Summary: Jeffrey Peterson spoke to RMS in English earlier this year. This talk was uploaded here. Start at around 25 minutes from the start to skip to the new material and skip past some cruft/replay/technical perils.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-ND 4.0)
Video download link | md5sum 91a83b73c423db450be76a1a63cced45
Gemini Daily Fix
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Gemini is aging nicely; today we publish a short video to demonstrate how Gemini can be used to do all sorts of things on a daily basis
THE Web has a growing number of problems. We habitually put citations in our Daily Links with some of the latest examples of such problems.
If you’re new to Gemini, start here. We have a Web proxy, too.
“Gemini is not a protest against the Web. It’s just a noise-free alternative to it. For many use cases Gemini is perfectly fine and sufficient.”This past spring we started including many Gemini links in IRC and then in Daily Links. We want to help cultivate Geminispace, which grows each year if not every month since its inception 3 years ago. To keep up with the growing number of capsules we’ve created and now maintain our own ‘Planet Gemini’ (aggregator of aggregators for the most part; that helps reduce strain on capsules by reusing lists). “All in one” page exists as well (for the past 2-3 days alone, sorted suitably for easier digestion, sans duplicates and very old stuff) and this is what most of the video above illustrates. There are pictures, there are games and daily riddles, there are discussions and so on. It’s not as boring and primitive as it may seem from the command line; the client demonstrated above is Lagrange, which we introduced more than a year ago and have occasionally revisited since then.
Gemini is not a protest against the Web. It’s just a noise-free alternative to it. For many use cases Gemini is perfectly fine and sufficient. █
First up in the news: Ubuntu is out-fedoring Fedora; Linux 5.18 brings new optimizations; the Budgie has landed; Debian 12 has a projected birthday, and Asahi has its first Alpha;
In security and privacy, a new Spectre has arisen;
Then in our Wanderings, Bill gets “Jitsi with it”, Moss goes down the “pi-hole”, and Norbert hops onto the Fedora bandwagon
In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.6 and some of the applications pre-installed.
After my last blog post I was so exhausted I had to take a week off, but I’m back. In the course of my blog-free week, I remembered the secret to blogging: blog before I start real work for the day.
It seems obvious, but once that code starts flowing, the prose ain’t coming.
[...]
Some time ago I implemented dmabuf support for lavapipe. This is finally landing, assuming CI doesn’t get lost at the pub on the way to ramming the patches into the repo. Enjoy running Vulkan-based display servers in style. I’m still waiting on Cyberpunk to finish loading, but I’m planning to test out a full lavapipe system once I finish the game.
Also in lavapipe-land, 1.3 conformance submissions are pending. While 1.2 conformance went through and was blogged about to great acclaim, this unfortunately can’t be listed in main or a current release since the driver has 1.2 conformance but advertises 1.3 support. The goalpost is moving, but we’ve got our hustle shoes on.
On May 19, 2022 nVidia made a release of their OpenSource kernel modules for their newer GPU platforms (Turing and newer) with Risc-V system processor. Meanwhile we have (open)SUSE packages for simple testing available in the X11:Drivers:Video project of our openSUSE Build Service. If you want to give these a try you need to install nvidia-open-gfxG06 and kernel-firmware-nvidia-gsp packages.
Apple announced a slew of updates to Mac with macOS Ventura at WWDC this week, including a new feature that will let users take advantage of Rosetta inside ARM Linux virtual machines.
One of the few things that Intel Macs can do that Apple Silicon Macs can’t is run operating systems written for Intel processors inside of virtual machines. Most notably, this has meant that there is currently no legal way to run Windows on an Apple Silicon Mac.
Whether you are a movie lover or an animation series lover, you must need a good-quality video player to run the file on your Linux-powered PC. And most Linux users often face a problem finding the best Linux video players. While finding a video player for Linux, you should check the interface, file support, shortcut, subtitle support, and some basic features. And it should be clean and contain not so many features to make you confused. However, if you are looking for a Linux/Ubuntu video player, you can check this content.
apt-get command is used to manage package in Ubuntu and other Debian based distribution. You can install, remove software in Ubuntu, You can update upgrade ubuntu and other operating systems with help of this command.
If you want to install new software on the Linux operating system by apt-get command but you get the error “apt-get command not found“. This is really the biggest problem for the new user. Neither you can install new packages nor you can update and upgrade ubuntu.
apt-get is not working, how will you install a new package? If the problem only of installing new packages then it can be solved. You can use dpkg command to install deb files in ubuntu and derivatives.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Discord on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Discord is a platform that allows you to create chat servers where users who are fans of a particular topic can get together to talk in a kind of community. Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros and portable platforms such as Android and iOS and even directly in the browser.
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 Discord on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Hello geeks, booting Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) into rescue and emergency mode helps to reset the forgotten user password, fix the file system errors and disabling or enabling systemd service during boot.
In this post, we will learn how to boot Ubuntu 22.04 LTS system into rescue and emergency mode. Rescue mode is similar to single user mode where are all troubleshooting steps are executed. Rescue mode loads the minimal environment and mount root file system.
Whereas in emergency mode, we get the single user shell without starting any system services. So emergency mode is required when we can’t boot the system into rescue mode.
Wireguard is a modern VPN that employs cutting-edge cryptography. It was originally designed for Linux, but it is now a cross-platform tool that works flawlessly on all major operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, BSD, iOS, and Android.
Wireguard is simple to set up and use. It is faster than OpenVPN and other VPN tools because it is built into the Linux kernel. Unlike other VPN tools, the codebase of Wireguard is so small that it can be easily audited by a single person.
It employs cutting-edge cryptographic techniques such as the Noise protocol framework, Curve25519, ChaCha20, Poly1305, BLAKE2, SipHash24, HKDF, and secure trusted constructions. The modern design of wireguard makes the codebase unusually small, resulting in faster communication between server and clients.
In this article, I will show you how to install and configure Wireguard VPN on Linux. I’m going to use Ubuntu with 8GB of RAM and 4 vCPU for the demonstration. It is more than adequate for home users or small businesses with a few employees.
When searching a file using grep it’s often useful to be able to ignore the case of the text you are searching for. By default grep is case sensitive.
The security of your network — and the traffic flowing back and forth — is crucial to keeping your data and the data of your customers and clients out of the hands of bad actors. To that end, there are several tools you can use. One such tool is the open-source Maltrail traffic detection system.
Maltrail offers a web-based interface and works with publicly-available blacklists, reports, and user-defined lists to help security admins discover unknown threats on your network. Maltrail is run from the command line but offers a user-friendly web-based interface.
I want to walk you through the installation of Maltrail on Ubuntu Server 22.04, so you can start monitoring for malicious traffic right away.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GlassFish on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GlassFish is a free, open-source software application server developed by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). It implements technologies defined in the Java EE platform of this company and allows running apps that support this specification. It comes under two free software licenses Common Development and Distribution License and GNU General Public License.
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 GlassFish 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.
This tutorial continues Calc Basics IV and now we will learn two new formulas namely LEN and CONCATENATE. As an addition, you will also learn new skills called Paste Special and also Compare Sheets to help you copying formula and text to your needs. As a reminder, if you haven’t followed this LibreOffice Calc series, read the first and second parts here. Now let’s study.
The first thing we are going to think if we talk about web servers is Apache and Nginx. And it is that these two web servers are the most used around the world thanks to the speed, stability, and flexibility that both provide. However, there are other solutions that we have to consider. Today, you will learn how to install Lighttpd on Linux Mint 20.
Let’s learn the commands to install Docker Compose on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy JellyFish to automate the process of setting up containers with the help of various Docker Images.
What is Docker Compose?
Docker-Compose is a CLI tool that is installed with Docker. Similar to images, there is the file in which the individual steps are listed. However, the syntax is slightly different from the individual calls directly in the Docker CLI. Particularly charming is the fact that it automatically ensures that the containers can see each other on the net.
Why do we use Docker Compose?
The network is one of the most significant components of the modern information technology infrastructure. When your computer is connected to a network, other devices can communicate with your computer using the computer name, which is also known as the hostname. If your computer does not have a unique hostname in the network, then you must change it.
Over the “pinksterweekend” (Wikipedia informs me that’s Pentecost) the board of KDE e.V. met in real life for the first time in over two years. The board of directors meets weekly online, and we have regular – two or three times a year – weekend-long sprints to hammer out bigger issues and do administrative backlog. Since COVID, we have done these weekend sprints online as well, but we felt that at this point, the benefits of an offline, real life meeting outweighed the risks. The meeting was hybrid, with four people in the room and one virtual participant.
The time I have available to maintain GNOME Initial Setup is very limited, as anyone who has looked at the commit history will have noticed. I’d love more eyes & hands on this important but easy-to-overlook component, particularly to guide it kindly but firmly into the modern age of GTK 4 and the refreshed HIG.
I found that making a batch of 1–3 releases across different GNOME branches every few months was surprisingly time-consuming and error-prone, even with the pretty comprehensive release process checklist on the GNOME Wiki, so I’ve been periodically trying to automate bits of it away.
Philip Withnall’s gitlab-changelog script makes writing the NEWS file a lot quicker. I taught it to output the human-readable names of each updated translation (a nice additional contribution would be to also include the name of the human who updated the translation) and made it a little smarter about guessing the Git commit range to scan.
Beyond that, I added a Meson run target, maintainer-upload-release pointing at a script which performs some rudimentary coherence checks on the version number, tags the release (using git-evtag if available), atomically pushes the branch and that tag to GNOME GitLab, then copies the source tarball to master.gnome.org. (Apparently it has been almost 12 years since I did something similar in telepathy-gabble, building on the make maintainer-upload-release target that Simon McVittie added in 2008, which is where I borrowed the name.) Maybe other module maintainers may find this script useful too – it’s quite generic.
The new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) is compliant with version 4 of Google’s SLSA framework, which should help users combat vulnerabilities such as Log4j and upstream JavaScript library issues.
The company’s online conference, SUSECON, is under way, and the first big announcement was SLE 15 SP4, an incremental change to this relatively slow-moving, business-friendly distribution.
SLE 15 appeared in 2018, and the company puts out a new version about once a year. For its enterprise distro, it calls this a “service pack,” but for the free distro it’s just a simple point release.
More often than not, sitting underneath enterprise applications running on-premises or in the cloud is a Linux operating system. Today at the SuseCon Digital conference, enterprise Linux vendor Suse today announced the latest update release of its namesake platform, with new features designed to help improve reliability, security and performance.
Among the new features in Suse Enterprise Linux 15 Service Pack 4 (SLE 15 SP4) is support for live patching, which will enable organizations to patch a running system without the need for a system reboot. The new Suse Enterprise Linux update also includes support for the latest AMD confidential computing capabilities. Suse is now also among the first enterprise Linux distributions to include open-source Nvidia GPU drivers, which will help to accelerate graphics and AI use cases on Linux systems.
Members of the openSUSE Brazilian community are getting together for a release party on June 15 for openSUSE Leap 15.4.
The team is developing a full schedule and will be doing live lectures and will give away a few items.
The event will be on YouTube and people are asked to sign up for a ticket to receive the participation link.
A quick Google search of the term “new normal” will return countless results outlining how life has changed as a result of the pandemic. Spanning virtually every industry and touching on numerous facets of our daily life, it’s safe to say that things will never return to the way they were prior to March 2020.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, particularly when it comes to the changes driven by our new reality.
When you think about COVID-19’s corporate impact, the remote work shift is likely one of the first things that come to mind. According to a February report from Pew Research, 59 percent of U.S. workers who say their jobs can be done remotely are continuing to work from home even as offices have opened back up.
Colleagues and job seekers often ask me, as a CIO, what I’m looking for when it comes to hiring. I tell them, “I’m looking for ranchers, not pet owners.”
My response, while blunt, speaks to the changing nature of IT and how digitization and worldwide governmental mandates are changing how we approach our roles. We no longer have the time nor the resources for one-time unique “pet” projects without repeatability or reuse components. We need solutions that are template-based, repeatable, and easily scalable to meet rapidly changing business conditions.
My advice to peers and colleagues is to hire candidates with the skill sets to focus on economies of scale. Interchangeable solutions that can be replicated to meet whatever level of service your business demands are essential.
The kernel team is working on final integration for Linux kernel 5.18. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week now through Sunday, June 05, 2022. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Packit shows basic information about allowlisting in the status description when your namespace is not allowed. (packit-service#1533)
We’re pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.5, which is designed to help organizations streamline the management of cloud-native workloads and hybrid cloud. This latest release enables customers to extend their existing tools and skills to simplify operations, while providing greater visibility into how they can further optimize Kubernetes management.
As a Technical Account Manager (TAM) one of the best parts of the job is the regular contact with our customers, talking to them frequently and helping them solve interesting problems.
One of our customers came to me with an interesting challenge. The team creates a new Gold Image every month and they wanted to provide release notes for the image, automatically generating a list of CVEs that had been fixed in this version of the image.
Red Hat publishes release notes for new product versions which include details of CVEs and RHSAs which have been fixed in a release, such as in the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 now offers convenient (but unsupported) access to RPMs from two of the largest and most popular code repositories: The Python Package Index (PyPI) for Python and the RubyGems collection for Ruby. This new offering makes it easier to use thousands of community libraries in your projects. We’ll look at the repositories in this article.
Hello all, As of the 7th of June 2022, Fedora 34 has reached its end of life for updates and support. No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 34. All the updates that are currently in testing won't get pushed to stable. Fedora 35 will continue to receive updates until approximately one month after the release of Fedora 37. The maintenance schedule of Fedora releases is documented on the Fedora Project wiki [0]. The Fedora Project wiki also contains instructions [1] on how to upgrade from a previous release of Fedora to a version receiving updates. Tomas Hrcka
It turns out that it is not just a whole lot of money at stake. When you involve lawyers, everybody’s dirty laundry has to come out. Serious people quit and new people will be reluctant to replace them. Carter has demonstrated with his own words, above, that he did not calculate the real cost of this extreme act of bullying. Therefore, the only act of leadership remaining for this Debian Project Leader is to apologize and resign or prove that some other party, like Google, blackmailed him to do this.
Carter has the option to withdraw the claim from WIPO. Some lawyers would provide very strong reasons to do so. If Carter withdraws the claim then that is an admission of both failure and cowardice and he must simultaneously resign.
Chris Lamb attacked the privacy of my family at a very painful time. He violated a holiday season. Lucy Wayland died a death that may have been avoidable in a healthier organization. Chris Lamb’s complete resignation from Debian would be a helpful act of leadership that will encourage future Debian Project Leaders to live up to that particular title.
Both Debian and Ubuntu are often considered outstanding choices to meet your desktop and server needs. But what are the differences and similarities, and which is right for you?
If you’ve ever asked a seasoned Linux user what desktop distribution is best for a new user, chances are pretty good you might be told Ubuntu. If you ask about server distributions, you might hear the same answer. You might also hear Debian added into the mix.
Although there are a lot of similarities between these two open-source operating systems, there are also differences. Let’s take a look at both and see if we can determine which might be the best fit for your needs.
Texas Instruments has just launched the new Sitara AM62 family with AM623 and AM625 single to quad-core Cortex-A53 processors designed to provide IoT gateways and HMI applications with AI processing at low power, in some cases with up to 50% reduction in power consumption.
The AM623 processor specifically targets Internet of Things (IoT) applications and gateways that may benefit from object and gesture recognition, while the AM625, equipped with a 3D GPU, should power HMI applications with edge AI and up to two full-HD displays.
If you ever wished you could bring the accessibility, simplicity and power of the Arduino ecosystem into your work environment, you’re not alone.
Whether you’re a Gen Z or a Millennial engineer, developer or entrepreneur, and whether you’re beginning your first job, founding a startup or progressing in your career, you’re bringing to the table a wide range of skills previous generations were never taught or encouraged to explore. What’s more, you likely have a whole different approach to work, change and innovation. At Arduino, we like to think we might have had a little something to do with that.
As you probably know, Arduino was born in Italy at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, as an easy-to-use tool for fast prototyping, aimed at students with no background in electronics or programming. The platform was meant to enable creatives through technology. Little did we know we’d fire up the maker movement, and soon expand to offer tools for education and professionals as well.
Goldman Sachs open sourced the code and contributed its internally developed Legend data management platform into FINOS in October 2020. Legend provides an end-to-end data platform experience covering the full data lifecycle. It encompasses a suite of data management and governance components known as the Legend Platform. Legend enables breaking down silos and building a critical bridge over the historical divide between business and engineering, allowing companies to build data-driven applications and insightful business intelligence dashboards.
Is your business looking for an easy way to create database applications, without having to worry about writing complicated code? If that sounds like you, you might want to invest a bit of time with a new platform called NocoDB.
NocoDB claims to be an Airtable alternative, and it can be deployed to your network via a Docker container. What’s special about NocoDB is that it offers a very user-friendly means of creating database-driven applications with point-and-click simplicity.
I’m going to show you how to deploy NocoDB with the help of Docker so you can get started building your first database application.
Welcome, June –we’re opening the month with another great week. Here’s what the Apache community has been up to…
Machine Translation is an important tool for expanding the accessibility of web content. Usually, people use cloud providers to translate web pages. State-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are large and often require specialized hardware like GPUs to run inference in real-time.
If people were able to run a compact Machine Translation (MT) model on their local machine CPU without sacrificing translation accuracy it would help to preserve privacy and reduce costs.
The Bergamot project is a collaboration between Mozilla, the University of Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Tartu with funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It brings MT to the local environment, providing small, high-quality, CPU optimized NMT models. The Firefox Translations web extension utilizes proceedings of project Bergamot and brings local translations to Firefox.
In this article, we will discuss the components used to train our efficient NMT models. The project is open-source, so you can give it a try and train your model too!
The wait for this year’s major new Thunderbird release is almost over! But you can test-drive many of the new features like the brand new Address Book, Matrix Chat support, import/export wizard, and refreshed visuals right now with the Thunderbird 102 Beta. Better still, you might be directly responsible for improving the final product via your feedback and bug reports.
Below, you’ll find all the resources you need for testing the Thunderbird 102 Beta. From technical guides to a community feedback forum to running the beta side-by-side with your existing stable version, we’ve got you covered.
She holds an engineering degree in computer science and has been working as a test engineer for more than 10 years. In the last couple of years her main focus is automation in testing, finding ways to improve testing process and tools that will support testing activities.
Zaklina will be the primary contact for our History of Testing project where we are compiling a database of people who influenced or made important contributions to our professional field.
In 2020, the city of Bühl in Germany launched “Palim! Palim!”, a video conferencing platform based on the Free Software “Jitsi Meet”. The city offered the platform to citizens who needed it, and the initiative was well received. Two years later clubs, citizens, and the city itself use “Palim! Palim!” daily.
Interview with German administrations which use Free Software. May 2022.
Other municipalities have also shown interest in the solution. An association of nine administrations that use ‘Palim! Palim!’ have jointly modernised the administration, based on Free Software. Re@di – regional.digital is an inter-communal cooperation of nine southern German cities. Their common needs are met through synergy effects in collaborative development. In an interview, Alexander Gabriel and Eduard Itrich shared that the administrations could use their resources cost-efficiently thanks to cooperation and sharing Free Software.
Don’t you just hate it when you get nerd sniped?
I don’t either. It is usually quite fun. Case in point, some time ago I came upon this YouTube video:
It is about how a “500 piece puzzle” usually does not have 500 pieces, but instead slightly more to make manufacturing easier (see the video for the actual details, they are actually quite interesting). As I was watching the video I came up with an idea for my own math-themed jigsaw puzzle.
You can probably guess where this is going.
The idea would not leave me alone so I had to yield to temptation and get the damn thing implemented. This is where problems started. The puzzle required special handling and tighter tolerances than the average jigsaw puzzle made from a custom photo.
“From scratch” is a bit of a murky expression. How scratchy does it get? Are you just baking your bread yourself or are you growing your own wheat? Rolling your own solar installation probably doesn’t involve manufacturing your own photovoltaic cells. But when it comes to making the frame to hold your panels, why not machine your own brackets and harvest the wood from trees nearby?. That’s what [Kris Harbour] did with his over-engineered 8.4kW solar stand.
We have released Qt 5.15.10 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.10 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
You can add Qt 5.15.10 in the existing online installation by using the maintenance tool or do a clean installation by using the Qt Online Installer. Offline installers are available in the Qt Account download area.
The Python Software Foundation has released the results of its fifth annual Python Developers Survey, done in collaboration with JetBrains. The study, performed in late 2021, surveyed more than 23,000 Python developers and enthusiasts globally, according to the announcement. Here are a few highlights from the survey.
“Python is being used by the vast majority (84%) of survey respondents as their primary language,” the announcement says, and it is an important tool for many others.
Automatic Garbage Collection (GC) is one of the most important features that makes Java so popular. This article explains why GC is essential. It includes automatic and generational GC, how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) divides heap memory, and finally, how GC works inside the JVM.
I was talking to @frotz@freeradical.zone since he’s thinking of adapting Halberts to a science fiction game of his, which is funny because Halberst is a translation of Helmbarten which is a variant of Traveller for Fantasy. Full circle!
[...]
Also makes me think about Burning Wheel where you have two “skills” for wealth and circles/contacts: if you need to talk to a certain person, or get a certain thing, you roll that skill and that determines whether you can get it using your networks. One of the rewards could be +1 to either of these two, for example.
If it’s a skill we could model scouts having no resources and no networks, merchants having lots of resources, navy people having no resources but lots of contacts, stuff like that.
Those old enough to have encountered punch cards in their lifetime are probably glad to be rid of their extremely low data density and the propensity of tall stacks to tip over. But obsolete as they may be, they’re a great tool to show the basics of binary data storage: the bits are easily visible and can even be manipulated with simple tools. As an experiment to re-create those features in a more modern system, [Michael Kohn] made a punch card-like system based on LEGO bricks that stores machine code instructions for a 65C816 CPU, the 16-bit successor to the venerable 6502.
As part of [Erich Styger]’s recent kitchen overhaul with more power-efficient machines, he came across the ‘AutoDos’ feature of the new Miele G 27695-60 dishwasher. These are essentially overpriced containers of dishwashing powder that go into a special compartment of the machine, from which the dishwasher can then dispense the powder as needed. The high price tag and purported single-use of these containers led to the obvious question of whether they can be refilled.
The inconvenience of having to walk to your mailbox to check for mail has inspired many hackers to install automated systems that let them know when the mail has been delivered. Mailbox monitors have been made based on several different mechanisms: some measure the weight of the items inside, some use cameras and machine vision, while others simply trigger whenever the mailbox’s door or flap is moved. When [Gary Watts] wanted to install a notification system for his 1940s brick letterbox, his options were limited: with no flap or door to monitor, and limited space to install mechanical contraptions, he decided to use a LIDAR sensor instead.
Most people I talked to about buying expensive products are aware of “the law of diminishing returns”. When you buy a product, the more you pay for it the less extra quality you get for the extra spending. However, not many people recognize that the same can be said of most human activities. It is a lie that “just a little more effort” will lift you from above average to the top, as the law of diminishing returns hits even harder. You can have all the money in the world, but time – that is limited.
The law of diminishing returns
I am a HiFi maniac, so I am affected greatly by this law. I can choose to buy a pair of headphones for $20, $200, or for over $2000. There is probably a 2-3x quality increase in sound between the $20 and $200 headphones. The difference in quality is even less noticeable from $200 to $2000. I try to convince myself that my Sony WH 1000XM3 or my Sennheiser HD300Pro are good enough. They are more expensive and of better quality, than what most people use around me. I am happy with them, but unfortunately, I can hear the difference between them and the $1000+ category. Thankfully, I am not this picky when it comes to many of my other interests.
Two years ago, just as the COVID pandemic was beginning to radically transform day-to-day life for nearly everyone on the planet, the United States Postal Service decided to protect cops from passive criticism. One month after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin personified America’s omnipresent racism by kneeling on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd until he was dead, the USPS stepped in to seize a shipment of face masks containing phrases like “Stop killing Black people” and “Defund police.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (glib2.0, librecad, and php-horde-mime-viewer), Fedora (vim), and Ubuntu (freerdp2, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, ruby2.7, ruby3.0, and vim).
Owl Labs has released security updates to address a vulnerability (CVE-2022-31460) in Meeting Owl Pro and Whiteboard Owl. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability to obtain sensitive information.
Looking to secure the Joomla website? Here are some of the best practices to prevent the Joomla website from getting hacked by cyberattackers in 2022.
Access Now is encouraged by the introduction of the discussion draft of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, and its potential to defend human rights and combat data-driven discrimination. The legislation brings civil rights protections into the digital age.
Last week, U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone, Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Ranking Member Roger Wicker released a draft of a comprehensive national data privacy and security framework. The bill would require companies that collect data to conduct annual civil rights assessments on their algorithms’ impacts and submit those reports to the Federal Trade Commission. It would also prohibit disparate impact in AI algorithms, limit the amount of information entities collect about people online, hold companies to high standards of data security, and give people the power to sue companies for privacy violations.
Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester lever action 30-30. I moved my way up the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Marksmanship Qualification Program, helped along by a summer camp where riflery was mandatory. Like many boys in rural America, I was fascinated by guns, although I disliked hunting. Two decades as a reporter in war zones, however, resulted in a deep aversion to weapons. I saw what they did to human bodies. I inherited my grandfather’s guns and gave them to my uncle.
With senators negotiating a gun control package that is expected to leave out a reinstatement of an assault weapons ban and expanded background checks on gun purchases, Rep. Don Beyer is proposing a unique method of keeping AR-15s and similar semiautomatic weapons out of people’s hands.
The Virginia Democrat said late Sunday that he’s drafting a proposal to impose a 1,000% excise tax on firearms like the ones used by numerous perpetrators of mass shootings in recent years.
Mexico’s leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Monday that he is skipping the Summit of the Americas, following through on his threat to boycott the upcoming meeting if the White House refused to invite officials from all nations in the Western Hemisphere.
The Biden administration’s decision to bar the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from this week’s gathering in Los Angeles was made final on Sunday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s devastating and illegal invasion of Ukraine, launched in large measure to compensate for strategic vulnerabilities caused by NATO’s expansion, has triggered the most tumultuous and potentially dangerous transformation of the geopolitical disorder since the end of World War II. Internationally, there is a near-complete absence of trust and cooperation between the world’s most powerful nations even as we face the existential threats of nuclear, climate, and pandemics. We are cursed with the near-complete absence of arms control agreements with the exception of New START which will soon expire. And hopes that global warming can be limited to 1.5C have evaporated.
An anti-war coalition based in the United Kingdom warned Monday that the British government’s decision to follow in the Biden administration’s footsteps and supply Ukraine with longer-range rocket systems risks extending—and potentially intensifying—Russia’s deadly war.
The move, announced Monday by U.K. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, could usher in “a wider and still worse conflict,” said Andrew Murray, deputy president of the Stop the War Coalition.
Russia’s war against Ukraine has unleashed a battle not only between two armies and two societies, but also between two generations of leaders. Indeed, a striking age gap divides Russia and Ukraine’s top brass. Vladimir Putin’s close associates and key officials were largely born in the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas the most important positions in the Ukrainian leadership and on Volodymyr Zelensky’s team are, for the most part, occupied by people born in the 1970s and 1980s. But there’s also another clash of generations, one occurring not at the interstate level, but inside Russia itself. Putin’s contemporaries are afraid to relinquish power and bequeath it to those who should be their successors. Instead, they’ve worked to bring the younger generations of would-be leaders to heel, pushing them to the margins of public space or driving them out of the country altogether.
Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine has been deadly for reporters. The Ukrainian Institute of Mass Information has recorded 243 crimes against journalists and the media committed by Russian troops since the start of the full-scale invasion (as of the end of April). At least 32 journalists have died while reporting on the war or fighting on the front lines. Reporters have been tortured and kidnapped, and as of the end of April, at least 15 Ukrainian media workers had gone missing. Over 100 regional Ukrainian outlets have had to shut down due to threats from Russia. In early May, the Pulitzer Prize committee dedicated a special award to all Ukrainian journalists — for “their bravery, resilience, and commitment to truthful coverage” of the Russian invasion. Five Ukrainian journalists told Meduza about what it’s like to live and work in these unprecedented circumstances.
Now that we’re encountering mass shootings in America on what appears to basically be a weekly or so clip, all the tired, made-up, bullshit talking points that get trotted out to shift blame are coming off as even more tired and made-up than they did previously. We’ve now had three mass shootings that have been all over the media in the past 3 weeks — while, by definition, there have already been over 200 mass shootings that have occurred just this year in America — all of which used a common AR-15 long-rifle weapon. Beyond that, there aren’t a ton of similarities in the shootings. One appears to have been a racist attack on an African American neighborhood, another the random desire of a sick individual to specifically shoot up an elementary school, while the most recent in Tusla thus far looks to be a more targeted killing event for reasons unknown at the time of this writing.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (appointed by a Republican President) wrote in 2019, “District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution, is unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.”
A survey published Sunday shows that nearly half of Republican voters in the United States believe mass shootings of the kind that took the lives of 19 young children Uvalde, Texas last month are “unfortunately something we have to accept as part of a free society.”
“I’m sorry, but living with the threat of random mass violence isn’t freedom.”
The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its first public hearing on Thursday after 10 months of meeting in private. The hearing will be the first of eight and is expected to draw on roughly 1,000 depositions and interviews. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Will Bunch says the success of the hearings will hinge on whether the committee can convince the public that the January 6 attack “wasn’t just a one-off event” but rather “part of an ongoing threat to democracy.” Bunch also speaks about the Pennsylvania Senate race, which he says “is life or death for democracy,” as well as the mass shooting in Philadelphia on Saturday, which left three dead and 11 injured.
A leading peace group on Monday said a new report detailing the depth of U.S. support for Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen—hundreds of which have been called war crimes by international legal experts—shows the need for Congress to pass a recently introduced measure to end American complicity in the one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
“Our ongoing complicity is a stain on our nation’s soul. Just further reason for Congress to pass the newly introduced Yemen War Powers Resolution.”
Ten days ago, late on a Friday afternoon, May 27, 2022, the contractor’s assessment of the repairs needed in the US Navy’s Red Hill Jet Fuel Storage Area was delivered to the Hawai’i Department of Health. The redacted report made available to the public shed light on how badly managed and maintained the massive 80-year-old, 20 storage tank, 250 million gallon facility located a mere 100 feet above Honolulu’s water supply, had become.
U.S. officials claim the sale will support national security objectives by improving Nigeria’s ability to fight the extremist group Boko Haram. But sales of weapons like these come with major human rights risks for the Nigerian population — risks U.S. officials should be taking more seriously.
U.S. lawmakers in Congress had a 30-day window, through May 14, to stop the administration from issuing a Letter of Offer and Acceptance. But they can still adopt legislation to block or modify the sale at any time up to the point of delivery of the military equipment.
Once upon a time, long, long ago—actually, it was early in the year 2000—I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It had been written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way:
Every year, as the calendar flips from May to June, I feel a sense of dread sink into my chest. By June 1 each year, the West’s rainy season is long over, hurricane season is likely to have kicked off, and the grim annual parade of heatwaves has begun. While summer is still summer and we on the climate team at UCS look forward to ice cream and late sunsets as much as anyone, there’s something we need to tell you: Climate change has transformed summer into our country’s Danger Season, and we’d best start seeing it as such so that we can adequately prepare.
A major renewable energy bill never got a vote before the New York State Assembly’s session ended early Saturday, leading its supporters and political observers to call out the Democratic speaker and cast doubt on the party’s commitment to climate action on a national scale.
Noting that it only takes 76 votes to pass a bill in the chamber and 83 members confirmed their support for the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), the Public Power NY Coalition on Friday pushed Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-83) to hold a vote before lawmakers left Albany for the year and charged that “failure to do so is unequivocally climate denial.”
The White House announced on Monday executive actions to help “create a bridge” to a “clean energy future” including invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of U.S.-made solar panels.
The actions, first reported by Reuters, come as the Build Back Better’s climate provisions remain stalled in the Senate and amid the threat of new tariffs the solar industry has blamed for dampening domestic projects.
The economy added 390,000 jobs in May, while the unemployment remained unchanged at 3.6 percent for the third consecutive month. The May report showed clear evidence that the labor market is normalizing with wage growth continuing to slow.
The annualized rate of wage growth comparing the last three months (March, April, and May) with the prior three months (December, January, and February) was 4.3 percent, down from the 5.2 percent year-over-year increase. This is only moderately higher than the peak 3.6 percent year-over-year rate hit in February 2019. This means that if we are concerned about underlying inflation rather than supply shocks, most of the Fed’s work has been done.
Low-wage workers, union presidents, and progressive faith leaders on Monday urged President Joe Biden to meet with a handful of the millions of Americans living in poverty before the Poor People’s Campaign rallies in Washington, D.C. on June 18 to demand an economy and democracy that works for everyone, not just the wealthy few.
“It is time for the president to act on his pre-election promise to address poverty. More jobs alone, with a $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage, equal more poverty.”
But this time it happened in Mexico, under a government that has promised to be governed by human rights, compassion and sovereignty. The videos of the Aug. 28, 2021 operation by the National Migration Institute with the National Guard against a caravan of migrants, mostly Haitians, on the Tapachula-Arriaga highway caused indignation and rage. They show National Guardsmen dressed in riot gear, pushing a Haitian man with his child in his arms and hitting another while his young son tries to save him. Another agent kicks a migrant man in the head as he lays helpless on the ground. The scenes captured on video are but a small part of the violence against the migrant caravan–many people are reported injured in acts that were not recorded.
Despite the bad image of Mexico generated by the brutality exposed on Aug. 28, two days later, the Migration and the Guard launched another operation against the group in Mapastepec, resulting in more people injured and detained. This video shows a hunt, people scattering, screams, men subjected to force and crying babies.
Though Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar has already twice declared victory in Texas’ 28th District, progressive primary challenger Jessica Cisneros announced Monday that she plans to formally request a recount for the May 24 runoff election.
“Our movement was never just about the one politician—it was about taking on an unjust system.”
The Altered States Series began in 2016, during the presidential primary election cycle, as a comment on the decline in discourse. Since then, it has evolved to explore the yawning chasm between the ideals of a nation and the brutality of its practice. These flags have been used in protests and demonstrations; they come to life outside of the gallery walls.
Third parties have a political impact far greater than their electoral successes. They are the research and development wing of the political system. Only once, during the exceptional rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s, has a third party gained enough support to actually contend for power, but there are plenty of cases where the two major parties have liberally borrowed issues and ideas from upstart rivals. Lincoln’s Republicans themselves took their stance against the expansion of slavery from the earlier Liberty Party and Free Soil Party. The Democrats under William Jennings Bryan filched (and watered down) the agenda of the People’s Party. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was similarly light-fingered in borrowing ideas from the Socialist Party and other left formations. In a more sinister vein, Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” and dog whistles about “law and order” were motivated by a desire to steal the thunder of George Wallace, who ran in 1968 as the nominee of the American Independent Party.
Once upon a time, long, long ago—actually, it was early in the year 2000—I was involved in publishing Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. It was written by the eminent scholar of Asia, former CIA consultant, and cold warrior Chalmers Johnson. I was his editor at Metropolitan Books. In its introduction, using a word Americans were then (as now) all too uncomfortable with, he bluntly summed up his professional life by labeling himself “a spear-carrier for empire.” And he described the origins of his book’s title this way: Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [the term blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.
More than 40 civil rights and racial justice groups on Monday called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to ensure that the U.S. Senate votes to reinstate the monthly enhanced Child Tax Credit, which last year was credited with slashing child poverty by 30%.
Restoring the payments, which ended in December after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he would not support his party’s signature Build Back Better Agenda, would be “the most immediate, meaningful response to higher prices that Congress can deliver to 36 million families” who previously benefited from the Child Tax Credit (CTC), said the groups, including ParentsTogether Action, NAACP, and People’s Action.
Including offenses based on harmful speech in the treaty, rather than focusing on core cybercrimes, will likely result in overbroad, easily abused laws that will sweep up lawful speech and pose an enormous menace to the free expression rights of people around the world. The UN committee should not make that mistake.The UN Ad Hoc Committee met in Vienna earlier this month for a second round of talks on drafting the new treaty. Some Member States put forward, during and ahead of the session, vague proposals aimed at online hate speech, including Egypt, Jordan, Russia, Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, Tajikistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Algeria, and Sudan. Others made proposals aimed at racist and xenophobic materials, including Algeria, Pakistan, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, India, Egypt, Tanzania, Jordan, Russia, Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan.
For example, Jordan proposes using the treaty to criminalize “hate speech or actions related to the insulting of religions or States using information networks or websites,” while Egypt calls for prohibiting the “spreading of strife, sedition, hatred or racism.” Russia, jointly with Belarus, Burundi, China, Nicaragua, and Tajikistan, also proposed to outlaw a wide range of vaguely defined speech intending to criminalize protected speech: “the distribution of materials that call for illegal acts motivated by political, ideological, social, racial, ethnic, or religious hatred or enmity, advocacy and justification of such actions, or to provide access to such materials, by means of ICT (information and communications technology),” as well as “humiliation by means of ICT (information and communications technology) of a person or group of people on account of their race, ethnicity, language, origin or religious affiliation.”
As we have previously said, only crimes that target ICTs should be included in the proposed treaty, such as those offenses in which ICTs are the direct objects and instruments of the crimes and could not exist without the ICT systems. These include illegal access to computing systems, illegal interception of communications, data theft, and misuse of devices. So crimes where ICTs are simply a tool that is sometimes used to commit an offense, like the proposals before the UN Ad Hoc Committee, should be excluded from the proposed treaty. These crimes are merely incidentally involving or benefiting from ICT systems without targeting or harming ICTs. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) highlighted in January that any future cybercrime treaty should not include offenses based on the content of online expression:
Human rights and press freedom defenders on Monday called on the Brazilian government to do everything possible to find an Indigenous activist and a British journalist after the pair went missing in a remote area of the Amazon rainforest just days after receiving threats.
The Guardian reports Bruno Araújo Pereira, a former Brazilian government official tasked with protecting the country’s uncontacted tribes, and longtime Guardian contributor Dom Phillips were last seen over the weekend in the Javari region of Amazonas state. According to the British paper, Pereira has long received threats from the loggers and miners seeking to invade and exploit Indigenous lands.
A judge on Spain’s highest court has summoned former U.S. Secretary of State and Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo to testify about an alleged Trump administration plot to kill or kidnap jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to a report published on Friday.
Spain’s ABC reports National High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz issued the summons, which compels Pompeo to testify as part of an investigation of alleged illicit spying on Assange by Spanish security firm U.C. Global while the Australian was exiled in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
We speak with the chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which is the first in the United States and has just released a landmark report calling for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. While the state report is unprecedented, reparations are “first and foremost a federal responsibility,” says attorney Kamilah Moore.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson faced tough questioning during the Senate confirmation hearing on her nomination to the Supreme Court. Everyone expected that. What came as a surprise was the sudden focus on a picture book, Anti-Racist Baby, written by Ibram X. Kendi. Held aloft in accusation by Texas Republican Ted Cruz, the gesture was indicative of an election-year assault on public education, especially anti-racist education and the sort of mud throwing we’re likely to see more of. How to respond? Kendi is professor in the humanities at Boston University, where earlier this year resurrected the abolitionist paper, The Emancipator, in collaboration with The Boston Globe. He’s also the author of five number one New York Times bestsellers, including Stamped: Racism, Anti-racism, and You, which was number two on the American Library Association’s list of most challenged books in 2020. His next two books coming out in June are How to Raise an Anti-Racist and the picture book, Goodnight Racism. He was interviewed by Laura Flanders with Mitra S. Kalita and Sara Lomax-Reese, the cofounders of URL Media, on The Laura Flanders Show on April 6. Listen to the full, unedited conversation by subscribing to the Laura Flanders Show podcast at Lauraflanders.org.
McAllen, Tex.—Sister Norma Pimentel, the Catholic nun who directs the Humanitarian Respite Center in the Rio Grande Valley, surprised me when I asked about right-wing commentators and politicians using the baby formula shortage to vilify immigrants. Fox News, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and others claim that “illegal” migrant kids are getting formula while American children are not. “Our guests don’t want baby formula,” Sister Norma explained. “They’ve spent months walking and riding buses through Central America and Mexico, and their kids got used to drinking ordinary milk.”
Starbucks workers are accusing company management of illegally retaliating against labor organizing by moving to shut down an Ithaca, New York shop that voted to unionize in April.
Workers United, an SEIU affiliate representing Starbucks workers, filed a complaint Friday urging the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to pursue a court injunction to prevent the store closure, which is not the first time Starbucks has halted operations at a shop engaged in union activity.
For more than a decade (see our articles from 2012 and 2018), we’ve been monitoring the saga of Yonas Fikre, a US citizen who was placed on the US government’s “No-Fly List” and blacklisted by his government as a “suspected terrorist” while he was overseas on business.
Last week, after nine years and counting in the courts, Mr. Fikre “won” a second successive favorable decision on pre-trial appeals to the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals, but his quest for justice remains unfulfilled. The history of this case to date is a case study in the lack of accountability or judicial review for no-fly decisions and decision-makers.
The US government didn’t tell Mr. Fikre when it blacklisted him, but did tell airlines and other governments who it hoped would take action against him — as in fact they did. Mr. Fikre’s placement on a widely-disseminated US government blacklist of alleged terrorists (euphemistically and misleadingly described by the US government as a mere “watchlist”) resulted, among other consequences, in his being arrested and tortured by authorities in the United Arab Emirates who told him they were acting at the request of the FBI.
In the final days of Missouri’s legislative session in May 2019, lawmakers turned their focus to a bill that would outlaw abortion in the state if the U.S. Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade.
The abortion ban passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Mike Parson remains in limbo, at least for now. A leaked draft opinion suggests the high court is preparing to overturn the landmark 1973 ruling, which would trigger bans in Missouri and about a dozen other states.
Access Now supports UN human rights experts’ condemnation of the Myanmar military’s efforts to cement a “digital dictatorship,” and backs the call for UN Member States and international donors to support civil society initiatives to counter internet shutdowns, censorship, surveillance, and increasingly throttled internet access in Myanmar. For more than a year, civil society has been calling for international intervention.
“Access Now welcomes the UN experts’ strong statement that shines a spotlight on the deteriorating digital rights situation in Myanmar,” said Wai Phyo Myint, Asia Pacific Policy Analyst at Access Now. “Day by day, more people are being forced into the dark. If they are not already shut out from communications via shutdowns, they struggle to maintain access because of deliberate sky-rocketing of internet service costs. Any access is controlled and manipulated through sweeping website and platform bans.”
In Parker vs. Delaware (1950), the famed attorney Louis Redding argued before the Delaware Court of Chancery that denying Black students admission to the University of Delaware was unconstitutional and violated the “separate but equal” provisions set forth in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)
“She’s begging for total global humiliation. She’s gonna get it… I have no mercy, no fear, and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market… I’m so fucking happy she wants to fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!!”
While it got lost under the obsession with “big tech,” California has been doing a lot of interesting stuff in a bid to counter “big telecom.” The state not only implemented new net neutrality rules requiring that telecom monopolies behave, it’s building a massive new open access fiber network that should go a long way in driving broadband competition to market, expanding broadband access and lowering costs.
As a new mother, I’ve spent the last few weeks terrified of running out of food for my 2-month-old baby, who was born six weeks early and has struggled with breastfeeding. But the thing that scares me as much as the prospect of running out of formula is the knowledge that this shortage is a preview of what is to come if governments fail to transition off fossil fuels and limit global warming.
Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital.
While there’s still two glaring omissions (client certs and history) from Eva’s feature set I consider Eva to be a solid application for browsing around the Smolweb at this point. I’ve put a lot of work into refining the code that doesn’t factor into user facing features, but should not only make for a more stable piece of software but one that is now much easier to maintain going forward.
The actions refactor mentioned above was an interesting case. The original code had a big struct where all of it’s members were the same data type. Simple static arrays aren’t often used in Rust, and generally I think a lot of people tend to think of arrays as old fashioned these days, but by switching to a static array strings (the names of every gtk::SimpleAction in Eva) it’s possible to just loop over all of them to create the action, associate a keybinding to it, connect a closure and add it to the main window. So yeah, sometimes a simpler data structure is a big win.

The top utility will need little introduction to seasoned Linux users. top is a small utility that offers a dynamic real-time view of a running system.It allows users to monitor the processes that are running on a system. top has two main sections, with the first showing general system information such as the amount of time the system has been up, load averages, the number of running and sleeping tasks, as well as information on memory and swap usage.
The second main section displays an ordered list of processes and their process ID number, the user who owns the process, the amount of resources the process is consuming (processor and memory), as well as the running time of that process.
For a friend’s memorial I signed up to make a batch of images into a slideshow. All I wanted was the Simplest Possible Thing: a web page that would cycle through a batch of images. It’s been a while since I did something like this, so I looked around and didn’t find anything that seemed simple enough. The recipes I found felt like overkill. Here’s all I wanted to do:
1. Put the images we’re gathering into a local folder
2. Run one command to build slideshow.html
3. Push the images plus slideshow.html to a web folder
No magic. No plan. No philosophy. Just copying what demonstrably works for someone I know directly.
Generally, the path portion of web URLs maps more or less on to the idea of a hierarchical filesystem, partly because the early web was designed with that in mind. However, in thinking about this I’ve realized that there is one place where paths are actually a superset of the broad filesystem API; in fact this place actually causes some amount of heartburn and different design decisions in web servers when they serve static files.
The area of divergence is that in the general filesystem API, directories don’t have contents, just children. Only files have contents. In web paths, of course, directories very frequently have contents as well as children (if anything, a web path directory that refuses to have contents is rarer than one that does). This is quite convenient for people using the web, but requires web servers to invent a convention for how path directories get their contents (for example, the ‘index.html’ convention).
Snort rules are considered the gold standard of network intrusion detection signatures, and because of that, new analysts need to learn how to read and understand their logic. There are many great blog posts already on understanding Snort rules, such as this one by Rapid7, so I won’t try to rehash them here.
Instead, I wanted to show how you can use Wireshark to find which specific packet triggered a Snort rule in seconds from within the Wireshark GUI, giving you all the surrounding context that a PCAP can give you.
Set up identity and access management for command-line interface (CLI) applications with the Keycloak open source tool.
Is it possible to install the application graphically without touching the command line? I said, “Yes, it’s possible to install applications graphically,” but you need to have an installer installed on your system. You can find a software installer inbuilt, but for some reason, you are not able to access it, or maybe the software installer is missing.
From the developer of while True: learn() and Learning Factory comes yet another game with programming. Craftomation 101 brings together elements of a survival game, crafting and automation.
Another remake of a classic has landed, with Atari’s Gravitar from the 80s now being available on Steam with Gravitar: Recharged. This was was in collaboration with developers Adamvision Studios and SneakyBox, along with artist and composer Megan McDuffee.
ScummVM, the excellent open source software that bundles together multiple game engines has a new release coming and now it’s time to help test.
Action Quake 2 (AQtion), a free and open source first-person shooter that the developers say “spawned one of the most popular and influential games of all time, Counter-Strike” is now available on Steam. Originally developed in 1998 to recreate the look and feel of an action movie, having a fast pace and a semi-realistic damage system.
Endlanders and the prologue demo Endlanders : First Encounter have a graphics style that reminds me of Hyper Light Drifter and Resolutiion while offering rather different gameplay. A game that offers up a single-player RPG experience, along with a blending of deck-building and real-time grid-based combat wrapped up in a glitchy world.
Rogue Company, a free to play shooter from First Watch Games and Hi-Rez Studios recently had an update of Easy Anti-Cheat and now it’s confirmed as “Playable” (not fully Verified) on Steam Deck. The situation is a little odd for the Linux desktop though.
Since Diablo Immortal is the hot new thing, I decided to attempt to give it a go on Steam Deck. Turns out the Battle.net launcher really hates some connections, here’s a fix and a Diablo Immortal video.
For readers who prefer to shop over on GOG, their Summer Sale has just started along with some new releases.
Well well, it’s been a long time since I personally wrote a post..
The 6th of July will be my last day at my current employment having tendered my 30 day notice today. Despite having enjoyment at my current position, the reality is that my passion and focus is Serpent OS.
I’m now in a transition process and will ramp up my efforts with Serpent OS. Realistically I need to reduce the outgoing costs of the project and with your help I can gain some level of financial support as we move through the next stages of development. Worst case, I will only take on any part-time or contractual gigs, allowing my primary focus to be Serpent OS.
I’ll begin accelerating works and enabling community contribution so we can get the derailed-alpha train back on the tracks.
I have absolute faith in this project, the community and our shared ability to deliver the OS and tooling. To achieve it will require far more of my time and I’m perfectly willing to give it.
Thank you all to everyone who has been supporting the project, it is now time to deliver. Not just another run of the mill distribution but a technically competent and usable distribution that is not only different but better.
The other day I woke up and I thought “I’m going to migrate my server to OpenBSD for absolutely no reason”. And so I did. The operating system have been a pain and a pleasure simultaneously, and in this page I intend to give my experiences with it.
I will be updating this page as I have more experiences with OpenBSD. So add this page to your booksmarks!
A few months ago, Elephant Robotics launched the myPalletizer, which was a robotic ARM with 4 degrees of freedom (DOF) built around the Raspberry Pi 4. The company has just released a similar robotic ARM that has 6 degrees of freedom, 270mm for robot workspace and it’s also powered by the Raspberry Pi 4 for easy user interface.
It seems that the mechArm Pi 270 was originally showcased on Indiegogo and Kickstarter. According to Elephant Robotics, the mechArm team has officially joined them.
Hello and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week we welcome the newest sensor to our Qwiic ecosystem, the BMP384 Pressure Sensor. This little sensor is highly accurate, to the point where you can even turn it into a low-grade IMU if you want! Following that, we look at two new development boards from WIZnet that utilize the RP2040 from Raspberry Pi. Last up we’ll talk about two new wall adapter power supplies to power your next project! Enough of the intro, let’s dive in and take a closer look.
OSOR introduces the new Interactive Resource Map, developed to facilitate the visualisation of resources available on OSOR. Users can navigate the map and find all the information available on OSOR in one single place. For every country, when available, the Open Source Country Intelligence bundle, the OSS Repositories, the Specific Resources, as well as the Case Studies are displayed and linked for easy access.
The Internet is the world’s most fascinating invention to date. The journey started back in 1969 as a part of a research program and by the time of the ’90s, it became a sensation among everyone. In fact, today, if you’re reading this, you should be thankful for the Internet.
With a drastic change over the period of time, technology has changed. Today Internet has become our necessity and it is being used by more than 2 Billion population throughout the globe. So, if we go back to 1969, the journey of the internet started as a host-to-host network interaction and there’s no denying that it couldn’t have been created by any individual therefore, a team of researchers developed this idea and with the help of programmers and architecture, the Internet was born by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 1969 and was initially called as ARPANET. Now before we jump in, let’s discuss step by step right from the beginning. If you break it down, the word Internet is derived from Interconnected Networks and this simply indicates that it needs networks to be interconnected.
Many programming errors turn up when one function calls another. They can be caused, for instance, because the caller passes bad arguments or because a function is called when it shouldn’t be. This article shows the tools offered to meet these challenges by the GNU Debugger (GDB), the standard open source debugger for C and C++ programs.
The commands in this article manipulate stack frames, which represent all the information stored on the stack when one function calls another. GDB allows you to see a lot of information related to each function call, such as local variables, who called what, and much more.
Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even fucking executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware crap to achieve it.
The eight fallacies of distributed systems come from different engineers at Sun Microsystems.
The first four are from Bill Joy and Tom Lyon (co-founders of Sun). Five, six, and 7 come from L. Peter Deutsch (designer of PostScript). The last is attributed to James Gosling (lead designer of Java).
The dimension of an array can simply be defined as the number of subscripts or indices required to specify a particular element of the array. Dimension has its own meaning in the real world too and the dimension of an array can be associated with it like:- 1-dimension array can be viewed as 1-axis i.e., a line.
It’s no secret that I prefer audio over text. This weekend I wrote a quick script that converts gemini:// sites to audio. I hope that it helps people who prefer audio as well as those with reading difficulties.
?-> is a combinator that takes a predicate test and a transformer, and returns a unary procedure that transforms its argument if the predicate applies.
That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down with some examples: [...]
This sort of thing drives me absolutely insane, but its also why I have a successful business, and multiple million-dollar selling games, over a 25 year period. Its actually *really easy* to do well in any business. You just make a decent product, work hard, listen to customer feedback AND try your own product and keep refining until you and they are happy with it. It sounds too easy to be true, but the reality is 99% of people are not working this way at all.
pins removes the hassle of managing data across projects, colleagues, and teams by providing a central place for people to store, version and retrieve data. If you’ve ever chased a CSV through a series of email exchanges, or had to decide between data-final.csv and data-final-final.csv, then pins is for you.
pins stores data on a board, which can be a local folder, or on RStudio Connect or a cloud provider like Amazon S3. Each individual object (such as a dataframe, model, or another pickle-able Python object), together with some metadata, is called a pin.
Known as the father of MIDI, Smith invented widely adopted synths including the Prophet-5
Though the Prophet-5 would be Sequential’s flagship instrument, and received many updates via future releases, Smith’s greatest legacy might be the introduction of MIDI to synth technology. Standing for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, Smith’s invention (along with Roland pioneer Ikutaro Kakehashi and Sequential engineer Chet Wood) of MIDI allowed unprecedented levels of synchronization and communication between different instruments, computers and other recording equipment, which was previously incredibly difficult to achieve — particularly between equipment designed by separate manufacturers. The innovation of MIDI helped facilitate the explosion of forward-thinking programming and creativity throughout the industry of the ’80s, essentially making the future of pop music accessible to all.
Today, MIDI is ubiquitous in not only synthesizer keyboards and drum machines, but DAWs, guitar pedals, controllers, plug-ins and much more. It was the groundwork of which MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) was built, powering modern, touch-sensitive controllers such as the Roli Seaboard.
In 1981, Smith presented a paper at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in New York proposing a USI (Universal Synthesizer Interface), as a technical solution for interconnecting electronic musical instruments. With the input of several other companies, Smith developed this into MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), and went on to create the first MIDI synth, the Prophet-600, in December 1982. At the January 1983 NAMM show, MIDI debuted as a new standard, when a Prophet-600 and a Roland Jupiter 6 were connected and performed together.
Latisha Rogers, an assistant office manager at the supermarket, told The Buffalo News that she had called 911 while hiding inside the store and was whispering on the phone to avoid the gunman’s attention.
She said the dispatcher admonished her for speaking quietly on the call.
The May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 children and two teachers, prompted an announcement by Axon last week that it was working on a drone that could be operated remotely by first-responders to fire a Taser at a target about 40 feet (12 m) away.
“In light of feedback, we are pausing work on this project and refocusing to further engage with key constituencies to fully explore the best path forward,” Chief Executive Rick Smith said in a statement on Sunday.
However, a university official said he won’t be attending the school.
“He has not been admitted as a student this summer or fall,” university spokesperson Kelly Brown said Monday afternoon.
Rittenhouse, 19, of Antioch, Illinois, tweeted later Monday that he’s set to enroll in the Blinn College District in Texas, which he equated with attendance at Texas A&M.
The Washington Post suspended political reporter Dave Weigel without pay for 30 days after he retweeted a sexist joke last week and touched off a public fight on Twitter among staffers at the Jeff Bezos-owned paper.
The definitive list of supercomputers is the Top500, which is based on a single measurement: how fast a machine can solve vast numbers of equations by running software called the LINPACK benchmarks. This gives a value in float-point operations per second, or FLOPS.
But even Jack Dongarra at Top500 admits that not every supercomputer is listed, and will only feature if its owner runs the benchmarks and submits a result. “If they don’t send it in, it doesn’t get entered,” he says. “I can’t force them.”
Part of the problem here is that many academics who are selected and promoted on the basis of their research are still called “lecturers” and expected to do more and more teaching – as well as the tedious administration that increasingly goes with it (including ordering sandwiches for induction days). Just as students have learning difficulties, so lecturers have teaching difficulties. They are required to do more and more of what they are often not good at and don’t enjoy.
In the old days, this was recognised by many wise heads of department, who allowed people to trade lecturing ability for success in getting grants and publishing papers. This wisdom seems to have declined.
Very typical of journalism that is satisfied with the anecdotal, the mixed up, and never delves deeply into the matter.
According to the CBS/YouGov poll, 44% of GOP voters and 15% of Democratic voters feel that frequent mass shootings are an inescapable reality in the U.S., where there are more guns than people.
That view appears to be out of step with the vast majority of U.S. society, however. The new survey shows that U.S. adults overall—regardless of party or political affiliation—believe by a 72% to 28% margin that mass shootings are “something we can prevent and stop if we really tried.”
Motor vehicle traffic deaths
Number of deaths: 40,698
Deaths per 100,000 population: 12.4
Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality Data (2020) via CDC WONDER
All firearm deaths
Number of deaths: 45,222
Deaths per 100,000 population: 13.7
Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality Data (2020) via CDC WONDER
The switchover, which happened in 2017, stems from both a reduction in vehicle-related deaths and a grim uptick in gun-related fatalities. From 2000 to 2020, the number of firearm-related deaths in the one-to-24-year-old age group increased from 7.3 per 100,000 people to 10.28 per 100,000, age-adjusted data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal. During the same period, motor-vehicle-related deaths declined from 13.62 to 8.31 per 100,000.
An attempt to develop a server that is compatible with the AOL 3.0 clients (originally released back in 1996).
Currently developed by a small team (11 people in total), entirely in Python, the “Re-AOL” project is not yet open source — but, according to some of the developers on the project’s discord channel, the lead developer “will be working towards open sourcing the server side eventually.”
The software connects more deeply into core driving systems than prior versions that were limited to the vehicle’s infotainment displays for playing music and showing maps. While Apple’s car software has been in vehicles since 2014 is currently available in more than 600 models – even including a few motorcycles – it is largely separate from the vehicle’s own operating systems. Vehicles owners must leave the system for even basic functions like adjusting a car’s climate controls, a shortcoming the updated system is designed to address.
This is sometimes called the power button, and sometimes the TouchID. It is a sort of combined power-lock-unlock button. It has something to do with turning the laptop on and off, putting it to sleep and waking it up again, if you press it in the right way for the right amount of time. I understand that it can also be trained to recognize my fingerprints, which sounds like something I would want to do only a little more than stabbing myself in the eye with a fork.
If you tap the mystery button momentarily, the screen locks, which is very convenient, I guess, if you have to pee a lot. But they put the mystery button right above the delete key, and several times a day I fat-finger the delete key, tap the corner of the mystery button, and the screen locks. Then I have to stop what I am doing and type in my password to unlock the screen again.
With masked email, the focus is on auto-generated random, unique identifiers. Think 4k9xkeo@emailservice.com or even siftflask.3242@emailservice.com. You don’t need to come up with your own aliases, thus streamlining their use. The suggested aliases also completely obscure your email address, which inserting periods into your username (e.g., random.username@gmail.com) or adding a plus sign and an extra phrase (e.g. randomusername+alias@gmail.com) don’t achieve. You should also get streamlined controls to block incoming mail or disable the forwarding address if it gets flooded with unwanted email.
The result is a faster, easier way to maintain anonymity in your contact info—and for sites that default to email addresses as usernames, your login info too. With the added benefit of integration with some browsers and password managers, email masking saves time and reduces the hassles of the DIY route.
Germany must show true leadership and set a strong precedent in the EU against the use of mass data retention to fight serious crimes. Mass data retention is one of the most privacy-intrusive instruments that treat everybody as criminals by presumption. It is high time that European governments implement rights-respecting and proportionate solutions in police investigations. Read the open letter EDRi and 12 civil society organisations sent to the German ministers of the Federal Ministry of the Interior to urge them to stop the use of data retention practices in crime investigations.
Yesterday was the deadline to table amendments to the LIBE/IMCO report on the AI Act. This is the proposal by the Parliament’s competent committees to change the Commission’s original proposal on “Harmonised rules on Artificial Intelligence”; members of these committees will next vote on compromises based on the proposed amendments, following which the text will be voted on in plenary (likely not before the end of 2022).
My group made sure that a strong ban on biometric mass surveillance will be considered. This is a demand I have consistently been making throughout my mandate, but the need and urgency for such a ban became even clearer this month, after I met with Alexander Isavnin.
The Chromium team is planning on phasing out Manifest V2, its current set of extension APIs, in favor of Manifest V3. Manifest V3 involves giving extensions less access to page contents. Instead, extensions use new APIs that involve giving the browser simple instructions for page modification. The browser performs those instructions using its own logic; extensions themselves can’t access page contents.
According to Washington, when the platform is up and running you can register your spouse by providing their ID, a marriage certificate where available and or pictures from your lobola. So pretty much what we expected to be part of the registration procedure but there are some concerns we had and we shared them with Washington to see how they will be addressing these. I mean… after all this is sensitive information that is going on in a public forum…
Opinion article argues: “Yes, the gun lobby and weapons manufacturers fuel the violence with easily available assault-style weapons, whose small caliber 5.56 mm cartridges make them largely useless for hunting. Yes, the lax gun laws and risible background checks are partially to blame. But America also fetishizes guns.”
Campaigns for greater defense spending accompany every international crisis. David Ignatius, the Washington Post’s leading apologist for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, is currently beating the drums for a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines that would cost more than $2 trillion over the next two decades and would increase the risk of nuclear war. In April, Ignatius argued that the “risks of nuclear war” created “extra urgency in developing a new generation of doomsday weapons that could maintain deterrence.” He praised the Pentagon’s budget request for 2023, which emphasized “stronger nuclear weapons,” including a new-generation intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) known as the Sentinel, a new B-21 manned bomber, and an exotic mix of drones and manned fighters known as Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD.” The fact that nuclear weapons have no utilitarian value is completely lost on Ignatius and others.
Ignatius’ case for greater defense spending echoes the case made by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III. Austin spoke at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii in April and summarized his views in a Post oped last month. Austin wants greater funding in order to expand U.S. security “not just through air, land and sea but also space and cyberspace.” His inexplicable label for this approach is “integrated deterrence,” designed to address the changing nature of warfare “that stretches from the heavens to cyberspace and far into the oceans’ depths.” Austin wants to invest in quantum computing and artificial intelligence to “enable us to find not just one needle in one haystack but ten needles in ten haystacks.” I have no idea what the Secretary of Defense is talking about, but Ignatius proclaims his support for all of it.
Ominously enough, he added, “All around the world today, it is possible to see the groundwork being laid for future forms of blowback.” On page 10, he brought up — and remember he was writing this as the previous century ended — the name of “a former protege of the United States,” one Osama bin Laden. In the 1980s, that rich young Saudi had been part of Washington’s secret war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, forming a group to battle the Russians that he called al-Qaeda (“the Base”) to battle the Red Army. By the time Chalmers wrote his book, the Russian war there was long over, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and bin Laden had turned against Washington. He was then believed responsible for the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On page 11, Chalmers added that such “retaliation” for American acts was “undoubtedly not yet at an end in the case of bin Laden.”
He summed things up this way: “Because we live in an increasingly interconnected international system, we are all, in a sense, living in a blowback world.”
The Washington Post and CNN reported Monday evening that the email, written by Trump campaign Georgia operations director Robert Sinners, instructed the fake electors to tell security at the state capitol that they had appointments with two state senators.
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” Sinners wrote.
“Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion,” Sinners wrote.
Russia’s UN ambassador has stormed out of a UN Security Council meeting after the European Council president blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for causing a global food crisis.
Charles Michel said Russia was using food supplies as a “stealth missile” against the developing world, forcing people into poverty.
Enrique Tarrio, the national chairman of the Proud Boys during the events of Jan. 6, 2021, has been charged with seditious conspiracy, in a new, superseding indictment filed Monday. Tarrio is already in custody, with a federal judge ruling recently that he should remain locked up until trial.
The new indictment (embedded below) brings Tarrio and four other Proud Boys into dubious company, joining Stewart Rhodes and a slew of militia members from the Oath Keepers, who also face sedition charges in relation to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
The new [insurrection]-related indictments against Proud Boys members are among the most serious filed so far, but they aren’t the first of their kind.
“The company is interested in Lithuania’s latest solutions in the digital field because few countries have such a legal framework,” she added.
A law recently adopted by the Lithuanian parliament will allow diversification of data storage in public and private data centres and on the cloud, she said, noting that Lithuania stores data not only domestically but also at NATO’s headquarters in Brussels.
The Marines are the first to fight, and the first to establish an innovation-focused unit connected to experts in cyber, automation, contested logistics, machine learning and more ― in New York.
The Corps has established its Marine Innovation Unit and its headquarters in Newburgh, New York. That’s an effort to tap directly into the technology, entrepreneurship and tech-enabled colleges, universities and people in the Empire State.
More than 11,000 former members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) members on Sunday took qualifying exams that will allow them to join the Philippine National Police (PNP).
The assailants stormed the church in the midst of the Sunday service, opening fire at the worshippers, local media reported. Some explosives were also used, but initial reports suggest the majority of injuries were due to gunshots.
Nigeria is still fighting a 12-year-long jihadist insurgency in its northeast and heavily armed criminal gangs often carry out raids and mass kidnappings in the northwest.
But large attacks in the country’s southwest are relatively rare although kidnappings have become increasingly common.
Boko Haram jihadists in the northeast have targeted churches in the past. The conflict has killed 40,000 and displaced two million more.
Since 2016, rival Islamist terror groups affiliated with the Islamic State group and with al-Qaida have spilled into the country from the north with deadly consequences.
IS first arrived in the Sahel in 2015. Since then, terrorist groups under the IS umbrella have expanded their range from the desert interior to the Atlantic Coast. The groups have killed or kidnapped thousands of civilians and attacked military bases across the region.
Four years ago, the German parliament passed a Passenger Data Act, and since then, more and more travellers have been dragnetted. Federal police and customs take over „follow-up measures“.
Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv for the first time in over a month on Sunday. This comes as Russian and Ukrainian forces continue to battle over control of the eastern city of Severodonetsk and Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning Western nations against supplying longer-range missile systems to Ukraine. “The longer this war goes on, the much more difficult it is to end it,” says Katrina vanden Heuvel, editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine and columnist for The Washington Post. Vanden Heuvel says U.S. corporate media is responsible for what she calls a “one-sided debate” on Ukraine, which is greenlighting unprecedented spending on weapons over the importance of negotiations.
If the first three episodes are any indication, season 3 of “The Boys” is all about peeling back the layers of the characters who haven’t had the focus yet. We learn the origin story of Black Noir’s mask and his silent, aloof behavior. We find out more about M.M.’s (Laz Alonso) past with supes. Perhaps most importantly, we get the revelation that Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) isn’t quite as noble as the first season made her seem. When Butcher (Karl Urban) finds out she knows about some sort of weapon that could potentially kill Homelander, he forces her to spill the beans.
I decided Ming’s rumor was probably correct and Apple’s denial was very suspect, maybe referring to service launch timing more than the literal facts of the matter. It was even possible that Apple had intended to make the satellite announcement as part of its iPhone 13 launch, but then pulled it for whatever reason.
I began to ask around about both the technical capability of satellite service somehow being able to be easily added to mobile phones and also about Apple. Fortunately I had a hunch where to start, with Qualcomm.
The San Francisco Chronicle charges for subscriptions. How much does a subscription cost? This is an impossible question to answer, even for current subscribers. The Chronicle advertises several different prices for new subscribers.
The only public information the Chronicle shares about its permanent subscription rates raises more questions than answers.
On Oct. 1, 2021 — the same day Michael Gableman issued subpoenas for election materials in Wisconsin — Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan sent One America News host Christina Bobb copies of Arizona “audit” subpoenas, writing, “In case this helps you with anything in [Wisconsin] coming up.” His email also includes messaging language and details about the Arizona ballot review that he had written in response to a reporter’s article about the review.
Designed to reduce roadkill and help animals roam more freely, wildlife bridges have become popular from Canada to Australia. In France they have a long history. aprr built its first, near Fontainebleau, in 1960. Early versions were rudimentary. Today’s models, such as the one under construction to connect forests near Chagny, in Burgundy, are deluxe: 25 metres wide, complete with a pond for frogs and other amphibians, opaque wooden-fenced sides to shield the passing critters from the glare of headlights, and carefully laid piles of rocks and branches and landscaped vegetation. Pedestrians are banned.
One of the primary goals of an International Dark Sky Place is to encourage communities and protected areas to become environmental leaders by communicating the importance of dark skies to the general public and providing an example of what is possible with proper stewardship. Depending on the location, resources, experience, and knowledge of staff and volunteers, International Dark Sky Places are committed to providing various types of engaging outreach and education every year. These diverse events incorporate various values, such as astronomy, wildlife, energy efficiency, safety, and human health. However, as we saw over the last few years, the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to adapt to keep the dark-sky initiative going. Despite this novel disturbance, a review of nearly 150 International Dark Sky Place 2020-2021 Annual Reports revealed spectacular examples of creativity and persistence. As we close out our review cycle and reflect on the work of our Program advocates, it is clear that the dark-sky initiative is alive and well despite the significant worldly challenges that we all face. With the help of our advocates’ diligence and perseverance, we are starting to reframe the way we are approaching the Program to increase its global reach and impact, such as incorporating our holistic Values-Centered Approach, as well as enhancing our vision through the inspiration of our advocates and International Dark Sky Place candidates.
Juan Ignacio Barragán Villarreal said the new water schedule would replace the “Water for Everyone” program, which had seen water cuts for one day a week rotating around different areas of the city since March 22.
The battle for water in Nuevo León has been long running: the state declared a state of emergency on February 3 due to a lack of rain, which has caused a shortage of water in the Cerro Prieto and La Boca dams.
This week came a measure of last resort. The local water agency began choking the taps of the worst offenders, limiting the water flow of those who flouted water conservation rules, paid the fines, and kept on flouting. Their showers will henceforth slow to a trickle. Sprinklers will be rendered unusable. Good luck refilling the pool. Or the koi pond.
Biggs, 72, still remembers when the family property had a thriving orchard. When he was a teenager, he planted pecan and orange trees, while his father grew alfalfa and raised cows and sheep.
“Now, it’s all dirt,” Biggs, a lifelong California resident, told CNN. “Central California is dying. We’re becoming a wasteland. A hot and dry wasteland.”
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, which serves communities in western Los Angeles County including Calabasas and Agoura Hills, has installed four water flow restrictors since Wednesday, KABC reported.
That beginning set the tone for the season. I was invited to a shindig at a farm outside of Charleston, West Virginia. Rock bands, Rebel Yell whiskey, a few hundred folks and two barbecued pigs in a pit. There was coleslaw and potato salad too. And baked beans. A guy who called himself Mad Dog befriended me for the weekend and we had a hollering time. The farm was owned by a guy who was part of a group that smuggled weed into Key West and up the coast. He was making a lot of money moving a few hundred pounds a week. Later that summer when weed was hard to find he helped us all out with a pound he had stashed just for such a time.
The first Saturday in December a friend and I hopped on a bus to Mobile, Alabama. Snow was beginning to fall. Back then Greyhound had a deal that let you ride as far as you could in twenty-four hours for twenty-five bucks. Our trip took us from Maryland to Mobile. It was early evening when we arrived in Mobile and we were hungry. My friend, whom I’ll call Dorey until I ask her permission to use her real name, grew up in Macon, Georgia. She knew the south; its pleasures and its ways, its racism and its rationales. We gritted down on some fried chicken and greens, bought a six pack of Dixie beer, found a cheap motel where we stole a couple tokes each of a joint in the bathroom of our room careful to blow the smoke up into the ceiling fan and away into the night, turned on the television and made love. Southern nights.
54 years ago today, June 6, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated and America turned into a darker, meaner place in the five decades that have followed.
In his expanded role, Rosen “will have overall accountability for safety and security around on-platform abuse as well as the security of our products, infrastructure and company information – focused on both internal and external risks,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Facebook’s previous chief security officer, Alex Stamos, left in 2018.
Google has been ordered to pay former NSW deputy premier and Monaro MP John Barilaro $715,000 in defamation damages over two YouTube videos hosted by YouTube.
The videos were uploaded by comedian Jordan Shanks, otherwise known as FriendlyJordies on YouTube over September and October 2020. Justice Steven Rares stated In these videos Shanks carried out a “relentless and vicious campaign” which traumatised the former politician
Significantly, the case went beyond merely a sense of upset over being targeted for criticism. The case heard that Shanks’ videos engaged in vulgar and offensive language, portrayed Barilaro as a corrupt conman, and further included racial slurs about his Italian heritage.
Here’s where Google comes in; Barilaro’s office reported the videos to YouTube as violating the website’s stated code of conduct policies. Yet, the videos remained online.
The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to declare war. Since the presidency of George Washington, it’s invoked that power 11 times to fight nations in five distinct conflicts—the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II. In each case, the president had to first request congressional authorization either in writing or in person. He would explain his justification for why the U.S. should enter the conflict at hand. Congress would then put it to a vote—majority support was required, but most declarations were passed unanimously or near-unanimously—and pass a declaration of war in the form of a bill or joint resolution.
Amnesty International Wednesday urged Croatian authorities to release Turkmenistan-born Russian activist Aysoltan Niyazova because she faces a “great risk of suffering serious abuse, including torture and other ill-treatment, should she be extradited to Turkmenistan.’
Niyazov is a member of Pussy Riot, a Russian performance and protest group. Niyazov traveled to Croatia this week to participate in the anti-war Riot Days tour and was arrested in Zagreb based on an Interpol red notice issued by Turkmenistan in 2002. The notice stated that Niyazov is wanted on charges of alleged embezzlement of funds ($40 Million) belonging to the country’s central bank.
Unlike other social platforms, like Instagram or TikTok, it is primarily devoted to news-sharing and is a space where journalists can talk to and learn from other journalists. Those who dismiss Twitter as a distraction or seek to stop reporters from using it should keep this in mind.
Humans get stuff wrong. We do it all the time. We’re biased and blind and overconfident. We’re bad at paying attention and terrible at remembering. We’re prone to constructing self-serving narratives after the fact; worse, we often convince ourselves they are true. We’re slightly better at identifying these distortions in others than we are in our own thinking, but not by much. And we tend to attribute others’ mistakes to malice, even as we attribute our own to well-intentioned error.
All of this makes the very concept of misinformation—and its more sinister cousin, disinformation—slippery at best. Spend 10 minutes listening to any think tank panel or cable news segment about the scourge, and it will quickly become clear that many people simply use the terms to mean “information, whether true or false, that I would rather people not possess or share.” This is not a good working definition, and certainly not one on which any kind of state action should be based.
Online debates are waste of time. They are no good for anything but for trolls to spend time and satisfy their need to be seen. I try to avoid them, and I try to simply not get involved with them as much as I can. I also have been blocking and avoiding interaction with people who I see as trolls so I don’t unintentionally entrap myself in a meaningless conversation with them.
If the law eventually goes into effect, it would force social media companies to change how they moderate posts, which would likely exacerbate problems with misinformation, hate speech and other distasteful content on these platforms.
“You may think there is one less voice in Hong Kong, but if I stay, it would only be a matter of time before I am silenced or forced to change topics. The choice I have made allows me to continue – continue to have a voice in the world that supports Hongkongers,” the artist wrote.
Before the fateful date arrives, the CCP goes to extra lengths to cover up any mention of the events in 1989. It is a known fact that the Chinese censor the numbers June 3, June 4 and Tiananmen Square. Any attempt to search the events generally results in blank pages on the Chinese internet. Even the giant [Internet] providers follow the CCP directives, which is a prerequisite to tapping the vast Chinese market.
Another anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown has come and gone. This year – like last year – the authorities mobilised thousands of police officers to ensure that no organised event took place. Officials closed Victoria Park and ramped up stop and searches, threatening anyone who looked “suspicious” with possible national security law violations, such as “sedition.” Intimidation.
Police largely thwarted attempts by Hongkongers to mark the 33rd anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown on Saturday, making six arrests, shutting down the traditional commemorative vigil venue, and warning that those illegally gathering risk up to five years in prison.
But just as Li’s career was gaining momentum, partly because his major rival Viya disappeared from the industry for tax evasion last year, a seemingly innocuous move during one of his livestreams last Friday (June 3) has become the biggest crisis he has ever faced. During the session, Li and a co-host displayed a layered ice cream flanked by round cookies and topped with black stick that appeared to be made of chocolate, all of which made the dessert look like a tank, according to the Wall Street Journal. Almost immediately after Li presented the ice cream, his livestream was suspended, said the outlet.
The episode showcases the heightened risks for business figures in China, where political redlines are becoming almost impossible to keep track of. In Li’s case, the timing of the appearance of the tank-shaped dessert is the main problem. On June 4th, 1989, the government ordered the military to quell student protests in Beijing. A video showing an unidentified man facing down a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square made images of tanks into a symbol for supporters of the students.
Notes: John Cobb is an eminent theologian, philosopher and environmentalist. He taught at the Claremont Colleges in California, has authored over 50 books, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Lisa Wells is a poet and author based in Portland, Oregon. Her conversation with Mickey Huff took place as a Zoom event in the summer of 2021, sponsored by KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA) and Project Censored.
He accused Moscow of “false equivalence” in comparing independent US journalists to the sanctioned Russian media, whom he described as “propaganda arms of the Russian government.”
The Dicle Fırat Journalists’ Association (DFG) released a report on rights violations against journalists in May.
Systematic violations against journalists continued throughout the month, according to the report.
Spanish National High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz summoned Pompeo along with former US counterintelligence official William Evanina as witnesses in the case.
Mr Evanina has allegedly previously confessed to accessing security camera footage and audio recordings from inside the Ecuadorian embassy where Mr Assange lived for seven years until 2019.
In December 2019, before a gathering at the Chifley Research Centre, Albanese also referred to Assange. “You don’t prosecute journalists for doing their job.” In December 2021, he also expressed the view that the “ongoing pursuit of Mr Assange” served no evident “purpose” – “enough is enough”.
That said, prior to winning office, the Labor opposition was hardly making disruptive ripples on the subject. “As an Australian, he is entitled to consular assistance,” came the anaemic remark from Senator Penny Wong and opposition spokesperson for foreign affairs in April. “We also expect the government to keep seeking assurances from both the UK and US that he’s treated fairly and humanely … Consular matters are regularly raised with counterparts, they are regularly raised and this one would be no different.”
In Failed Crusade: America and the tragedy of post-communist Russia (2001), the late Russian scholar Stephen Cohen has written an explosive text that, understood, can provide the necessary critical historiography of Russia’s “time of troubles” from 1985-2000. Cohen enables his readers to see two things clearly: the direct link between the current NATO-backed and cultivated war in Ukraine and profoundly disturbing evidence piled to the heavens that the US took advantage of Russia when it was “on its knees” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Failed Crusade puts the spotlight on one of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century: the deceptive and cruel “shock therapy” applied to the great “civilizational and cultural space known as the Russian world” (Sergei Lavrov) in the 1990s.
Reading this text is almost emotionally unbearable. Most of us, I think, do not have much of a clue about the extent and depth of the suffering of the Russian people after the collapse of communism as well as the significance of the Russian loss of dignity and civilizational esteem. The US “missionary crusade” – to impose a “market economy” and “democracy” on the poor, immature Russians – was aimed at turning Russia into a second-rate Eurasian country without great power status. Once its back was broken, the US could use NATO as a bludgeoning instrument to expand its membership to countries bordering Russia. The US deceived Russia – Gorbachev had received US commitment to not move NATO “an inch” closer to his country’s borders. Once defanged, the US must have simply assumed that Russia would be their plaything, a kind of eternal Yeltsin puppet. Flattery and head-pats would suffice.
“Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse,” one former church official said.
Yet another American apocalypse, you might say — linking the SBC with institutions as diverse as the military, the Catholic Church, Hollywood, and of course, politicians. Whatever such institutions stand for, whatever their values, what is suddenly on public display is the fact that these values don’t apply to the institutions themselves. Hierarchical power rules and officially espoused values morph, essentially, into public-relations clichés.
There was drama at the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) as CEO Adelaide Chikunguru was said to have stormed out of a meeting with employees according to a report by New Zimbabwe. The issue stems from the introduction of the Paterson Job Evaluating System which essentially places job decision-making into six groups or bands which are policy-making, programming, interpretive, routine, automatic and defined.
The unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 is something of a spontaneous and idiosyncratic literary critic. In the novel’s first pages, she avows the pleasure of sitting next to an unopened book, luxuriating in its untapped mysteries. When she is inclined to crack a spine, the words on the left-hand pages seem vastly superior to those on the right, where they appear “far too eager, overbearing, and yes somewhat ingratiating.” She claims to prefer reading about the exploits and interests of men; dissimilitude renders them novel sites of discovery, another species traversing a disparate, more expansive world of “train stations…foreign ports…revolving doors.” Women, on the other hand, “were sort of ghostly” and obscure, their bodies committed to domestic drudgery, while “their eyes were fixed on something else, something I couldn’t fathom.” It can be more unsettling to feel alienation where one expects resonance.
A New York Times report found that in August 2020, officers from five law enforcement agencies gathered in Uvalde to role-play and train on how to stop a shooter. It was at the same time school officials were updating security protocols and hiring more officers into the school district’s police department.
This still didn’t stop the outcome on May 24.
Dadio said she wanted to withhold judgment on what went wrong in Uvalde until all the facts are known.
The Turkish state is deliberately attacking the Kurdish women’s movement. Female politicians and activists are arrested or murdered. In particular, women who became symbolic figures in the Kurdish freedom struggle are a thorn in the side of the AKP/MHP government. Sakine Cansız, Leyla Güven, Sebahat Tuncel, Aysel Doğan, Ayşe Gökkan and Aysel Tuğluk are just a few of them. The list could be extended endlessly. Recently, political repression in Turkey has been directed particularly strongly against the Free Women’s Movement (Tevgera Jinên Azad, TJA), an umbrella organization of Kurdish women activists and politicians.
“Defund the police!” people shouted as cops continued to kill unarmed black people in ways that went far past “subjectively defensive” into “objectively racist.” Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for ten minutes, personifying 300 years of white oppression of black people. Floyd died, suspected of nothing more than passing a counterfeit $20 bill at a local store.
Paul Street argues it is important to reject the approach of Democratic Party “elites” and leading establishment “pro-choice” organizations regarding the upcoming SCOTUS decision.
With the leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization formally overruling Roe v. Wade, progressives’ worst fears about an ever more reactionary Supreme Court appear set to come true.
I noticed a little bit of visitors/readers coming to my other blog via “theforest.link”, so I checked it out, and it’s a site that prompts you to “go for a walk”, and then that button takes you to a sort of random Smol Web site.
Several decisions made during the 1980s, in the infancy of IPv4, resulted in making these addresses ‘special’ and unavailable for ordinary addressing purposes. Even though the reasons behind those decisions have not been borne out over the past decades, the addresses have, perhaps surprisingly, continued to be treated specially. That has resulted in a substantial amount of numbering resources going to waste.
GAO said Congress needs to come up with a national broadband plan to rectify what it says is a “fragmented, overlapping patchwork” of broadband accessibility funding, though the White House has not decided whether it plans to do that or not.
That is according to a new GAO report that identified more than 100 federal programs — overseen by 15 agencies — that can be used to expand access.
There are so, so, so many different discussions going on concerning internet platform regulations, and so many of the different ideas conflict with one another. But there is a general agreement that the US really, really needs a federal privacy law. Without it, we just bounce back and forth between (1) EU and other nations’ privacy laws effectively defining how the internet should work (in a way that has had tons of negative consequences, and little proven benefit), (2) various states pushing half-baked and equally problematic laws, leading to a patchwork of nonsense that’s impossible to comply with and… (3) a never ending string of data breaches and privacy scandals.
Throughout 2021, the #KeepItOn coalition witnessed governments in Uganda, Zambia, Russia, Niger, and the Republic of the Congo hit the kill switch during elections, disconnecting millions of people from the internet — and their civic rights.
When governments shut down the internet during elections, they rob people of their opportunity to participate in the democratic process. Without a fair, open, accessible internet, people — from voters to monitors, journalists to political opponents — cannot fully exercise their rights to access information, communicate, and hold authorities accountable for their actions.
In commentary published in the journal Nature, two leading academics from UNSW Sydney examine the implications of patents being awarded to an AI entity.
Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] (IP) law specialist Associate Professor Alexandra George and AI expert, Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor Toby Walsh argue that patent law as it stands is inadequate to deal with such cases and requires legislators to amend laws around IP and patents — laws that have been operating under the same assumptions for hundreds of years.
You may have heard that, on Friday, Mariah Carey and Sony Music were sued by a guy named Andy Stone (pretty sure a different Andy Stone than the one who leads communications for Facebook) for allegedly infringing on his song “All I Want For Christmas, Is You.” What you might not have heard is that this is possibly the dumbest, most ridiculous copyright lawsuit I’ve seen in ages, and I see a lot of really dumb copyright lawsuits. You can read the nine-page lawsuit yourself, and marvel at the fact that two lawyers actually put their names on a complaint so frivolous. My biggest question is whether the lawyers or Stone will end up paying the legal fees of Carey and Sony, not to mention the sanctions against the lawyers.
In 2019, three men from the UK received prison sentences totaling more than 17 years for selling illegal access to the Premier League’s matches. Scheme ‘mastermind’ Steven King was sentenced to seven years and four months but has now been told that if he doesn’t pay back £963,000 within three months, six years and eight months will be added to his custodial sentence.
Popular stream-ripping site Yout.com has rejected a deal from Brazil’s public prosecutor to ‘resolve’ a criminal lawsuit. The agreement would allow the site’s operator to avoid a prison sentence with relative ease. However, that would come at a significant financial cost and a permanent ban on Brazilian visitors.
Also available via the Gemini protocol at:
Over HTTP:
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QmUHyt2h55HQWeaVabwyYVwNxDnD1y2BCaRtGT3M7BbM8b |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmaQ6A2theF1is7AxUJ1m5PLhoP5wTXYWuev2esUnH75JT |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmXZqMj9z2GaRudsAQ65w97yJAgpMvKbkxxUvhXiHxhreT |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmegJ7XJXpyLhSNCGrphrQei9oxG8KCP3L5gPzVifWcoHW |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmNiz8GDRiJfgdK5yno7ejMZmzJJ4J29MAB9VyTbggoUVr |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmWadgWD5unSSwrBbt7NxF493goapv1JfwJtCzghKGG2Mw |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmXwAuCYybHjHWGFBHo51oVVoQJDDehnJiAj15HKykzPUm |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmbAXzWhJt2wXYk16TrdbuNr881tgeHaZXJaov6Bv6G59e |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmNfDQ75xBxSAamisMxhTjpn9Au6GFQzWE4dr1y8fZzXpu
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be guiding you to the best alternatives to all of the Adobe Creative Cloud tools. Then we will be discussing a new phone that’s guaranteed to get your open source blood flowing. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
The usual love for the Mars helicopter and KDE, rare praise for Mozilla, and fingers pointed at DuckDuckGo and Brave. Plus apprehension about Broadcom’s VMware acquisition, and Intel’s new “features”.
The Mali-G57 GPU part of the Valhall family, and found in several Arm processors such as MediaTek MT8192 and MT8195 SoC powering some Chromebooks, is now supported by the Panfrost open-source driver with a fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation.
Last year, Collabora updated Panfrost with support for OpenGL ES 3.1 on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost (Mali G31, G52, G76) GPUs, and also announced having started working on Valhall GPUs. One part of the work was done in the summer of 2021 with some reverse-engineering work on Mali-G78 GPU’s instruction set, and this has culminated with a fully-conformant OpenGL3.1 for Mali-G57 GPU.
Welcome, my friend. Today, you will learn how to install Ant on CentOS 9 Stream. Thanks to this tool, we will be able to automate the process of compiling and creating Java packages. Let’s take a look at it.
When you are transferring a large number of files that take some time, the rsync command shows a blank output.
The cursor just blinks without any information.
This leaves you wondering whether the files are being transferred or its just trying to connect to the remote server.
The good thing is that rsync is a versatile tool and it allows to show the status of file transfers.
The Linux terminal is not going to become obsolete anytime soon, so it’s time to embrace it. If you’re ready to take that step, Konsole is a good place to start.
Using a Linux operating system distribution is not just about simplifying and solving technical problems in a flawless manner but also unraveling the technical mysteries behind them. One of the technical mysteries this article seeks to bring to light is the prominent use of the Linux rm command.
As per its man page, the rm command is a member of the GNU Coreutils package and comes pre-installed in all Linux operating system distributions.
It serves a primary goal of getting rid of files and directories no longer required in the Linux file system. This command is manually executed by a Sudoer/root user of the Linux OS system, especially when dealing with files stored under the root file system.
We are still not in a utopia to have all the rolling-out versions of packages inside solo repositories for which we have to use a different medium to install them.
Today, you will learn how to list all the installed packages from Apt, Deb, Snap, and Flatpak on Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 738 for the week of May 29 – June 4, 2022.
Orange Pi has presented the Orange Pi 800, its version of the Raspberry Pi 400. The Orange Pi 800 comes with a Rockchip RK3399 SoC, 4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage and a 6-row keyboard, among other features.
Orange Pi has introduced the Orange Pi 800, its version of the Raspberry Pi 400. Like many of Orange Pi’s Raspberry Pi alternatives, the Orange Pi 800 is a single-board computer attached to a keyboard. Accordingly, you only need an external monitor to use the Orange Pi 800, or a mouse if needed. As Orange Pi’s marketing images show, the Orange Pi 800 contains a 6-row keyboard with half-sized directional keys and three status LEDs.
Additionally, the Orange Pi 800 relies on the Rockchip RK3399, a chipset with two ARM Cortex-A72 CPU cores, followed by four Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali-T860 GPU. Also, the Orange Pi 800 has 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 64 GB of eMMC flash storage and a host of I/O.
German embedded systems company iesy’s ESP32 OSM-0F is an ESP32-based solder-on LGA system-on-module that complies with SGET OSM Size-0 (30x15mm) form factor, offers WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and more.
The SGET Open Standard Module (OSM) standard defines four module sizes, namely Size-0 (30x15mm), Size-S (30x30mm), Size-M (45x30mm), and Size-L (45x45mm), and all the modules we’ve covered so far were powered by a Linux-capable processor. But it’s more challenging, albeit not impossible, to design a Linux-capable OSM Size-0 module, and that form factor is better suited to microcontroller-class chips like ESP32. (Technically, ESP32 can run Linux, but it’s more for show that any practical applications)
Recently, I was browsing Hacker News and came upon Jakob Greenfeld’s piece *The simple system I’m using to stay in touch with hundreds of people*[1]. Feel free to read this piece, as it’s not very long and it could prove useful to some people. A quick summary of it is that Jakob managed to implement Derek Sivers’s method of staying in touch with hundreds of people[2], by which you categorize people into four levels of importance that dictate how often you should contact them. Sort of like MySpace’s top friends feature but even more punishing.
Although Greenfeld’s piece was genuinely interesting, I came out of it rather disappointed. For as good as his method of keeping in touch with people may be, it’s not something I would feel comfortable doing myself or being a part of.
For one, I have no desire to categorize people into different levels of importance. I don’t even think it’s possible to do that, and I’m sure the people I’m contacting wouldn’t be comfortable knowing that they’re merely a D list acquaintance to me. Sivers refers to the D list people as “demoted,” which surprised me at first until I found out he’s an entrepeneur. Founder of CD Baby, in fact. Weird way of refering to people when you’re supposed to sincerely care how they are when you contact them, but I guess the entrepeneurial mindset doesn’t see anything wrong with that.
In documents seen by Daily Maverick, a Chinese delegation at a top Antarctic meeting claimed rising polar bear numbers were among the reasons for stalling a global push to save emperor penguins. But while experts warn the species may go extinct in decades, China has not budged: based on ‘small’ threats – and claims by a controversial Canadian scientist who may have produced no peer-reviewed work on the links between ice loss and polar bears, or even penguins.
This was not sustainable, though once I lost the weight I was able to keep it off for around a year, but then covid happened and being stationary for long stretches isn’t known for being the best physical exercise.
[...]However, I recently discovered, or really rediscovered, that physical exercise is actually really good at making you less fat.
I know! crazy! who would have thought?!
But really, losing fat is really only a cool side effect that comes with working out. After only a few days of regular exercise I felt a tremendous sense of contentment, I wasn’t bogged down with sadness whenever I was alone like I was prior, and I felt like I had more energy at the start of each day.
Falling asleep at night was so much easier and I slept deeper, feeling rested when I woke up.
This tracked data helps the likes of Google and Facebook earn billions and billions of dollars a year in advertising revenue, as they use the information to target adverts at us.
DOE leads NSCI, and its Industry and Agency Council targets five agencies: the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA.
A pair of cotton top tamarin twins are one of the world’s most endangered primates with less than 2,000 breeding animals estimated to be left in the wild.
Stirring the pot, Musk recently slammed current media’s marked disinterest in who teen sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s prominent clients were…
[...]
Musk knows perfectly well that it is not so much that no one in current media “cares” as that most of them have a heavy investment in protecting “good guys” like Bill Gates — around whom rumors swirl in this area — and other icons as well. A bit of protective censorship can come in very handy. Stay tuned.
The richest person in the world has taken a swipe at the media over allegedly being disinterested in investigating the suspected clients of the alleged sex trafficking ring run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
How long will it take for my European Patent application to be granted?
A machine called DABUS is the rightful inventor of a light beacon and a beverage container, computer scientist Stephen Thaler will argue to the Federal Circuit on Monday in a battle over whether or not a human must be the inventor of a patent.
Thaler built the artificial intelligence “creativity machine,” which he says should be listed as the inventor of two patents. The test case for AI inventorship has arrived at the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit after losses around the world in the UK, Europe, and Australia. Only a court in South Africa has sided with Thaler.
Early last week, largely the same Apple-led crowd that is behind the “Save Our Standards” campaign (whose deceptive lobbying I’ve recently called out) sent a letter to Sophia Muirhead, the General Counsel of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). I’m in possession of that six-page PDF, which is dated May 3 and entitled Industry and Public Interest Support for Maintaining 2015 IEEE-SA Bylaw Updates. It’s a pressure group effort ahead of a (fairly confidential) meeting of the IEEE-SA’s Standards Board; the letter was allegedly authored by outside counsel for Apple; and from what I heard, it’s more or less unprecedented for industry players to lobby the IEEE in that fashion.
It looks like some folks are panicking, though a little over a year ago they had reason to celebrate: the Biden DOJ silently downgraded a letter that the Trump DOJ (specifically, then-Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim) had sent to IEEE, urging it to undo significant parts of its 2015 policy change favoring implementers. As I noted at the end of the post I just linked to, the wrangling over IEEE’s standard-essential patent (SEP) policy was sure to continue. Mr. Delrahim is now a Latham & Watkins partner (oddly, a firm frequently used by Apple), so he’s no longer in a position to push IEEE in the direction he outlined while in public office. But IEEE still has a problem on its hands that no one with an interest in a functioning standard-setting system can responsibly ignore or convincingly explain away.
The U.S. patent system affects the work of every company and individual in the country, but can be highly technical and difficult to understand. Unified Patents is proud to celebrate Patent Quality Week – June 6-10, 2022 with a few blog posts on why patents matter and educate others about the effects of low-quality patents that can create barriers to innovation and competition.
On May 27, 2022, a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 15 of U.S. Patent 7,979,277, owned by Zentian Limited, an NPE. The ‘277 patent relates to speech recognition and has been asserted against Apple and Amazon.
The CAFC affirmed the TTAB’s decision [TTABlogged here], sustaining an opposition to registration of the mark LEHMAN BROTHERS for beer, spirits, and bar and restaurant services, on the ground of likelihood of confusion with the identical mark used for various financial services. The appellate court upheld Appellee Barclays’ likelihood of confusion claim and dismissed Appellant Tiger Lily’s counterclaims challenging Barclays’ application to register the mark for financial services on the grounds of lack of bona fide intent, likelihood of confusion, and fraud. Tiger Lily Ventures Ltd. v. Barclays Capital Inc. and Barclays PLC, 2020 USPQ2d 513 (Fed. Cir. 2022) [precedential].
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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