There are already several serial terminal programs such as Putty and minicom, and in recent times, I’ve been using Bootterm myself. But that does not mean there isn’t room for more and Martin Lund has developed tio serial device I/O tool for Linux.
Martin found out many of the existing tools are very modem focused or a bit cumbersome to use, so he developed tio as the simpler alternative which puts less focus on classic terminal/modem features and more focus on the needs of embedded developers and hackers.
Q1 FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report 2022, Nginx on OpenBSD 7.1, Persistent Memory Allocation, Colorize your BSD shell, cgit With Gitolite and Nginx on FreeBSD 13, and more
1:20 The News 15:47 Security and Privacy 21:07 Bi-Weekly Wonderings 35:42 The Linux Innards 56:58 Vibrations from the Ether 1:03:45 Check This Out 1:04:20 Announcements
First up in the news, Gnome wins Microsoft money, Firefox translates offline, Rocky overtakes the Red Hat pack, apps on KDE look more klear, Debian gets the Gecko treatment, Zoom gets Wayland screen sharing, Photoshop is kind-of–but not-really coming to Linux, and Nvidia contributes.
In security and privacy, Hertzbleed is coming for your CPU, and the EU is going after deepfakes.
Then in our Wanderings, Moss goes Custom, Norbert emerges, and Joe is Florida Man In our Innards section we discuss the various licenses in the world of open source software
Joel cannot get pizza hut delivered. Little ceasars is too far away now.
I started my journey with the Linux Kernel in October 2021. At that time, I thought it was impossible for a 19-year-old Brazilian girl to have an approved commit at the kernel. Then, I find out about an extracurricular group at Campinas, LKCAMP. And I found out that undergraduate students were able to contribute to the kernel. Although I couldn€´t go to the LKCAMP meetings, this really push me forward, cause I saw that I was able to be a part of the kernel community.
I was a Linux user for about two years, and I became passionate about the system. I was eager to contribute to the community and improve the kernel. But, I was in doubt about where to start.
I’m a Fedora fan. I mean: I have two laptops for development, and all of them run Fedora. I also have a deployment machine. Guess what? It runs Fedora. Stickers? The Fedora Logo sticked forever on my laptop.
So, by now, you know: I’m really a Fedora fan.
So, when I started working with Linux Kernel, I really wanted to develop in a Fedora environment. But, without any kind of script, the work of a Linux Kernel developer is ungrateful. I mean, do you want to deploy to a remote machine? Be ready for network configurations, grub configurations, generate initramfs image, and tons of commands. Do you want to manage your config files? Basically, you are back to the ancient times when many save tons of config files on folders.
With some pushes and pulls from friends, I’ve been studying the Linux Graphical stack for some time now. After some minor patches to both Mesa and the Linux Kernel, I followed the instructions thoroughly and landed a successful Google Summer of Code proposal...
As you can probably imagine, the Linux graphics stack comprises many layers of abstractions, from the pretty little button from which you open your Proton-able AAA Steam title to the actual bytecode that runs on whatever graphics card you have installed.
These many abstractions are what allow us to have our glorious moments of being a hero (or maybe a villain, whatever you’re up to…) without even noticing what’s happening, and – most importantly – that allow game devs to make such complex games without having to worry about an awful lot of details. They’re really a marvel of engineering (!), but not by accident!
All of those abstraction layers come with a history of their own, and it’s kinda amazing that we can even have such a smooth experience with all of those, community-powered, beautifully thought-out, moving pieces, twisting and turning in a life of their own.
But enough mystery! Let’s hop into it already, shall we?
Though in most cases we start from the bottom of the stack and build our way towards the top, here I think it makes more sense for us to build it upside down, as that’s what we’re used to interacting with.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install HPLIP 3.22.6 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Fedora 36, and other Linux distributions.
HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers on Linux platforms.
The latest version of HPLIP 3.22.6 contains new Distro support and added support to the new printers.
There goes a lot more behind the scenes between a browser and a server than we might think. Our browser may be handed a index.html but on processing, it (the browser) may need to get additional documents such as style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. This requires multiple connections to the server. Making a connection requires performing the TCP three-way handshake, exchanging headers, etc. all of which introduces unnecessary overhead, as well as latency to the client. It is in this context that the need for a better way to serve documents become apparent.
It wasn’t until the publication of the HTTP/2 protocol that the issue could be solved. HTTP/2 protocol, officially RFC 7540 or more recently RFC 9113, is a replacement for the older HTTP/1.1 which provides an optimized method for transportation of documents over TCP. It allows multiplexing connections so that multiple documents can be sent over the same stream. It also allows compressing the headers and many requests into a single packet. Furthermore, it provides an optional feature called server push whereby a server can send additional documents that the client may need along side the response for the document that was actually requested. For example, a server may send the style sheets and JavaScript files along side the response for the request to an HTML file.
A Kernel is somewhat the soul of an operating system since it exists at its core. Once you start/boot your machine, the Kernel takes control of the entire system. Each RHEL 8 distribution is shipped with a custom-built kernel.
Since a Kernel is the primary bridge of communication between the hardware and software components of an entire computer system, it is responsible for such a system’s integrity and supported hardware compatibility. Also, it is the kernel that provides an interfacing link between system processes and computer hardware.
There are new vulnerabilities being disclosed every day that put your server at a security risk. This stress of updating your system for the latest security patch or application update can be relieved by automating the update process using the dnf-automatic command.
The dnf-automatic is a command-line tool for RHEL-based distributions such as Fedora, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc., for automating the update process using systemd timers. It will periodically check the system for the latest release or security update and update them without your interaction as a background process.
Learn how to use the PPA repository to install Python’s old versions such as 3.9. 3.8, 3.7, and more on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy JellyFish using the command terminal.
Python is freely available for the common operating systems. The programming language is standard equipment in many Linux distributions. Python can also be used on many mobile operating systems. For web servers, WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface) is a universal interface between the server and Python.
It offers clear syntax and good readability. It is considered easy to learn and can be interpreted in the common operating systems. Python supports several programming paradigms such as functional, object-oriented, or aspect-oriented programming and can also be used as a scripting language.
Since Python is a so-called multiparadigm language, programmers are not tied to a specific programming style. The optimal programming style can be selected for the various tasks. Python allows Python programs to be embedded in other languages ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹as individual modules.
Darktable (stylized as darktable) is a free and open-source photography application program and raw developer. Rather than being a raster graphics editor like Adobe Photoshop or GIMP, it comprises a subset of image editing operations specifically aimed at non-destructive raw image post-production. It is primarily focused on improving a photographer’s workflow by facilitating the handling of large numbers of images. It is freely available in versions tailored for most major Linux distributions, macOS, Solaris and Windows and is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later.
Pinta is an open-source, cross-platform bitmap image drawing and editing program inspired by Paint.NET, a similar image editing program which is limited to Microsoft Windows. Pinta has more features than Microsoft Paint. Compared with open-source image editor GIMP, Pinta is simpler and has fewer features.
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install or upgrade MariaDB 10.9 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal and some tips on how to upgrade your existing database if needed one exists.
Sublime Merge is a git client software that comes with various features to help make working with git repositories easier. One of its most valuable features is the syntax highlighting engine, which makes it easier to read code. The custom high-performance Git reading library is also helpful, allowing you to stage changes line-by-line.
Additionally, the build-in git search function lets you quickly find commits, and the themes allow you to customize the look of the software to match your preferences. The Command Palette and Commit Editing functions are also helpful, letting you quickly execute git commands and edit commits. Finally, the Submodule Management and Git Flow Integration functions make it easy to work with submodules and manage branches. Overall, Sublime Merge is a powerful git client that can significantly improve your workflow.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sublime Merge on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS using the official Sublime APT repository using the command line terminal, along with how to launch the software and remove it in the future if required.
SQLite is a free, lightweight relational database management system (RDBMS) in a C library. SQLite is not a client-server database engine. Instead, it is embedded into the end program. Primarily all programming languages support SQLite, which how languages embed the program is with a file with .sqlite3/.sqlite/.DB extension. The software is popular for local/client storage such as web browsers, Android devices, etc. The list is quite extensive.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install SQLite 3 with CentOS 9 Stream using the command line terminal using the standard DNF package manager or manually installing straight from the project’s Git.
Here’s how to configure Linux superuser access so that it's available to those who need it—yet well out of the way of people who don't need it.
This beginner-focused article discusses how you can hide files and folders from normal view in Linux. Both GUI and command-line methods have been discussed.
There will be times when you need to hide files in Linux.
No, I am not talking about those ‘special files’ that you don’t want your family to see. Although you can hide these special files, it is better to lock them with a password for an extra layer of protection.
Back to hiding files. Any file or folder whose name begins with a . (dot) is “hidden” in Linux.
Many Fedora users are unaware of the fact that you do get an option to choose other Desktop Environments apart from the default GNOME which we are used to downloading directly from their download page.
Apart from the default GNOME, you do get an option of KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQT, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, SOAS, and even i3.
So through this guide, we will be showing you how you can install XFCE Fedora spin on your system in the easiest way possible but before that, let’s discuss why you should even consider using XFCE instead of GNOME.
Displaying hidden files in Linux is quite easy. You use the ls command in this manner:
ls -a That's fine. You can see the hidden files with their names starting with a dot (.).
But you see all the files in the current directory, the hidden ones and the regular ones.
What if you want to ONLY see the hidden files, not the regular ones?
There is no ready-to-use option like -a and -A. However, you can always find a way to achieve things by combining a few commands through the wonderful pipe redirection.
In this article, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Ubuntu systems.
PlayOnLinux is a graphical frontend for the Wine software compatibility layer which allows Linux users to install Windows-based video games, Microsoft Office (2000 to 2010), Microsoft Internet Explorer, as well as many other applications such as Apple iTunes and Safari.
While initially developed for Linux-based systems, it is also used on macOS and FreeBSD under the names PlayOnMac and PlayOnBSD, respectively. It can also be used on other operating systems supported by Wine.
I watched Jeremy’s talk at CSS Day 2022 titled “In And Out Of Style” and, as always, I had my notepad ready. Here are a few points that stood out to me.
However, if you have a multi-homed host, a host with multiple interfaces and IP addresses, this approach to routing outgoing traffic can create a situation where outgoing and incoming packets for the same connection (or flow) use different interfaces. To have this happen you normally need at least two of your networks to be routable, which is to say that hosts not on those networks can reach them and hosts on those networks can reach other networks.
Courtney Allen has published a blog post about how to run a website and blog almost exclusively on things that are in the OpenBSD base system already, only adding AsciiDoc to the mix.
A few months ago, a friend of mine mentioned that they still, in the year 2021, used RSS feeds to subscribe to the blogs they liked. I was incredulous? RSS? That orange button I used to see on websites years ago? The one that returned XML if you accidentally clicked it? People still used that? People still provided that?
Apparently the answer was yes. My friend also said that if I implemented RSS on my blog, they would subscribe to it. So I thought about it, and decided to do it. I forgot about it until today, but when I did remember it didn’t take long to implement at all.
I have fallen in love with a recent combination of software to make good looking websites, and having an easy to manage web server. I’m a minimalist in many ways. Really, I find that it makes my life easier. I like to keep my blog up here and don’t want to deal with database updates, language exploits, weird migrations, and so on. I also manage my church’s website. I can’t be having complex solutions that require large amounts of maintenance at multiple times a month because of a dozen pieces of software requiring version upgrades or what have you. Sure, some people have needs for elaborate content management systems, but sometimes you only need a simple site too, and why overcomplicate it?
This is why I like my current combo:
1. OpenBSD
2. AsciiDoc
It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell co-founded Atari, which brought video games to the mainstream. To celebrate, we asked Bushnell what he learned during the early years—and what we’ve lost sight of since then.
Valve made a change to the specifications of the top two versions of the Steam Deck last month, which it seems plenty of people (including me) completely missed. It's not a massive change but still one to be aware of as not all Decks are the same.
AOKZOE will be jumping in the handheld ring with their upcoming AOKZOE A1 AMD Ryzen 7 6800U portable that will offer either Windows 11 or SteamOS to perhaps rival the Steam Deck. They're a rather new company, so everything they're talking about and showing off should be taken with a rather large pinch of salt.
While installation of RHEL 9, the installer recommends we choose a complex password and while making the password complex enough, the chances of forgetting our password are quite high. And things get even more complex when your user is not even added to the wheel group (which allows a normal user to elevate root privileges for a small amount of time).
This tutorial will guide you on how you can change your forgotten root password in 3 scenarios and we are quite sure that you’ll be able to recover your forgotten password at the end of this guide.
GNU Nano is an editor that has a minimal learning curve and hence is widely used for beginner-level guides.
The action-adventure genre is a video game genre that combines core elements from both the action game and adventure game genres. They engage both reflexes and problem-solving in both violent and non-violent situations.
There are many games that can fall into this genre given that the action genre, itself, is very wide encompassing. Other games that can fit into this genre are covered in the series.
There is an eligibility criteria that needs to be met to be included in this round up (see below).
Let’s explore the 10 games. For each game we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, a screen shot of the game in action, together with links to relevant resources.
GNOME Web (Epiphany) is one of the best browsers available for Linux users.
It offers a minimal, and a unique user experience.
Unfortunately, the uniqueness does not incentivize users to use it as their primary web browser.
But, it looks like that could change soon…
GNOME Web is finally adding support for WebExtensions, as revealed by one of the developers (Patrick a.k.a TingPing).
This is all a part of the GNOME 43 feature set.
Personally, I've done an enormous amount of work promoting Debian over more than 25 years without receiving any payment in return. I couldn't help noticing the news that Debian is now paying a lawyer to silence critics, in other words, contradicting the Debian Social Contract. The lawyer's west London mansion in Pinner has really emphasized the injustice of this situation.
News today tells us the UK is planning to cut off gas supplies to some European countries so that traditional British mansions like this can stay warm. This could be avoided if Mr Cohen used some of his Debian money to insulate his house.
I had a quick look at the pictures that have been circulating online, they provide valuables lessons for all homeowners in the UK and Ireland.
[...]
With all the money he has received from Debian in the last year, this type of deep retrofit will be easily within reach for Mr Cohen.
Autonomous Raspberry Pi robots navigate their environment without bumping into things. Using an ultrasonic sensor, such as the HC-SR04, to detect obstacles is a fairly common tool for Pi-based robots and cars but this robot car project, created by maker and developer ãâ¨ãâ¹ ãÆ©ãÆÅ (S Lab), is going even further by mapping out a room with the help of a LiDAR sensor.
The car has a Raspberry Pi 4 4GB at its core and as it drives around, LiDAR sensor data is transmitted from the Pi to a nearby PC which uses a SLAM-based (simultaneous localization and mapping) system to create a virtual, 3D replica of the room surrounding the Raspberry Pi. The program also provides a virtual representation of the car in Unity to estimate its position in the room.
Pine64, maker of many fine SBCs including the Rock64 and Quartz64 (opens in new tab), is preparing to dip its toe into the choppy waters of RISC-V, including news of an upcoming “powerful, yet affordable” board based on the versatile open-source architecture in its most recent product update (opens in new tab).
Hello and welcome, everyone! We are back, yet again, with a handful of new products here at SparkFun Electronics! We've heard your requests for kits for our mikroBUS boards to include a few hookup accessories (specifically Click boardsââ¢) so we took both of our boards and made them easier to get started with! Following that, we have a new WiFi HaLow HAT from ALFA Network that we expect to really help your Raspberry Pi get connected to a new type of IoT network. Now, let's jump in and take a closer look at all of this week's new products!
Solid hardware, good software, and Wi-Fi access see this incremental update elevate the Raspberry Pi Pico to a truly versatile development board.
New product alert! In January last year, we launched the $4 Raspberry Pi Pico, our first product built on silicon designed here at Raspberry Pi. At its heart is the RP2040 microcontroller, built on TSMC’s 40nm low-power process, and incorporating two 133MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ cores, 264kB of on-chip SRAM, and our unique programmable I/O subsystem.
I was expecting the next official Raspberry Pi board to be either an update of Raspberry Pico with WiFi and Bluetooth or with a machine learning accelerator and the new $6 Raspberry Pi Pico W delivers that wish through the addition of 2.4GHz WiFi 4.
Having said that, I was actually expecting a competitor to ESP8266 or ESP32 with a new Raspberry Pi wireless microcontroller, but it did quite happen that way as the Raspberry Pi Pico W features the same Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller found in Raspberry Pi Pico board coupled with an Infineon CYW43439 chip that’s supposed to support both 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth LE 5.2. Bluetooth is not enabled right now, but may be at a later stage.
A while ago I did a bit of an experiment to compare the sound level between TMC2208 and A4988 stepper motor drivers. At the time, A4988 drivers were more commonly used on 3D printers and other hobby CNC devices. Since then, most 3D printer and CNC laser manufacturers have moved towards replacing at least the X and Y axis motors with the silent TMC2208 stepper motor driver or some other variant of silent motor driver. A question that has come up quite a lot in the video’s comments was how these drivers manage to drive the motors with such a significant sound reduction and if there was any trade-off.
In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But first, some background. During the Apollo missions to the Moon, NASA could send digital messages to the spacecraft from the ground. These data messages could perform specific tasks: control spacecraft equipment by activating relays, send commands directly to the Apollo Guidance Computer, or even set the spacecraft's clock. Onboard the Command Module, these messages were decoded by the Up-Data Link, a drab bluish box (below) mounted in the equipment bay.
Logitech’s Driving Force Shifter is a very common piece of kit for those who enjoy racing games, as it connects to a Logitech Racing Wheel and allows the player to control their car in a more realistic fashion. However, this accessory’s DB-9 connector must be connected to a proprietary base within the racing wheel or else it fails to work. So as a way to circumvent this annoying problem, Parts Not Included’s Dave Madison created his own custom adapter, which translates the signals from the shifter into commands over a USB port on the host PC.
To begin this endeavor, Madison purchased a DB-9 connector with the rear leads exposed, and after quickly modifying them, plugged the X/Y axis wires into analog input pins and connected the binary reverse pin into a digital input pin on the Arduino Leonardo. In terms of software, this setup requires both the Arduino Joystick library and the Sim Racing library. The latter converts X/Y values into shifter positions in order to determine the current gear, while the former communicates with the host as an emulated HID device.
With the update to version 102, Firefox now automatically strips tracking parameters from some URLs, including those shared on Facebook. However, as reported by Bleeping Computer, it’s just a handful, and in some light, quick testing, it won’t cover all the sites you might visit during the normal course of a day.
I chose SQLite for the database that supports this dashboard, which in early 2021 when I built this system, seemed like a perfect choice for what I thought would be a small, niche application that my teammates and I can use to improve our blogging. But almost a year and a half later, this application tracks daily traffic for close to 8000 articles across the Twilio and SendGrid blogs, with about 6.5 million individual daily traffic records, and with a user base that grew to over 200 employees.
At some point I realized that some queries were taking a few seconds to produce results, so I started to wonder if a more robust database such as PostgreSQL would provide better performance. Having publicly professed my dislike of performance benchmarks, I resisted the urge to look up any comparisons online, and instead embarked on a series of experiments to accurately measure the performance of these two databases for the specific use cases of this application. What follows is a detailed account of my effort, the results of my testing (including a surprising twist!), and my analysis and final decision, which ended up being more involved than I expected.
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted€ an interesting blog post€ by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible:
The first step to eliminate bugs is to find a way how to reproduce them consistently. Wait… what?
Test suites are great for that, since they can simulate very specific behavior in a timely manner. IGT GPU Tools is a collection of tools for development and testing of the DRM drivers, and, as such, it can help us to find and reproduce bugs.
Recently I’ve heard from a friend that his professor simply doesn’t believe that free software should be profitable, so I’m making this blog post.
Being part of the community, is more than just writing code and sending patches, it is also keeping track of the IRC discussions and reading the mailing lists to review and test patches sent from others whenever you can.
Both environments are not the most welcoming, but there are plenty of tools from the community to help parsing them. In this post I’ll talk about b4, suggested by my GSOC mentor André, a tool to help with applying patches.
Each “source” in the above diagram represents a single encoder. To the sinks it provides a position and velocity, along with various validity indications for that data. Each has three basic configuration components: where to get the raw data, how to transform that raw data, and the low-pass filter configuration. We’ll cover each in turn.
The command set wasn't always well thought out, and then over the years it grew by accretion, with new stuff piled on top of old stuff that couldn't be changed because Backward Compatibility. The commands are non-orthogonal and when two commands perform the same task they often have inconsistent options or are described with different terminology. Even when the individual commands don't conflict with one another, they are often badly-designed and confusing. The documentation is often very poorly written.
When [bornach] browsed through his office’s free-cycling box he found an old novelty toy that lets you play simple tunes on miniature steel drums. Such a thing is probably fun for about five minutes – if it’s working, which this one wasn’t. But instead of throwing it away, [bornach] spotted an opportunity in the capacitive touch pads on top of those little drums: they looked perfect to be modified into an unusual mouse cursor controller.
Over the past two decades, Pierre Senges has emerged as one of France’s most important and celebrated writers. At the age of 54, Senges has published 16 novels, mostly with Ãâ°ditions Verticales, an experimental imprint of Gallimard, the most storied publishing house in France, as well as some two dozen radio plays. Since his 2000 debut, Veuves au Maquillages, a dark comedy about a man with a fetish for women who have murdered their husbands, he has won a number of prestigious literary prizes. Yet despite the efforts of a handful of devoted translators and small presses, he remains little-known among Anglophone readers.
Cuban rapper Maykel Castillo and visual artist Luis Manuel Otero who helped compose and record last year’s Latin Grammy-winning “Patria y Vida,” a bitter viral rap song that gave voice to the accumulated rage and resentment of some disaffected Cubans, received harsh prison sentences last Friday.
I think a lot about the lifecycle of websites. I’m frustrated by so much of the short-term thinking I see in the world today, and the way we think about websites is a part of that: it’s “normal” for them to just go up in smoke as soon as their authors stop paying attention. People switch platforms and providers and break links without a second thought. It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it.
I would like to propose a new term: outrage dividend.
Outrage dividend is the boost in reach that content which elicits strong emotional responses often gets on social media and other content sharing platforms.
This boost can be related to human nature — an outrage-inducing article will get shared more. It can also be caused by the particular set-up of the platform a given piece of content is shared on — Facebook’s post-promoting algorithm was designed to be heavily biased to promote posts that get the “angry” reaction.
According to The New York Times, some of the employees laid off were involved in human resources and writer support. The report also says that Substack recently halted efforts to secure funding from investors, but that its revenue is still growing.
I’m not here to defend him but it appeared to me that he wasn’t necessarily looking to attack or hurt his team (I could be wrong) but to stop them from limiting themselves, to prevent them from settling for less, to force them to push themselves to think outside of the box, to “think differently”.
In August 2020, Boise State University chose a doctoral student in public policy, Melanie Fillmore, to deliver what is called a “land acknowledgment” speech at a convocation for incoming freshmen. Fillmore, who is part Indigenous, would recognize the tribes that lived in the Boise Valley before they were banished to reservations to make way for white settlers.
Fillmore considered it an honor. She was devoted to Boise State, where she had earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, taught undergraduate courses and served on job search committees. She also admired Marlene Tromp, a feminist literary scholar who came from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2019 to become Boise State’s first female president. Tromp had been hired with a mandate to promote diversity, and including an Indigenous speaker in the ceremony marking the start of students’ higher education would advance that agenda.
Like today’s Intel-AMD duopoly, the market for home computer CPUs in the 1970s and ’80s was dominated by two players: Zilog with their Z80, and MOS Technology with their 6502 processor. But unlike today, even if two computers had the same CPU, it didn’t mean the two were software compatible: differences in memory layout, video interfaces, and storage media meant that software developed for an Atari 2600 wouldn’t run on an Apple I, despite the two sharing the same basic CPU architecture.
An Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC) is at its core a straight-forward device: by measuring an analog voltage within a set range and converting the measured level to a digital value we can use this measurement value in our code. Through the use of embedded ADCs in microcontrollers we can address many essential use cases, ranging from measuring the setting on a potentiometer, to reading an analog output line on sensors, including the MCU’s internal temperature and voltage sensors.
While some decent lasers are out there for under $400 USD, they tend to be a little small. What if you wanted something a little nicer but didn’t want to jump to the $2,000 category? The answer for [Owen Schafer] was to build it with parts he had lying around and a few strategic purchases.
The number of new infections declined as herd immunity was established, marking a turning point in the effort to stop epidemic polio. The success of this decades-long campaign was one of the greatest US achievements in the 20th century. Not that it did me any good at the time as I was admitted to St Finbarr’s fever hospital in Cork city on 30 September.
When I was released three months later, I was at first confined to bed or was in a wheelchair and learned to walk again with metal callipers on my legs and wearing a plastic waistcoat to keep my back straight. Though my mobility improved markedly over the years, I could not run and have always walked with a severe limp.
From time to time, there are dubious studies that pop up that I mean to discuss and, for whatever reason, never get around to or, having failed to discuss them in a timely fashion, decide that no one cares any more and don’t come back to. On the other hand, sometimes there are studies like what I just described that keep bugging me, that keep coming back in a niggling fashion in such a way that eventually I just say, “WTF?” and discuss them, even though I probably should have done so a week or two ago. A new study by Peter Doshi and colleagues that purports to be a reanalysis of the adverse events data from the original phase 3 clinical trials of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines that the companies used to gain Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for their products over a year and a half ago is one such study, and last night I just gave in.
Flint residents expressed disappointment and disgust after the Michigan Supreme Court on Tuesday determined former state officials were not indicted properly—yet again delaying accountability for the city's water crisis.
"No more excuses. No more delays."
I think what we’re facing is an instance of the Two-Worlds Problem that’s now everywhere in US society. It’s where the vast majority of people are feeling pain from an issue, but there’s an elite that lives in a reality where the problem doesn’t exist.
Norway’s public and private sector websites were temporarily down on Wednesday following a cyberattack that targeted the country’s national data network, forcing it to suspend online services for several hours.
The distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack targeted a secure national data network forcing the temporary suspension of online services for several hours, the Norwegian National Security Authority said.
Now if I break another YubiKey, or brick my phone, I can always generate codes using the secret key, or easily re-add it to my new phone. But also, now a new option is open for me: I can programmatically generate the OTP tokens.
Israeli phone malware manufacturer NSO Group has plenty of customers. Or at least it did until the Israeli government edited the company’s list of approved customers and the US government slapped sanctions on it.
According to the Republican FCC commissioner, TikTok violates policies dictating the app stores of Apple and Google covering user data. He cites Apple’s guidelines stating that an app developer “must provide access to information about how and where the data [of an individual] will be used” and “data collected from apps may only be shared with third parties to improve the app or serve advertising.” Of Google’s app store, Carr argues that TikTok violated rules requiring developers to disclose an app’s access, collection, use and sharing of data.
The app is run by ByteDance, a company that is “beholden to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC’s surveillance demands,” read the June 24 letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sunder Pichai.
“It is clear that TikTok poses an unacceptable national security risk due to its extensive data harvesting being combined with Beijing’s apparently unchecked access to that sensitive data,” said Carr, calling it a wolf in sheep’s clothing. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data” such as search histories, keystroke patterns and biometric identifies.”
This issue is not resolved yet
Any honorable foreign policy dedicated to the betterment of the human condition must begin by wresting control of the policy process, from inception to execution, away from the elites who now control it.
The spate of mass shootings we've witnessed over the past few weeks has jolted our minds and broken our hearts. The killings come in rapid-fire sequence, leaving us hardly a pause to catch our breath. In May alone, ten people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York; nineteen children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; four at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and three at a church in Ames, Iowa. Over the first weekend of June, a medley of gun deaths dotting the country's landscape. Mass shootings, it seems, have become an American pastime.
Mitchell Zimmerman's June 22, 2022 column explored a similar theme. This newer column contains significant new information.
No one who watched, listened to, or read about the Jan. 6 committee’s most recent hearing could possibly believe Trump’s big lie of a stolen election for one second. The Attorney General, acting Attorney General, and the entire top echelon of the U.S. Department of Justice did their jobs, investigated the potential for voter fraud across the nation and came to a unanimous agreement on one thing€ — there was no evidence of any actions by any individuals in any state, county, or municipality that could possibly affect the reality that Donald Trump simply lost his re-election bid.
Despite threats of physical violence€ — including intrusions into the homes of voting election officials€ — the witnesses at the hearing bravely told the nation that they stood their ground, followed the law, and did their jobs. Hardcore Republican conservatives — who admitted they wanted Trump to win€ —€ testified that they could not and would not break their oaths to uphold the constitution to cast doubt on the integrity of the American election system for Donald Trump. Even when threatened with dismissal and replacement they refused to claim there was a shred of truth in Trump’s Big Lie — despite his demand that they “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
As my friend and colleague John Nichols wrote right after Tuesday’s shattering January 6 Committee testimony, Donald Trump assaulted his security detail as he was trying to illegally hold on to the presidency. Trump said, “I’m the fucking president. Take me up to the Capitol now!” when he was told he could not personally lead the insurrectionists into the seat of government. Trump then attempted to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine and, when he was stopped by Bobby Engel, the leader of his Secret Service detail, Trump tried to strangle Engel.
A day after a key witness dropped "bombshell after bombshell" during a surprise hearing of the panel probing last year's insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the committee on Wednesday subpoenaed former White House Counsel Pasquale "Pat" Cipollone for "on-the-record testimony."
Cassidy Hutchinson—an ex-special assistant to Mark Meadows, former President Donald Trump's last chief of staff—testified Tuesday that Cipollone urged her to prevent Trump from joining a violent mob of his supporters at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, revealed Tuesday to the House January 6 committee that Meadows and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani both sought pardons after the insurrection. Meanwhile, in a video deposition with Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Flynn repeatedly refused to answer questions from committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney. Cheney concluded the hearing by presenting evidence of possible witness tampering by allies of Trump.
A Russian missile strike hit the Amstor shopping center in Kremenchuk, Ukraine, late in the afternoon on Monday, June 27. According to the latest reports, the attack killed up to 20 people and injured 59 others; at least 21 people are still missing. Ukrainian Interior Minister Denys Monastyrsky said on Wednesday that rescue workers are still recovering body parts from the wreckage, but there is no longer any hope of finding survivors.€ Journalist Shura Burtin, who is reporting for Meduza from Ukraine, traveled to Kremenchuk on Monday to cover the immediate aftermath of the strike. Here’s what he saw.
Members of the president’s cabinet were so disgusted with his actions that they seriously contemplated invoking the 25th Amendment, which would have removed the president from power. The next day, Mr Trump had to be dissuaded from mentioning the possibility of pardons for those who had taken part in the attempted insurrection. Mr Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer (who filed frivolous lawsuits about voter fraud and put pressure on state legislators to decertify lawful election results), would later both seek presidential pardons.
An April circular by the Chinese Ministry of Education on student admission criteria at Tibetan universities has been harrowing and discriminating to say the least.
The circular said that prospective students must state their “political attitude and ideological morality” to be considered for admission.
It also said that students should not be involved in religious movements and students who are proficient in Marxist theory should be preferred.
Since Beijing started occupying Tibet, it has meticulously introduced policies to dismantle the Tibetan education system, which is closely tied to its rich monastic tradition, and has even pulled students from Afghanistan and eastern Europe to Tibet.
While Chinese-state propaganda says the reason for the move is to get the people away from “harsh weather and relatively backward production and living conditions”, the real consequences would be the end of the traditional Tibetan way of life. Farmers and nomads have made a sustainable way of life high on the Tibetan plateau for centuries and those being relocated are often not given an opportunity to stay or even given full information about what will happen to them as they are forced into a completely alien way of life.
Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre said on Monday afternoon that the most serious incidents had been brought under control, but warned that attacks might continue.
Contrast that with the cowardice of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the insurrection schemers, whose testimony the committee aired, to chuckles:
“Do you believe the violence on January 6 was justified morally?”
“Take the Fifth.”
“Do you believe the violence on January 6th was justified legally?”
“Fifth.”
“Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power?
“The Fifth.”
According to ex-aide Stephanie Grisham, she personally sent a text to Melania on Jan. 6 asking "Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness & violence?"
Melania's response was a simple "No."
Instead of exploiting this crisis to expand even further, NATO should suspend all new or pending membership applications until the current crisis has been resolved.
Stoltenberg could have looked all the way back to when the U.S.S.R. was dissolving, and highlighted a 1990 State Department memo warning that creating an “anti-Soviet coalition” of NATO countries along the U.S.S.R’s border “would be perceived very negatively by the Soviets.”
Stoltenberg could have reflected on the consequences of all the broken promises by Western officials that NATO would not expand eastward. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous assurance to Soviet President Gorbachev was just one example. Declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted by the National Security Archive reveal multiple assurances by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and 1991.
In Vienna, a total of 65 countries with many others as observers and a large number of civil organisations...
Sweden and Finland agreed not to support Kurdish militant groups and to lift export controls on Turkey.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, I was easing my way into a new job and in the throes of the teaching year. But that war quickly hijacked my life. I spend most of my day poring over multiple newspapers, magazines, blogs, and the Twitter feeds of various military mavens, a few of whom have been catapulted by the war from obscurity to a modicum of fame. Then there are all those websites to check out, their color-coded maps and daily summaries catching that conflict’s rapid twists and turns.
The repercussions of the open sectarian war sparked by the U.S. invasion of Iraq can still be felt throughout the region, says As`ad AbuKhalil, partly because of Iran’s inaction.
A congressional committee is investigating whether portable generator manufacturers have done enough to protect the public from deadly levels of carbon monoxide emitted by their products.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, D-N.Y., who leads the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, sent letters to top executives at four major generator companies on Tuesday requesting copies of records documenting why they have not implemented potentially lifesaving safety upgrades in many generator models for sale. Maloney also asked for messages sent or received by officials at the companies — Generac Power Systems, DuroMax Power Equipment, Firman Power Equipment and Champion Power Equipment — related to any injuries or deaths connected to their products.
Just about the time that this half-century-long campaign to enshrine the right to a safe environment kicked off, a story about the horrific violation of this same human right and its cover-up emerged in a community near my own childhood home in Southern California. In 1979, a UCLA student named Michael Rose uncovered evidence of a partial nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) in the Simi Hills outside of Los Angeles. The SSFL, formerly known as Rocketdyne, played key government roles throughout the Cold War, developing and testing rocket engines and conducting experiments with nuclear reactors. Today, as the result of a recently published peer-reviewed study that represents the dogged efforts of both professional researchers and a team of specially trained citizens, we have solid evidence of the spread of dangerous contamination from that site.
Working with nuclear safety expert and then-UCLA professor Daniel Hirsch, Rose discovered documentation that the partial nuclear meltdown had occurred at SSFL twenty years earlier in 1959, releasing up to 459 times more radiation into the environment than the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Unlike the Three Mile Island facility, the SSFL reactors lacked containment structures—those tell-tale concrete domes that surround commercial nuclear power plants to prevent radiation spread in case of a nuclear accident.
Higher energy prices are a significant political problem for US president Joe Biden and many other world leaders, who face strikes and protests. One way world leaders might seek to lower prices is work to increase the global supply of oil. Biden especially has a significant opportunity in his hands to boost global production by breaking with Trump’s failed “maximum pressure” campaigns, and ending unilateral — and likely illegal — sanctions against Iran and Venezuela. These potential increases in oil production amount to about 2.6 million extra barrels per day, which dwarfs increases Biden is likely to get directly from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel that coordinates oil production in many countries.
To show the potential benefits of abandoning the Trump administration’s failed policies toward Venezuela and Iran, it is useful to compare their potential oil production to that from OPEC Plus, an expanded and loosely organized group of oil-producing countries. Biden, along with other world leaders, have been extensively lobbying OPEC Plus to increase production. A recent announcement from the group included an agreement to accelerate planned increases in oil production for July and August. For these months, the total production increase will now be 648,000 barrels per day — but this does not represent a new commitment to increase total supply. Rather, increases scheduled for over three months have been condensed into two months, meaning that production levels in July and August will be about 200,000 barrels above what they would have been. The increase represents 0.4 percent of global demand for these months.
Several environmental groups sued the Biden administration on Tuesday for resuming oil and gas leasing on public lands despite ample evidence that doing so will exacerbate the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.
"Our climate can't afford any new fossil fuel developments."
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but the most likely eventual conclusion of changing it from one form or another will be relatively useless heat. For those that workout with certain gym equipment, the change from chemical energy to heat is direct and completely wasted for anything other than keeping in shape. [Oliver] wanted to add a step in the middle to recover some of this energy, though, and built some gym equipment with a built-in generator.
To advocates, scaling up the markets where companies go to offset their greenhouse gas emissions will unlock billions of dollars to plant forests, restore ecosystems, and spur a global roll-out of machines to scrub carbon dioxide (CO2) from the sky.€
To critics, a long history of failed projects suggests that the chief beneficiary may not be the climate — but the bankers and brokers betting that carbon trading is on the cusp of exponential growth.€
Ultimately, the climate ministers hope their proposed package of laws will help the EU meet its target of a 55 percent greenhouse gas emissions reduction by 2030.
Plans are being made to adapt micro-mobility vehicles to suit existing laws and regulations under the aegis of local governments and the Road Transport Department (JPJ). Upon finalisation, the plan will be forwarded to the Housing and Local Government Ministry (KPKT) as well as the MOT.
Such micro-mobility devices are currently banned from use on Malaysian public roads, gazetted under the Road Traffic (Prohibition of Use of Certain Microbility Vehicles) Rules 2021 and in effect since December 17, 2021. The ban covers mopeds, personal mobility aids (i.e. motorised wheelchairs, mobility scooters) and personal mobility devices (i.e. e-scooters, hoverboards, skateboards, kick scooters).
If you had ventured down a dirt road running through remote marshland along the Gulf Coast in Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, at just the right time back in late February, you might have come across a pit of gray muck. Down in that pit, you’d find a contractor welding a steel cap about the size of a dinner plate onto a stub of pipe jutting up from the mud below.€
That pipe was the last visible sign of an old oil and gas wastewater well that once dropped over a half-mile deep into the earth, now plugged up and sealed by contractors hired by the state.
The leaders of the seven most powerful imperialist countries are meeting in the Alps. These seven men stand for environmental destruction and militarism like no one else. That’s why protests were g…
It truly is astonishing to watch the G-7 and NATO summits which are theaters of the absurd; meetings of rouge bandits laughing away while their policies lead to death and destruction on a global scale. Highway robbery does not describe adequately what the US-Europe have done with Russian foreign assets or those of other nations (Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan) at the receiving end of the US sanctions regime. Further, as the United States and its NATO puppets continue to punish Russia for its military activities in Ukraine, the end result of the deadly gambit is to send to the slaughter more Ukrainians as Russia methodically moves to liberate Luhansk and Donetsk, and fortify its gains in the south of Ukraine.
Arsenal of Stupidity
Like most of the previous six phases of sanctions the purpose of the latest is to deprive Russia of revenues from exports. So far sanctions haven’t been all that successful in that regard, at least in the shorter term. While the USA has banned Russian oil and gas imports to the USA, those amounts and their respective revenue impact on total Russian export revenue is insignificant. Moreover, the ban on Russian oil exports to Europe do not begin until December 2022, while there’s no ban on Russian natural gas imports whatsoever. So little net impact on Russian energy export revenues from Europe either.
The sanctions on oil & gas Russian exports to Europe have been quite minimal to date. Meanwhile, Russia’s exports to China, India and rest of the world have been rising. As have global energy prices in general.€ With accelerating global prices for oil and gas, and an increase in Russian energy exports to India, China and elsewhere, Russia’s revenues have been actually rising.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic U.S. Senate candidate John Fetterman on Wednesday urged the Department of Transportation to levy hefty fines against airlines that schedule flights they're unable to adequately staff, causing the kinds of mass cancellations that have thrown travelers into chaos in recent months.
"Government has a responsibility to hold these airlines accountable."
Armageddon comes November 8. Pundits and progressives have been warning Democrats for months that if they don't change course and achieve significant legislation promised in 2020, they will go down in flames on election day, along with our democracy. The tone of these warnings is imbued with the implication that the party, and especially President Biden, either doesn't believe this or that it is flummoxed on how to avoid the calamity. But is this case?
—Kendrick Lamar, N95
Beware of those saying Putin is a communist. Beware of those saying Putin is fighting Nazis. Beware of those cancelling Amber Heard. Beware of those telling you they are cancelled when you give them a monthly subscription. There is some very spooky shit going on. Socially distance for clarity when necessary. Socially distance for health when necessary. Thank your friends. Thank your enemies but only on the inside.
In mid-June, the European Commission voted against recommending that Georgia receive EU candidate status, recommending instead that it be granted the “European perspective.” Now, if Georgia wants to join the EU, it will have to take specific steps that, according to the EU, will strengthen its democracy. After the announcement, protesters from Georgia’s Sirtskhvilia (“Shame”) movement led thousands of people in a rally they called Going Home — to Europe. Another rally followed the European Parliament’s official refusal to grant the country EU status. That time, the protesters demanded the resignation of the government —€ and gave them an ultimatum.
The new bid for Scottish Independence is started. It does not matter how each of us got here, who had which idea first, what might be a better plan, who stabbed who in the back. It is gone. Let it be.
In explosive testimony Tuesday, Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, revealed new details to the January 6 select committee about the events leading up to the “Stop the Steal” rally. She indicated then-President Donald Trump and his inner circle, that included personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, expected the event to grow violent and did little to stop it. Hutchinson described how Trump demanded that the Secret Service allow his supporters wielding weapons to enter the Ellipse in order to make his rally seem better attended. “They’re not here to hurt me,” Trump said in dismissing safety concerns, Hutchinson testified. We feature her extended remarks.
Minutes after rioters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows seemed unperturbed and reluctant to act, according to live testimony from his former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, at the public hearing on Tuesday. Then-President Donald Trump, rather than calling off his supporters, defended their chants to hang Vice President Mike Pence for validating the election results. “I remember thinking in that moment, Mark needs to snap out of this,” recalled Hutchinson. “I don’t know how to snap him out of this, but he needs to care.” Hutchinson also notes Meadows and Rudy Giuliani both sought pardons after the insurrection. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney presented evidence of possible witness tampering by allies of Trump. Meanwhile, in a video deposition with Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Flynn repeatedly refused to answer questions from Cheney.
In one of the most dramatic revelations at Tuesday’s hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack, star witness Cassidy Hutchinson described how then-President Trump intended to join his supporters in the march to the Capitol and lunged at his Secret Service agent, who tried to prevent him from doing so, and grabbed the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, before he was driven back to the White House. Hutchinson was aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows at the time. She also describes another temper tantrum by the president weeks earlier, after Attorney General Bill Barr said publicly there was no election fraud, saying Trump threw a plate of food, leaving “ketchup dripping down the wall.”
State Rep. Delia Ramirez trounced Chicago Alderman Gil Villegas in the Democratic primary for Illinois' newly drawn and solidly blue 3rd Congressional District, besting an influx of spending by billionaire-backed organizations working to defeat progressive candidates nationwide.
"Tonight, the Illinois 3rd Congressional District has spoken—we are rooted and we are ready," Ramirez said after she was officially declared the winner. As of this writing, Ramirez leads Villegas by a margin of 65.8% to 23.7%.
A former leftwing guerrilla—Gustavo Petro—has been elected to Colombia's highest office.€ €
One does not need to look very far into the past to find evidence of collective targeting of known political detractors. For example, over 4,000 activists, leaders, and presidential candidates of the first openly leftist and oppositional party, Unión Patriótica, were systematically assassinated after achieving some initial electoral success at the local and regional level in the mid-1980s. Supporters, too, were targeted. Civilians were forcibly displaced or killed by illegal armed groups with the explicit goal of violently reorganizing districts and municipalities to deny Unión Patriótica a local or regional base of support. Traditional political elites and their wealthy patrons made it clear that alternative political projects grounded in social justice were not to be tolerated even in a competitive democracy.
And while the threat of political violence has not ceased, analyst and current Colombian Senator Ariel ÃÂvila recently remarked that the struggle to create a political space for the excluded and marginalized has resulted in the ascendancy of Petro and Márquez. As an Afro-Colombian environmental activist, Márquez and her connections to grassroots social movements increased Afro-Colombian and indigenous voter participation in the Pacific region of the country, ensuring a strong base of support for an egalitarian political program, that guaranteed their victory.
Civil rights advocates on Tuesday decried the U.S. Supreme Court's reinstatement of Louisiana's Republican-drawn congressional map, which a federal judge said will cause "irreparable harm" to Black voters in the 2022 midterm elections and likely violates the Voting Rights Act.
"We won't stop fighting in court until Louisiana has a fair congressional map."
Warning that U.S. President Joe Biden may lose his chance to confirm more circuit and district court nominees after the midterm elections if Republicans win a Senate majority, legal scholars are calling on Democratic lawmakers to immediately ramp up confirmations of federal judges.
"It's lunacy not to fill [judicial seats] immediately and by any means necessary."
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday endorsed a pair of House Democrats in their primaries against challengers backed by the nation's most powerful pro-Israel lobby—which is spending heavily to defeat progressive candidates who advocate for Palestinian rights.
Sanders (I-Vt.) endorsed Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Andy Levin, both of Michigan, tweeting that the former "has taken on powerful special interests and fought for working people" while the latter "is a strong labor voice" who is "taking on right-wing-funded super PACs."€
Such herbs have become the focal point of a new wave of discourse on TikTok focusing on herbs that can induce abortion. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned last Friday — prompting an onslaught of terror and protests from reproductive rights advocates across the country — people on social media are taking matters into their own hands by offering grassroots solutions to those seeking abortions. Some of these solutions, such as a TikTok trend set to the Chainsmokers’ “Paris,” with women in blue states offering to help people in red states procure abortions, have been helpful; yet medical experts are concerned about the growing trend of TikTok creators promoting these herbal abortifacients — some of which can also have devastating health effects.
However, social media is structured in a way that encourages one’s interactions with an issue to awareness alone. It is designed to encourage users to spend hours scrolling through automated feeds. Users can like a single post from an eco-influencer and feel the gratification of having taken a stand against climate change, then move on to watching cat videos.
And the ease with which Meta seems to have simply flipped a switch to block information about abortion pills reminds us that the company can effectively cut off access to harmful postings if it wants to — like, for example, expressions of hate. Over 40% of Americans have been victims of online harassment, according to a 2021 Pew Research survey. So what seems to be missing here is the will to better protect users from abuse. (Meta, for its part, claims to work hard to remove such content.)
On the one hand, content moderation at the scale modern social media companies operate at is an impossible nightmare. Companies are always going to lack the staff and resources to do it well (raising questions about the dangers of automation at scale), and they’re always going to screw things up for reasons well discussed.
“He could be seen sharing Tibet’s history and authentic Tibetan culture with the tourists, so I think that may be the reason for his arrest. His family has no idea where he is imprisoned at the moment,” the source has said, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.
His persecution is seen as arbitrary and in keeping with China’s ongoing crackdown on intellectuals, artists, critics, and activists who are seen as antithetical to President Xi Jinping’s sweeping Sinicization drive being implemented across the Tibetan Plateau.
As we’ve discussed before, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really does not like the “actual malice” standard required to make a defamation claim against a public figure, as laid out in the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case. The actual malice standard confuses many people, because it’s not actually about malice. The standard is that for there to be defamation of a public figure, it needs to be expressed while the speaker knows that the claims are false, or with “reckless disregard” for whether it’s true. And even the “reckless disregard” part is often misunderstood. It’s a much higher bar than simply being negligent. It means that that the speaker had serious doubts at the time of expression that the speech was false.
Bottom line: You cannot trust its future rulings to be based on neutrality. Respect for it, chiefly among the most vulnerable and who conservatives sneeringly describe as “libs,” has vanished.
The court has been slip-sliding in the direction of extremist Republican conservatism since its opening in October with a new 6-3 right-wing majority, three of the six appointed by Trump, the disgraceful and disgraced nemesis of most Americans.
A Mexican reporter was shot dead on Wednesday in the violence-plagued northeastern state of Tamaulipas -- the 12th journalist killed so far in a particularly bloody year for the country's press.
The high-profile Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial ended with what seemed like a split decision: Both were found to have defamed each other. But with the jury awarding millions more in damages to Depp than to Heard, the outcome suggests that she defamed him more. The chilling effect of the ruling on survivors of domestic violence who want to speak out against their abusers is clear, but the damage from the case extends to all issues that depend on unfettered discussion in a free press.
The way the JCPA is supposed to work is by giving an antitrust exemption to news sites, allowing them to negotiate as a bloc with sites like Google and Facebook, with the goal of getting paid every time those sites link to news articles. There are a few major, fundamental problems with that premise. For one, creating a new cartel to deal with existing monopolists is not competition, it’s the opposite. For another, creating an implicit right to control linking in any context won’t preserve journalism, it will let it rot away. Finally, the focus on getting paid for links makes even less sense when the problem, historically, has been the domination of the digital ad market by a few huge players. The Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act actually targets that specific problem much more effectively than the JCPA.
As mentioned above, competition doesn’t flourish when a group—even one of smaller newsrooms—are allowed to form a cartel. It just means that both sides of this fight are now huge. Proposed changes to the bill will limit the organizations that could get compensation under this scheme to publications with 1,500 employees or fewer. But that won’t preserve competition, because the loss of local and independent news has already happened. Many smaller publications are now owned or backed by large corporations and venture capital funds. And the industry is consolidating at a rapid rate.
The large corporations and investment vehicles that dominate online journalism took advantage of the mess created by Facebook and Google’s ad domination. And the JCPA would allow them to reap the rewards of buying up, laying off, and click-baiting these newsrooms. That’s infuriating.
"We are the actors, stunt performers, and stable hands of Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey joining together in union to create a fairer, safer, and more enjoyable workplace," the group said in a statement. "With a supermajority of support, we are excited to be forming our union with the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA)."
The American Guild of Variety Artists, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, represents live act performances at theaters and theme parks across the country. Notable performers they represent include entertainers at Disneyland and the Radio City Rockettes.
Bruce's Beach was purchased in 1912 to create a beach resort for black people at a time of racial segregation in southern California.
Located in the desirable city of Manhattan Beach, it was forcibly taken by the local council in 1924.
But on Tuesday, Los Angeles officials voted to return the land to the family.
A Kansas City hospital system on Wednesday reversed its decision to stop providing emergency contraceptives like Plan B following assurances from Missouri's top elected officials that the morning-after pill does not violate the state's restrictive abortion ban.
"First it's abortion. Next it's contraception."
Roe v. Wade is now history, and with it the U.S. constitutional protection of a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. A half century of medical practice, normative evolution, and legal precedent has been overturned by a Supreme Court stacked with conservative, Trump-appointed judges who have long made clear their opposition to the idea that reproductive freedom is a fundamental right.
Make no mistake. This Supreme Court decision is a huge disaster for women, minorities, and all those who want a freer and more democratic society.
The wording of the ruling, penned by the fanatic Federalist Society Catholic theocrat Samuel Alito, makes it clear that it is based upon an “original intent” concept of the Constitution where laws are evaluated for their constitutionality on the basis of what the white property-owning, and in many cases slave-owning founding men of the Constitutional Assembly believed to be the natural order of things. That so-called natural order included slavery, the genocide of North America’s Indigenous people, second-class status of women and freed blacks, the denial of voting rights to people — even white people — who owned no property, and the right to a public trial by a jury of one’s peers (except to those excluded populations, who weren’t even allowed in courtroom public galleries, much less in a jury box).
Appalled by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down Roe v. Wade and concerned about the dark money-fueled global assault on abortion rights, advocacy groups from 28 European countries demanded Tuesday that their leaders take immediate steps to shield and strengthen access to reproductive care throughout the continent.
Expressing "profound solidarity" with people across the U.S. who will be or already have been harmed by the right-wing high court's unpopular ruling, the groups noted in an open letter that several European countries—including Liechtenstein, Malta, Monaco, and Poland—also have in place "highly restrictive laws in disregard of international human rights obligations and public health evidence."
Less than a week after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, women across the United States€ are facing€ the painful chaos and confusion of a new reality in which they are being forced to continue unwanted pregnancies€ as clinics end abortion services and struggle to help patients get the care they need.
The court's ruling last Friday immediately triggered abortion bans in nine states that are home to 16 million women of reproductive age. Lower courts have blocked the bans for now in two of them, Louisiana and Utah, but several more states are expected to impose bans soon.
The€ Dobbs€ opinion overturning€ Roe. v. Wade€ is another marker on the road to where Republicans and the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative super-majority are taking the country. Millions of Americans cheer the journey. But a lot of them won't like the final destination.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, is going to be a catastrophe. There’s a German proverb that translates roughly as “the soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked,” meaning things won’t be as bad as you fear. Sometimes that’s true, but it wasn’t for the Germans, and it won’t be for us.
Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade, I want to share my experience as a woman who had to turn to an illegal abortion to end a pregnancy. The experience was frightening, degrading, and painful. It was frightening because I was not sure who would be preforming the abortion. Degrading because I was blindfolded during the procedure. Painful because the abortion was performed with very little anesthesia. No woman should have to go through what I went through, and no woman should have to overcome barriers to obtain a safe abortion.
Less than three hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Elyssa Klann sat down at her kitchen table, her phone plugged into the wall, two laptops open in front of her. Klann is a psychologist who has volunteered for the All-Options Talkline for seven years, supporting callers who are making decisions about their pregnancies and connecting them to resources when they ask for them.
In November of last year, I froze 16 eggs. I had met the man I now plan to marry a few months earlier, but if the relationship hadn’t worked out, I was prepared to become a solo parent. I was tired of feeling like I’d fucked up by failing to find a suitable romantic partner during my peak childbearing years. The women of my generation have more education and workforce participation (pre-pandemic) than at any time in history, but none of the social affirmation or infrastructure to support our ambitions. Even the heterosexual millennial men who are our peers aren’t necessarily interested in a financially or professionally successful partner if she doesn’t put his career first. And I wasn’t terribly interested in doing that.1
Indigenous leaders on Wednesday condemned a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows authorities in Oklahoma and other states to prosecute certain crimes on sovereign tribal land, a narrowing of a landmark 2020 decision affirming Native treaty rights.
"The right and power of tribes to rule themselves is being dismissed in favor of state power."
I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills€ that are likely to hurt, or at least not help, kids. Today’s example is€ AB 2273, the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act€ (AADC),
Donald Trump promised to take the social media world by storm with his Truth Social Twitter-clone for the MAGA world. “Free speech!” he claimed as he banned anyone who criticized him. Of course, from the beginning, many suspected that this was all a very sketchy grift, using a SPAC to try to cash in on gullible MAGA folks willing to pump up a shell company stock well beyond what it could possibly be worth.
The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: blame the internet.
The terrible, awful, no good, horrible plans to regulate the internet keep coming faster and furiouser these days. So, it’s worth remembering a time back when Congress passed one of the worst laws about the internet: the Communications Decency Act. Yes, these days we talk about the CDA more reverently, but that’s only because we’re talking about the one part of it that wasn’t declared unconstitutional: Section 230. Section 230, of course, was never even supposed to be a part of the CDA in the first place. It was crafted by then Representatives Chris Cox and Ron Wyden as an alternative approach to the ridiculousness that was coming out of Senator James Exon in the Senate.
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, the world's most powerful anti-piracy coalition, has announced further expansion. ACE/MPA chief Charles Rivkin says the addition of two new members - Hong Kong-based streaming platform Viu and Thailand’s leading cable satellite TV provider True Visions - will strengthen ACE's global reach. But the coalition doesn't plan to stop there.
There's a small patch of grass alongside the Djerring trail just after the Huntingdale station car park, almost every time I ride past during the day I can see a couple of pairs of Galahs[1] foraging around, probably digging up the roots of the grass. Sometimes just a pair, other times one or two groups of three or four, today was a small flock of nine, and the closest less than a metre from the path. They look up when I ride past, but barely stop feeding . I guess they'd pay more attention if I stopped
The moment when someone asks me for how I'm feeling, and then it'll take me serveal minutes to figure out how I'm actually feeling, and to think about if I'm ok to express how I'm fine with expressing for some other minutes.
Only a couple of days after the winter solstice and its still very dark when we get up in the morning, the sun doesn't rise until after 7.30.
I just discovered the Berty messengers. It's an open-source (Apache 2.0 & MIT) offline-first messenger that looks like it has a lot more potential and polish than others. A messenger designed to function even without an internet connection, falling back to Blutooth to connect devices directly.
At The Enterprise, QA (Quality Assurance) asked if they could have a tool that starts all our stuff up so they can do some performance tests (there are reasons they're asking for this, and why I agree with them that go beyond the scope of this entry). I replied I would see what I could do—it can't any harder than what I've done so far [1]. And I came across an interesting bug.
Firefox [1] was giving me fits. It would work fine except when I quit the application, then it would just sit there consuming over 100% of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) (not hard given I have multiple CPUs on the machine).
Whenever someone uses the term "trickle-down" in a performative (usually economic) sense it invokes a feeling of warm apathy, like a high profile politician promising the passive benefits of his high nutrient diet as he smiles and pisses against your leg.
That being said, there is one instance of trickle-down theory where I do believe that that the benefits are actually passed on from the top to the bottom - and that's: technology.
A metrology geek will go to extreme lengths to ensure that their measurements are the best, their instruments the most accurate, and their calibration spot-on. There was a time when for time-and-frequency geeks this would have been a difficult job, but with the advent of GPS satellites overhead carrying super-accurate atomic clocks it’s surprisingly easy to be right on-frequency. [Land-boards] have a GPS 10 MHz clock that’s based around a set of modules.
How can a few grams of battery, geared motor, and some nifty materials get a jumping robot over 30 meters into the air? It wasn’t by copying a grasshopper, kangaroo, or an easily scared kitty. How was it done, then?
The original web was a revelation. It may be lo-fi compared to what we know today, but it was a dream for academics, scientists, and indie hobbyists. The Internet connected computers and people around the world.
[...]
Libraries helped normalize programming for the web. Then the frameworks had frameworks. And configuration of configuration. Soon frameworks rewrote browser mechanics inside the browser instead of dealing with browser compatibility and shortcomings.
[...]
While we were waiting on our test suites, browser vendors worked together and got their act together. Performance gains, standardized APIs, increased user security and privacy, and native components. The sun rises on the platform.
algorithms, machine learning or not, are already better than people at many things. the main problem is that the current machine learning algorithms are limited to pretty specific domains and it's a pain to teach them how to learn new things unless you have lots and lots of data. the next big leap for AI would be creating an algorithm that learns how to learn. this means that AI entities would eventually be able to replace all the engineering jobs that were used to create the itself as well as continue to progress at a much faster rate than humans due to various advantages computers have over human intellect.
so what will you do with your life if AI powered algorithms and robots can do anything you can do but better?
Emacs is a Lisp machine. Lisp is a programming language from the 1950s but it’s good. It looks different from C or JavaScript or shell scripts but just like them, you can make functions, and functions can be marked as interactive so they can be called as commands. Don’t worry, it comes with a huge amount of ready-made commands.
I can see how that might work. But I'm too lazy to read a whole book to find out how to use soure control because I came to git simply as another replacement for the (many) previous source control things. Conceptually, though, I was reading from chapter 1, but pretty soon with git I found myself thinking "that can't possibly work" and having to find out some of the chapter 10 stuff. So... I want to read both ends??
I think there may be a pre-book stage that's important but often ignored. I knew what git was before I used it, but often that's not the case. For example, today I saw a mention of Jupyter notebooks.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.