dance-like movement right after he concluded his remarks.

      • Salon ☛ Uvalde shooting timeline exposes an ugly truth: The police have no legal duty to protect you

        Police, it appears, were not keen on confronting a teenager armed with an AR-15. That's understandable from a human perspective but in direct conflict with the image that law enforcement likes to portray of themselves as brave public servants who put their life on the line for ordinary citizens. This image has been bandied about even harder in recent years, in response to the ongoing debate over how much public money is spent on policing in lieu of other social services. It's safe to say that the widespread support for robust police funding is entirely due to the assumption that cops have a duty to rush in and protect people, especially children, in such situations.

      • Pro Publica ☛ Alaska Charges Former Acting Attorney General With Sexual Abuse of a Minor

        A special prosecutor has charged Alaska’s former acting attorney general with three counts of sexual abuse of a minor for having sex with a 17-year-old girl he coached on a high school mock trial team in May 1991.

        The charges were filed Friday in Alaska state court in Anchorage against Clyde “Ed” Sniffen, who served as acting attorney general from August 2020 to January 2021. Gov. Mike Dunleavy asked the Department of Law to appoint an independent investigator to review the case after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica first reported in January 2021 that a woman had accused Sniffen of sexual misconduct.

      • TruthOut ☛ Boris Johnson Dodged a COVID Reckoning. Now He’s Doubling Down on Deportations.
    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Common Dreams ☛ World Leaders Must Commit to End Covid-19 Patents: Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus

          Social entrepreneur and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus on Saturday called for a comprehensive waiver of intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments, declaring that "freeing" the technology "from profit and patent is the key" to a global health system that puts human lives above corporate profit.

          In an op-ed published Saturday in Stat news, Yunus—who's previously joined with other Nobel laureates in pushing for an end to intellectual property barriers—pointed to the global inequality in access to vaccines.

      • Copyrights

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Sued IPTV Operator is Curious About MPA's "Involvement" With TorrentFreak

          Last year, several Hollywood studios plus Netflix, Amazon, and Apple sued the alleged operator of IPTV services AllAccessTV and Quality Restreams. According to a joint report filed with the court, it appears the parties are still open to settlement but something else piqued our interest. As part of discovery, the defendant wants details of the MPA's "relationship and involvement" with TorrentFreak.



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