When I was around 5 years old, my father brought home our first computer. From that moment on, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in computers. I haven't stopped hanging around them since. During high school, when considering which specific area I wanted to focus on, I started experimenting with hacking, and that was the moment I decided to pursue a career as a security engineer.
I'm now a software engineer on the security compliance team. I've been at Red Hat for over two years, and I work remotely in the Czech Republic. I've used Linux for about 12 years, mainly Arch Linux and Fedora, but I've also administered Debian, Gentoo, and Ubuntu in the past.
Came across the Kubuntu Focus project and I thought it deserved a spotlight as I believe it represents one of the approaches that desktop focused Linux projects need to take to drive desktop Linux adoption.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to be discussing ways projects can use on how to make money in Open Source. Then we will be discussing issues with GNOME’s data collection ambitions. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!
Huge wins for RISC-V and Ubuntu Unity, the changing ways that software is distributed, and a sad lament for young people’s privacy. Plus why KDE Plasma isn’t default in many major distros, along with the usual goodness in the Korner.
CubyText is a fascinating personal project that you can fork or try as a knowledge management app.
There are plenty of open-source applications that help you note down and organize your thoughts/research or knowledge.
Peazip is a free and open-source file manager and archiving tool based on popular technologies like 7-Zip / p7zip archiver, Facebook Zstandard fast compressor, Google Brotli fast compressor, etc.
It is written in Pascal (programming language) and is available for all major platforms like Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows. A source file is also available for manual compilation and installation.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is one of the popularly used general-purpose, object-oriented NoSQL databases. Unlike relational databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and SQL servers which store data in tables according to a rigid schema, MongoDB stores data in documents with flexible schema. MongoDB is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS systems supporting both 32 and 64-bit 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 MongoDB NoSQL database on Rocky Linux. 9.
Let me start this article with one question, which answer I’m expecting from you in the comment section. So let’s take the question: when you read the title of this article, what goes into your mind? Why should one create a separate partition?
If you are new to Linux, then you might not be able to give the answer, but those who have given some time to Linux do understand the importance of separated partitions.
Yes, it is very important to create a separate partition in Linux. So let me explain to you why it’s necessary. If you do remember, while installing any Linux-based operating system, you may get the option to choose a partition as guided or manual.
“Are you beginning your career in programming or DevOps and opted to start with Docker?
If you have no clue what docker is and how it makes the life of a DevOps engineer easy, we have got your back with this incredible tutorial about docker images. This article includes all the required steps on how you can successfully create a docker image. We will guide you with the help of examples to learn how to build a docker image quickly and easily.
Developing applications need a lot more than just writing a few lines of code. Different architectures, multiple languages, discontinuous interfaces between tools, and various framework models for each stage of a lifecycle create enormous complexity. Here, dockers come to the rescue of the developers and especially the DevOps engineers by simplifying and accelerating the workflows and providing developers the freedom to innovate with their selected tools, development environment, and application stacks.
In this tutorial, we will take you through the complete lifecycle of Dockers step by step. We will describe the basic concept of dockers and docker images and how a docker image is created in ubuntu environments. We will also provide you with the different methods of installing the dockers in ubuntu environments. You can also install and use dockers in the windows operating system as well. However, this article is specifically designed for the installation and creation of docker images in an Ubuntu platform.
By following this guide, you will be able to create your first docker image quickly and easily. So, let us begin!”
ImageMagick is a popular open-source software that allows you to manipulate digital images in almost every way and supports more than 200 image formats!!
The chances that ImageMagick has already been installed on your Ubuntu system are pretty high as many other software use it as a dependency.
“In the era of concurrent execution, there have been running many processes simultaneously to make more throughput and high working efficiency. In such circumstances, the servers are required to handle loads of workload for high performance, and it gets difficult for the servers to manage such huge traffic. To rescue this devastating situation, load balancers come to rescue the servers. These load balancers distribute the workload between the several networks and the hosts (that are being clustered) to increase the availability, performance, and reliability of the networks. Load balancers take the incoming network requests and assign them a VIP (Virtual IP address) and then send these requests to that server which load balancer finds an appropriate one keeping the minimum possible packet modification. The selected server by the load balancer then replies to the load balancer with the data being required; the load balancer then passes this required data to the client.”
PIP is simply a Python Package Installer, which is used to retrieve and install Python-related packages from indexes such as the Python Package Index.
“Editing photographs, changing their formats, renaming images, and doing numerous operations on multiple files at once are frequent tasks. Both vector and raster images can be shown, converted, and edited using the free and open-source software “ImageMagick”. John Cristy created it in 1987 while he was employed by DuPont. He utilized it to create several of his creations and compress 24-bit photos to 8-bit graphics. Once he transferred the ownership to ImageMagick Studio LLC in 1990, it was publicly disclosed. It provides rudimentary API-like capabilities for UNIX-like computers but lacks a full GUI like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and GIMP. Numerous image file types are supported, including GIF, JPEG, PNG, Postscript, and TFF.”
“Nginx, also abbreviated as “Engine-x,” is an open source Linux software that serves as a web server for HTTP caching, reverses proxy, and balancing of load. It proves to be a high-performance web server for its high-performance stability, HTTP capabilities, improved application-based deliveries, and security of the websites with the reduction of the long waiting times for the busiest web pages by acting as a load manager/balancer for the websites. Being a competitive lightweight server, Nginx offers a tremendous variety of features, and one of these features includes “Secure Service Layer (SSL)”. SSL is the technology that enables HTTP websites to secure the connection between the web server and web browser from any malicious attacks from unknown sources.”
Follow through this guide to learn how to configure CentOS/Rocky/Oracle Linux as a Linux Router. A router is a device that connects two or more IP networks or subnetworks. Linux can be configured as a default gateway to route traffic between networks.
“Ansible is an open-source IT engine that optimizes the deployment of IT technologies, including intra-service orchestration, cloud provisioning, as well as application deployment. Because Ansible pushes modules toward clients rather than using any client-side agents or customized security architecture, it is simple to implement. The output of such modules was sent back to that same Ansible server once they had been run locally on that client side.
It can quickly establish SSH-Key connections with clients, streamlining the entire procedure. The files, which are sometimes called inventory folders, include the client data. Ansible may utilize an inventory file that you’ve produced but also filled up.
Ansible employs the playbook that utilizes plain language, i.e., YAML, to specify automation jobs. Although YAML is frequently used only for configuration files, it may be utilized in a wide variety of applications whereby data is already saved. The fact that any of the IT infrastructure support staff can understand and read the playbook but also troubleshoot if necessary is a huge advantage.
Make your Linux terminal more useful with tmux, a terminal multiplexer that allows you to run multiple Linux programs over a single connection.
Right now, the most advanced OpenSUSE version is 15.4. It is an opportunity for desktop and server users running the previous 15.3 release to update to the latest software stack. The procedure for upgrading OpenSUSE 15.3 to 15.4 is simple to follow. This tutorial will walk you through the process of upgrading OpenSUSE 15.3 to 15.4.
The pydf command displays the amount of used and available space on your file systems, just like df command, but in colors. The output format is completely customizable.
This is a little known tool (python script) that displays the amount of disk space available on the mounted filesystems, using different colours for different types of filesystems.
In this tutorial, we will discuss how to change user password in Linux using passwd command from commandline. In addition, we will also learn how to allow an user to change the password of certain other users via sudo.
I recently experienced another interesting problem in the Linux startup sequence that has a circumvention–not a solution. It started quite unexpectedly.
I was writing a couple of articles while making some updates to my personal copy of my series of books, "Using and Administering Linux: Zero to SysAdmin." I had four instances of LibreOffice Write open to doing all that. I had three VMs running with VirtualBox to test some of the things I was writing about. I also had LibreOffice Impress open to work on an unrelated presentation. I like to listen to music, so I had one of several tabs in Firefox open to Pandora, my music streaming service of choice. I had multiple Bash shells open using Konsole with numerous tabs and the Alpine text-mode email client in one. Then there were the various tabs in the Thunar file manager.
So I had a lot going on. Just like I do now as I write this article.
It takes more than a blockchain node to build enterprise-grade applications at scale. As a result, developers often find themselves building plumbing from scratch to make their business logic work. The release of Hyperledger FireFly changed blockchain development, offering developers a full stack of tools to build and scale secure web applications using familiar APIs.€ FireFly’s next-gen platform simplifies development, making it easy to connect across multiple public and private chains while running many use cases simultaneously. Whether you want to build on permissioned chains like Hyperledger Fabric, Corda, or Enterprise Ethereum, or public chains like Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Optimism, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Moonbeam, or Fantom, FireFly has you covered.
In this article I'll walk you through where to download Hyperledger FireFly, how to set up a local development environment, and introduce you to the FireFly Sandbox. But first, a quick introduction to the Supernode.
NNCP is one of those things that almost defies explanation. It is a toolkit for building asynchronous networks. It can use as a carrier: a pipe, TCP network connection, a mounted filesystem (specifically intended for cases like this), and much more. It also supports multi-hop asynchronous routing and asynchronous meshing, but these are beyond the scope of this particular article.
NNCP’s transports that involve live communication between two hops already had all the hallmarks of being reliable; there was a positive ACK and retransmit. As of version 8.7.0, NNCP’s ACKs themselves can also be asynchronous – meaning that every NNCP transport can now be reliable.
Yes, that’s right. Your ACKs can flow over tapes and USB drives if you want them to.
I use this for archiving and backups.
Hello, it's been a long time I didn't have to take a look at monitoring servers. I've set up a Grafana server six years ago, and I was using Munin for my personal servers.
However, I recently moved my server to a small virtual machine which has CPU and memory constraints (1 core / 1 GB of memory), and Munin didn't work very well. I was curious to learn if the Grafana stack changed since the last time I used it, and YES.
There is that project named Prometheus which is used absolutely everywhere, it was time for me to learn about it. And as I like to go against the flow, I tried various changes to the industry standard stack by using VictoriaMetrics.
In this article, I'm using NixOS configuration for the examples, however it should be obvious enough that you can still understand the parts if you don't know anything about NixOS.
During the discussion cycle, many (if not most?) have failed to see the great potential such a simpler server (like my own) has with regard to security (and other directions). Most participants were happy with their generic HTTP server that also serves static files.
As a practical matter, I don't think we'd deploy any reused server with less than 4 GB of RAM, and we might take the effort to bring them up to 8 GB. We have very few machines with less than 8 GB now, and it's not just because of the hardware generation they're on. We've simply wound up in a situation where we default to thinking that 8 GB is the minimum amount of RAM that a server should have (and we add more if it seems called for). Of course this isn't absolutely necessary; we probably have plenty of servers that don't really need 8 GB, and I've never had problems on my virtual machines with 4 GB.
Akregator is a powerful yet easy-to-use news feed reader. With Akregator, you can follow your favorite news sites, blogs, and other RSS/Atom-enabled websites without constantly checking for updates using a web browser. Akregator’s fast search feature lets you quickly find the information you’re looking for, while its advanced archiving functionality ensures that you’ll never miss an important story. With Akregator’s internal browser, reading the news is a breeze. Whether a casual news reader or a power user, Akregator is the perfect tool for keeping up with the latest headlines.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Akregator on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using two methods with APT or Flatpak using the command line terminal.
Jellyfin is an open-source implementation of Plex. It is the perfect media server for those who don’t like Plex’s direction. This guide will show you how to deploy a Jellyfin server on Linux in Docker.
Erlang is a functional, concurrent programming language designed specifically for systems with high availability requirements. The original implementation was developed by Ericsson in the 1980s and was later released as open source in 1998. Over the years, Erlang has gained a reputation for being particularly well suited for parallel and distributed systems. This is due to its support for “lightweight” processes, which can be created and destroyed very efficiently. In addition, Erlang’s fault-tolerant design also means that it can gracefully handle failures without bringing down the entire system. As a result, Erlang has become a popular choice for mission-critical applications that require high availability.
POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.
Mozilla developers contribute code to a central repository every day. This code is compiled nightly to create a pre-release version of Firefox for testing. The code matures and then merges into stabilization repositories (Beta and Dev Edition). The code is polished until it reaches a level of quality that allows for a new final version of Firefox to be shipped to hundreds of millions of people. Nightly builds are an essential part of the Firefox development process, as they allow us to test new code and ensure that it meets our high standards before it is released to the public.
Often, non-developer users should refrain from using the nightly version, given it can bring either system instabilities but, more often, features that may not be secured or open new security issues. For example, one would never do internet banking on a nightly browser. However, checking out the nightly version may be interesting for users that like upstream versions of the latest bleeding-edge software and are casual browsers.
The following tutorial will teach you how to install Firefox Nightly on Fedora 36 Linux using a COPR repository using the command line terminal.
Want a more complete alternative to the du command? Well, in this post, we will show it to you because you will learn how to install and use the duf command on Linux.
Service is a Linux program that runs continuously in the background. Some of the common examples of Linux services are reverse proxy servers, network, cron, SSH, and the high-performance web server. Linux supports multiple tools and methods to list and manage services. Some services start at the boot time and some services can be started after your system boots up. You can control Linux services with systemctl commands.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to list services in Linux using systemctl.
Neofetch is a cross-platform, simple shell script that scans for your system’s information and displays it in a terminal, together with an ASCII image or any desired image next to the output.
In this tutorial, we learn through the steps to list installed packages by size on Ubuntu/Debian Linux systems. This can be important when doing space audits and trying to find packages using occupying large space on your system.
The Ubuntu / Debian dpkg-query and dpkg package manager provide some command line options which can be utilized for this task, with the help of some Linux regex tools like awk, sed, sort, tr etc.
AppImage is a format for packaging applications that is self-contained. It is the universal software package format compatible with various Linux distributions.
In the traditional system of installing software packages, you need to download, extract and install on various directories of the system. But with the AppImage there is no extraction, no installation, no root permission, you just download the single package, make it executable and run it with a single click. It includes all the compressed image, dependencies, and libraries needed to run the software. Even to uninstall the application, you will just remove the AppImage file.
Arch Linux is one of the popular Desktop Operating systems. Its main pros revolve around large communities and thousands of packages that can be installed on Arch Linux, both from official repositories and from AUR.
AUR is a community-driven repository for Arch Linux users. It was created with the intention to make it easy to share community packages in an organized manner. AUR contains package descriptions called PKGBUILDs which allow you to compile a package from source with makepkg.
For you to install a package on Arch Linux from AUR, you need a helper tool that automates the process of building and installing the package.
Have you wondered how to perform calculations in Linux and Unix systems? This mostly comes into use when you do programming.
In this tutorial, we learn about bc command in Linux with examples.
Vim is a text editor that can be used to edit all kinds of plain text, especially useful for writing and editing programs. It is also one of the customizable text editors heavily used in the Linux operating system.
The suitable color in the editor helps you to categorize, analyze and identify bugs in the code. You can change color schemes that come with the software package or install vim themes.
In this guide, we learn how to list and change color schemes in VIM.
Linux systems have several hardware components, and it is important to know the exact hardware specifications to know whether your Linux computer is compatible with certain applications. Linux supports multiple commands or tools to check hardware devices, such as CPU, memory, PCI card, USB devices, and network card. Some of these commands are lshw, lscpu, hwinfo and lspci.
In this tutorial, we cover some of the most significant Linux commands to check hardware device information on your computer.
Want to see what could have been? Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has revealed some working prototype units and they look pretty interesting.
Continued from Part 17: The Llama Master
Well here's a game I didn't expect to like or actually be any good. It's Disney Dreamlight Valley from Gameloft, a game that's a mixture of Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley but for Disney fans.
Valve seem to be continuing to give some love to their older titles, with Left 4 Dead 2 recently getting a nice bug-fix release. This is one of their older Native Linux ports, that came to Linux officially back in 2013 and back in 2021 they updated it with Vulkan support powered by DXVK.
Distrobox is a way to use pretty much any other Linux distribution in your terminal, along with full GUI apps and now it supports the Steam Deck with SteamOS too.
A mixture of strategy and puzzling elements together, Xenospore is a currently free game about defending humanity by prevent a strange alien organism from spreading too far.
Two very popular open source compatibility layer projects from developer 'GloriousEggroll' are out now, with updates to both GE-Proton and Wine-GE-Proton too.
The open source Heroic Games Launcher for running Epic Games and GOG has another important bug-fix release now available.
 Despite the availability of many other application launchers for Linux, Fly-Pie stands out the most. Using Fly-Pie, you can launch applications, simulate hotkeys, URLs, and most recent files, access the clipboard, and many other things. Let’s dig deep into Fly-Pie to see what it has to offer you.
You might know that Simon Schneegans and Cue Faux Shock, both developers collaborated to create GNOME pie for Linux. Fly-Pie is also the product developed by them, but don’t make the mistake of judging these two as the same. Fly-Pie has remarkable individual features (e.g., Wayland compatibility).
For those unfamiliar with the process: this is not the 7.2 release, but is part of the standard build-up to the release.
With 96% of organizations either using or evaluating Kubernetes and over 7 million developers using Kubernetes around the world, according to a recent CNCF report, it’s safe to say that Kubernetes is eating up the world and has become the de-facto orchestrating system of cloud-native applications.
The benefits of adopting K8s are obvious in terms of efficiency, agility, and scalability. However, despite the project’s maturity, the industry is still developing the knowledge-base, best practices, and tools required to manage day-to-day K8s operations.
This 55th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest covers what happened in the Apache Kafka community in August 2022.
For last month’s digest, see Kafka Monthly Digest: July 2022.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending SHARE 2022. It was a great experience, not only because of the incredible content, but also because it was the first live event that we were able to attend since the pandemic. Interacting with clients and partners was truly enlightening and we learned a lot about what was top of mind.
Not surprisingly, the topic of security came up in nearly every conversation. And while many were enthralled by the new IBM z16 that we talked about in a prior blogpost, I am pleased that the SUSE enterprise open source solutions in conjunction with the new IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 server address not only data security but also provide sustainability – coupled with high performance.
The mainframe, the hardware stalwart that has existed for decades, is continuing to be a force for the modern era.
Among the vendors that still build mainframes is IBM, which today announced the latest iteration of its Linux-focused mainframe system dubbed the LinuxOne Emperor 4. IBM has been building LinuxOne systems since 2015, when the first Emperor mainframe made its debut, and has been updating the platform on a roughly two-year cadence.
With digital transformation or any big initiative, there are many decisions to be made – and many opinions to navigate along the way. Gaining buy-in and support is a critical, and often difficult, part of a leader’s job. Even when it’s easy to get a group of people on board with what goals to pursue, there are often many various and conflicting perspectives on how to achieve them.
We asked CIOs who recently won a 2022 Wisconsin CIO of the Year ORBIE Award to share their tips for getting buy-in. From asking the right questions to building strong relationships, learn how to work collaboratively to bring people on board with your next big idea.
Computer hardware requirements for Linux Mint 21 have not changed. You need a fairly-modern computer because LM is not as lightweight on system resources as it used to be. That means a box with a 64-bit processor, at least 2 GB RAM, and 15 GB free space.
The Linux Mint website has a comprehensive installation guide should you need assistance installing Linux Mint 21. But that should be unlikely. The installation engine is well polished. Most of my computers run multiple partitions, which typically force manual interventions.
LM 21 installer did not stumble. It simply asked where to put the OS. The installer handled all the partitioning and adjustments in the background.
Kubeflow 1.6 was released on September 7, and Charmed Kubeflow 1.6 (Canonical’s distribution) came shortly after, as it follows the same roadmap. Charmed Kubeflow introduces a new version of Kubeflow pipelines as well as model training enhancements.
[...]
Metadata is a project that is used to better track and manage machine learning workflows. It provides information about runs, models, datasets and data artefacts, enabling users to monitor and understand their artificial intelligence projects. However, in the previous versions of Kubeflow, machine learning engineers had to manually configure it to benefit from this feature, which was often challenging. Moreover, they could not log additional metadata or use any metadata in downstream components. Kubeflow 1.6 changes the asynchronous process implementation that the metadata project had. It offers more assurance that the metadata is captured and recorded, regardless of the deployment step. The metadata is now sourced from the pipeline execution cache. KFP concepts are used to capture the metadata instead of the Pod spec.
As noted in the Khadas VIM1S announcement, the company is also preparing to launch the Khadas Edge2 single board computer with a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor and a thickness of just 5.7mm (before a low-profile heatsink is installed). The new board follows a similar form factor as the original Khadas Edge board powered by a Rockchip RK3399 processor, except the edge connector is gone, so it can’t be used as a system-on-module anymore, but remains the thinnest and one of the most powerful Arm SBCs so far.
Most of the ESP8266 and ESP32 projects and products we cover here use the Espressif microcontroller as the main chip, but ESP8266 started as a WiFi module meant to be controlled with AT commands from a host device. But there are still “legacy” products that may benefit from connecting to the cloud, and Espressif introduced the ESP-Hosted for that purpose in 2020, and recently released a next-generation ESP-Hosted solution (ESP-Hosted-NG) specifically for Linux hosts.
The solution is available in two variants: ESP-Hosted-FG (First generation) exposing an Ethernet interface to the host and suitable for microcontrollers and Linux hosts, and the ESP-Hosted-NG presenting an 802.11 network interface and designed for Linux hosts only. Both solutions include ESP32 firmware and a host driver running on the legacy system.
Raspberry Pi Trading released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS last week with the highlight being the Picamera2 Python library for Raspberry Pi cameras, along with small changes such as the ability to search menu items, a new audio input control,
The new Picamera2 library was first announced in mid February 2022 with a preview release, and it’s the first time the Python library is included by default in Raspberry Pi OS. It is now based on the libcamera open-source framework instead of the proprietary and closed camera APIs from Broadcom found in the original Picamera library.
The NX6412-4L is a Mini-PC equipped with Intel’s Elkhart Lake Celeron J5412 processor developed by Maxtang. This fanless mini-PC offers flexible connectivity including up to four 2.5GbE LAN ports, Wi-Fi/ Bluetooth connectivity and a slot for SIM cards.
The processor found on the NX6412-4L is the Elkhart Lake J6412 processor which has been featured in other similar router mini-PCs (i.e., Topton X6, Fitlet3).€
Many types of calculators exist beyond those basic models that everyone used in elementary school. The most common is the scientific calculator, including the iconic Texas Instruments TI-83. Programmer’s calculators contain buttons and functionality designed to help with coding, with the ability to work in binary, hexadecimal, and other base systems and to perform logic operations like XOR and AND. Simon Boak had a 45-year-old TI Programmer that was becoming unreliable, so he built his own 16-bit integer Reverse Polish notation (RPN) calculator with an Arduino.
Boak’s SB116 programmer’s calculator very closely mimics both the button layout and functionality of that old TI calculator. The most visible difference is that the SB116 has a modern SSD139 driver-based 2.42” OLED display with a resolution of 128Ãâ64, in contrast to the vintage TI’s retro bubble LED screen. The keypad looks almost identical to the original, with the only other major external aesthetic difference being the gorgeous custom aluminum enclosure that Boak constructed. To add to the aesthetic, Boak even made a matching retail box that looks absolutely fantastic.
Before I suggest some awesome Firefox add-ons, let me give you some pointers.
One thing that we all know is that blindly installing browser extensions can be extremely harmful. So how do you determine if a browser extension is safe to use?
We don’t have to tell the average Hackaday reader that desktop 3D printing has been transformative for our community, but what might not be as obvious is the impact the technology has had on the scientific community. As explained in€ Thermal Post-Processing of 3D Printed Polypropylene Parts for Vacuum Systems by [Pierce Mayville], [Aliaksei Petsiuk], and [Joshua Pearce], the use of printed plastic parts, especially when based on open source designs, can lead to huge cost reductions in the production of scientific hardware.
The European Astro Pi Challenge is back for another year. This is young people’s chance to write computer programs that run on board the International Space Station.
There’s something about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) and the calculators that use it. It calls to mind a time when a calculator was a serious tool, and not just a throwaway toy. Created in the legacy of such calculators by HP and Texas Instruments, [Simon Boak] shows off his SB116, sporting an Arduino Nano under the hood. It’s a fully custom design, with a hand-built metal case, a custom PCB for the keyboard, and a tiny OLED display for maximum retro green goodness. The impetus for this build was to replace a particular calculator, a well-used TI Programmer, that’s useful for working with 6502 assembly. The SB116 supports binary, octal, decimal, and hex; and boasts some downright useful functions — AND, NOT, OR, XOR, and bitshifts. The source code is available, but you’re on your own for the case and keyboard. And for maximized retro faux-nostalgia, [Simon] designed a box that would have looked right at home on an 80s store shelf.
Git is a wonderful tool that can multiply your project’s impact, or make your project easier to manage by an order of magnitude. Some of us hackers don’t yet know how to use command-line Git, but a relatable example of why a certain tool would be useful might be a good start. Today, I’d like to give you a Git crash course – showing you why and how to put a KiCad PCB into a Git repository, later to be shared with the world.
Vssue is a free open-source commenting plugin for Vue that uses GitHub or GitLab as a backend to store data.
Beyond it is support to GitHub/ and GitLab it also supports self-hosted Git platforms, as well as Bitbuckets, Gitee, and Gitea.
Vssue is an easy to integrate with Vue2 and Vue3 projects, and it plays well with other Vue frameworks as Nuxt, VuePress, and Gridsome.
Qt for Android Automotive helps developers create visually stunning user interfaces and experiences for different in-car displays – all with the same code base. Here’s how.
So I came to think that there might be some generators of disagreement around the subject that are a bit more fundamental than simple engineering questions about efficiency and scaling. After reading nintil’s (linked above) and VKRs most recent essays on the subject, I think I can finally formulate what those might be.
The symbol used to perform operations is called an operator. In Java, the “!=” is a Comparison Operator utilized to determine whether two operands are equal or not by comparing them, while the “=!” operator combines two operators; the first is an Assignment operator “=”, and the second is a logical Not operator “!” that operates on boolean values. It is also utilized in the inversion of boolean values.
Your system clock assigns a date and timestamp to each file you create and update on your computer, an email you sent or received, and so on. Every operation of a computer depends on the date and time. Sometimes, the current date or time may be required while developing an application. Java allows you to set and adjust dates and times using two packages, java.time and java.util.
You may know that the variable gives named storage that programs can access. Every variable in Java has a unique type that specifies its memory size, the range of operations that can be performed on the variable, and the range of values stored in memory. To compute data, sometimes you need to check the data type of a variable because the logical operations are performed with the same type of variables.
This write-up will discuss the approaches for checking the type of variable in Java.
I had the honor of attending this workshop, however, this is not a full report. Instead, I am reporting on what I learned and how it relates to my So You Want to Rust the Linux Kernel? blog series that I started in 2021, and of which this post is a member. I will leave more complete coverage of a great many interesting sessions to others (for example, here and here), who are probably better versed in Rust than am I in any case.
UCEPROTECT Level 3 blocks ASNs which you can think of as a group of IP ranges operated by an ISP. They want the ISP to take down misbehaving / spamming actors on their network. One could theoretically pay them to remove an ASN block for.. $485. But once a single IP address spams again, they'll add it back to their block list and keep the money.
Out of 14 types of diagram there are 3 that I use on a regular basis: Activity Diagram, State Machine Diagram, and Sequence Diagram. I think the Timing Diagram is borderline, but I can only think of a couple of occasions when it has been useful.
Writing the diagrams in text and rendering them with Mermaid makes including them in documentation and websites painless, and the project is under active development.
Driving the news: In a tweet Saturday, CBP commissioner Chris Magnus said the agency "has become aware of unauthorized and inappropriate content" posted to the account, and that the tweets were removed and the account was deactivated.
In 2009, an advertiser (because that is exactly the deep feeling person you want) came up with an idea born from his own insecure moorings.€ Gavin Larkin’s “R U OK?” was inspired by the death of his father Barry Larkin.€ Instead of leaving his father alone in dark melancholic repose brought out by suicide, the son chose to exploit his death with a messianic urgency.€ It spawned a campaign of grotesque proportions, judgmental, insisting and persevering.€ “To genuinely change behaviour Australia-wide, a national campaign was needed. And from this realisation, and with Gavin and Janina’s expertise and passion, R U Ok? was born.”
Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4 was a popular OS choice in that European country back in the day, but could the Slovenian Computer Museum lay their hands on a copy? In that question lies a bit of detective work and some luck.
Last week Slate published a fascinating longish excerpt from Kevin Driscoll’s latest book The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media. In the excerpt, which Slate titled “The Birth of the Modem World,” Driscoll goes back to the days when modems weren’t something that got you connected to the fiber or coax running to your door, but to the copper wires from the phone company.
We’re talking about old school dial-up modems here. Really old school.
If you’re envisioning the old dial-up modems we had in the early days of the World Wide Web, which occupied a slot on your motherboard so you could plug the computer directly into the phone systems connector box, you’re thinking way too modern. We’re talking about external modems, that coupled to your telephone sonically, through a cradle upon which you set the handset of your old wired to the wall telephone receiver.
But the Slate article wasn’t about modems, it was about what people were doing with them, which according to Driscoll was pre-internet bulletin boards that people ran out of their homes and to which people could connect by telephone, but only one user at a time. We’re talking ’70s or early ’80s here, back when the little private internets such as Prodigy and Compuserve were still the stuff of some future science fiction world.
The sky was a sickly orange-gray.
Even if you’re just making a brief hop over the Kármán line to gain a few minutes of weightlessness, getting to space is hard. Just in case any of their engineers were getting complacent, Blue Origin just got a big reminder of that fact this afternoon with the destruction of their New Shepard 3 (NS3) rocket during a suborbital research flight.
Additional research demonstrates that pleasant music can reduce activity in the brain’s amygdala, which is responsible for regulating our negative emotions. Accordingly, music can open a safe path to remember, to talk, to engage and heal.
I'll be taking 12 weeks off of work and attending Recurse Center in the Fall 2 batch, starting September 19th. Here's what I'll be learning and how I'll be doing it.
The College Board’s announcement to digitalize the SAT made major news headlines across the United States earlier this year. While standardized college entrance exams are undergoing changes and modernization, the assessments that college and university students take while in school are also in desperate need of an overhaul.
Many academic institutions across the country are overly reliant on pre-made test banks and outsourced homework questions that have risen in prominence due largely to the major publishing companies. Given the expansive use of these prepared test questions by college professors, it is fair to wonder if publishers share some of the responsibility for the recent cheating trends.
Efforts are also more aggressive. Several communities have voted to stop funding their public libraries. In others:
"There's been a few instances where there have been physical threats or, for example, the library in Montana that found books in their book dropped that had been riddled with bullets."
Today, On Point: Protecting America's public libraries.
The old saying “you get what you pay for” is a cautionary cliché, but is directly contrary to several other common sayings. In the case of [Spikee]’s planned CNC machine build, he took the more adventurous idiom of “no risk, no reward” to heart when he purchased these spindles for the machine from AliExpress. While the delivered product seemed fine, there were some problems that needed investigations.
Audiophiles will go to such extents to optimize the quality of their audio chain that they sometimes defy parody. But even though the law of diminishing returns eventually becomes a factor there is something in maintaining a good set of equipment. But what if your audio gear is a little flawed, can you fix it electronically? Enter HiFiScan, a piece of Python software to analyse audio performance by emitting a range of frequencies and measuring the result with a microphone.
According to the study's primary author Michela Lenzi, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Padua in Italy, inequality may have negative effects on teenagers' problematic social media use at the individual, school, and national levels.
"Policymakers should create initiatives to lessen disparities and restrict adolescents' unhealthy social media usage behaviours."
As detailed in a new study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, a team of Swiss researchers administered 20 participants, who were diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and a further 22 participants with a mental disorder, significant amounts of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) — a drug more commonly used recreationally to induce a number of hallucinogenic effects — under the supervision of a trained therapist.
The results, as measured by the use of scientifically-validated and widely used questionnaires, appear to have been much better than the researchers expected.
"In the richest country in the world, no one should die or go into debt just because they don't have access to healthcare."
Because of Bolsonaro’s cavalier attitude to the pandemic, it spread to the indigenous communities living in remote areas of the Amazon Forest and to Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, home of millions of people living in extreme poverty and without the protection of good public health services. An editorial in the Lancet stated, “Yet, perhaps the biggest threat to Brazil’s COVID-19 response is its president, Jair Bolsonaro.” The bottom line: Bolsonaro and Trump’s policies towards the pandemic have caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of people.
The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline.
"I can't give my patients the care they deserve."
We look at how corporate involvement in Jackson, Mississippi’s infrastructure helped set the stage for its water crisis, as tens of thousands of residents of the majority-Black city remain under a boil water advisory. The main water treatment plant was damaged after a flood in late August, and while water pressure has been restored to most homes, viral videos show undrinkable brown liquid coming out of many taps. Mississippi’s Governor Tate Reeves has said “privatization is on the table” for the state capital. This could lead to a repeat of problems stemming from a $90 million contract Jackson signed in 2010 with the German multinational conglomerate Siemens to overhaul the city’s water infrastructure and install new water meters meant to raise extra revenue and help the city reinvest in the system. “This contract ended up being a disaster,” says Judd Legum, who wrote about the Siemens deal for his independent political newsletter Popular Information. “There was essentially a lost decade where the system deteriorated further and there were really no substantial investments made, and that’s part of the reason why we see what’s going on today.”
Mark Fiore's animation on the Mississippi water crisis is scathing about American exceptionalism.
The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases. The initiative already benefits from strong support including leading companies across technology, public sector, and industry vertical segments, and standardization organizations.
If you have worked in cloud computing, DevOps or related fields in recent years, you’ve no doubt come across Kubernetes. One of the earliest and most popular open source container orchestration systems, Kubernetes, also known as K8s, enables development teams to group containers that make up an application into logical units for easy administration (stylistic) and discovery in cloud environments. There are other container orchestrators out there—Nomad from HashiCorp, Red Hat’s OpenShift, Helios and Azure Container Instances are all popular alternatives. But there are just as many variations on what amount to Kubernetes-specific management services, such as Google Kubernetes Engine (Kubernetes originated as a Google project), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Obviously, there is a lot of demand out there for container orchestration, and there are a lot of different ways to take advantage of what K8s has to offer. Check out the case study section of the Kubernetes website, and you will see accolades from all areas of the developer community.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FBI has recovered over $30 million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers earlier this year. It’s only a fraction of the $540 million stolen, but it’s something.
As an application developer, you have likely connected to GitHub or an SSH server with an SSH Key. To do this successfully without anyone else impersonating you, a Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) is used to authenticate you. Several DSAs can be used to authenticate over SSH; Ed25519 is a great option and not only for SSH keys. In A Deep dive into Ed25519 Signatures, I suggest the Ed25519 algorithm is modern, fast, small, misuse-resistant, and secure option for signing data; I also included an exercise in creating Ed25519 keys, signing data and verifying signatures.
Digital Signature Algorithms (DSAs) underpin modern technology enabling phone calls, emails, operating system updates, and payments to process securely. Every DSA is built upon one way functions, which is easy to perform one way but hard to reverse. Ed25519 is one such DSA and in this article I'll show how to use it.
Scammers are using 'forgotten' cryptocurrency accounts as bait for stealing the identities of the gullible and dishonest. You have been warned.
I have never put any money into bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
While a large win for endpoint security, this is also a small loss for privacy. Lockdown Mode is unlikely to be used by many people, compared to the millions who use iOS devices, and as such it makes those that do enable it stand out amongst the crowd as a person who needs extra protection. Web fingerprinting is a powerful technique to determine a user's browsing habits, circumventing normal mechanisms users have to avoid tracking, such as clearing cookies.
At DEF CON 30 "Crypto Agility" and "Post Quantum" buzz words were repeated in several villages. I heard it around the Privacy and Crypto village and Soatok heard about it at the Quantum village. If you are an application developer, keep reading, these words are for you!
Just after midnight on New Year’s Day of 2021, Newark police officer Rod Simpkins shot 39-year-old Carl Dorsey dead. Simpkins was in an unmarked police minivan and in plainclothes when he arrived at the scene after reportedly hearing gunshots. Within seconds of exiting his car, Simpkins fired his gun at Dorsey. It is unclear if he announced himself as a police officer. The family of the unarmed Black man killed that night is now suing the police and the city of Newark, frustrated that the investigation by the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office has dragged on for 20 months with no findings so far. “We’re demanding justice for my brother, and we need people to be accountable for what happened to him,” says Madinah Person, Dorsey’s sister. Larry Hamm, chair of the People’s Organization for Progress, says New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin owes the family and the wider community answers. “Two years is too long not to hear anything from the attorney general about this case,” says Hamm.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II has focused global attention on the British royal family and renewed criticism of the monarchy both inside the U.K. and abroad, especially among peoples colonized by Britain. “There’s a degree of psychosis that you can go to another people’s land, colonize them, and then expect them to honor you at the same time,” says Kenyan American author Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who teaches literature at Cornell University and whose own family was deeply impacted by the bloody British suppression of the Mau Mau revolution. He says that with Queen Elizabeth’s death, there needs to be a “dismantling” of the Commonwealth and a real reckoning with colonial abuses. We also speak with Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, a leading scholar of British colonialism, who says that while it’s unclear how much Queen Elizabeth personally knew about concentration camps, torture and other abuses in Kenya during her early reign, the monarchy must reckon with that legacy. “Serious crimes happened on the queen’s imperial watch. In fact, her picture hung in every detention camp in Kenya as detainees were beaten in order to exact their loyalty to the British crown,” says Elkins.
Thanks to our supporters, we were able to report from London the day after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, to show our Hungarian readers how the British are mourning their longest-reigning monarch. Our video report from the UK's capital.
Whipped by monks, Henry went to Becket’s tomb in the crypt and confessed that his “incautious words” had led to the killing. His penitence went down spectacularly well with onlookers and, in what was taken as an instant sign of divine approval, Henry’s armies started winning in the field.
No institution helps obscure the crimes of empire and buttress class rule and white supremacy as effectively as the British monarchy.
The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.
King Charles III has had an unusually protracted apprenticeship. He is only now, at the venerable age of 73, ascending to the throne—an elevation made possible under melancholy circumstances thanks to the death of his 96-year-old mother, Queen Elizabeth II. It’s a strange fate to prepare all your life for a role you don’t get to perform until the eighth decade of that life. Yet, despite his undeniable maturity, Charles is unable or unwilling to perform many simple tasks that almost all his subjects who are above the age of 5 manage for themselves: Squeezing toothpaste on his toothbrush is one example. Charles has his valets take care of this arduous task, using a crested silver dispenser made especially for the job. He is similarly servant-dependent for almost all of the most menial daily activities.
This will also be a rare-old-time for paparazzi and the court correspondents of the tabloids. Will Meghan Markle and Kate speak to each other? What will the reprobate Prince Andrew be up to? Which of the royal offspring will misbehave and how?
For the first time, a German ââ¬Å¾Master of a Drone System“ reports stress disorders and depression just from watching from the air. With the introduction of combat drones, the phenomenon is likely to get worse.
With the ââ¬Å¾TB2“, Turkey is becoming a worldwide drone power, now Ukraine is supposed to help in doubling the production.
Congress has spoken when it comes to next year’s Pentagon budget and the results, if they weren’t so in line with past practices, should astonish us all. The House of Representatives voted to add $37 billion and the Senate $45 billion to the administration’s already humongous request for “national defense,” a staggering figure that includes both the Pentagon budget and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. If enacted, the Senate’s sum would push spending on the military to at least $850 billion annually, far more—adjusted for inflation—than at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or the peak years of the Cold War.
Contractors Cash in as Congress Adds Billions to the Pentagon Budget.
For the past few days, one reactor was kept running to power the pumps, meters, and other essential equipment. Now an external line has been repaired and a shutdown was deemed safe.
According to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, in 2021 the nine nuclear nations spent a total of $82.4 billion on their nuclear programs—$156,841 a minute. The ultimate driver of this profligate, irrelevant, dangerous spending turns out to be: profit, shored up by $117 million in lobbying.
Channel One reported on September 12, 2022, that the Russian security services had staged the murder of two Russian occupation officials in Nova Kakhovka, Kherson region.
Nearly two dozen municipal deputies in Moscow and St. Petersburg have signed a petition demanding Vladimir Putin’s resignation as president. Shared by St. Petersburg councilwoman Ksenia Thorstrom, the document says, “We, the municipal deputies of Russia, believe that President Vladimir Putin’s actions harm the future of Russia and its citizens.”
In early September, the Ukrainian army launched an offensive on the country’s Kharkiv region, causing occupying Russian troops to retreat for the first time since the start of the full-scale war. According to independent analyses, Ukrainian forces have regained control of thousands of square kilometers. While the Russian Defense Ministry has technically confirmed the withdrawal, it claims the goal of this new “operation” is to consolidate its troops in the Donbas, not to flee a Ukrainian attack. Here’s what Russia’s TV personalities had to say about the retreat on September 11.
At least 1,000 civilian residents of Izyum were killed during the Russian occupation.€
Residents of several cities in the Rostov region reported a powerful explosion. Citing eyewitnesses, local publication 161.ru noted that the distance between some of the witnesses was nearly 125 miles.
Viktor Zyryanov, a Telegram administrator for the news site Orlets, and Sergey Nosov, an activist from Russia’s Oryol region, have fled Russia, according to the news outlet Sever Realii. The men’s homes, along with the homes of a number of other journalists in various regions of the country, were raided last week in connection with the Russian authorities’ case against former State Duma deputy and Putin critic Ilya Ponomareva.
By enlisting the sectarian insurgent-allied, US-funded White Helmets for chemical weapons probes in Syria, the OPCW abandoned impartiality and broke its fundamental rules for collecting evidence.
While the authors admitted that increased access to screenings have contributed to the uptick, they say early exposures to harmful chemicals, some even in-utero, are likely contributing to rising cancer rates. The culprit, they suspect, is that human environments have changed substantially in the last century, and that combined with changes in diet, lifestyle, and the microbiome, the cause of the rise may just be civilization itself.
Some scientists theorized that these were rocky banks that had been pushed up by sea ice.
This year has already been marked by numerous extreme weather events of record intensity, with the tragic loss of life from the Pakistan floods just the latest example. We all know that climate change – driven by the continued expansion of fossil fuel production, in defiance of all scientific advice – is making these events more common and severe.
Transmission lines are a good place to ground this (sorry: energy infrastructure joke). The decarbonization strategy, at its core, is simply this: Most cars, homes, buildings and industry are currently powered by fossil fuels. In the future, they will be powered by clean electricity. But right now, 60 percent of electricity comes from fossil fuels. We need to rebuild our electrical grid around clean sources, and then we need to triple or quadruple the total amount of electricity we generate.
“A lot of that needs to be built where the resource is,” Liza Reed, an electricity transmission expert at the Niskanen Center, told me, “where the solar is, or the wind is, or the geothermal is. So you need to move that power around from the places it’s generated.” That means building many, many more power lines than we currently have. But the way we presently build transmission lines is a mess.
"We cannot let the oil, gas, and mining industries weaponize the legal system to silence their critics."
Sky & Telescope readers can record scientifically useful observations of BlueWalker 3. I have been studying magnitudes recorded by visual observers since Starlink and other spacecraft became an issue for astronomers a few years ago. The brightness data are used to characterize and monitor these space objects. Visual magnitudes revealed that the addition of a sunshade made Starlink satellites fainter than the original design, while omission of that shade for more recently launched satellites has increased their luminosity again.
Despite its urban setting, the site is primarily forested yet includes sensitive wetlands and aquatic habitats that are home to some 400 species of plants and over 100 species of wildlife, a dozen of which are endangered. The park’s location in the center of the city of Sherbrooke and near the Université de Sherbrooke’s campus makes it possible to reach a large population to raise awareness about the impacts of light pollution on the nocturnal environment and model good outdoor lighting practices. Situated within the MMIDSR, this site further allows Sherbrooke’s citizens to reconnect with a quality night sky and implement practices that are respectful of the nocturnal environment.
This certification results from combined efforts between the Cégep de Sherbrooke, the Ville de Sherbrooke, the Université de Sherbrooke, the MMIDSR, and other partners working together to combat light pollution and protect the region’s natural resources since 2019.
Several of the allotments are located in designated grizzly recovery zones and within important habitat linkages for bears in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The U.S. Forest Service has expanded both the livestock grazing area and season, putting the bears at higher risk of being killed in response to conflict with cattle operations. Greater grizzly bear mortality in areas on the cusp of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem will slow the bears’ recovery and keep the Yellowstone grizzly population isolated. Scientists predict that long-term isolation of Yellowstone grizzlies will likely decrease their genetic diversity, which would harm the population’s health and reproductive success.
In addition to several of the allotments’ located in the grizzly bear’s “recovery zone,” the agency also expanded the area and lengthened the grazing season, putting the bears at increased risk of being killed in response to foreseeable conflict with private, for-profit cattle operations. Our lawsuit also names the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a defendant because the agency is supposed to be protecting endangered and recovering species but used out-of-date scientific information and failed to adequately consider the impacts of the grazing decision on grizzly bears in the Lower 48 states.
The support for enlarging Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument by both Senators provides a lesson in conservation history that I’ve seen repeatedly. Both Senators initially opposed the proposal for a unit of the National Park System in the Maine Woods. They wrote a letter to President Obama outlining “serious reservations.” However, to their credit they are now supporters of the monument.
On June 7, 2021, a slaughterhouse inspector with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported a violation at a Tyson Foods-owned poultry plant in Nashville, Arkansas. The inspector saw a bird on the slaughter line "vigorously flapping" as it headed towards the "scald vat." That wasn't supposed to happen.€
The Great Recession began in 2007. Two years later, in 2009, Ehrenreich published Bright-Sided. Two years after that, in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began in New York’s Zuccotti Park and spread throughout the country. OWS participants called damning attention to the stark economic split between the haves and the have-nots, in this case the wealthiest “1 percent” of Americans and the rest of us—the “99 percent.” There was no putting a smiley face on the economy in that moment.
Polling conducted last week by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) for Investor's Business Daily revealed that "adults 18-44 now approve of Biden's handling of the presidency by a 51%-40% margin. Biden's net approval of 11 points among younger Americans reversed from net disapproval of 11 points in August. At that time, just 40% approved and 51% disapproved of his job performance."
The Biden administration has eliminated a major chunk of federal student debt, extending forgiveness€ up to $10,000 for all individual borrowers who earn under $125,000 annually, and up to $20,000 for Pell grant recipients.
Many workers remain unsatisfied with the compromise proposed last month by President Joe Biden's appointed arbitrators, saying that it ignores their demands for more humane workplace policies and isn't enough to keep them from going on strike.
The US Federal Reserve Board will meet again on September 20-21, and while most analysts anticipate another big interest-rate hike, there is a strong argument for the Fed to take a break from its aggressive monetary-policy tightening. While its rate hikes so far have slowed the economy—most obviously the housing sector—their impact on inflation is far less certain.
"Union-busting is disgusting," declared Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, leader of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.
Economist Dr. Richard Wolff joins Lowkey where he exposes ways economic policy can be a code term used by the political establishment for class war.
But the wave of falsehoods in the wake of that election — including the "big lie" that Donald Trump won — has continued to spread, espoused by hundreds of Republican candidates on ballots this fall.
That's left experts who study social media wondering what lessons tech companies have learned from 2020 — and whether they are doing enough this year.
The White House plan is a mixed bag. They set out six action points, each of them amorphous enough that they could all be summarized as "the devil is in the details" – that is, depending on how these are handled, they could be great, or terrible.
But one point stands out as especially fraught, controversial and dangerous: a vague promise of "fundamental reforms to Section 230," which is incorrectly characterized as "special legal protections for large tech platforms."
I'm going to go through all six of the points below and describe how they could go right, or wrong, and in the end I'll get into more detail on 230 – it's one of the worst-understood areas of internet law, a favored punching bag of the right and the left, and getting this one wrong could deliver permanent dominance to Big Tech platforms.
The changes are being initiated in the wake of the tapping of PASOK President Nikos Androulakis’ phone, which exposed long-standing problems linked to the country’s intelligence services. Apart from the blow suffered by the government because of the transparency issues that emerged from the case, it became very clear that in its present form and mode of operation, EYP does not play the role it should and is not consistent with its mission of defending national security.
Hill said police initially told him he was arrested under the U.K.'s recently toughened laws on protests, a change that came after advocacy groups such as Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter mounted large and/or disruptive protests in recent years.
The new law allows police to act in cases which they deem to be "unjustifiably noisy protests that may have a significant impact on others" or seriously disrupt an organization's activities.
The arrests highlight individuals' troubles with the authorities — but large groups have also chosen or been forced to change their plans due to Elizabeth's death.
Even before Truss becomes prime minister today, it is possible to describe the political landscape in which she will operate. For all Boris Johnson’s boosterism, the British state is less powerful than it was 10 years ago. There have now been four prime ministers in six years, which is the sort of turnover once associated with political instability in Italy.
I must confess that I, too, choked up a bit as I watched a streaming video of this performance at the Golden Mask festival along with its emotional curtain call.
Richard Falk: I think it is safe to say that Mikhail Gorbachev had the greatest historical impact of any public figure since the end of World War II. To be sure, it is a bitterly polarized legacy. One of unbounded admiration and historical achievement in the West and one of contempt and unconditional disrepute in Russia, holding Gorbachev responsible for the breakup of the Soviet Union as a Great Power and its loss of political relevance beyond its territorial borders. It has taken Vladimir Putin, a political figure reviled in the West, to undue Russian irrelevance by launching an aggressive war against Ukraine, but whether the cost is worth even for Russia, only time will tell.
By the early 20th century, Paris commanded control over much of West and Central Africa. However, the French Empire grew increasingly strained during World War I as well as during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany in World War II. French decolonization began soon after and was largely finalized relatively peacefully after 1960, save for a bloody seven-year war with Algeria that lasted until 1962.
I mean, of course. On Friday Elon Musk terminated his Twitter purchase for the third time. In yet another termination letter sent to Twitter, he claims that Twitter’s severance agreement with Peiter “Mudge” Zatko was a violation of the purchase agreement.
"County officials are drowning. And in some cases, when the requester does not like the response they get, they become belligerent and threatening."
"There is no way to mitigate the damage that would be done by this side deal, it must be unequivocally rejected."
It has often been noted that the White House can provide a rarified atmosphere that separates the occupants from reality and this might, to some extent, be the case with President Biden. So, here is a big, big, big hint. Biden is in the United States—a place with quite a history of civil strife, assassinations, and large sections of cities periodically going up in flames, and most of this is politically motivated violence. And, that emphatic “never” so belies U.S. history as to suggest an embarrassing naïveté. Ask many of the nation’s police chiefs. They apparently believe that “blood in the streets,” when produced by those supposedly upholding the rule of law, is very appropriate. So what is it that Biden is really trying to say? Here is an educated guess.
On September 7, Jadue told us that he was feeling “calm,” that it was a significant advance that nearly 5 million Chileans voted for the constitution and that “for the first time we have a constitutional project that is written and can be transformed into a much more concrete political program.” There is “no definitive victory and no definitive defeat,” Jadue told us. People voted not only on the constitution but also on the terrible economic situation (inflation in Chile is more than 14.1 percent) and the government’s management of it. Just as the 2020 plebiscite to draft a new constitution was a punishment for former President Sebastián Piñera, this was a punishment for the Boric government’s inability to address the problems of the people. Jadue’s “calm” stems from his confidence that if the left goes to the people with a program of action and is able to address the people’s needs, then the 5 million who voted for the constitution will find their numbers significantly increased.
There should be a rule in politics that if you have trouble explaining something, you can’t build a movement around it.
Sooooooo… this was something that happened.
During the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the George W. Bush administration often deployed a pet mixed metaphor, which originated with then–national security adviser Condoleeza Rice: We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. In the mode of rudderless geopolitical scaremongering that took hold in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, the underlying appeal was unmistakable: If our national sanctums of war-making aren’t granted unqualified power, the world itself may just be headed for nuclear annihilation. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Hany Farid is a computer science professor at Berkeley. Here he is insisting that his students should all delete Facebook and YouTube because they often recommend to you things you might like (the horror, the horror):
Last week, Nevada Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer and I appeared before the party’s Resolution Committee at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in National Harbor, Md. We were there to speak in favor of our resolution calling on the party to ban the use of “dark money” in Democratic primaries.1
Astonishingly, citizen leaders for years have been marginalized to their and the Democratic politicians’ disadvantage. The Republicans do not make such mistakes. Witness the roles and influence of right-wing advocacy groups such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the National Taxpayers Union.
Recent polls suggest that the bonkers, even barbaric, rhetoric coming from far-right MAGA candidates could be undermining Republicans' chances of capturing both chambers of Congress in November. Now, the greater danger may lie down-ballot. If extremists win key offices in swing-state governments in 2022, they might manage to award their states' Electoral College votes to the MAGA presidential candidate, against the will of the voters, in 2024 and illegitimately capture the White House.€
Chicago—It wasn’t hard to tell which of the guests at the 63,000-square-foot Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago were there for the 2022 Socialism Conference. Giveaways included T-shirts bearing political slogans and labor affiliations (“Abortion is a Human Right,” “Troublemakers Union,” “Tired Feminist”); elaborate tattoos; moth-like attraction to the makeshift bookstore set up by Haymarket Books, this year’s main sponsor; and anything red. At one session, when the moderator called on “the comrade in the red shirt,” three heads pivoted toward the podium. “I dropped, like, $100 on books and already have tons I haven’t read at home,” a middle-aged Black male comrade confessed in the elevator, adding, “The wife is not happy.”
Obviously, this is all very confusing. So I have a better idea:
Let’s just ban all the books.
That way, no fragile minds will have to worry about being offended. No closed minds will dare be opened.
I used to think Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” was a 1950s warning about the dangers of censorship. But Florida’s governor and legislators have taught me the book was really a how-to guide for 2022.
The new Florida mantra is: Information is bad, especially when it prompts people to think for themselves — and most especially if it ever prompts a child to have an independent thought that contradicts their parent’s.
Normally, there wouldn’t be much need to insert yourself into lawsuits involving seriously flawed claims about social media moderation. But these two lawsuits — both losses for plaintiffs claiming the Biden administration conspired to ban their social media accounts — are now in the hands of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has delivered some unusual (and terrible) takes on Section 230 and intermediary liability recently.
According to a RIA Novosti source, police are checking one of Ksenia Sobchak's channels for a violation of the law on "gay propaganda."
Notes: -Betsy Gomez is coordinator for the Banned Books Week Coalition. -Cameron Samuels is a recent high school graduate and activist from the Katy Independent School District near Houston, Texas. Cameron was named the Youth Honorary Chair of Banned Books Week (the first time the title has been awarded) for actively opposing book banning in the District as a student there. -Jordan Smith is the digital editor at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. -Nico Perrino is Executive Vice-President at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights In Education, an organization specializing in protecting academic freedom.
We publish regular reports about what we have been able to do thanks to our readers’ support. This is the latest such report.
Multiple people in Russia have been charged with “discrediting” the Russian army for allegedly writing anti-war slogans on ballots for Russia's September 11 elections, according to the independent outlet Mediazona.
On March 18, 15 of the club's 23 employees at the time delivered a petition to Star Garden's owners stating their demands. When they attempted to meet with their bosses at the club the next day to discuss their grievances, the dancers said, they were locked out.
NPR spoke to eight dancers for this story, all of whom said that they were contract employees and that they were unfairly terminated for raising safety and privacy concerns with management. They spoke to NPR on the condition that they be identified by only their stage names to protect their safety and privacy. All the dancers said they use the term "stripper" to describe their work and often use the label interchangeably with "dancer."
A third of her neighbors in Coffee County struggle to read at a basic level, and she wanted to make sure they had help navigating their ballots. In the late afternoon, she slid behind the sparkly pink steering wheel of her SUV for her final push of the day, heading down a long stretch of road where buildings gave way to fields and thickets of pine. She turned in to the Kinwood Estates mobile home park and stopped at the edge of a familiar dirt driveway just as Shondriana Jones, 30, bounded down the steps of a trailer.
Combs’ feelings of insecurity and disorientation when faced with a ballot are not unusual. Voters with low literacy skills are more likely to take what they read literally and act on each word, sometimes without considering context, literacy experts say. Distractions can more easily derail them, causing them to stop reading too soon.
Our reporting has found that helping people with low literacy skills to read their ballots at the polls enables them to understand what and who they are voting for and ensures that their votes are counted. But decades of voter suppression — particularly in the South — have made this kind of assistance difficult to access in many communities.
You do not have to prove you can read or write to vote.
"Should this decision be made by Dr. Oz?"€ Fetterman asked the roughly 3,000-strong and enthusiastic crowd, which replied with a forceful "no!"
In June, at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., Albert Mohler Jr., the president of the denomination’s flagship seminary and one of its leading theologians, was asked whether he believed that women who have abortions should be prosecuted for murder. Mohler acknowledged that there could be gray areas, such as miscarriages, but came down on the side of criminalizing women. “There are many cases in which, demonstrably, there is not just an abortionist who should face criminal consequences, but a woman seeking an abortion,” he said to applause. “That is something we believe the law should pursue.” Law enforcement could pursue such cases, he added, if the final version of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion, resembled the draft that had leaked in May.1This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations.
"Nothing can justify the persistence of this fundamental abuse of human rights."
The operative word in the phrase “criminal justice system” isn’t “justice.” As much as we tip our hats to enshrined rights and ideals like “innocent until proven guilty,” the operative word remains “system.” And like any system, the justice system is mostly there to process those accused of crimes, rather than act as a check on government power.
"If the Legislature were to be successful in Moore v. Harper, it could threaten the state court's ability to provide this crucial check on the legislative branch."
“Women and exile are linked,” observes Etel Adnan in Of Cities and Women, her series of letters concerning urban life, place, and gender written toward the end of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf, writing closer to the century’s midpoint, famously declared in her great anti-war treatise Three Guineas that “As a woman I want no country. As a woman I need no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” The sensibility that links these works and those of others (Simone Weil, Judith Butler, etc.) is a desire to imagine a space outside the masculine spheres of nations, flags, and borders.
Notice what’s missing: Free Software / FLOSS in the Richard Stallman sense of the word. Stallman lived in the big institution world – after all, he worked at MIT – and what he was doing with the Free Software Foundation and GNU project beginning in 1983 never really filtered into the DOS/Windows world at the time. I had no awareness of it even existing until into the 90s, when I first started getting some hints of it as a port of gcc became available for OS/2. The Internet was what really brought this home, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
To be clear, the shift from traditional cable television to streaming TV has been a very good thing. Consumers had grown irritated with bloated, expensive bundles of channels they never watched, and customer service that was literally ranked some of the worst of any industry in America. Based on recent data, it’s not a trend that’s going to be slowing down anytime soon.
After a Hamburg court issued a preliminary order requiring DNS resolver Quad9 to block a music piracy site, the case is now progressing through the court system. Sony filed a main proceeding at a Leipzig court that allows both sides to provide further evidence. According to Quad9, the outcome of this case is going to be very important.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has announced the shutdown of seven domains linked to illegal streaming services, together generating at least 27 million visits per month. ACE's interest in these domains dates back to 2020 and was revealed in DMCA subpoenas issued in the United States. A new batch of similar subpoenas reveal fresh ACE targets.
Ace Stream is a decentralized streaming tool with millions of users. The application, built on the VLC media player, doesn't host or link to any content, but that hasn't stopped rightsholders from complaining. In fact, the software's website is currently blocked by ISPs in Spain, which is completely unjustified according to Ace Stream's management.
It’s a space for open culture and cultural heritage practitioners, advocates, and enthusiasts to share resources, hold conversations, and collaborate on matters related to open access to cultural heritage, especially heritage held in galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs).
We’ll start off with a few minutes talking about CC and some current topics and then open the floor for anything you’d like to chat about. As usual, CC will not be able to offer specific legal advice.
A strange 1797 text with literary ambitions, written in Dexter’s personal eye dialect and entirely devoid of punctuation.
Obviously they're quite different artists, but right from when I first heard Aldous Harding, she reminded me of Kate Bush Not so much stylistically, more in how artistic they both are.
So it was interesting to find a recording of Aldous Harding singing Wuthering Heights, which goes back to 2016.
I saw on the Chilly Weather service that there was supposed to be a break in the cloud cover around midnight, so I gave it a go. Indeed, the sky was mostly clear, but star gazing was nonetheless rather difficult because of a very bright moon, waning but mostly full, and high in the sky. The moonlight was so bright, I was able to take notes in my notebook without a flashlight.
In the course of my usual “oh, that sounds interesting” travels on Teh Intarwebs, i recently came across ‘ontopoetics’. As someone who's something of a panentheist, i'm finding the concept more than intriguing.
The concept of ‘ontopoetics’ was created by Naarm/Melbourne philosopher and academic Freya Matthews.
FFS, am I Harvey Danger? I can "identify" with nearly every lyric from the song "Flagpole Sitta", which was a one-hit wonder type of song from 1998, which was *the* year for one-hit wonder bands. Countless swarms of them all over MTV and the radio. It was a hop skip and jump away in time from Britney Spears dominating...music, and I think every record label in the developed world were trying to make anything/everything "happen" in regards to trends, genres, and fashion. Sorta fun times, but I was pre-occupied with my own narcissism at the time, so I just stayed focused on my life and the times I could have with my friends and our frantic shit we would get into.
Recently, I've been feeling really creative, which is surprising because I've found it hard in the last few years to make much art, and when I do it's usually a once in a blue moon thing. But since discovering all the interesting creatives on neocities (and working out how to make pixel art), I've actually been genuinely excited about creating in a way that I haven't in a long time.
I feel like we're not talking about the same things, though. I guess I was pretty vague about my thoughts even though I tried.
[...]
On Free/Developed/Democratic etc Societies, Persecution, Criminals
I haven't written a whole lot about my gemini/spartan server project on this gemlog recently, as it's mostly been a toy for me to play with the protocol and different ways of program organization.
However, recently I've dropped a major two-part release that I think might bring it into production-quality territory. The biggest outstanding bugs were fixed, the packaging/release system was streamlined, etc. I intend to deploy it onto one of my public-facing servers soon and see how far I can get.
An arcade not far from the area has a dance game called StepManiaX, or SMX for short. The game involves stepping on a dancing stage with up, down, left and right panels similar to DanceDance Revolution, but it also features a center panel, bringing the total number of inputs per side to five.
On the surface, SMX sounds like a cheap ripoff of DDR, as many dance games were in the 2000s. The creative team behind the game, however, have no intention to be exploitative: they have been avid rhythm game fans for decades and developed the game in an effort to improve on the groundwork laid out by arcade machines like DDR and Pump It Up.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.