Fresh from vacation, Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams makes his triumphant return to the Hackaday Podcast! He’s joined this week by Managing Editor Tom Nardi, who’s just happy he didn’t have to do the whole thing by himself again. In this episode we’ll talk about tackling BGA components in your custom PCBs, a particularly well executed hack against Google’s Nest Hub, and why you probably don’t really want the world’s cheapest 3D printer. We’ll also take a look at an incredible project to turn the Nokia 1680 into a Linux-powered handheld computer, a first of its kind HDMI firewall, and a robot that’s pretty good at making tacos. Listeners who are into artificial intelligence will be in for quite a treat as well, as is anyone who dreams of elevating the lowly automotive alternator to a more prominent position in the hacker world.
This brief tutorial explains how to force users to use strong passwords using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) in Debian, Ubuntu and other DEB-based systems.
You are about to learn what a MAC address is, where they are stored, how they are assigned, the relationship between MAC addresses and IP addresses, and finally, how to get the MAC address of a network interface card.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KTorrent on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KTorrent is a full-featured BitTorrent application that allows you to download files using the BitTorrent protocol. Also enables you to run multiple torrents at the same time and comes with extended features to make it a full-featured client for BitTorrent. KTorrent is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
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 KTorrent torrent client 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.
I’ve been using OpenIKED for some time now to configure my VPN. One of its features is that it can dynamically assign addresses on the internal network to clients, and clients can assign these addresses and routes to interfaces. However, these interfaces must exist before iked can start. Some months ago I switched my Debian laptop’s configuration from the traditional ifupdown to systemd-networkd. It took me some time to figure out how to have systemd-networkd create dummy interfaces on which iked can install addresses, but also not interfere with iked by trying to manage these interfaces. Here is my working configuration.
It's Free RPG Day again, and there's no better to play a free roleplaying game than with free and open source software. In this digital era of pen-and-paper gaming, it's still relatively unusual for adventures to include digital maps. In fact, it's also unusual for paper adventures to include maps that are sized correctly for miniatures, and many that do have colourful and richly textured maps that look great in a glossy book but look murky when photocopied and enlarged for the tabletop. Long story short: a tabletop gamer is often in need of a quick and convenient way to produce maps. Mipui is an open source web app that enables you to create grid-based maps for role-playing games, and it works great for virtual and physical tabletops alike.
EndeavourOS, one of the most popular Arch Linux derivatives, has released a new version called “Artemis.” Here’s what’s new!
EndeavourOS has earned the reputation of being one of the best Arch Linux derivatives in recent years, and for a good reason.
Surely, one of the first things you’ll notice about EndeavourOS is that, despite its claim to be a terminal-focused distribution, it has excellent GUI tools that make handling an Arch Linux system simple for new users. Something that considerably contributed to the success of this distro.
Of course, being based on Arch, EndeavourOS is a rolling release Linux distro. As a result, you may find the most recent versions of practically every piece of software here.
About two months after the previous “Apollo” release, the new EndeavourOS “Artemis” is now available for download. So let’s see what’s new.
EasyOS was created in 2017, derived from Quirky Linux, which in turn was derived from Puppy Linux in 2013. Easy is built in woofQ, which takes as input binary packages from any distribution, and uses them on top of the unique EasyOS infrastructure.
Throughout 2020, the official release for x86_64 PCs was the Buster-series, built with Debian 10.x Buster DEBs.
EasyOS has also been built with packages compiled from source, using a fork of OpenEmbedded (OE). Currently, the Dunfell release of OE has been used, to compile two sets of binary packages, for x86_64 and aarch64.
The latter have been used to build EasyOS for the Raspberry Pi4, and first official release, 2.6.1, was in January 2021.
The page that you are reading now has the release notes for EasyOS Dunfell-series on x86_64 PCs, also debuting in 2021.
Ongoing development is now focused on the x86_64 Dunfell-series. The last version in the x86_64 Buster-series is 2.6.2, on June 29, 2021, and that is likely to be the end of that series. Releases for the Pi4 Dunfell-series are still planned but very intermittent.
The version number is for EasyOS itself, independent of the target hardware; that is, the infrastructure, support-glue, system scripts and system management and configuration applications.
The latest version is becoming mature, though Easy is an experimental distribution and some parts are under development and are still considered as beta-quality. However, you will find this distro to be a very pleasant surprise, or so we hope.
Version 4.2 has significant structural changes, so there may be some minor-version-bump releases to fix things. In particular, there has been one comment that the Limine bootloader might not work on some UEFI PCs. Write the image-file to a usb-stick and report back whether it boots on different legacy-BIOS and UEFI computers.
Holybro has revealed two new models of the popular Pixhawk flight controller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The Pixhawk 6X and the Pixhawk 6C use a Cortex-M7 as Flight Management Unit (FMU) and a Cortex-M3 as an I/O processor.
The Pixhawk 6X is based on the Pixhawk FMUv6x Open Standard and the Pixhawk Autopilot Bus Standard. Both versions 6X/6C feature H7 microcontroller which consists of a Arm Cortex-M7 core (up to 480 MHz) and a single core Arm Cortex-M3 (up to 72MHz).
Arti is our ongoing project to create a working embeddable Tor client in Rust. It’s not ready to replace the main Tor implementation in C, but we believe that it’s the future.
Right now, our focus is on making Arti production-quality, by stress-testing the code, hunting for likely bugs, and adding missing features that we know from experience that users will need. We're going to try not to break backward compatibility too much, but we'll do so when we think it's a good idea.
In my own case, my learning preference is somewhat influenced by a broader context: to what extent am i needing to just Get Something Done, and to what extent am i interested in the topic for its own sake?
The LLVM project currently has support for zlib as a compression algorithm. Usage of it varies from compression of ELF debug sections, to serialization of performance stats and AST data structures.
We would like to add Zstandard (A.K.A. Zstd) as an alternative to zlib, which tends to achieve higher compression rates while being faster across the board. Using those for internal tooling could lead to speed improvements in places where we compress AST’s etc, without sacrificing the compressed size of them.
I’ve been selected for GSOC this year. My task is to redesign and port the KCMs currently in Qt Widgets to QtQuick/Kirigami
Thanks, Nate and David for agreeing to mentor me.
Joel Kim Booster€ is the main character€ in€ Fire Island. He also wrote this entertaining€ and thought-provoking€ film.
Bowen Yang plays Booster’s best friend. He has a€ nice€ career,€ but€ alas€ is€ unable€ to find a mate€ to share his life.
But Xun Sero is a Tzotzil person from Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, and he knows that when many people watch the documentary they will make it about violence within Tzotzil communities, rather than allowing it to speak to broader social issues.
Mamဠpremiered in Mexico last week, and at the€ Canadian€ Hot Docs festival last month. It (see the trailer, with subtitles in English€ here) shows Sero€ and his aunties€ talking€ to his mother€ about how she had to run away from home as a child to avoid being married off, and about how his biological, but not-present father raped her.
In the 1990s, TV2 in Tomsk emerged as one of the most remarkable independent media outlets in Russia. Under editor-in-chief Viktor Muchnik, the television station weathered the early years of Vladimir Putin’s reign, only to lose its broadcasting license in the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Nevertheless, TV2 journalists continued reporting until about a week into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Like dozens of other outlets, TV2 was forced to shut down amid the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on Russia’s remaining free press. But its editor-in-chief remained determined to record the fallout from the war. To find out more about the rise and fall of TV2, and what its former journalists are up to now, Meduza sat down with Viktor Muchnik.€
It’s fair to say that there’s really no phase of spaceflight that could be considered easy. But the case could be made that the most difficult part of a spacecraft’s journey is right at the very beginning, within the first few minutes of flight. At this point the vehicle’s booster rocket will be fighting with all its might against its own immense propellant-laden mass, a battle that it’s been engineered to win by the smallest of margins. Assuming the balance was struck properly and the vehicle makes its way off of the launch pad, it will still need to contend with the thick sea-level atmosphere as it accelerates, a building dynamic pressure that culminates with a point known as “Max q” — the moment where the air density imposes the maximum structural load on the rocket before quickly dropping off as the vehicle continues to ascend and the atmosphere thins.
Two Georgia school board candidates who criticized the hiring of a Black educator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives lost their runoff elections this week. Meanwhile, a person who helped organize the effort to push educator Cecelia Lewis out of her job is narrowly losing her bid for a seat in the state House of Representatives.
The three were described in a ProPublica story last week that detailed how Lewis was attacked in both Cherokee County and neighboring Cobb County by white parents making baseless claims that she was bringing critical race theory to both school districts. (CRT maintains that racial bias is embedded in America’s laws and institutions and has caused disproportionate harm to people of color; it’s rarely if ever taught in K-12 public school systems.)
The desk of any self-respecting technology enthusiast in the 2020s is not complete without a special keyboard of some sort, be it a vintage IBM Model M, an esoteric layout or form factor, or just a standard keyboard made with clacky mechanical switches. But perhaps we’ve found the one esoteric keyboard to rule them all, in the form of [HIGEDARUMA]’s 8-bit keyboard. You can all go home now, the competition has been well and truly won by this input device with the simplest of premises; enter text by setting the ASCII value as binary on a row of toggle switches. No keyboard is more retro than the one you’d find on the earliest microcomputers!
USB-C seeks to rule the roost when it comes to connectors, and even has Big Europe on its side. Apple hasn’t had to abandon Lightning just yet, but [Restore Technique] has put a USB-C port into an iPhone 13 to give us all an idea what it’s going to be like in the brave new future ahead of us.
[David Lovett] aka Usagi Electric is taking a dive into yet another old computer design, this one from the early 1960s.€ He recently obtained eight mystery circuit boards on-loan for the purpose of reverse engineering them. It turns out these came from an old mainframe called the Bendix G-20, a successor to the 1965 G-15 vacuum tube model. The cards are:
We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this actually makes it ridiculously difficult for any project that wants to do something innovative and donate it to the world, without patents. Because someone else might just come along and patent it themselves.
At Hackaday, we love those times when we get a chance to follow up on a project that we’ve already featured. Generally, it’s because the project has advanced in some significant way, which is always great to see. Sometimes, though, new details on the original project are available, and that’s where we find ourselves with [Scott Bez] and his haptic smart knob project.
Water leaks can be pernicious things. Even just a few drips per minute happening undetected inside a wall can cause major damage if left unrepaired for long enough. AquaPing is a new device that hopes to detect difficult-to-find water leaks with the aid of acoustic methods.€
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for debt relief for the world's poorest countries on Friday as he warned that an "unprecedented global food crisis" that is already ravaging more vulnerable nations will also have severe impacts for the entire world.
The U.N. chief said Russia's invasion of Ukraine has significantly worsened disruptions to the food supply chain that had already been hard-hit by the droughts and extreme weather triggered by climate crisis as well as the coronavirus pandemic and persistent inequality.
“The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.”
“Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.
If you want a metaphor, we are dinosaurs and an Intel ME exploit is an asteroid hurtling towards the Yucatán peninsula.” (https://hackaday.com/tag/intel-me/)
Intel might have installed – over the course of at least a decade (to this day?) a closed source backdoor in your computer’s firmware, that might never receive updates and is hard to remove. Once this backdoor is fully cracked, everyone (Russia, China and North Korea) can use it. Having remote control over a server down to the BIOS is a neat feature.
[...]
another dramatic way to put it:
“The biggest network security threat today is a remote code execution exploit for Intel’s Management Engine.”
“Every computer with an Intel chipset produced in the last decade would be vulnerable to this exploit, and RCE would give an attacker full control over every aspect of a system.
Prime Minister Nahendra Mohdi’s government has apparently peered over the Great Wall of China (to pedants: figuratively, of course) and liked what it was seeing. China is the world leader in pervasive surveillance — something the government uses to shield the government from criticism and to keep the people the government considers to be undesirable under the bootheel.
Clearview has never had a great reputation. Its first appearance in the public eye — via a Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times — was inauspicious, to say the least. The company’s database was composed of data and photos scraped from thousands of websites. This image database — which has now passed 10 billion images — is packaged with Clearview’s facial recognition AI and sold to whoever wants to buy it: law enforcement agencies, app developers, human rights violators, retailers, etc.
Give anyone access to tons of sensitive personal information and it’s bound to result in abuse. Give cops access to this data and abuse is guaranteed. Why? Because law enforcement officers — for reasons unfathomable to regular people — face far fewer consequences for violating internal policies and breaking laws.
My recap of Thursday’s January 6 hearing, headlined “The Fascist Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” went up minutes before the Supreme Court’s six-member Christianist majority struck down the constitutional right to abortion on Friday morning. I winced a little when I saw it on our site, because it suddenly seemed so wrong: When it comes to using the high court to impose minority rule, this fascist gang has been able to shoot very straight—and it will be very deadly.
Have you noticed how every major foreign policy crisis since the U.S. and U.K.’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 has peeled off another layer…
My night train to Volgograd, which was Stalingrad in its hours of desperation, left Moscow from Paveletsky station, which when I rolled up to the main entrance was a maelstrom of people traveling for summer holidays. I had to show my tickets at several checkpoints, and men with scanner wands examined my bicycle bags for explosives, of the kinds that some years back Chechen rebels detonated around Moscow (how the enemy voted in that conflict).
The Night Train to Volgograd
The extent of such collaboration, manipulation and interference can be gathered in National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood (2017). Matthew Alford and Tom Secker argue that a number of operations mounted by the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI were designed to further “violent, American-centric solutions to international problems based on twisted readings of history.”
The US Air Force has its own Entertainment Liaison Office in Hollywood, run by director Lieutenant Colonel Glen Roberts. “Our job,” he explained in 2016, “is to project and protect the image of the US Air Force and its Airmen in the entertainment space.” Propaganda is not a word he knows, even though he is its most ardent practitioner. He describes the involvement of his office across scripted or unscripted television, movies, documentaries, reality TV, award and game shows, sporting events and video games. Its purpose: “to present the Air Force and its people in a credible, realistic way” and provide the entertainment industry with “access to Airmen, bases and equipment if they meet certain standards set by the Department of Defense.”
Now he must be indicted.
Trump’s criminality is proven not by the words of his enemies, but by the sworn testimony of Republicans he himself appointed or hired —including his own officials and staff, his attorney general William Barr, and Republican election lawyers and campaign personnel.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a century-old New York state law that limited who can carry concealed weapons in public, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the 6-3 majority that the statute violated the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. The ruling vastly expands gun rights in the U.S. just weeks after mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, and represents “a revolution in Second Amendment law,” says Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern. “It declares that any restriction on the right to self-defense is presumptively unconstitutional.” In light of the Supreme Court decision, a bipartisan gun violence bill passed by the Senate is “one step forward, two steps back.” Stern also discusses a separate ruling in which the court’s conservative majority said a person who is arrested and not told of their right to remain silent cannot subsequently sue police for violating their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination — even if statements they give are ultimately used against them at trial. The decision could be setting the stage for the court to overturn the 1966 Miranda v. Arizona precedent altogether, Stern warns.
No one knows how this meal will end. Ukraine is eager to force Russia to disgorge what it’s already devoured, while the still-peckish invader clearly has no interest in leaving the table.
This might seem like an ordinary territorial dispute between predator and prey. Ukraine’s central location between east and west, however, turns it into a potentially world-historical conflict like the Battle of Tours when the Christian Franks turned back the surging Ummayad army of Muslims in 732 AD or the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1975.
Colombia made history this week. Progressive former M-19 guerrilla Gustavo Petro, a current senator and former mayor of the nation's capital Bogotá, won the presidential election. His running mate Francia Márquez Mina will be the nation's first Black vice president. Theirs will be the first leftist presidential administration in Colombian history. The Petro/Márquez ticket garnered more votes than in any presidential race in Colombian history.
By 8 am, the residents of Suarez, a township in the northern Cauca department in Colombia, are lined up from the sports arena filled with polling booths to the police roadblock, where security forces are controlling entry. Local authorities tell me they’re seeing many more people than in past elections and they expect an historic turnout. No wonder. This is the hometown of Francia Marquez, the environmental activist and now—with the support of millions of impoverished Colombians like her townspeople—the first Black woman vice president in the nation’s history.
Former top officials in President Trump’s Justice Department told the House January 6 committee Thursday they threatened to resign en masse when Trump mused about appointing Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist who backed the baseless voter fraud claims, as acting attorney general. “I said, 'Mr. President, within 24, 48, 72 hours, you could have hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department because of your actions,'” said former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. “’What’s that going to say about you?’”
Since February, Russia has seized some of Ukraine’s most vital agricultural regions in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. The Russian military has also prevented Ukraine from accessing its ports on the Black Sea recently, leaving Ukraine essentially landlocked, and unable to export its food products to the international markets.
But though the war has certainly exacerbated the global food crisis, it was preceded by the food price hikes of 2007 and 2011, in addition to the hike witnessed due to COVID-19, after decades of falling costs in real prices of food items. In 2021, data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) showed more massive increases in meat, dairy, cereals, vegetable oils, and sugar prices that exceeded the previous spike witnessed in 2007 and 2011.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently had that opportunity, but that’s not the opinion piece he ended up writing (“You’re Kids Are Not Doomed,” June 5, 2022), and many are disappointed.
Instead, Klein did what Elon Musk, Mitt Romney, many growth-minded economists and dozens of other relatively wealthy white men have done. He pushed people (women, actually) to have kids. Instead of offering a nuanced response to the problems, Klein framed the issue as a simple idea about having kids, and then urged people to go forward and have them.
What, indeed, is to be done about the nuclear waste that has been produced at the two Millstone nuclear power plants which have been operating in Connecticut? (They are now the only nuclear power plants running in New England.)
And what is to be done about the nuclear waste at other nuclear power plants?
It took millions of years to compress the coal into a carbon rock that takes approximately 16 hours to burn in a stove or furnace.
The resultant heat caused by burning a lump of coal is felt in the atmosphere within 95 days, which is the time it takes for its carbon emissions to trap enough heat in the atmosphere to equal the amount of heat generated when burning the lump for 16 hours in a furnace. But, it doesn’t stop there, as shall be explained in more detail.
In a 2019 article, Dom Phillips quoted a Macuxi spokesman, Edinho de Souza, “We are not fighting the farmer, a little garimpeiro. We are fighting the government.” As Indigenous people and environmental defenders know, “The bullets that kill journalists, activists and Indigenous people in Amazonia are bought with money from land grabs, illegal mining and logging”, high priorities of the Bolsonaro government. Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips were murdered in the remote Amazon region of Vale do Javari, Brazil’s second largest Indigenous territory, near the borders with Peru and Colombia, home to more uncontacted tribes (who reject contact) than anywhere else in the world, and also an extremely violent place because of illegal mining, logging, drug, and poaching activities. However tragic these two murders are in themselves, they’re even worse because of what they represent: the danger to anyone who tries to protect the Amazon and its peoples.
In fact, Bolsonaro himself, delaying the search efforts and callously attempting to blame the two men for their fate, actually obeyed the compulsion to confess what Edinho de Souza and his people know all too well: “Really two people just on a boat, in a region like that, completely wild, is an adventure that is not recommended to do … Anything can happen.” If the region is “completely wild”, the Bolsonaro government has done everything possible to make it so. If defending Indigenous rights is an “adventure”, he’s proclaiming his contempt for Indigenous rights. If Phillips was “disliked” in the region, as Bolsonaro claims, the question is who disliked him (no prizes for guessing the answer: the government and its henchmen). Finally, the mainstream press, which prominently reported politicians like Boris Johnson and other eminences as expressing “deep concern” about the two men, mostly gave said concerned eminences more coverage than the valuable work Pereira and Phillips were doing. Their deaths were reported, arrests were reported, but there was little attempt to explain why they were killed and, going up the chain of responsibility, who wanted this. Bolsonaro can feel that his threat is successful.
A source from the Brazilian Amazon wrote to us at Revista Opera two years ago to warn us about something strange that was going on there: illegally mined gold was being sold at the same price as legally mined gold. “If the nugget is a big one,” said the source, “they give the miner extra [money].” There was no investigation based on this information since it would have required great resources and risks, neither of which we could afford. It was just another fascinating story that was buried in the green hell (Inferno Verde) or El Dorado—terms often used to describe the immensity of the Amazon rainforest.
In August 2021, a study by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in partnership with the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry (MPF) showed that in two years—2019 and 2020—28 percent of all gold that was both produced by and sold in Brazil appeared to have been mined illegally. Perhaps such a large influx of gold for some exceptional reason had an effect on the price paid out for mining it at a given time, or perhaps the information provided was fabricated by the source, we thought.
This quilt project was coordinated by Marietta Bernstorff. The top work was completed by Evelyne Lundberg. The bottom work was completed by a student of Andre LePage who is a professor at Washington and Lee University.
The US housing crisis has been decades in the making, but combined with an inflation squeeze and a systemic shortage of affordable housing, more renters have nowhere to go.
Photo by Laura Tancredi on Pexels.com By Ralph Nader The great progressive Harvard economist and prolific best-selling author, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote that, “Ideas may be superior to vested i…
If a parent dies, the burden created on their children is substantial. A bereaved child loses access to their deceased parent’s financial, emotional, and social support. This is also true if a parent is incarcerated, but it can come with additional emotional and social burdens that are less obvious. This story was produced for StudentNation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism, which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here. StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation. If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email€ protected].
CEOs of the six biggest train companies also took home a combined salary of more than €£5m in 2020.
“From unemployment to health care outcomes, virtually every issue hits poor folks the hardest,” he told me.
As a result, pastors like him have more prayers to shepherd, more funerals to perform, and more concerns to ease — “not because it’s God’s will or because fate declared it,” he said, “but because identifiable policy choices have created burdens on people that should be lifted.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday slammed oil companies for raking in huge profits on the backs of U.S. consumers and reiterated his case for a windfall tax, a demand that came as President Joe Biden's call for a federal gas tax holiday faced growing pushback from progressives and top officials in his own administration.
"This is outrageous. Corporate profits soar, working people can't afford to fill up their gas tank. We need to pass a windfall profits tax now."
Led by the dominant capitalist-imperialist nations, especially the U.S. and China, the system involves the capture and transfer of surplus value from workers in poorer countries to leading corporations in the advanced countries. Today, global value chain corporations that represent only 15 percent of all trading firms worldwide, capture some 80 percent of total trade.
This unprecedented globalization and monopoly concentration of capital is driven by the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Ever declining average rates of profit, as repeatedly demonstrated by British Marxist economist Michael Roberts, have been countered worldwide by ever intensifying attacks on working people, including union-busting at home, systemic racism/sexism/LBGTQI+ discrimination, massive social cutbacks, anti-labor legislation, layoffs, speed-up, part time casualization of work, forced overtime, cuts in fringe benefits, obliteration of pensions and the imposition of multiple-tier wage systems. When these prove insufficient to stem profit declines, the ruling elite embark on massive drives to transfer production [de-industrialization] outside their borders to further free themselves from the gains workers have won during decades of struggle.
In that newsletter, the general treasurer of Rhode Island, Seth Magaziner, addresses the collective membership of past and present public employees with vested interests in the retirement system: “so it is a great honor for my team and me to serve you and to be responsive to that feedback [about the retirement pension system].”
Further on in his Compass message, he states that the pension fund “has grown by over $3 billion since 2015… outperformed 92% of peer public pension plans.”
Last June, drawing on the largest trove of confidential American tax data that’s ever been obtained, ProPublica launched a series of stories documenting the key ways the ultrawealthy avoid taxes, strategies that are largely unavailable to most taxpayers. To mark the first anniversary of the launch, we decided to assemble a quick summary of the techniques — all of which can generate tax savings on a massive scale — revealed in the series.
Our first story unraveled how billionaires like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos were able to amass some of the largest fortunes in history while paying remarkably little tax relative to their immense wealth. They did it in part by avoiding selling off their vast holdings of stock. The U.S. system taxes income. Selling stock generates income, so they avoid income as the system defines it. Meanwhile, billionaires can tap into their wealth by borrowing against it. And borrowing isn’t taxable. (Buffett said he followed the law and preferred that his wealth go to charity; the others didn’t comment beyond a “?” from Musk.)
A qualitative ‘threshold of awareness’ was reached this past week when the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, accelerated its pace of rate hikes by 75 basis points—purportedly to bring the rate of price hikes under control. Whether the Fed can succeed in taming inflation and do so without precipitating a recession remains to be seen but is highly unlikely. Taming inflation without provoking a recession is thus the central economic question for the remainder of 2022.
Clearly some think this is possible—i.e. that further rate hikes will moderate the pace of inflation without driving the real economy into recession and result in what is called a ‘soft landing’. Clearly the Fed and the Biden administration believe that will happen. But a growing chorus of even mainstream economists and bank research departments don’t think so.€ Almost daily new forecasts by global banks and analysts appear indicating recession is more than 50-50 likely—and arriving sooner in late 2022 than in 2023.
It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is tightening his grip on the Republican Party by endorsing hard-right candidates in primary races across the United States. Nor is it unexpected that even in races where Trump hasn’t offered an endorsement, the passions of the MAGA movement are helping extremist candidates surge in these primaries. What is more notable is that some of these candidates have been buoyed by an unusual source: Democratic Party strategists who are spending millions to raise the profile of the most rabid Trumpists.
Ever since the Haitian people successfully overthrew slavery and French colonialism in 1804, the US government refused to recognize the independent Haitian republic; instead the US sided with the French government to internationally isolate Haiti and force the Haitian people to pay “restitution” to their former enslavers in France, a massive robbery well-documented in the recent NYT article “The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers”.
Echoing this history of the US exclusion of Haiti in 1826, the Biden Administration convened another Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, excluding Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua from participation. There was massive international attention and opposition by progressives to this measure. The Haiti Action Committee was part of this opposition and stands in full solidarity with the people of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
In recent weeks, an unlikely drama has unfolded in the media. The center of this drama isn’t a celebrity or a politician, but a sprawling computational system, created by Google, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). A Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, was suspended for declaring on Medium that LaMDA, which he interacted with via text, was “sentient.” This declaration (and a subsequent Washington Post article) sparked a debate between people who think Lemoine is merely stating an obvious truth—that machines can now, or soon will, show the qualities of intelligence, autonomy, and sentience—and those who reject this claim as naive at best and deliberate misinformation at worst. Before explaining why I think those who oppose the sentience narrative are right, and why that narrative serves the power interests of the tech industry, let’s define what we’re talking about.1
“Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral earlier in June for the Jubilee Thanksgiving service, the flag-waving royalists took a break from their revelry to boo him. The next day, he received notice that the number of parliamentary colleagues calling for a vote of no-confidence in his leadership had reached a threshold, and he would effectively have to run again for his job.
The Hungarian Parliament has passed a law that nearly doubles Viktor Orban’s wage from 2.8 million forints ($7,380) to 4.8 million ($ 12,647). The Prime Minister’s salary is now ten times the Hungarian average and more than twenty times the minimum wage in the country, according to the Hungarian outlet,€ Telex. The raise comes at a time when the Central European country is suffering from a record high inflation.
The proposal also includes paragraphs about other members of the government. Under the new law, the salaries of the political director of the Prime Minister, the State Secretary, the Government Commissioner, and other high-ranking government members will be decided by Orban.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has revealed new details about former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to help him stay in power after he lost the 2020 election. In the committee’s fifth televised public hearing Thursday, former top DOJ officials testified about how Trump urged the department to seize voting machines and declare the election results corrupt. One of the former top DOJ officials who testified was Trump’s former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who described a phone conversation with President Trump in which he tried to reject his repeated false claims. Donoghue also discussed how he and others were pushed to investigate a baseless conspiracy theory that an Italian defense contractor had hacked a satellite, switching votes from Trump to Biden.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol revealed Thursday that six Republican members of Congress who supported Donald Trump’s lies sought broad presidential pardons for their involvement in the campaign to discredit the election results: Mo Brooks of Alabama, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona. “The only reason I know to ask for a pardon is because you think you’ve committed a crime,” noted Republican committee member, Congressmember Adam Kinzinger.
On Thursday, Labour under Keir Starmer got a lower percentage of the vote in Wakefield than they did in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn. In 2017 Labour got 49.7%. On Thursday they got 47.9%. I want you to think that through.
Xi announced the meeting at the end of May, just after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Pretoria. The earlier ambition was to have a post-Covid in-person BRICS summit, which logically would have been in September. That was the case in 2017, in Xiamen, the last time the BRICS met in China.
But in recent weeks, a sense of panic must have arisen in Beijing – and perhaps Moscow – as the realization dawned that two BRICS could well be wheeled and dealed by the G7. The two could thus continue “spalling”; the construction-industry terminology refers to a process (spalling) in which – mainly due to the freezing-thawing cycle – a wall’s masonry and bricks crack, crumble, flake, and even pop out of the wall.
The prospect of such teamwork doubtless leaves most normal people muttering “what next?” What next? I’ll tell you. Like Matt “Who Knew She Was a Teenager?” Gaetz’s internship offer to Kyle “Judicial Double Standard” Rittenhouse, this latest pairing signifies parlous times ahead – specifically when Trump or some Trump wannabe prances back into the white house. Then, as happened before, all the psychos will pop out of the woodwork. We may even get Ginni “My Husband Will Fix It” Thomas testifying that radical communists eavesdropped on her pillow talk. Others of her ilk will also demand their day in the sun.
You thought weirdos like Sydney “Chavez’s Ghost Rigged the Election” Powell, Mark “Italian Satellites” Meadows, Mike “Eliminate Voting Machines and Maybe Voting” Lindell and Rudy “Four Seasons” Giuliani were gone? Think again. They’re waitin’ in the wings. Drunk on power or just plain drunk, they thirst for the limelight, and if Joe “Sanctions, Inflation, Rinse Repeat” Biden doesn’t figure things out fast, we could be looking at a very dismal future. One that includes a billion dollars a month for weapons to Ukraine, while lots of Americans can’t cover routine expenses, and the electoral fury at Dems that this outrage ignites. Given this white house economic bumbling and the disaster of dimwit neocons with their hands firmly planted on the foreign policy steering-wheel, we’re likely headed for an ugly crash. Think President Ron “Covid Cruise” DeSantis and vice president Mo “Bullet Proof Vest” Brooks. And that’s the tamer of the two scenarios. The wilder one features a rerun of the Trump Show with someone like “They Call Me” Dr. Oz “For a Reason” as veep.
We’ve covered on here former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform for violating its terms of service (a lawsuit that is not going well at all), but I had missed that some random person, Maria Rutenberg, had also sued Twitter for the same thing. No, not for kicking her off, but for kicking Trump off. She claimed (I am not joking) that it violated her 1st Amendment rights not to be able to respond to his tweets. I only wish I were joking. From the complaint:
Confirming the findings of several major journalistic investigations, the United Nations Human Rights Office said Friday that Israeli forces fired the shots that killed beloved Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and wounded her colleague last month as they covered a raid in the occupied West Bank.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement that it is "deeply disturbing that Israeli authorities have not conducted a criminal investigation" in the six weeks since Abu Akleh's killing, which sparked international outrage.
This accomplishment can only be appreciated within the larger context of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
In November 2006, the Israeli military prevented all Palestine-based footballers from participating in the final match of the Asian Football Confederation qualification group stage. The news had a major demoralizing effect on all Palestinians. Even rare moments of hope and happiness are often crushed by Israel.
At least eight inmates died this week at a jam-packed prison in Haiti that ran out of food two months ago, becoming the latest victims of an ongoing crisis that has killed dozens of people this year.
Ronald Richemond, the government commissioner of the southwest city of Les Cayes, told The Associated Press on Thursday that hunger and dangerously high temperatures contributed to the deaths reported this week by the prison, which holds 833 inmates.
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.–Benito Mussolini
Today, Justice Alito ruled that you have constitutional rights, but no right to know what they are.
Rarely in history has a United States senator been so blatantly beclowned as Susan Collins was on Friday.
In late May, Russian activist Aisoltan Niyazova was arrested in Slovenia; a few days later, it happened again in Croatia. She had come to both countries to take part in Pussy Riot’s charity concert tour. Niyazova began her career working at a bank, but in 2011, she was sent to prison for allegedly committing fraud; there, she met Maria Alyokhina and became an advocate for prisoners’ rights. Niyazova spoke to Meduza about her recent arrests, her introduction to Pussy Riot, and how her time in prison turned her into an activist.
When Elie Lamadrid, 18, suggested starting an after-school gay youth club in the winter of 1972, George Washington High School, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, had been a source of trouble for school administrators and city officials.
The authors of “Let’s Agree to Disagree” offer a guide to fostering critical thinking and dialogue in a society that seems to have forgotten how to engage in either.
“I continue to support efforts to free him,” Sanders said of Leonard Peltier, 77-year-old Indigenous rights activist, in a letter obtained by HuffPost.
Volkswagen, a company that famously used Jews as slave labour to profit during the Holocaust, recently announced that they will stop the production and suspend exports of vehicles to Russia.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Volkswagen plans on suspending operations in Xinjiang, an area where over one million Uyghurs are detained in concentration camps, are forcibly sterilized, and subject to abortions, rape and tortured. Not only is Volkswagen operating in the Uyghur Region, that they are using Uyghur slave labour to directly profit from largest incarceration of an ethnic minority since the Holocaust.
Unlike Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Carl Oglesby, Cathy Wilkerson and other New Leftists, including Bill Ayers, the author of€ Fugitive Days, Bernardine Dohrn has never written an autobiography or a memoir. It’s unlikely she ever will, especially now that€ Mother Country Radicals€ tells much of her story and the stories of her comrades, such as Ayers, her husband, from both the inside looking out and the outside looking in. Autobiography isn’t Bernardine’s style. Writing essays and articles about herself isn’t her forte, either, though she has been and still is an eloquent and impassioned public speaker. “My mother always was a private person,” her son, Zayd, explains in€ Mother County Radicals,€ from Crooked Media€ (available on Spotify and elsewhere). Zayd adds, “Sound bites don’t capture her,” Still, the mass media has often tried to reduce her to a simple sentence or a flat phrase, much as reporters have rarely failed to describe her wearing a mini-skirt, as though the miniskirt defined her. No way.
Zayd is the creator, executive producer and host of the “Mother Country Radicals” podcast which has just won an award for “Best Audio Storytelling in Non-Fiction” from the 2022 Tribeca Festival. To make the podcast, he had help from€ Jon Favreau, Sarah Geismer, Lyra Smith, Alison Falzetta, Misha Euceph, with sound design by Arwen Nicks, Stephanie Cohn, Ariana Gharib Lee, and Misha Euceph, and music by Andy Clausen.
What are some of the “best practices” abroad that might be reproducible in the U.S. to help strengthen workplace protections here? Two labor-oriented academics, Kim Scipes and Robert Ovetz, have recently published collections of case studies that answer that question in great detail. Their new books will be useful to both union organizers and campus-based observers of comparative labor movements.
In Building Global Labor Solidarity (Lexington Books), Scipes brings together his own past writing on international labor struggles over the last four decades. A retired professor of sociology at Purdue, he is the author of several previous books, including KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) and AFL-CIO’s Secret War Against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010). Earlier this month in Philadelphia, he was involved in efforts to inform national AFL-CIO delegates about what’s wrong with their federation’s continuing dependence on U.S. government funding of its international operations.
This did not sit well with reporters, academics and activists who have studied Secretary Clinton’s record.
“Clinton has always been a war hawk,” said Aisha Jumaan, President of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Project. “During her tenure at the State Department, arms sales to Saudi Arabia increased by about 100%. These arms have been used against the Yemeni people since the Saudi started their aggression on Yemen in March 2015. In 2011, her aide congratulated her for pushing through arms sales to Saudi Arabia calling it a ‘Christmas gift.’”
People should carefully review privacy settings on the services they use, turn off location services on apps that don’t need them, and use encrypted messaging services. Companies should protect users by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, enabling end-to-end message encryption by default, preventing location tracking, and ensuring that users get notice when their data is being sought. And state and federal policymakers must pass meaningful privacy legislation. All of these steps are needed to protect privacy, and all are long overdue.
More resources are available at our reproductive rights issue page.€
"Lights Out," a new original cartoon by the inimitable Mr. Fish, suggest that the darkness of the SCOTUS decision to profoundly limit the rights of women is not – must not be – permanent.
Abort. The. Court.
Two days ago, I spent hours in a Capitol Hill bar and restaurant doing jail support for three Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) activists arrested by Capitol Police outside the United States Supreme Court. I was a curious sight for US Congressmen and their obsequious staffs as I sat bedecked in green bandanas (see below), working my phone and taking notes from teeth-pulling conversations with jail officers while I downed one overpriced IPA draft after another. Unlike everyone else in the establishment, I wasn’t wearing a medium-priced suit.
I was struck by how differently humans fall out. Earlier that morning I had beheld glorious and self-sacrificing popular solidarity as RU4AR and other abortions rights cadres made powerful, moving statements against the coming likely Supreme Court decision to re-impose the female bondage that is forced motherhood. I had made a statement myself, as I would the next day.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Friday that the U.S. Senate must swiftly respond to the right-wing Supreme Court's "outrageous and reactionary" decision to overturn Roe v. Wade by eliminating the legislative filibuster and codifying abortion rights into federal law.
"Six Supreme Court justices, including some who in their nomination hearings called the case 'important precedent,' today did exactly what the American people did not want and overturned Roe v. Wade," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "This decision cannot be allowed to stand."
Progressives on Friday rebuked€ Democratic Party leadership for showing a lack of urgency over the end of abortion rights in the country, a failure epitomized by U.S. House Majority Whip James Clyburn who dismissed the U.S. Supreme Court's historic reversal of€ Roe v. Wade€ as an "anticlimactic" development.
Even abortion rights supporter took immediately to the streets in anger and protest,€ the powerful South Carolina Democrat told€ USA Today€ reporter Dylan Wells that "we all expected this" and said he was considering "the extent to which we can move legislatively to respond to it."
Large crowds of people took to the streets of cities and towns across the United States Friday evening to protest the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade and to vow to fight for reproductive rights.
In San Francisco, hundreds of youth-led protesters shouting slogans including "We won't go back!" and "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries" rallied in Civic Center Plaza, while hundreds marched and staged a sit-in on Market Street.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had an immediate impact on pregnant people in Republican-controlled states with "trigger bans," more than 80 elected attorneys from around the country vowed not to prosecute individuals who seek, assist in, or provide abortion care.
"Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion care makes a mockery of justice," says a joint statement signed by 84 district attorneys and attorneys general. "Prosecutors should not be part of that."
The effects of Friday's U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade were felt almost instantaneously when patients who were scheduled to receive abortions from clinics in trigger-ban states were turned away within minutes of the 6-3 ruling.
More than half of all U.S. states are now poised to end or drastically restrict legal access to abortions. In the 13 states with "trigger bans" that were designed to take effect as soon as the high court's right-wing majority struck down Roe, abortion will be outlawed within 30 days, though in some cases patients were immediately denied care.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas made clear in his concurring opinion regarding the overturning of Roe v. Wade that the high court has no intention of stopping its rollback of Americans' rights, naming cases that centered on marriage equality and the right to obtain contraception as previous rulings that should be revisited.
"This Supreme Court is out of touch with the American people and increasingly suffers a legitimacy crisis."
For decades, Americans have pussyfooted around what’s at stake in the abortion debate: women’s status as full citizens, able to represent themselves. But the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization€ enables frank speech and can transform the “debate” into positive action, starting with the election of a Congress this November that will fulfill the people’s will and codify Roe.
Ginsburg would’ve preferred that abortion rights be secured more gradually, in a process that included state legislatures and the courts, she added. Ginsburg also was troubled that the focus on€ Roe€ was on a right to privacy, rather than women’s rights.
People and advocacy groups across the nation rushed to voice outrage and organize rapid-response demonstrations Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority voided half a century of reproductive rights by reversing the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
"The SCOTUS decision is class warfare—time to hit the streets!"
The right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on Friday, ending the constitutional right to abortion and imperiling access to reproductive healthcare nationwide.
"A right-wing Supreme Court has stripped women and people seeking abortions of their long-held rights to control their bodies."
As the country braces for the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court's decision in a case challenging Roe v. Wade, a coalition of Black congresswomen led by Reps. Ayanna Pressley, Barbara Lee, and Cori Bush implored President Joe Biden on Friday to declare a public health emergency to shield abortion rights nationwide.
"We urge you to use any and all executive authorities to address the public health crisis our nation will face if Roe v. Wade is dismantled."
The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. It has said unequivocally, by a vote of 6-3, that “the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” and that Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey are “overruled.”
With the fate of reproductive rights for tens of millions of Americans now dependent upon federal and state lawmakers in the wake of the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, Common Dreams takes a look at how Democratic and Republican candidates in 10 key U.S. Senate races responded to Friday's ruling.
"The court just took away a woman's most fundamental freedom... for the first time in our country's history, our daughters will grow up with fewer rights than their mothers had."
On June 8, the U.S. Supreme Court again validated this “exemption” and strengthened it. In Egbert v. Boule the court ruled to protect federal agents, particularly Border Patrol agents, from civil rights lawsuits (by making it much more difficult to do so). Central to the case was a Fourth Amendment claim. U.S. Border Patrol agent Erik Egbert entered innkeeper Robert Boule’s property in Blaine, Washington, without a warrant to check the immigration status of some recently arrived guests. When Boule protested Egbert’s presence, Egbert threw him against a vehicle and then to the ground. In its ruling in favor of Egbert, the Supreme Court wrote that “regulating the conduct of agents at the border has national security implications,” and that there would be a “risk in undermining border security.”
As SCOTUSblog contributing writer Howard Wasserman told NPR, “Considerations of national security and foreign affairs that are endemic to immigration enforcement and immigration issues are always going to make it improper for a damages action to go forward.” As has been the case since 9/11, the broad yet ill-defined notion of national security trumps all else.
For more than a decade, cable and broadcast executives brushed aside the threat of cable TV “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV) as either a nonexistent threat or a€ temporary phenomenon. There were endless reports about how these users were poor and unimportant (they weren’t), or how the phenomenon would end once Millennials bought homes and starting procreating (it didn’t).
There’s nothing more important to a parent than providing for their child. As a mother who was unable to breastfeed, I relied on formula. I remember once making a long drive to another town when my local store was out of the brand my child was used to.
It was a stressful experience — and mild compared to what millions of parents are feeling right now as they face store shelves emptied of formula.
Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the takedowns but insisted it wasn’t them or their enforcement partner, CSC. Some of Bungie’s own official content had also been hit with claims, bolstering its defense somewhat, though it certainly isn’t unheard of for official content to accidentally get DMCA’d. Further solidifying that this wasn’t actually Bungie or CSC, however, occurred when Bungie went ahead and filed a lawsuit against 10 John Does over all of this.
A popular browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator with nearly 100 working games was removed from GitHub this week. The takedown request was sent by the ESA, which acts on behalf of Nintendo and other game companies. The problem hasn't been sorted out completely, however, as nostalgic games can easily find alternatives, even on GitHub.
In response to persons unknown sending large numbers of fake DMCA notices to YouTube while impersonating its anti-piracy partner, Bungie filed a lawsuit in the US seeking millions in damages. At the time the name of the 'Doe' defendant was unknown. This is how a Bungie investigation followed digital breadcrumbs to track down and identify that person by name and physical address.