Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup.
We had another wonderful week in the world of Linux releases with Bluestar Linux 5.17.9, Pearl Linux OS 11, and LXLE Focal.
A new Linux update allows Intel to control features in your CPU using hardware-level DRM.
Can you rename a file that's set to read-only? If you said "no" then you don't know UNIX file permissions as well as you think you do. Hear all about the details in this episode.
Josh and Kurt talk about a recent OpenSSF issue that asks the question how many open source maintainers should a project have that’s “healthy”? Josh did some research that shows the overwhelming majority of packages have one maintainer. What does that mean?
At one point in time the pacman contrib scripts shipped with pacman and shipped with Arch Linux but due to maintenance issues it was split out.
Google Drive is one of the best Cloud Storage options in the market. It offers sufficient storage for free to fulfill our primary requirements, including storing photos, Gmail, or various documents. The popularity of Google drive increasing day by day, and we can assume that cloud storage will take the throne from physical storage shortly. So it’s always better to adapt ourselves to changing technology. But Google doesn’t offer any official Google Drive client for Linux.
You must be aware of the importance of a Google Drive client if you are a Linux user. And so, you must be looking for one to use. If so, I am sure you are on the right track because this content will lead you to the best 15 Google Drive clients for Linux users.
I’ve wrapped up the Calamares 3.2 branch today. It is now in bug-fix-only mode, or LTS. The main development branch, calamares, is now for a future 3.3 release. The new release will drop a bunch of legacy support, dating back to Debian 8. This cleans up a bunch of #ifdefs and means we can target just one Qt version. The release wraps up my paid involvement with Calamares – call 3.1 and 3.2 the “era of [ade]” if you will – and for now, hands the project over to the community.
I’m sure there will be another maintainer at some point. The project itself is Free Software, it isn’t going to go away, be co-opted, or destroyed.
Early on, I was thinking that to support top-level zram for containers, each container would need its own zram device. However, yesterday I realised the obvious; the main layered filesystem and the layered filesystems of the containers, could all use the same zram. It is simply a matter of having a sub-folder in the zram for each aufs layer.
What makes Surfshark one of the best paid VPN services on the market? Well, besides being extremely affordable, it has no device limit and is very easy to use on many platforms, including Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and iPadOS. Not to mention, the developers are constantly adding new features -- they don't rest on their laurels. I highly recommend the service.
A desktop Linux version of Surfshark has been available for a while now, but sadly, it did not have a graphical user interface (GUI) -- you had to configure and run it from the terminal. While this technically worked, it was clunky and annoying, making Surfshark on Linux inferior to versions for other operating systems.
My first commit to my dotfiles repository was ten years ago. Here are a few things I’ve learned about maintaining a system configuration in that time.
It seems that lately I’ve written several shell implementations of a simple queue that enforces ordered execution of jobs that may arrive out of order. After writing this for the nth time in bash, I decided it was time to do it properly. But first, a word on the why of it all.
File deletion is an important yet sensitive aspect of Linux administration. The Linux commands behind file deletion operations help us get rid of files we do not need.
There is usually a high chance that the files we wish to delete reside in a single folder or directory. If we did not need all these files; once we navigate to that directory, it would be easier to get rid of them with a simple rm command implementation.
Having control of your system also means knowing what the temperature of your computer is at any given moment. Although this may sound difficult, the reality is that it is not and it helps to prevent errors and hardware damage. Therefore, we have prepared the following post for you to learn how to Install Psensor Temperature Monitoring Application on Ubuntu 20.04.
Nginx is a web server created with a focus on performance, high concurrency and low resource usage. It serves the majority of the top websites. Whilst this is mostly due to its performance, it’s also relatively easy to get started with.
By default, Nginx deals with web requests asynchronously i.e. a single nginx process can serve multiple requests concurrently. However, because of this design Nginx, as compared to web servers like Apache, can’t embed server side programming languages like PHP into its own process. This means those tasks are to be handled by completely separate processes and then reverse proxied back to the clients via Nginx. Therefore, at its core, Nginx is actually just a reverse proxy.
In this article, we’re going to go through the process of compiling and installing Nginx through source. While installation through the package manager is fairly easy, we do not get as much control over the Nginx binary as we get by compiling from source. I have chosen OpenBSD for it serves very well as a secure server operating system.
RPM Fusion is a software repository, providing add-on packages for Fedora Linux. It was born as a merge of the older repositories Livna, Dribble and Freshrpms. They distributed software that Fedora will not, either because it does not meet Fedora’s definition of free software, or because distribution of that software may violate US law.
The RPM Fusion repository comes in two variants, Free and Non-Free. The free repository contains a free version of the software that is open source and non-free, which have mostly almost all free software but are closed source and mainly proprietary.
In this article, we will show you how to install Bareos backup solution on Fedora 36
Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a backup software, originally forked from the Bacula project. It is network-based, multi-client and very flexible with an architecture oriented towards scalability. Thus the learning curve might be considered somewhat steep. The project is backed by the commercial company Bareos GmbH & Co. KG, based in Germany.
DNF or Dandified YUM is the next-generation version of the Yellowdog Updater, Modified (yum), a package manager for .rpm-based Linux distributions. DNF was introduced in Fedora 18 in 2013, it has been the default package manager since Fedora 22 in 2015, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 , and OpenMandriva; and also an alternative package manager for Mageia.
Perceived deficiencies of yum (which DNF is intended to address) include poor performance, high memory usage, and the slowness of its iterative dependency resolution. DNF uses libsolv, an external dependency resolver.
Learn the steps to install the Signal Private Messenger app on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.
Signal is one of the popular open-source messaging apps that has been known for several years for its end-to-end encryption and its independent structure as a non-profit organization operated by a foundation — not a large tech company. It is a handy tool for communication among activists and other people who are particularly concerned about their privacy.
End-to-End communication in Signal is encrypted. This means that only those people who are involved in the conversation can read the content of messages any other user who is not the part of the chat, not even the company itself – are unable to do so. Signal is particularly serious about privacy, even sticker packages have their own encryption. In addition, Signal has developed the encryption protocol that other services such as Skype and Whatsapp use.
Follow through this tutorial to learn how to install LibreNMS on Ubuntu 22.04/Ubuntu 20.04. LibreNMS is a fully featured MySQL/PHP and SNMP based network monitoring system.
In this video, we are looking at how to install ONLYOFFICE on Debian 11. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at how to install Mine-imator 1.2.9 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.
Hiding a file or folder is a feature that helps you increase your device’s privacy and security. You wouldn’t want a 5-year-old child to mess up your most essential documents. And how would you feel if someone deleted your hours of work just as a prank?
The easiest way to tackle such ‘accidents’ is to keep your files hidden and later unhide them when needed. If you don’t know how to hide and unhide files on Ubuntu, then good news for you. Because that’s exactly what we will cover here.
A Linux hostname is a unique name that identifies a computer on a network. When working on multiple computers on the same network, you may get confused because of duplicate hostnames. So the need to change your hostname arises.
In this article, we cover the best methods (including terminal and GUI) on how to change Linux hostname in some of the major Linux distributions. Let’s get started.
Today you'll be able to download a collection of passwords and wordlist dictionaries for cracking in Kali Linux.
A wordlist or a password dictionary is a collection of passwords stored in plain text. It's basically a text file with a bunch of random passwords in it.
Today you will learn which are the best wifi adapters that are most commonly used for hacking in Kali Linux.
If you're new to Kali Linux or wifi hacking, the most important hardware you need besides a computer with Kali Linux installed, is a USB wireless network adapter with a wifi card (chipset) that supports packet injection and monitor mode.
Are you a college student struggling to make your way up to progress? Are you seeking a competitive advantage? If yes, then first, you need to remember that being a good student is not merely only about good grades. It is your study time and dedication to education that will help you become a better student. Hence, for that, you should switch to Linux.
Linux is the greatest operating system, perfect for students because it comes with a variety of features and unique tools that can assist you very well in your study.
In the past I've felt as though Tails was one of the better distributions available for people who wanted to communicate anonymously or visit websites without giving away their location. It was a solid tool, if somewhat held back by two issues. One was that some of the included software was either geared more toward technically experienced users or hadn't yet matured. Early versions of OnionShare come to mind as software which still had some problems when it was first introduced in Tails. The other issue was performance. GNOME is one of the heaviest open source desktop environments and early versions of GNOME 3 were particularly cumbersome, especially when run on lower-end hardware.
What I have appreciated about Tails 5 is it feels like a polished, evolutionary step forward without (as far as I can tell) any regressions from the 4.x series. GNOME 38 still isn't as responsive and smooth as later versions of GNOME (40 and newer) have been for me, but it feels a little better than past releases.
I really like the new Kleopatra tool which acts as a one-stop application for all our encryption key management, file signing, and encryption needs. Kleopatra is another tool I feel has become more polished in recent years and I enjoyed having it in Tails 5.
Both Tor Browser and OnionShare worked beautifully for me. I think Tor Browser has always been a solid experience and it continues to be good. OnionShare was a good idea in the past, but I sometimes encountered stability issues with it. The current version feels easier to use and entirely stable.
I like the initial configuration screen Tails displays when the distribution starts. The default settings lock down the system (using MAC randomization, locking the Unsafe Browser option, and locking admin functions). However, we can toggle these features if we wish to give more flexibility. This walks a careful line between being secure by default while allowing users latitude to perform more actions.
Last, but not least, I appreciate the detail and honesty of the Tails documentation. There are a lot of tips and guidelines on the project's website. I especially appreciate the project is transparent about both the features Tails offers and the limitations. Some projects boast they will prevent all viruses or will keep people safe on-line, or will keep you anonymous. Tails doesn't make wild marketing claims. The developers explain how their tools work and how they help, but also warn there are limits and nothing is guaranteed. I appreciate this balanced approach to keeping users informed.
In short, if you need to browse the web or want to share files without giving away your location, then Tails is probably one of the most secure and easiest to use distribution to do this.
Time Machine is a backup software by Apple, part of macOS allowing easy and foolproof backups. In a nutshell, it creates incremental backups on a storage medium of your choice and you can access the data either with a graphical client or directly via file system tools. I especially like that you only have to plug in an external USB drive which is immediately recognized, the backup starts and the drive is unmounted as soon as the backup is done. Since Time Machine is Apple only and I use OpenBSD on all my personal machines, I decided to write my own Time Machine like solution.
Subtitler is a free Desktop application to search and download right subtitle blazingly fast. Now available in the software repository.
Catalyst browser is an amazing and elegant Electron/Chromium based web browser. Now available in the software repository.
Fifo browser is a privacy orientated browser based on modern frameworks. Experience a modern browser based on new frameworks. Easily integrate your day with Fifo. Since Fifo is so modern, you don’t need to worry about change, you can just enjoy the experience.
For Rock and Rolling users OpenMandriva Community has made ISOs using the LXQt desktop.
A highlight of the expected new features of elementary OS 7 "Horus" which caters to changes across look-and-feel, features and performance.
The RZBoard V2L from Avnet, is a Single Board Computer (SBC) that shares a similar design to the Raspberry Pi 4 model B. One of the main differences between these SBCs is that the RZBoard V2L is powered€ by the powerful RZ/V2L System on Chip (SoC) from Renesas Electronics. Avnet also has these SBCs in stock and they are available for $147.
The RZ/V2L processor combines a dual core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU (up to 1.2GHz), an ARM Cortex-M33, a Mali GT31 3D-GPU and an AI accelerator (DRP-AI). In addition, there is a H.264 video (1920/1080) encode/decode function implemented in silicon.€
In the referenced entry, OP (me) makes a curious statement about the Raspberry Pi power usage: "Uses too much power"...
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It took me too long to figure it out - I had a USB power supply that worked just well enough most of the time that it was always a mystery.
Actually, the micro-USB connector and the USB standard call for power supplies that do not provide adequate power. The cable is rated for 500mA, not 2A, so even if you have an overpowered supply, a cheap cable can cause a voltage drop rendering the Pi useless.
 The Rockchip RK3568-powered NanoPi R5S SBC with two 2.5GbE ports, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and M.2 NVMe storage is now available for $59, or $75 with a metal enclosure.
As previously mentioned, the mini router board is equipped with 2GB RAM, 8GB eMMC flash, two USB 3.0 ports, as well as an HDMI output for people wanting to make use of the Rockchip RK3568 processor’s multimedia capabilities, or simply have a user interface on a monitor.
Lodestone is designed to be the modern and digital equivalent of a home filing cabinet. If you've gone searching for something similar in the past, you might be familiar with terms like Electronic Document Management System (EDMS), Document Management System (DMS) or Personal Archival.
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Lodestone is released under the GPL-3.0 license.
Today marks 19 years since 19-year old Matt Mullenweg partnered with Mike Little to release the first version of WordPress based on the b2/cafelog software. The blog where he shared his thoughts on life and tech was starting to get more traffic and he wanted to ensure its future after the b2/cafelog’s main developer disappeared.
Mullenweg had the vision for what WordPress should be, even before it had a name.
This release has no code changes since 2.12, but just a minor documentation fix and updated translations.
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit that provides infrastructure support for free and open source software projects, has received a favorable ruling in its right-to-repair lawsuit against Vizio, an American TV manufacturer. The SFC alleges that Vizio has demonstrated “repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the General Public License (GPL),” after the company refused to provide the source code for software with copyleft licenses that it bundles with its products.
Vizio had filed a request to “remove” the case from California State Court into U.S. Federal Court. After hearing oral arguments from both sides, the court has granted SFC’s motion to remand the case back to California State Court.
I feel like doing an experiment with HTTP Basic Authentication. What if instead of just sending the user:password encoded I provide a session token during the login (using regular post via HTTPS) and from this point on use user:token? And why not encrypt with SHA instead of just encoding?
I was reading about OAuth2 because of my job and was thinking about using it in my personal project but wow... what an over-complicated solution for something simple as my project!
Since the day it was open sourced in 2009, the Go programming language has consistently grown in popularity. Now the five Google software engineers behind its original creation are taking a look back at what fueled that growth.
Writing in Communications of the ACM, Go’s five original creators stress that even their earliest work “benefited greatly from advice and help from many colleagues at Google.” And the paper’s second sentence emphasizes that it’s now a public project “with contributions from thousands of individuals and dozens of companies.”
Any solution in this area needs to recognize that one size does not fit all. For some applications a single "name=[string]" will be sufficient and it would be seriously counter-productive to force those folks to engage in detailed encoding. Another barrier to detailed encoding is that few people have knowledge to encode the universe of name forms at a detailed level. Requiring metadata creators to make distinctions outside of their understanding would only result in error-ridden metadata. Better a blind single string than mis-coded details. Yet there will be applications and their metadata communities that can or must make use of the subtleties of name details that are not of interest to others.
Because of both the great variety of name forms and the variability of applications that make use of names, I recommend a metadata vocabulary that follows the principle of minimum semantic commitment. This means a vocabulary that includes broad classes and properties that can be used as is where detailed coding is not needed or desired, but which can be extended to accommodate many different contexts.
The trick then is to define broad classes that aid in defining semantics but do little restriction. Classes for things like "Agent", with subclasses for "Person", "Groups of Persons", and perhaps "Non-persons". Properties could begin with "name" which could be subdivided into any definable part of a name that people find useful. Further specificity can be provided by application profiles that define such requirements as cardinality or value types for the various properties. Applications themselves could contain rules for the displays that are needed for their use cases.
The challenge now is to find a standards group that is interested to take this on.
Even then farming for them was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped design RCA’s first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she’d never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their so-called spare time, they farmed.
My parent’s house was in a sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses, baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.
Because I’ve been asked a couple times recently:
I keep up with 345 websites and newsletters using an app called NetNewsWire. It’s free and I have it on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s a type of app called a newsreader.
more broadly, lefebvre is trying to develop a 'theory of needs' (299) that illuminates the relationship between nature and culture in everyday life. he does so by suggesting that we think dialectically about need and desire: 'there is a transfer from need to desire which crosses the social and society in its entirety' (305). this quote should make it clear that he's not arguing for a naive account of nature or essence, since 'the circuit from need to desire and from desire to need is constantly being interrupted or distorted' (305).
Drone Day proceeds glowingly. I place my headphones over my ears to hear and the combination of Purpll + Draume delights. Is anyone else listening? That relates to a topic I'll address later in this meandering essay (I laughingly call it an *essay*). The short answer is that Flavigula's Drone Day broadcast has had at this moment of writing a peak of 29 simultaneous listeners. How does that make me feel? It doesn't, really. More on this later in the *essay*. For now - back to Purpll + Draume! A lovely combination! Perhaps one to win universal acclaim! I guffaw. Soon Draume will be in other hands. I sold it to attain a more gentle yet more controllable reverb - Red Panda Context. Honestly, though, it may house hidden madness like its cousins 2.7182818 times removed, Tensor and Raster. Draume has one timbrel quality I will miss. At least I have the unique *overdriven reverb* that spews from its innards encased in stone, never to be struck from the earth. Not that the earth will be around for much longer - or so I hear. Fuck um.
I recently took up basketry as a hobby. Each basket has been a bit better, as one would expect, but this one -- my fourth -- is the first one I'm truly happy with. It's the first one that I've stained and sealed with a wood oil and I think it really completes what otherwise looks like a half-finished product.
But it sure does feel like the last few years have been a string of problems strung together.
Some of them are big (family members dying, lockdowns, depression, lockdown depression), but most of them are small (see aforementioned noisy neighbour).
With the summer months nearly upon us, many are dreaming of warm afternoons spent floating on a quiet lake. Unless you’re [Kolins] anyway. Apparently his idea of a good time is controlling a full-sized inflatable canoe not from onboard with a pair of oars, but from the shore with a RC transmitter.
I’m debating right now whether or not to write my account of what happened. Leaning toward writing this. And, then I’ll debate myself later on whether or not to share it…Debated…going to share. No names, or any other identifying information. Overall my students are really great. This could be a fiction. There was a lot of cheating, so the story is long. I mean this could be a podcast. It ends well too, for the most part.
One more side note. Why tell this story? Since this whole thing happened I’ve told the story a bunch of times, and sometimes I get requests to tell it. This is also a story for my future students about what not to do. So, here is a long form version. I’m not interested in outing my students, or casting shade on them. There were many fantastic students in my course while the cheating completely overwhelmed everything like a metastasizing slime mold. People cheat in college for lots of reasons. I don’t condone the behavior. I teach my courses because I’m interested in engaging students in the material. When cheating happens, it can reflect on me as an instructor and whether or not the course merits engagement. So, this is a story about cheating, but also about how I tried to turn things around and get students to engage in my course. Anyway, without further ado:
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I had nothing better to do so I wrote an R program to help me fill out the forms. Who knew I could automate pdf text entry from R. You learn something new everyday.
[hackbyte] reminds us about a classic hack that, even though we’ve seen floating around for over a decade, has somehow never quite graced our pages before. Many of us keep small home labs and even, at times, collections of servers that we’d be comfortable be calling mini-datacenters. However, if you use the ever-abundant 19ââ¬Â³ switches, servers and other hardware, keeping these mounted and out of the way can be a thorny experience. Which leads us to, undoubtedly, unintentional – but exceptionally handy – compatibility between IKEA LACK table series and 19ââ¬Â³ rackmount hardware.
Honeycomb tables are often found on laser cutters, where they provide a way for work material to be laid flat while not interfering with things like airflow. This leads to a cleaner laser cut and a nicer finish, but if one’s work depends on precise positioning and placement, they leave something to be desired because there’s no good way to attach rails, jigs, or anything of the sort in an easy and stable fashion.
[Les] from [Les’ Lab] has designed a driver for laser diodes up to 10 watts, and decided to show us how it operates, tells us what we should keep in mind when designing such a driver, and talks about laser safety in general. This design is an adjustable current regulator based on the LM350A, able to provide up to 10 watts of power at about 2 volts – which is what his diode needs. Such obscure requirements aren’t easily fulfilled by commonly available PSUs, which is why a custom design was called for.
In the movie Terminator 2, the T-1000 robot was made of some kind of liquid metal that could change shape among other interesting things. According to a chemical engineer at North Carolina State University, there may be something to the idea. [Michael Dickey] has been experimenting with gallium, a liquid metal, that scientists think may unlock a new generation of flexible devices.
You’d think that a synthesizer that makes as much noise and sports as many knobs as this one would have more than a dozen transistors on board. Surely the circuit behind the panel is complex, and there must be at least a couple of 555 timers back there, right?
The objective of this thesis is to make it easier to understand, use, and deploy strong anonymization practices. We make progress towards this goal in three ways.
First, we make it easier to understand what anonymization means, and lower the cost of entry for new practitioners. After a historical tour of a number of possible definitions, we introduce differential privacy, a central concept studied throughout this thesis. We then systematize and organize the existing literature on variants and extensions of differential privacy: we categorize them in seven dimensions, compare them with each other, and list some of their main properties.
Second, we consider a natural class of weaker variants of differential privacy: definitions that assume that the attacker only has partial knowledge over the original data. We raise some fundamental issues with existing definitions, and we establish strong theoretical foundations to solve these issues and clearly delineate between distinct attack models. We use these foundations to improve existing results on the privacy of common aggregations and draw links between our notions and older syntactic definitions of privacy. Then, we provide strong negative results for cardinality estimators, a class of algorithms that cannot be made private even under very weak assumptions.
Third, we focus on practical applications. We present novel algorithms to detect reidentifiability and joinability risks of large datasets, and we describe the design of a differentially private query engine designed to be usable to non-experts. We propose multiple possible improvements to this query engine, and discuss a number of trade-offs between privacy, utility, usability, and extensibility; we then discuss operational challenges arising when rolling out anonymization at scale, from choosing parameters to providing appropriate education and guidance to engineers working on anonymization pipelines.
All EU member states are to network their police facial images and investigation files across Europe. This puts pressure on some governments without such systems.
In the past two years, we have come across multiple news reports related to Safai Karamcharis across the country being made to wear tracking devices in order to enable their surveillance by the authorities. Concerned by the human rights violations that such actions will trigger, IFF is releasing a joint letter initiated by the All India Lawyers Association For Justice (AILAJ) to express our concerns over these ongoing violations to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis.
Americans have blamed many culprits, from mental illness to inadequate security, for the tragic mass shootings that are occurring with increasing frequency in schools, offices and theaters across the U.S.
Col. Sayad Khodayee, 50, was fatally shot outside his home in Tehran on Sunday when two gunmen on motorcycles approached his car and fired five bullets into it, according to state media. Iran has blamed Israel for the killing, which bore the hallmarks of other Israeli targeted killings of Iranians in a shadow war that has been playing out for years on land, sea, air, and cyberspace.
Although a spokeswoman for the Israeli prime minister declined to comment on the killing. But according to an intelligence official briefed on the communications, Israel has informed American officials that it was behind the killing.
NATO’s spat over Turkish opposition to Swedish and Finnish membership is about more than expanding the North Atlantic military alliance. It’s as much about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s immediate political goals as Turkey’s positioning itself in a new 21st-century world order.
On its surface, the spat is about Turkish efforts to hinder support for Kurdish ethnic, cultural, and national aspirations in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq and a crackdown on alleged supporters of a preacher who lives in exile in the United States. Turkey accuses the preacher, Fethullah Gulen, of instigating a failed military coup in 2016.
Jordanian Islamic scholar Bilal Al-Qasrawi said in a May 20, 2022 show on the Hizb-ut-Tahrir-affiliated Al-Waqiyah TV (Lebanon) that when an Islamic caliphate is reestablished, the infidels might use nuclear weapons against Muslim countries, but that the Muslims nonetheless will not surrender. He said that if the infidels kill a million or two million Muslims, the Muslims will kill as many infidels, adding: "We can afford to lose a million [lives], but can they? No. That's it." For more information about Bilal Al-Qasrawi, see MEMRITV clip no 4559.
In her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson chronicled the damage — and looming consequences — of human “contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials,” which she called “elixirs of death.” In the book’s spellbinding opening parable, which profiles a fictional town of the future, she wrote:
On Facebook, the zoo posted a picture of two of its gentoo penguins, and asked visitors to “Be GENTOO with our things”.
The post read: “We're delighted to see so many enthusiastic faces but please remember that alongside respecting our team and other visitors, our wonderful exhibits and signage deserve the same treatment.”
When an oil company invests in an expensive new drilling project today, it’s taking a gamble. Even if the new well is a success, future government policies designed to slow climate change could make the project unprofitable or force it to shut down years earlier than planned.
When that happens, the well and the oil become what’s known as stranded assets. That might sound like the oil company’s problem, but the company isn’t the only one taking that risk.
In a study published May 26, 2022, in the journal Nature Climate Change, we traced the ownership of over 43,000 oil and gas assets to reveal who ultimately loses from misguided investments that become stranded.
It turns out, private individuals own over half the assets at risk, and ordinary people with pensions and savings that are invested in managed funds shoulder a surprisingly large part, which could exceed a quarter of all losses.
The distribution of ownership of transition risk associated with stranded fossil-fuel assets remains poorly understood. We calculate that global stranded assets as present value of future lost profits in the upstream oil and gas sector exceed US$1 trillion under plausible changes in expectations about the effects of climate policy. We trace the equity risk ownership from 43,439 oil and gas production assets through a global equity network of 1.8 million companies to their ultimate owners. Most of the market risk falls on private investors, overwhelmingly in OECD countries, including substantial exposure through pension funds and financial markets. The ownership distribution reveals an international net transfer of more than 15% of global stranded asset risk to OECD-based investors. Rich country stakeholders therefore have a major stake in how the transition in oil and gas production is managed, as ongoing supporters of the fossil-fuel economy and potentially exposed owners of stranded assets.
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The code of the network model, for imputing missing financial information and for generating figures, are available at ref. 45. The code that generates the network inputs from the E3ME-FTT-GENIE scenarios and from the company database is available from the authors on reasonable request. The code used by E3ME-FTT-GENIE to generate the underlying scenarios is available from the authors on reasonable request. The model is described in detail in ref. 13.
May 27, 2022: The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) on Friday directed all scheduled banks as well as microfinance banks to submit data of all digital frauds and scams on a monthly basis while the purview of reporting is also expanded from fake calls by Fraudsters to other digital channels including the mobile app, E-Commerce Transactions, ATMs and POS.
As it is custom, whatever trend appears in America becomes mainstream in Japan after it has completely lost its cool. This time the government and a billionaire think what the Japanese people really should care about is some jpgs.
While it has long been blatantly obvious that the global economic model is not working for all, the rate of accumulation of wealth by a small minority is now breathtaking – if not totally obscene.
We had quite a show up in the Alps last week, the first in-person gathering of the world’s mega rich since Covid hit. The occasion? The annual World Economic Forum at the Swiss resort of Davos, an ever-so-sober gathering that has an assortment of global deep thinkers sharing their wisdom with deep pockets ever eager for policy ideas that don’t involve sharing their wealth.
"Happy Memorial Day," a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, considers the service of our past soldiers and the reprehensibility of ventriloquizing their ultimate sacrifice.
In short, it’s perfectly legitimate to criticize and even reject an ideology if that ideology poses a serious threat to one’s society. It would be irrational to pretend that Nazism was a force for peace and justice.
In the song, the children pledge allegiance to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- the “commander.” Khamenei's followers have tried to elevate his status by bestowing him the title of imam, the highest title in Shi'ite Islam.
I hate ads. I think anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I hate ads. For most of my ad-blocking needs, I use uBlock Origin on my desktop browser, and that seems to work fine most of the time.
But there are situations where uBlock Origin does not cut it. For instance, I couldn't find a way to block ads in mobile apps on my iOS device. (I know you're saying "just buy the ad-free version and support the developer!" but there's no way in hell I'm going to pay a weather app $12/mo just to get ad-free access)
The New York Times’ 1619 Project entered a new phase of historical assessment when the paper published a scathing criticism by five well-known historians of the American Revolution and Civil War eras. The group included previous critics James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, along with a new signature from Sean Wilentz. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein then responded with a point-by-point rebuttal of the historians, defending the project.
Each deserve to be taken seriously, as they form part of a larger debate on the merits of the 1619 Project as a work of history and its intended use in the K-12 classroom curriculum. While the project itself spans some four centuries, devoting substantial attention to racial discrimination against African-Americans in the present day, the historians’ criticism focuses almost entirely on the two articles that are most directly pertinent to their own areas of expertise. The first is the lengthy introductory essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who edited the project. The second is a contentious essay on the relationship between slavery and American capitalism by Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond.
How should readers assess the competing claims of each group, seeing as they appear to be at bitter odds? That question is subject to a multitude of interpretive issues raised by the project’s stated political aims, as well as the historians’ own objectives as eminent figures – some might say gatekeepers – in the academic end of the profession.
But the debate may also be scored on its many disputed factual claims. To advance that discussion, I accordingly offer an assessment for each of the main points of contention as raised by the historians’ letter and Silverstein’s response.
With some American companies able to have a profound impact on the exercise of free speech and religious freedom, Alliance Defending Freedom and Inspire Investing have launched a Business Index to rate their commitment to these values.
“CEOs and business leaders have positions of considerable power. They shouldn’t weaponize their influence or the companies they run to divide Americans or engage in speech censorship or anti-religious bigotry,” ADF Senior Vice President for Corporate Engagement Jeremy Tedesco said in a May 26 statement.
The feds seized my website JeromeBaker.com during Operation Pipe Dreams, which was a federal effort to bring those of us selling bongs and pipes across state lines to justice. It was 2003. There were not a lot of website seizures going on. The internet didn’t really start in earnest until 1996. There wasn’t a lot of regulation out there at first. Porn was big on the internet. And then, buying and selling drug paraphernalia caught on.
The girl, who was harassed by her Islamic relatives, reportedly ran away from home several times until she reported the incidents. She was later placed in a sheltered community and even attempted to take her own life in the family home. According to the public prosecutor’s office, represented by prosecutor Donato Greco, the abuse continued for months. However, this was always denied by the family members, although the judges eventually acknowledged they were guilty.
“It’s no longer a question of telling us it’s the act of a mentally disturbed person. The truth of antisemitism must no longer be hidden,” Goldnadel wrote.
France has experienced a sharp rise in violence targeting its roughly 500,000 Jews, the largest community in Europe, in addition to jihadist attacks in recent years.
The case came to light after a local made a video and sent it to the police, who reached the site and freed the children before detaining the accused.
The victim's mother accused the girl's father and brother of stabbing her son in the First Information Report (FIR).
The tally of unionized Starbucks locations is continuing to swell, with the latest additions coming after pro-unionization votes late last week in Seattle and Birmingham, Alabama.
The coffee giant's CEO "Howard Schultz and Starbucks are getting creamed in union vote after union vote," labor journalist Steven Greenhouse tweeted Saturday.
Crimes without criminals was not a subject for study when I was in law school. The two were seen as part of the same illegal package. That was before notorious corporate lawyers and a cash register Congress combined to separate economic, health and safety crimes from corporate accountability, incarceration and deterrence.
We now have another question about book digitization: can books be digitized for the purpose of substituting remote lending in the place of the lending of a physical copy? This has been referred to as “Controlled Digital Lending (CDL),” a term developed by the Internet Archive for its online book lending services. The Archive has considerable experience with both digitization and providing online access to materials in various formats, and its Open Library site has been providing digital downloads of out of copyright books for more than a decade. Controlled digital lending applies solely to works that are presumed to be in copyright.
This is the third book by Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, and the third now in which he furthers his basic theme: that the ancien regime of intellectual property owners is locked in a battle with the capabilities of new technology. Lessig used his first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999), to explain that the notion of cyberspace as free, open, and anarchic is simply a myth, and a dangerous one at that: the very architecture of our computers and how they communicate determine what one can and cannot do within that environment. If you can get control of that architecture, say by mandating filters on content, you can get substantial control over the culture of that communication space. In his second book, The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Random House, 2001), Lessig describes how the change from real property to virtual property actually means more opportunity for control, not less. The theme that he takes up in Free Culture is his concern that certain powerful interests in our society (read: Hollywood) are using copyright law to lock down the very stuff of creativity: mainly, past creativity.
Lessig himself admits in his Preface that his is not a new or unique argument. He cites Richard Stallman's writings in the mid-1980's that became the basis for the Free Software movement as containing many of the same concepts that Lessig argues in his book. In this case, it serves as a kind of proof of concept (that new ideas build on past ideas) rather than a criticism of lack of originality. Stallman's work is not, however, a substitute for Lessig's; not only does Lessig address popular culture where Stallman addresses only computer code, but Lessig has one key thing in his favor: he is a master story-teller and a darned good writer, not something one usually expects in an academic and an expert in constitutional law. His book opens with the first flight of the Wright brothers and the death of a farmer's chickens, followed by Buster Keaton's film Steamboat Bill and Disney's famous mouse. The next chapter has the history of photography and how the law once considered that snapping a picture could require prior permission from the owners of any property caught in the viewfinder. Later he tells how an improvement to a search engine led one college student to "owe" the RIAA $15,000,000. Throughout the book Lessig illustrates copyright through the lives of real people and uses history, science and the arts to make this law come to life for the reader.
Police in Italy have revealed details of an operation against pirate IPTV services and subscribers. In addition to targeting around 500 'pirate' sites, servers, and Telegram channels, police say IT specialists were able to identify 6,500 people who accessed a pirate IPTV platform under police control.