Apparently, all we needed to make Mastodon more popular was for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. But is this a good thing? Are all these new Mastodon users going to be happy on Mastodon? I have some thoughts on this situation.
This week, Linux Out Loud chats about how variety is the spice of Linux.
Welcome to episode 38 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.
! In this video, we cover how to set up a Splunk Lab on Ubuntu Server for people training to get in the Cyber Security Field.
Available now under a BSD license, today NVIDIA put up the NVIDIA PhysX 5.1 SDK as open source which is great to see from team Green.
But for me, containers are just chrooted processes. Sure, they are more than that: Containers have a nice developer experience, an open-source foundation, and a whole ecosystem of cloud-native companies pushing them forward. But, let me show you why I think chroot1 is the key.
So, let’s build a container runtime using only the chroot system call. Doing so, we can learn a little about chroot, a little about container runtimes, and it will also be fun!
A quick note about some improvements to the capsule, specifically regarding the version accessible from the web: [...]
The clamp() function defines a minimum value, a preferred value, and a maximum value.
A quick recap of min() and max() before we talk about clamp(): [...]
If you are already experienced with Linux, FreeBSD should feel very familiar. The operating systems have a lot in common, due both to their Unix heritage and many shared modern components. Much of what may be unfamiliar to a Linux user adopting FreeBSD is also inconsistent between Linux distributions themselves.
In this article, we will cover some of the conceptual differences between Linux and FreeBSD, and go on to contrast some aspects of the basic system utilities and the differing views of hardware given by the two systems.
Asking for help to send by blog posts by email.
I’m currently in the process of moving my www blog out of Worpdress and merging it with this Gemini capsule. I’m quite excited by the progress I made in this project and will soon talk more about it. But there’s one bottleneck I’m currently facing : migrating users subscribed to my mailing list.
LibreNMS is a monitoring tool that supports auto-discovery with multiple protocols, including SNMP, ARP, OSPF, and BGP.
Odoo (formerly OpenERP) is an open-source and powerful business management software.
When using Debian or Ubuntu operating system on your server or desktop, you sooner or later will have to add or remove users from your system.
This guide explains what is Netdata, how to install Netdata in Linux and how to analyze and monitor a Linux system performance and resource usage with Netdata.
Tutorial to install the Mosquitto on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy or 20.04 Focal LTS including Management Web Graphical Interface Cedalo.
Eclipse Mosquitto is a lightweight message broker published under an open-source license. It implements MQTT protocol versions 5.0, 3.1.1, and 3.1. And because of its low power consumption, it can be used on boards like Raspberry pi.
Whereas the MQTT protocol (MQ Telemetry Transport or Message Queue Telemetry Transport) was developed in 1999 for M2M (machine-to-machine) communication as part of a joint oil pipeline[1] project between IBM and Arcom Control Systems.
The Mosquitto project also provides a C library for implementing MQTT clients, and the very popular mosquitto_pub and mosquitto_sub command line MQTT clients.
Oracle VM VirtualBox 7.0, the latest free and open-source hypervisor from Oracle has been released with numerous new features and improvements. The new version sees additions such as a recent utility showing performance statistics for running guests, secure boot support, Full VM encryption support (via CLI), and a reworked virtual machine wizard. Additionally, various bugs have been fixed in this release. For more information, visit the VirtualBox 7.0 changelog.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install VirtualBox 7.0 on your Ubuntu desktop or server by importing the official virtual box repository and installing the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal. The extra benefit for users using this method is that you will receive them instantly from the VirtualBox repository when updates drop.
Here’s how you can determine if you are running systems or any other init system in your Linux distribution.
The first process, which starts when you boot up your Linux distribution, is called init (short for initialization). It has the process identifier 1 (i.e. pid=1). All the processes and applications in your Unix-based system are direct descendants of this init process.
Based on functionality and features, different types of init processes are present. For example, systemd, Runit, OpenRC, sysVinit, etc. Among those, the systemd is the most popular and modern one, which is used and adopted by all the modern Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora.
There are ongoing debates about Systemd and its performance compared to the traditional Unix-based init systems. But that’s a topic for another article.
let’s find out how you can determine whether you are running a systemd or any other init system in your Linux distribution.
A simple tutorial that explains how to find out what init system in your Linxu distributions - systemd or any other init systems.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 7.20 on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04, and Linux Mint 21.
The first process, which starts when you boot up your Linux distribution, is called init (short for initialization). It has the process identifier 1 (i.e. pid=1). All the processes and applications in your Unix-based system are direct descendants of this init process.
Based on functionality and features, different types of init processes are present. For example, systemd, Runit, OpenRC, sysVinit, etc. Among those, the systemd is the most popular and modern one, which is used and adopted by all the modern Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora.
let's find out how you can determine whether you are running a systemd or any other init system in your Linux distribution.
Valve are working fast to clean up this New Big Picture Mode taken from the Steam Deck, with another Steam Client Beta for desktops out now.
Between 2022-11-02 and 2022-11-09 there were 25 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 268 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.3 % of total released titles.
Valve released another small Beta update last night, which pulls in a few useful sounding fixes for the Steam Deck. This is available in Beta and Preview. To change over you can find it in€ Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.
Paradox and Colossal Order are filling up Cities: Skylines with more DLC and free updates as part of their "World Tour" series starting this month.
Seems that Stardeus is not the only RimWorld inspired space colony sim around, with Nebula being another that plans to release in 2023. It recently finished€ crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with $87,290 from backers. You can support it€ still via their SlackerBacker.
Sonic Frontiers is a big new release on Steam from SEGA and it does work out of the box on Steam Deck, although it has certain issues.
Two games are doing an indie crossover, with a Dead Cells update out now and the next Terraria update will also include some Dead Cells content.
Still not quite ready yet it seems but Valve are pushing out lots of changes for the new Big Picture Mode, taken from the Steam Deck. Released in a new Steam Client Beta, there's quite a lot of improvements and fixes this time.
Valve has pushed out another small but very useful update to the Steam Deck Client Beta, here's a run over what has changed this time including how you install games. This update is available in the Beta and Preview branches. To change you can go into€ Settings >System >Steam Update Channel.
If you have a soft spot for a Z80 computer but want a new operating system experience, try Zeal. You can watch a demo of the open-source OS in the video below.
As you might expect, the whole system is written in Z80 assembly language. The features you expect are there: files, directories, device drivers, a clock, and even memory banking to support up to 16M of memory. The work isn’t totally done, nor is the initial target computer — Zeal — but it looks like a great piece of work so far and will be of interest to anyone who has a Z80.
The release candidate of openSUSE’s modern lightweight host operating system Leap Micro 5.3 is now available on get.opensuse.org.
The release made NetworkManager the default network configuration tool; autoyast ensures this. Users should be aware that firewalld is only installed from the ISO if the firewall is enabled during an installation.
A new SELinux module for Cockpit provides basic functionality for users to troubleshoot configurations.
A first-boot wizard gives users an alternative to setting a password via combustion/ignition, which allows for formatting partitions, configuring users, and writing of regular files, systemd units, and more.
The RC introduces newly generated QEMU Copy On Write images for Leap Micro.
Any other “policy” will also damage “GNU Linux” reputation for being pretty solid piece of software in general, as some users associate “GNU Linux = Ubuntu”.
With SC22 just around the corner, now is a great time to get in touch with Canonical on all things HPC.
SC22 or Supercomputing 2022 is one of the main events on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Supercomputing. You can expect to hear about all the relevant topics in the space, and even hear more about workloads that run on High-performance computing clusters, such as Complex computational or numerical workloads or advanced simulations, or even workloads such as High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).
Canonical remains committed to its Snap format as the coverage at its first public gathering in a few years shows.
Vulture Towers Central Europe are in Prague – which, handily, is also the location for Canonical's 2022 Ubuntu Summit. A significant amount of the coverage is devoted to the company's IoT offering, Ubuntu Core, and the Snap packaging system that it's built from. Indeed the second talk of the event was by Oliver Grawert, one of the core architects of the system, titled: "An Ubuntu for a 10 ton steel press and your window shades: UbuntuCore at a glance."
The Snap project emerged from Ubuntu's 2014 effort to build an Ubuntu-powered phone. When the phone project proved "not to be commercially viable", the company looked at moving some tech from the phone project into its nascent Ubuntu Core distribution, its play for the internet of things market, aimed at being "fail-safe, tinker-proof and reliable at a higher level."
Keeping the air in your home in the right condition is incredibly important. Your home is your safe haven from the outside world, a place where you can control your environment and enjoy the comfort and peace of a secure space.
Humidifiers are an excellent way to keep the atmosphere of your home in exactly the right balance for your health and enjoyment. Traditional humidifiers work well, but automated humidifiers can work even better.
In this article, we’ll look at why humidifiers are so useful and how you can use home automation to create your own smart home humidifiers.
Hardkernel just launched a new Odroid board based on the S922X hexa-core SoC. The Odroid-N2L doesn’t include ethernet support, but it comes with up to 4GB of LPDDR4, one ... HDMI, 40 I/O pins via expansion header and an eMMC connector.
Raspberry Pi Pico powers a tiny little 602 LCD display and three keypads. A level shifter converts the voltage between the Pico and the LCD display. The maker is still working on the code. They built this replica calculator to emulate the code testing experience HP-16C gave coders, except they’re using it to learn CircuitPython. Once they’ve a better grip on the language, they hope this recreation will have all of the original functions of Hewlett-Packard’s bespoke handheld.
Coding, or computer programming, is a way of writing instructions so that computers can complete tasks. Those instructions can be as simple as ‘move a toy robot forwards for three seconds and then make a beep’, or more complicated instructions, such as ‘check the weather in my local area and then adjust the heating in my house accordingly’.
There’s nothing like tinkering with a Raspberry Pi but why wouldn’t you take it with you if you could? That’s where maker, developer and 3D-artist Thor Brigsted’s latest project comes into play. He’s created an ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) with our favorite SBC that spans just 5-inches across.
According to Brigsted, the need for the project was devised from a need to fill some spare time spent on public transport. This UMPC makes it possible for Brigsted to program on the go while also familiarizing with the intricacies of Linux. Not only is he experimenting with programming on the Pi, he’s using this system to develop a new game from scratch.
A diagram accompanying the paper provides an overview of the paper PCB creation process. In brief, the steps are as follows: wax pattern printing, paper ink infusion, and screen printing of functional elements, laser cutting of through holes, and adding conductive traces. The aforementioned inks use a mix of conductive and semi-conductive formulas, capable of forming resistors, capacitors and transistors. The printed ‘wires’ and components are said to be as flexible as the paper they are deposited on.
It’s quickly become clear that the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk means the end of the site as I’ve known it since 2008. Instead I’m going to collect all the stuff I would have tweeted about & post it to this blog roughly once a week. If you have an RSS reader you can follow along there. I’ve also created a subreddit where I’ll link to each post, so that folks can follow via Reddit if they prefer, and also comment on what I’ve written. I’d also appreciate comments over email!
My goal is to post fewer things, more thoughtfully, to a smaller audience for a while, and see how that goes.
Understanding most domains requires processing large sets of connections along with individual values. Along with financial services providers, even social networks, payment networks or road networks depend on understanding relationships between individual values to establish recommendation engines and detect fraud.
This is where the importance of graph databases is highlighted as they utilise topographical data models to store data. They store nodes and relationships instead of documents or tables. Traversing through nodes, joins, and relationships is a lot faster than assessing individual values.
It’s a tradition of this blog that I write down impressions on my way back from Amsterdam conferences (addendum a week later: unfortunately I took a flight this time, too short to complete this entry, and it had to wait until I caught up). This time, it was Dutch Clojure Days 2022, my first post-COVID full-size conference and the first DCD I’ve ever been to. And, hopefully, not last. I know I want to come back.
The Africa Legal Innovation Week is a hybrid, annual conference that brings legal technologists across the African Continent together to discuss the role of technology in supporting access to justice. The event that is taking place from 22 to 29 November 2022, will give the attendees a chance to meet, interact and network with the leading digital justice and legal innovation experts, as well as engage with Africa’s disruptive justice and legal innovations.
The E – Scolarship Community Encyclopedia is a user-generated content collection platform for researchers with additional contributions published on scientific websites by competent experts. It focuses on scientific topics and concepts, including Mathematics and Computer Science.
We are happy to announce about the Qt Installer Framework and Online Installer 4.5 releases today.
Qt Insight is an analytics solution designed to provide real customer insights on the usage of your application or device. It was created for companies utilizing embedded technology to shed light on an application’s performance, usage, and user data that may not be otherwise attainable.
I had a JSON array of objects from a list of GitHub repo issues. Each object contained a blog post URL and a title. The URL had the post date embedded in the path, and I wanted to sort them all based on the post date. Here's how I did it.
I have a working list of blog posts, as issues in a GitHub repo (as a sort of temporary data store). Each issue has the blog post title as the issue title, and just the blog post URL in the issue body, like this: [...]
There are two ways to present statistical process control: one for the practitioner, and one for the statistician. This is the practitioner’s version. In this version, the reason behind some things will be given as, People have relied on these tools to increase quality and decrease costs for over 80 years. Trust me, it works.
That reason might not sit right with some of you, so try to rest assured that there is sensible statistical theory behind it, too. I just won’t go through that now.
Recently at work I’ve been doing a bit of performance tuning on a service that’s getting ready to launch. It’s been built mostly on the tried-and-true principle of “first make it correct, then make it fast”, and really more like “then make it fast if necessary“. This is important because you generally want to have an idea of your performance goals up-front, and if you’re already hitting them then you should not spend a bunch more time trying to micro-optimize your way into being as fast as possible.
The actual performance tuning part of this wasn’t that exciting; there were just a couple database columns that needed indexes, and once they’d been added, the response times were back to where I wanted them to be.
I was surprised when I saw that New York City’s Gagosian gallery was going to show Rick Lowe’s work. As long as I’ve been aware of him, Lowe has never made art that could be sold. He’s known for what some call “socially engaged practice,” and others refer to simply as “activist art”—art that aims to transform people’s perception of themselves, of others, and of society through direct interventions in daily life, rather than via images or objects. Such a mission, unlikely to yield much in the way of merchandise, is probably anathema to a gallery, let alone a market powerhouse like Gagosian.
Sometimes here at Hackaday we bring you stories from slightly outside our world of tech, because they have an interesting angle. Maybe they relate to science or astronomy, or in the case of the UK’s Ordnance Survey explaining how Britain’s three Norths will align, geography.
Most multi-rotor aircraft are about as aerodynamic as a brick. Unless all its motors are turning and the control electronics are doing their thing, most UAVs are quickly destined to become UGVs, and generally in spectacular fashion. But by switching up things a bit, it’s possible to make a multi-rotor drone that keeps on flying even without two-thirds of its motors running.
Sometimes, you really need a custom shelf. Whether you have a weird-shaped space, weird-shaped stuff, or just want something different, making your own shelving can make your place more like home. The Plus Shelf by [shurly] aims to make building your own shelves a little easier with a 3D printed bracket.
Oh, the places plastic has taken us. One of the arguably better inventions might be the fake carve-able pumpkin, which is more or less guaranteed not to shrivel up and rot on your porch, though it might get smashed by wily teenagers along with its organic brethren next door.
The Slingbox devices used to let you catch up with the programming on your TV when you weren’t near it, using your Internet-connected mobile device. As cable TV became less popular, their business model faded away, and in 2020, they scheduled a service shutdown for November 9th, 2022. If you own a Slingbox, it’s getting bricked tomorrow – for those reading this in EU, that’ll be today, even. Do you have a Slingbox? You might still be able to repurpose it, let’s say, for local media streaming – but only if you waste no time.
[Adrian] had a Commodore computer to fix and decided to see how his latest tiny portable scope would work. He paid $57 for the tiny little test instrument although the current price seems higher. It claims to have 120MHz bandwidth along with 500 megasamples per second. There are several versions with different claimed specs, but we did find a similar device for under $60. You can see the unboxing and how it worked in the video below.
In 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it.
The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. After a rat had been put in the box a few times, it learnt to go straight to the lever and press it: the reward reinforced the behaviour.
Skinner proposed that the same principle applied to any "operant", rat or man. He called his device the "operant conditioning chamber". It became known as the Skinner box.
The slot machine manufacturers will never stop until they have American life completely on a “coin-in-slot” basis, apparently. And in 1941, they’ve devised this machine. Strap your wrist to it, drop in a dime, and read your blood pressure level and pulse rate.
On the problem side, China is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world by a rather wide margin. In 2020, China was responsible for a little over 30 percent of annual carbon emissions. The share of the number two emitter, the United States, was about 13.5 percent. Factoring in all greenhouse gasses doesn’t change the picture very much, with China still number one at 26 percent and the United States number two at approximately half that figure. But if you look at historical emissions, the picture reverses, with the United States responsible for approximate 20 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1850 and China in second place at 11 percent. Also, on a per-capita basis, China slips to the number four position, with approximately half the emissions today of either the United States or Russia.
At the same time, China has been a global leader in shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy, adding more renewable energy capacity than any other country. By the end of 2022, China is on pace to install an astounding 156 gigawatts of additional capacity provided by wind turbines and solar panels, which is 25 percent more than the record it set in 2021. By comparison, the United States is expected to install only about 30 gigawatts of solar and wind power this year.
The implications of these reviews are broken down in the following sections: (1) What We Have Been Told; (2) The Scientific Reality; (3) What Are the Variables Associated with Depression? and (4) The Stacked Deck against Scientific Realities Denting Brain-Defect Mythology.
What We Have Been Told
Sigstore announced the general availability of its free and ecosystem-agnostic software signing service two weeks ago, giving developers a way to sign, verify and protect their software projects and the dependencies they rely on. Trail of Bits is absolutely thrilled to be a part of the project, and we spoke about our work at the inaugural SigstoreCon.
Some health claims data - including medical procedure history - was released, along with names, addresses, birthdates and government ID numbers.
The release of information on the dark web appeared to be a sample of the data that Medibank had previously determined had been stolen last month, a company said. Medibank expected the thief would continue releasing data.
Medibank Private Ltd (MPL.AX), Australia's biggest health insurer, reported a massive data breach in October that compromised personal and medical information of its current and former customers, and slashed its stock value by almost a fifth.
On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.
Twitter introduced retweets in 2009, turning an organic thing people were already doing — pasting someone else’s username and tweet preceded by the letters RT — into a software function. In the years since, the retweet and its distant cousin, the quote tweet (which launched in April 2015) have become two of the most common mechanics on Twitter.
This milestone, which few open source projects achieve, was accomplished through contributions from the MLflow community’s many open-source developers and users. As we celebrate the community’s success, we think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how MLflow reached this level of adoption in the emerging MLOps ecosystem. I’d like to highlight ten design principles and features that contributed to MLflow passing 10,000,000 monthly downloads by making users successful with a wide variety of model development and MLOps initiatives.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (vim, webkit2gtk, and wpewebkit), Fedora (mingw-python3, vim, webkit2gtk3, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (389-ds-base, bluez, ffmpeg, libtasn1, libtiff, libxml2, and mbedtls), Red Hat (kpatch-patch and linux-firmware), SUSE (conmon, containerized data importer, exim, expat, ganglia-web, gstreamer-0_10-plugins-base, gstreamer-0_10-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, kernel, kubevirt, protobuf, sendmail, and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (libzstd, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, openjdk-17, openjdk-19, php7.2, php7.4, php8.1, and pixman).
IceXLoader is traditionally distributed through phishing campaigns, with emails containing ZIP archives functioning as a trigger to deploy the malware. Infection chains have leveraged IceXLoader to deliver DarkCrystal RAT and cryptocurrency miners.
Called Cloud9 by security firm Zimperium, the malicious browser add-on comes with a wide range of features that enables it to siphon cookies, log keystrokes, inject arbitrary JavaScript code, mine crypto, and even enlist the host to carry out DDoS attacks.
In one malspam delivery chain detailed by Talos, an email purporting to be from a Turkish financial institution urged the recipient to open a ZIP file attachment that, when launched, worked as a downloader to retrieve an obfuscated version of Agent Tesla hosted within the IPFS network.
CISA is now pushing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.
The Russia-linked APT29 nation-state actor has been found leveraging a "lesser-known" Windows feature called Credential Roaming as part of its attack against an unnamed European diplomatic entity.
"The diplomatic-centric targeting is consistent with Russian strategic priorities as well as historic APT29 targeting," Mandiant researcher Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere said in a technical write-up.
Troubles with software supply chain safety have recently grabbed a chunk of negative headline space. That might well set the stage for what to expect in an upcoming State of Open Source Report.
The European Parliament's inquiry committee investigating the use of surveillance spyware by the bloc's governments said Tuesday the EU's executive arm and member countries are failing to properly tackle a surveillance scandal that has targeted opposition politicians and journalists.
In a draft report published Tuesday, the committee investigating Pegasus said the European Council and national governments "are practicing omertà" — or a code of silence — and regretted that the European Commission only shared “reluctantly and piecemeal" information concerning spyware attacks on its own employees.
Sabina has expressed utter disappointment with the way police handled her case, she said: "When they told me that they couldn't help me get my phone, I felt terrible and awful. And when they told me that no one had been assigned to the case I had to ask them if they were serious."
This afternoon, the EU Commission will present draft legislation to the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) to create a “European Health Data Space” (EHDS). The proposal aims to connect patients‘ health data across Europe. For example, patients’ medical histories, test results or prescriptions are to be shared with hospitals and doctors treating a patient throughout the EU, unless the patient restricts access. Industry, research and authorities would also be given access to personal health data.
[...] States considering right of publicity legislation would be well-advised not to include a registration system, particularly if it is anything other than voluntary, or if it creates a condition for damages.
There are supposed to be limits on what the federal government can do with all the data it forces people to hand over in exchange for government services. But much of the limiting appears to be left up to the discretion of federal agencies. Discretion is the better part of valor, as they say. If these agencies are ever going to become valorous, they’re probably going to have to steal it.
Courts have continually said pretextual stops are a cool way to engage in law enforcement fishing expeditions. But there are a few caveats.
What is the underlying worldview of groups proposing visions for “good” digital identity systems? An attempt to answer this question is offered up in a new study published by Cambridge University Press.
‘On the sociopolitical configurations of digital identity principles’ by Edgar A. Whitley and Emrys Schoemaker attempts to begin making clear where different groups are coming from, and why.
Identity is a major part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16.9, but Whitley and Schoemaker suggest that the prioritization of development differs between groups promoting digital identity and identification systems.
The World Bank explicitly focusses on the development impact of identity, while the World Economic Forum and ID2020 present development as one among several motivations for implementing identity systems, according to the study.
The paper takes up a call from Elizabeth Renieris in a 2021 paper on Ethiopia’s trial of a blockchain-based digital ID system for students. In the paper, Renieris argues that evaluations of digital identity systems should not be narrowly confined to their technical aspects.
Today, the European Parliament’s Pegasus committee is calling for an immediate moratorium on the sale, acquisition, transfer, and use of spyware. Access Now reviewed an early copy of the committee’s draft report via Politico — the preliminary conclusions of its investigations — that outlines detailed recommendations that would significantly increase the protections against the use of spyware and ensure further accountability. Notably, however, it just does not demand the prohibition of technologies that are incompatible with human rights. To right this wrong, Access Now is calling on the special committee to recognise a need for a ban to strengthen its stance on these dangerous tools, and urges other EU institutions to take the necessary steps to implement the committee’s recommendations both in law and practice.
“A call for prohibition would have been a key indicator that the European Parliament has the fortitude to stand up against the spyware industry and abusive governments. Hungary and other examples highlight the painful gaps the EU still needs to fill to protect democracy, rule of law, and fundamental rights”, said Fanny Hidvegi, Europe Policy and Advocacy Director at Access Now. “The special committee’s report rightly shows that national security is a political excuse not a legal constraint, and EU institutions have the means and obligations to fulfill their role as the guardian of the EU treaties.”
A southwest Ohio man shot and killed his neighbor because he believed he was a Democrat, according to the victim's family.
Austin Gene Combs was taken into custody by Butler County sheriff's deputies just before noon Monday after the shooting was reported in Okeana, and investigators found Anthony Lee King dead from multiple gunshot wounds, reported the Journal-News.
Indonesia’s second-largest Muslim organisation Muhammadiyah plans to buy and convert a church in Spain’s Alcala
State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters the department is aware of the reports of the killing of a U.S. aid worker in Baghdad and is looking into them. But, he said the department was not yet in a position to confirm the accounts of the death or that the person was a U.S. citizen.
Terrorist paraphernalia was readily apparent in previously released footage. Some marchers wore headbands showing allegiance to Lions' Den, a terrorist group that has been responsible for several recent terrorist attacks and battles with IDF soldiers. One prominently displayed banner depicted the launch of rockets, and another poster depicted a gunman with a Carlo submachine pistol, a firearm favored by Palestinian terrorists.
For more than a decade, the families of those killed by police in Vallejo, California, have pleaded for oversight of their city’s exceptionally lethal police force.
When a series of fatal shootings attracted national attention and the scrutiny of state officials in 2020, Vallejo’s leaders pledged to implement 45 reforms recommended by a private consulting group and overseen by the California Department of Justice. But officials have blown past deadlines and failed to follow through on nearly all of the promised reforms. Reporting by Open Vallejo and ProPublica has found that the city has fully implemented just two.
Two Israeli arms companies are offering their long-range drones in Europe for border surveillance. In addition to the military in Switzerland, the Greek coast guard is also carrying out corresponding missions.
At an aviation trade fair in Cologne, Deutsche Telekom’s business and the surveillance of commercial drone flights are also on the agenda
Indeed, it is, but it only involves USN nuclear submarines, which Admiral Houston says are the “best in the world” (2), which is debatable, but that is not the purpose of this article. He didn’t say US submarine captains are the best in the world, which is good, because as I pointed out in my 2007 book, Lessons Not Learned: The U.S. Navy’s Status Quo Culture, that is simply not true due to the focus on engineering over war fighting, the careerism and the risk averse culture of the USN (3).
This conclusion was recently confirmed by a friend named Commander Kerry Gentry who commanded an SSBN and told me that even today only about 20% of USN submarine captains stand a chance of defeating a first class enemy submarine, especially those commanded by captains who were trained by the British or Dutch, and many countries can make that claim, even though the Royal Navy no longer operates diesel boats, which I think was a mistake. He’s retired now, but he keeps track of these things and it would be wise for the USN to actually listen to constructive criticism from former senior officers who have the experience to know what they are talking about. Gentry was never a “yes man” so he retired as an O-5. He was a highly effective SSBN skipper, and might have made admiral if the USN were more open-minded to thoughtful advice from concerned officers that know that this organization is too expensive, and does not live up to Tom Clancy’s “we’re the best” propaganda. He even told me that the silent service is more like a cult still based on the domineering personality and pro-nuclear brainwashing of Admiral Rickover, who passed away decades ago, but remains a strong influence nevertheless. He and his disciples believed that real navies use only nuclear submarines, but it is time to get past that.
According to recent polls conducted by the independent projects Russian Field and Chronicles, the number of people in favor of continuing the war in Ukraine has declined.
U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner, who was convicted on drug smuggling charges in August, has been transferred to a penal colony, according to her lawyers.
Russian Archpriest Mikhail Vasilyev, who died in Ukraine while “carrying out pastoral duties” on November 6, has been posthumously awarded the title Hero of Russian by Vladimir Putin.
In late October, near the village of Pavlivka in the annexed part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, heavy fighting broke out between Russian and Ukrainian forces. On November 5, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that it had “defeated" Ukrainian forces on the southern Donetsk front; the following day, however, multiple Russian “war correspondents” posted a message from marines in the 155th Brigade of Russia's Pacific Fleet who took part in the offensive. The marines alleged that their unit had lost approximately 300 people and half of their equipment in just four days. They asked Oleg Kozhemyako, governor of Russia’s Primorsky Krai, to conduct an independent investigation into the actions of the officers responsible for the failed operation and for the heavy losses.
In an address on November 7, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky commented on the reports from marines in the 155th Brigade of Russia's Pacific Fleet that they lost hundreds of men in just four days during an offensive in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
The mother of a man from Russia’s Omsk region who was conscripted in September claims that her son and several other draftees from the region were sent to join the Wagner private military company (PMC), Soldiers' Mothers Committee Executive Secretary Valentina Melnikova told the news outlet Agentstvo.
The Russian state news outlet TASS reported Tuesday that Russia’s Education Ministry is developing a basic military training course for secondary and vocational schools, citing a response the ministry provided to a inquiry from Sergey Mironov, the leader of the party A Just Russia. The document says that 35 hours over the course of five days will be allotted for basic defense training.
Since the start of Russia’s war with Ukraine, not only Ukraine’s, but also Russia’s own survival has become a topic of heated discussion. Will Vladimir Putin manage to stay in power? Will Russia itself continue to exist in its present form? These are just two of the many currently open questions that Mikhail Khodorkovsky urges Russians to debate — in order to develop a new social consensus in advance of the inevitable regime change. Khodorkovsky’s new book, “How Do You Slay a Dragon: A Manual for Start-Up Revolutionaries,” is an attempt to jump-start that public debate, and to propose some solutions for reorganizing the Russian state in such a way that would prevent future abuses of power. The book’s central argument is that a parliamentary republic, with a carefully calibrated system of checks and balances, must replace the current model of Russian statehood, in which the president is vested with an extraordinary range of powers — and way too many opportunities to make unilateral decisions. This article is based on Khodorkovsky’s extended interview with Margarita Lyutova. Our free translation condenses his key remarks on what would be a good outcome for Russia from the viewpoint of a cautious optimist.
A military commissariat in St. Petersburg sent a draft order to a ship’s cook from the Russian cruiser Moskva whose family has been searching for him since April.
A new play that premiered in Russia’s Kaluga region on Tuesday purports to depict past stages of the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region. The title of the play is Polite People, a euphemism used to describe the unmarked Russian soldiers who appeared in Ukraine at the start of the war and seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
We recently published an article in the journal Bioscience that lays out a three-step approach for assessing the quality of historical observations. Using this approach, we believe that scientists can confidently use historical resources to inform studies reaching back to times and places where formal scientific data is not available.
For the third year in a row, the Environment Agency presents a special program of environmental films at the Tallinn Dark Nights Film Festival (PÃâFF), bringing film enthusiasts the most recent nature documentaries.
Emphasizing that mitigating the climate emergency and planetary heating is within policymakers' power, a new draft federal report released Monday outlined the impacts the crisis has had on U.S. communities so far and warned that extreme weather, wildfires, and climate-linked public health crises will only worsen without far-reaching action.
The finalized Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) is expected to be released in 2023, but federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Science Foundation, and NASA released the draft as global leaders attend COP27, the United Nations' annual climate conference.
By 2030, poor countries will need a combined total of $2.4 trillion per year to slash greenhouse gas pollution and respond to escalating extreme weather disasters, according to a new report presented Monday at the United Nations COP27 climate summit.
That amount of money (6.5% of annual world GDP) would be enough for every developing country except China to make the changes required to cap global warming at 1.5€°C above preindustrial levels, say the report's authors, but it dwarfs the level of annual funding that has so far been provided to help low-income nations mitigate and adapt to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
Greenpeace on Tuesday denounced the so-called Forest and Climate Leaders' Partnership launched by more than two dozen nations at the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, arguing that the pact is unlikely to stop deforestation.
"A robust partnership could go a long way to provide the necessary resources to protect, conserve, and restore the world's forests, but this partnership is nothing but a green light for eight more years of forest destruction, with little respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities," Victorine Che Thà Âner of Greenpeace International said in a statement.
By 30 September 2022, 7,513 new registrations of electric or hybrid cars had been recorded in Luxembourg. Of those, 4,589 were 100% electric. The trend away from combustion engines thereby continues with 23% of new registrations being electric or hybrid cars.
Although plans for the Tallinn-Helsinki tunnel were overshadowed by more pressing issues during the Ukraine energy crisis, the long-term plan and strategic importance of the tunnel have not changed, Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure Riina Sikkut said.
But Bitcoin bulls have consistently pushed against the narrative that Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy, frequently citing the stat that global Bitcoin mining operations use less power than all the clothes dryers of the U.S. combined. The contention in the [cryptocurrency] energy-use debate therefore is whether mining Bitcoin provides as much utility as consumer goods.
For policy makers, the answer is often no.
Even when Bitcoin mining runs on renewable power, policy planners would rather save that energy for industrial or consumer purposes because renewable electricity is still a limited resource.
Zach Bradford, chief executive of publicly traded Bitcoin miner CleanSpark, waded into the debate sparked by the Ethereum Merge, the shift from proof of work to proof of stake, which could see an order of magnitude reduction in the power consumed by the rival cryptocurrency network.
With real assets, you earn a return because you put money at risk and it is put to productive use. When you buy a stock or a corporate bond, on the other side of your investment is a business that uses your money to expand, to create new products, to employ workers—one hopes, to serve the common good. When a bank issues a mortgage, it makes a loan to a homeowner who borrows money to buy a house. The investor earns a return and the borrower benefits as well.
Christians should be excited to invest in ways that serve the common good, whether by using their retirement funds to align values and investments or by providing funding for a car wash to provide jobs or in any number of other ways. Investing creates and serves.
Given the choice between investing in a bubble that enables illicit black-market transactions, or investing in real assets that one hopes serve the common good—the choice should be obvious for Christians.
Even if you're not a Bloomberg subscriber you can read Matt Levine's The [Cryptocurency] Story with a free registration, or here, and I urge you to do so. It is long, about 40K words, but well worth the effort. It is remarkably good - lucid, comprehensive, balanced, accurate. It even has footnotes expanding on the details where he is oversimplifying for clarity of exposition.
Levine's magnum opus is in four parts: [...]
As voters across the United States headed to the polls Tuesday, a Greenpeace analysis found that the powerful oil and gas industry has spent nearly $13 million—averaging roughly $4.3 million per race—to boost Republicans vying for Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada, key battleground states that could tip the balance of power in Congress.
According to Greenpeace's breakdown of campaign finance data, Big Oil has donated more than $5.4 million to party committees and super PACs backing Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, $5.3 million to bolster Herschel Walker in Georgia, and $2 million to support Adam Laxalt in Nevada, each of whom has signaled they would oppose climate action if elected. During his tenure as Nevada's attorney general, Laxalt—who has ties to the Koch network—worked with other GOP officials to shield ExxonMobil from a fraud investigation.
Nongovernmental actors who continue to invest in fossil fuels, deforestation, and other activities that exacerbate the climate emergency cannot claim to be net-zero, a report published Tuesday during the United Nations' COP27 climate conference asserted.
"Using bogus 'net-zero' pledges to cover up massive fossil fuel expansion is reprehensible. It is rank deception."
Campaigners on Tuesday applauded leaders in the Global South for continuing to lead the way in the fight for far-reaching climate action as the island nation of Tuvalu brought a proposal for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty to the United Nations' annual climate change conference.
"We all know that the leading cause of climate crisis is fossil fuels," Kausea Natano, prime minister of Tuvalu, told global leaders at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. "It's getting too hot and there is very [little] time to slow and reverse the increasing temperature. Therefore, it is essential to prioritize fast-acting strategies."
Grizzly bears are protected under the Endangered Species Act, but their mortality rate is exploding mainly from human conflicts. Bears are expanding their range, largely due to food shortages in places like the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Grizzlies are confronted by armed people at cattle ranches and locations of unsecured foods and garbage.
Range expansion by bear populations is important for their long-term survival for two main reasons. One is a change in their food base due to climate warming. As plants and animals adapt, often by moving north, individual bears must explore new areas to survive. When they appear, people often respond with fear and alarm. If we hope to have them avoid extinction, changes in our daily routines are needed.
From the coasts of Africa to South America, around the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, China’s distant-water fleet (DWF) is steadily decimating fish stocks worldwide.
China’s bottom trawl fleet catches an estimated 2.35 million tons of fish per year around the African continent worth more than $5 billion, according to the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF).
Jake Johnson summarizes a fiery speech by the Vermont senator regarding the billionaires undermining American democracy.,
The Russian electronics manufacturers Aquarius and KEAZ (Kursk Electrical Equipment Plant) are lobbying for the Russian government to impose new import duties, or increase existing ones, on imported electronics.
Russian wholesalers and retailers have begun seeing a shortage of popular brands of alcoholic beverages that they used to import from abroad, the news outlet RBC reported on Wednesday, citing multiple market participants.
Today, voters will cast ballots in one of the most critical elections in recent history. Conspicuously absent from coverage despite its priority for many voters is housing. Half of Americans struggle with housing insecurity, unable to find affordable housing for their families, cover rent increases, or protect themselves from illegal harassment and evictions. In major cities like Los Angeles, the housing and homelessness crises consistently rank as the top issue on voters’ minds.
After four decades of low and stable inflation, prices in the US have risen by more than eight percent over the past year.€ This, without a doubt, is cause for concern.€
Roughly two-thirds (63 percent) of Russian employers are not planning to issue holiday bonuses to their employees this year, Russian news agency RBC reported on Tuesday, citing a recent survey conducted by Russian employment agencies. The pollsters spoke to 1,100 employers throughout Russia in September.
Leola Scott recently decided to become a more active citizen. The 55-year-old resident of Dyersburg, Tennessee, was driven to action after her son was stabbed to death and nobody was charged.
In August, Scott tried to register to vote. That’s when she learned she’s not allowed to cast a ballot because she was convicted of nonviolent felonies nearly 20 years ago.
Indigenous voters in Arizona who played a key role in catapulting Joe Biden to victory in 2020 are facing a sweeping rollback of their voting rights that may swing the state back to Republicans in Tuesday’s midterms. “In 2020, Native voters understood that the election of Donald Trump was an existential problem,” says New Yorker staff writer Sue Halpern, whose latest piece explores how voters on Arizona’s Navajo, Apache and Hopi reservations are navigating the 2021 Supreme Court ruling that banned a common method of voting collection used by Indigenous voters. We also speak with Lydia Dosela, who is running efforts to get out the vote on Indigenous reservations in Arizona to make sure “all Native American voices are heard loud and clear.”
The climate movement warns the midterm elections will either advance or torpedo climate initiatives in the U.S. This comes as climate activists and scientists at the U.N. climate summit in Egypt cautioned that the world is heading toward climate disaster without deeper cuts in planet-heating emissions. “We are up against a ticking time bomb of an unrelenting climate crisis and an economic crisis that is bearing down on working people,” says Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement, which has reached 3 million young voters to get out the vote in the midterms. Prakash also explains how parts of President Biden’s climate legislation passed this year could be stalled or reversed if Republicans take back control of Congress in 2023.
We speak to Damon Hewitt, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is spearheading nationwide efforts to protect the vote in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Republicans at the national and state levels have tried to disqualify thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots in an effort to swing close races in battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Hewitt describes how litigation has become a major part of the election process, given the increased number of election deniers and white supremacists who now hold positions as election officials. “When the casualness of racism is weaponized in the electoral process, that leads to voter suppression if we don’t stand up,” says Hewitt, who cautions that the final election results in Tuesday’s midterms may take a couple of days. He suggests people report problems to the Election Protection hotline: 866-OUR-VOTE.
On Tuesday, the United States holds its first midterm elections since the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Since then, it has become increasingly clear that the grave threat to American democracy posed on that day was no aberration; it was a prelude to a broader right-wing movement to undermine our electoral process.
For Americans who were on edge about whether voters would turn against President Donald Trump and his Republican allies, election night 2018 was a nerve-wracking exercise in mixed signals, conflicting indicators, and extended uncertainty. Early on, it still looked like Republicans were holding on in key congressional and statehouse races. It was almost midnight when the results finally confirmed that Democrats had taken control of the House, and hours more passed before it became clear that Republican “superstars,” like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, were going down to defeat. Only as the days passed did it become clear that Democrats had enjoyed a strikingly successful night nationwide—enjoying a net gain of 41 seats in the US House, gaining seven governorships, picking up multiple statewide posts, adding roughly 350 state legislative seats, and taking charge of six legislative chambers that had previously been controlled by the GOP.
Beverly Glover was right. The 66-year-old lifelong East Macon resident shooed me away from Senator Raphael Warnock’s Monday rally immediately, once she learned I wanted to get back to Atlanta in time for a late-afternoon Stacey Abrams event. I had best be going. It was only 1:45.
Kelly Halldorson is not going to be the next governor of New Hampshire—which may be why, when she shares her abortion story publicly for the first time—it doesn’t sound like a campaign ad.
When the election is over and the votes are counted, the winners will crow and the losers will cry. Nothing new there. But once the celebration and wailing is over, the job of running Montana will remain – and that’s going to take the best abilities of all of us.
Many of those challenges are eternal — we still have to educate our children, provide police and fire protection, ensure our citizens have access to health care, and allow our senior citizens to live out their lives in dignity.
The 2022 midterm elections were never going to favor the Democrats. Statistically the president’s party loses 26 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate.€ With a five-vote house margin and a 50-50 senate the odds were against the Democrats.€ Couple that with low presidential approval € ratings and a souring economy, classic political science analysis six months ago would tell you that € the Democrats were going to have a bad year.€ The Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade changed the political tide for a few months, but in the last few weeks the midterm cycle reverted back to what normally one would have predicted.
Thus for Democrats looking for solace, they might simply dismiss the losses as beyond their control, doomed by a structural cycle of American politics.€ But to think that is to miss the underlying causes of the problems for the Democratic Party.
By Democracy Now! On Tuesday, Nov. 8, Democracy Now! will air a 3-hour election night special from 9 p.m. to midnight ET. Democracy Now! will be covering the key congressional races which will determine the balance of power in Congress, as well as gubernatorial races and ballot initiatives from around the country. Join them to […]
Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman narrowly defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz on Tuesday, flipping a crucial Republican-held Senate seat as Democrats look to maintain control of the upper chamber.
Speaking to supporters after the race was called in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Fetterman said his dedicated campaign strategy of reaching every Pennsylvania county, regardless of past hostility to Democratic candidates, was key to his victory.
John Fetterman's U.S. Senate campaign joined Democratic groups on Monday in suing to override a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision barring state election officials from counting absentee and mail-in ballots that lack a correct date on the outer envelope, a technicality with potentially huge implications for the battleground's razor-close midterm races.
Filed in federal court on the eve of Election Day, the lawsuit argues that a Pennsylvania state law requiring voters to date the outer envelopes of absentee ballots "has no relevance to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote, in violation of the Civil Rights Act, and serves no purpose other than to erect barriers to qualified voters exercising their fundamental constitutional right."
Election Day is finally here. By tonight or tomorrow, it’s quite possible that something I never would have dreamed of a decade ago (or even a couple of years ago) will have come to pass. America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz might well be Senator-Elect Oz from Pennsylvania, because the polling as of today for his race against the Democrat John Letterman is too close to call. Never mind that Oz has spent his life since the 1980s in New Jersey and run his practice and The Dr. Oz Show from Manhattan, only moving to his in-laws’ house in Pennsylvania when his ambition led him to think that he could be a U.S. Senator. If Dr. Oz wins, he will join Rand Paul as the a quack turned Senator.
Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev has arrived in Tehran for a meeting with Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani, according to the Iranian news outlet IRNA.
Dmitry Kolezev, editor-in-chief of the Russian news outlet Republic, has been declared wanted by the Russian Interior Ministry. According to the ministry’s official website, a criminal case has been opened against Kolezev, though the exact charges are unclear.
Russian nationalist and neo-Nazi Dmitry Demushkin reported on Telegram that police had come to his apartment and begun “banging on his door” at 6:00 am Tuesday morning. He said he didn’t know the reason for their visit.
As Americans head to the polls to vote in Tuesday's midterm elections, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats warned that, as they tried to do in 2020, Republican candidates may attempt to prematurely declare victory or even claim fraud in contests in which they're initially ahead but they ultimately lose once all outstanding ballots are counted.
"It takes time to count every vote accurately and that's why Election Day is not results day."
There’s only one message this morning: get out and vote.€
With Republicans doing all they can to suppress the vote and sow doubt about the election process with brazen lies, progressive campaigners, lawmakers, and watchdogs said Tuesday that the most effective counter to the GOP and its corporate backers is large-scale turnout, particularly among young and working-class voters.
"Record-breaking youth voter turnout gets you historic gun safety legislation, it gets you student debt cancellation, it gets you the largest investment by any country on the planet to tackle the climate crisis, and it's getting us long-overdue marijuana reform," Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, said in an MSNBC appearance Tuesday morning, pointing to recent policy moves spurred by the 2020 youth turnout surge, which helped deny former President Donald Trump a second term and gave Democrats narrow control of Congress.
There are only two ways that independent nations can be governed: by the people themselves through free and fair elections with maximum participation, or by an elite group that is only acting for its own benefit.
Obviously, I can’t tell you how today’s elections will turn out. But I do want to reassure you about one thing: Over the long term, we are winning.
We speak with New Yorker staff writer Sue Halpern about the Senate race in New Hampshire, where she says far-right Republican nominee Donald Bolduc is running a “vigorous campaign” against the incumbent Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan and spreading conspiracy theories that some schoolchildren were using litter boxes. “If Maggie Hassan loses, the Democrats might well lose the Senate,” says Halpert, adding that New Hampshire is “a very swingy state” and the midterm outcomes there could surprise many people.
According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission published Tuesday, Musk sold 19.5 million more shares of Tesla.
Musk sold almost $22 billion worth of Tesla shares in 2021, a year when the stock jumped over 50%. This year, he sold over $8 billion worth of Tesla stock in April and another roughly $7 billion worth in August.
A former Twitter Inc engineer has accused the company of firing him days after it was acquired by Elon Musk because he developed a tool to allow workers to save important documents in anticipation of mass layoffs.
The engineer, Emmanuel Cornet, filed a complaint with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board on Monday claiming he was engaged in protected activity when he shared the software on an internal Twitter messaging channel.
Earlier this week, we released a story on how TikTok has revolutionised the short-video industry through its recommendation system. In just five years, the platform acquired about 1.2 billion monthly active users (as per Q4 2021) and is estimated to reach 1.8 billion users by the end of year.
Today, tech giant ByteDance revealed the main structure of ‘Monolith’, TikTok’s recommendation system’s algorithm. TikTok has undoubtedly taken over the internet by basically reading your mind to get personalised content.
In the chaos that has enveloped Twitter the platform – and Twitter the company – since Elon Musk took over, it has become clear this isn’t changing anytime soon. In fact, it’s likely to get much worse before it gets better – if it gets better at all.
The truth is, nobody can prepare for a stupid billionaire.
The last few weeks of Elon craziness regarding Twitter has been kind of shocking in all sorts of ways. We knew, going in, that he didn’t appear to understand the challenges of running a social media website. His statements regarding free speech suggested that he really didn’t understand that concept either. But, every time I point this stuff out, people (often on Twitter) start yelling at me that I’m being unfair to him, not giving him a chance, or they say I’m “jealous” (of what?!?) and that we just needed to let him do his thing.
And yet, in the days since Elon Musk took control of the site, users have taken to blaming this problem and the platform’s other long-standing issues on him. When a doctored video of former President Barack Obama being mocked at a Wisconsin rally went viral, the writer James Surowiecki rightly lamented, “Account posts totally fake video of Obama, presenting it as real, and it’s retweeted and replied to by thousands of people who think it’s real.” But he prefaced this observation with the words “New Twitter,” as though this didn’t routinely happen on the Old Twitter. “Is this what we are to expect on Twitter moving forward: zero content moderation or fact checking?” asked one Democratic political consultant, seemingly without irony. (In fact, Twitter’s nascent crowdsourced fact-checking system, Birdwatch, quickly labeled the video in question as misleading, though as usual, this did not stop it from spreading.)
The New York Times reviewed more than 20 hours of recordings of Michigan Fair Elections meetings, along with training sessions and organizing calls from closely linked groups. What emerged was a picture of an organization fueled by falsehoods, bent on trying to influence the 2022 midterms and determined to change the voting system in ways that would benefit Republicans.
Those claims gained new life early Tuesday after officials in New Jersey and in Arizona reported problems with some of their ballot scanners.
As Twitter's new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, faces intense criticism for his handling of the social media giant and encouraging voters to support GOP congressional candidates, U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Tuesday revealed that he spent hours trying to post an Election Day video from his campaign account.
"Twitter not letting me post videos. This is crazy. Never happened before. What's Elon doing?"
The censorship of Wallace is one of many examples highlighting the suppression on social media of those who share scientifically backed information in opposition to the “Let it Rip” policies of governments internationally and their false claim that the pandemic is over.
This has sparked a debate over whether content moderation is actually possible, and how to ensure a fair trade-off between curbing harmful content and allowing free speech. For example, this tweet by Ben Lang, co-founder & executive editor of Road to VR, that expresses disdain over any form of content moderation on social media platforms: [...]
Pressure to adopt a formal definition first mounted in 2018 with the publication of a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) entitled Islamophobia Defined. They proposed the following definition: “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness.”
As I pointed out at the time, this definition is hopelessly vague and highly problematic. Islam is not a race. Criticising Islamic culture, beliefs or practices is not racism. According to this definition, saying that UK law is preferable to sharia law would be Islamophobic, since sharia law is an expression of Muslimness.
People from various religions, including Muslim women who are part of the organisation, took part in the event. The hijab burning, inspired by similar incidents in Iran, took place on Sunday in Kerala’s Kozhikode.
Activists said Rahimi was targeted by plainclothes security agents on October 8 because he had honked his car horn in solidarity with anti-government protests in the northwestern city of Sanandaj, the provincial capital of Iran's Kurdistan Province.
Iran on Tuesday charged two female journalists with "propaganda against the state" over their coverage of mass protests.
The judiciary announced that the journalists — Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi — are "remanded in custody for propaganda against the system and conspiring against national security."
Both women have been in custody already for more than a month.
A federal appeals court on Friday said it would reconsider whether a citizen journalist in Texas can sue over her arrest for asking police questions, marking the latest twist in a case that has already divided parts the court's conservative faction.
The full New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it would revisit its 2-1 decision reviving Priscilla Villarreal's lawsuit against Laredo, Texas, police officers, county prosecutors and the city over her 2017 arrest.
It has been five years since police in Laredo, Texas, mocked and jeered at Priscilla Villarreal, a local journalist often critical of cops, as she stood in the Webb County Jail while they booked her on felony charges. Her crime: asking the government questions.
That may seem like a relatively obvious violation of the First Amendment. Yet perhaps more fraught is that, after all this time, the federal courts have still not been able to reach a consensus on that question. Over the years, judges in the 5th Circuit have ping-ponged back and forth over whether jailing a journalist for doing journalism does, in fact, plainly infringe on her free speech rights.
At oral arguments in February, lawyers for the city said officials were simply enforcing a statute and that Villarreal should not have sought the names of the deceased before they were made public, or published them on Facebook.
But in finding for Villarreal, the panel concluded that it was “hard to imagine a more textbook violation of the First Amendment.”
The rally on Monday wasn’t the first time Trump imagined journalists being raped in prison. He laid out the same fantasy at a rally in Texas last month, saying the reporter would give up the identity of the leaker as soon as they realize they are “going to be the bride of another prisoner very shortly.” The audience burst out in laughter, just as they did Monday night in Ohio.
Amid speculation that former U.S. President Donald Trump will announce his 2024 run next week, Rolling Stone reported Tuesday that the Republican leader has sought advice about how he could ramp up his war with the news media by jailing journalists if he regains control of the White House.
Trump's first presidential campaign and four years in office featured constant attacks on reporters, outlets, and the industry in general, from his frequent declarations of "fake news" to going after journalists for reporting on leaked information.
Chinese authorities in Tibet have sentenced two monks from the Kirti monastery in Sichuan province to prison for sending prayer offerings to the Dalai Lama and the abbot of their monastery, both living in exile in India, Radio Free Asia has learned.
The two monks, Rachung Gendun and Sonam Gyatso, had both sent the donations to Tibet’s foremost spiritual leader and Kirti Rinpoche, sources said.
The law has faced many legal challenges, but none quite like the one the U.S. Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday. As election results begin to trickle in across the country, the justices will hear oral arguments in a quartet of cases challenging ICWA on a variety of constitutional and doctrinal grounds.
Amazingly, the protests in Iran, now the longest-running against one-man rule by a cleric, have been largely leaderless. Demonstrators have united around anger (over dress codes), slogans (“Woman, Life, Freedom”), and shared agony over poverty and inflation. The leaderless quality, however, points to a largely unspoken theme: a desire for equality.
The moment when Iââ¬Â¯realised that I should not make my weblog available through Gemini. No, I needed to make my gemlog available on the web and migrate all my old content into my gemlog.
And that’s what I did. I started a python script generating my index.gmi. And to convert my posts to html. And to do all the things you never think about when you start writing software. Until it works.
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic. Office workers worldwide began to adjust to a ‘new normal’ of working from home wherever possible and the IT infrastructure supporting their work had to keep up with these changes.
While these changes were disruptive for most, for system administrators (sysadmins) the effects were compounded. This is because sysadmins are generally those running and adapting the digital infrastructure for users and clients. Therefore, not only did sysadmins have to adjust their own work to the remote working conditions but they also had to help others in adjusting, both technically and socially.
Pakistan’s Sindh province has a rich Hindu history and tradition – an outlier in the Muslim-majority country. Discrimination, however, is on the rise though the landscape of Pakistan, and Sindh in particular, retains a Hindu imprint.
"There is still no breathing space for Christian communities in southern Kaduna, as terrorists, jihadists, bandits and armed herdsmen have continued to plunder and wreck Christian communities in the southern part of Kaduna state." — Statement from the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union on extensive murders, saharareporters.com, September 19, 2022.
"The father was a tall and strong man. He started pulling and preventing the rescue men and got violent with them. He told them that he prefers his daughter being dead than being touched by a strange man," Burqibah said.
Two minor Hindu cousin sisters aged 11 and 13 were abducted from their home in Pakistan in the pre-dawn hours of September 24. Nisha (11) d/o Mavji Ashok Kohli & Heena (13) d/o Ramji Ashok Kohli were abducted by 8 Muslim men – Hajan Abdullah, Ejhas, Sanaullah, Mustafa, Ayub Khaskeli & others – from Tando Ghulam Ali, Badin district of Sindh province as per human rights activist Mahesh Vasu.
U.S. officials said Saudi authorities had confirmed the detention of Morris, whose efforts to leave the kingdom with her now-8-year-old daughter have been made more difficult by Saudi Arabia's strict male guardianship laws. Morris in recent months had spoken to reporters and tweeted about her circumstances.
The EFF Awards is a new ceremony dedicated to the growing digital rights communities whose technical, social, economic, and cultural contributions are changing the world. We can feel the impact of their work in diverse fields such as journalism, art, digital access, legislation, tech development, and law.
All are invited to attend the EFF Awards ceremony! The celebration will begin at 6 pm. PT, Thursday, November 10 at The Regency Lodge, 1290 Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. Register today to attend in person. At 7 pm PT, the awards ceremony will stream live and free on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
We are honored to present our three winners of this year's EFF Awards: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Digital Defense Fund, and Kyle Wiens. But before the€ ceremony€ kick off, we want to take a closer look at each of our€ honorees. Up next, Digital Defense Fund, EFF Award for Civil Rights Technology :
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg on Tuesday joined the growing chorus of calls demanding that United Nations Climate Change Conference host Egypt release hunger-striking political prisoner Alaa Abd El Fattah.
"Human rights and climate movements are stronger when we stand in solidarity together."
The family of the imprisoned Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd El-Fattah says they no longer know if he is still alive or if he is being force-fed, more than 50 hours after he stopped drinking water in an intensification of a six-month hunger strike. We feature an address by Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif at the U.N. climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh. “The symbolic battle has been won by your show of support,” says Seif. “I just hope his body and he is not sacrificed for it.”
I speak from personal experience. I grew up in a border town — Laredo, Texas and lived there for 33 years. I don’t know whether the situation with respect to maids, nannies, and gardeners is the same as it was when I was living along the border, but I suspect it is.€
The Border Patrol was an integral part of life in Laredo. Border Patrol agents wore uniforms and you saw them in their ugly pea-green vehicles everywhere — in town having coffee at Denny’s, stopping cars on roads and highways outside of town, manning fixed checkpoints on the highway, and conducting warrantless trespasses and searches of nearby farms and ranches. We were living under an immigration police state.
This indeed is true that the Islamic Republic instituted draconian patriarchal policies after the revolution on 1979 that stripped the very basic formal rights that women had been granted under the ancien régime.€ These measures formally reduced women to second-class citizens in matters of marriage, custody, inheritance, crime and judiciary, dress code, segregation, and many other spheres of social life. € Yet, despite all this, women’s social mobility and presence in public sphere grew exponentially in the past four decades.€ Ironically, this is in part an effect of the unintended consequences of these policies. Women learned very quickly how to navigate the new terrain, push the boundaries of the new institutions, and in practice gain access to rights and privileges from which the Islamic Republic deprived them. The recent revolt could not materialize without the remarkable agentive presence and mobility of women who carved out a space for ceaseless social and political engagement during the past four decades. Women are revolting because they refuse to continue the struggle in a field the boundaries of which are drawn in the dilapidated spirits of patriarchy. € Their gains have reached a hard as well as a glass ceiling that needs to be overcome.
The Iranian revolution succeeded in ending the monarchy on February 11, 1979. On February 26, only two weeks after the victory of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini annulled the Family Protection Law of 1967 and its 1975 amended version, which had given women more rights in divorce and matters of custody under the Shah. Since its inception, the clergy by and large had opposed the law’s basic premises, which they believed violated the Islamic views on women’s role in family.€ Khomeini knew that the unity and uniformity that his leadership afforded the revolutionary movement would not remain uncontested for long after the triumph of the revolution. He knew that the spirit of Islam and the symbolic revolutionary language with which it inspired millions of Iranians of many creeds and classes needed to be translated into a body of institutional projects of postrevolutionary state-building. € So, he seized the opportunity to put women under the control of their menfolk.
On October 6, India Spellman was supposed to have an evidentiary hearing for a potential retrial. In Philadelphia, a crowd of supporters passed through the courthouse’s metal detectors to fill the benches. Many wore T-shirts declaring Spellman’s innocence. The courtroom was so crowded that some were forced to stand. There was just one person missing: India Spellman.
On a cool spring morning outside a Dunkin’ Donuts in the Bronx, Madeline Brame stood before a pair of TV news microphones and cleared her throat. “This is my son, Sergeant Hason Correa,” she said, directing the cameras’ attention to the large poster she held of a man in military fatigues, a photo from when he served in the war in Afghanistan. The rally of around 25 people was made up mostly of friends and collaborators who stood behind her. Four years ago, she said, when her son was 35, “Hason was kicked, punched, stomped, and stabbed nine times by four people he did not know, nor had he done any harm.” The knife stroke that killed him plunged straight through his chest, piercing his heart.
When I was growing up, there was a parody of an old-fashioned public announcement tacked to the wall of our kitchen that I vividly remember. It had step-by-step instructions for what to do “in case of a nuclear bomb attack.” Step 6 was “bend over and place your head firmly between your legs”; step 7, “kiss your ass goodbye.”
When I was growing up, there was a parody of an old-fashioned public announcement tacked to the wall of our kitchen that I vividly remember. It had step-by-step instructions for what to do "in case of a nuclear bomb attack." Step 6 was "bend over and place your head firmly between your legs"; step 7, "kiss your ass goodbye."
Law enforcement needs probable cause to effect arrests and engage in searches. In most cases, a warrant is also required. It’s a bit of paperwork that allows the government to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to serve the greater good, i.e., the invasion of privacy (a search) or the removal of personal freedom (an arrest).
St. Petersburg police raided the homes of 50 employees and owners of bars on the city’s Rubinstein Street, according to the Russian news site 47news.
For years we’ve been firing no shortage of low-Earth orbit satellites into space without the federal government showing much concern about the the impact of these new technologies at scale. Like, the navigational hazards of unchecked space junk, or the way scientists warned that Starlink causes significant light pollution that seriously harms scientific research and can’t be fully mitigated.
The publisher accuses the artists of trademark infringement for rolling out a “deliberately deceptive” campaign “built entirely on the use of the VOGUE marks,” according to a lawsuit filed on Monday in New York federal court. “That Defendants would knowingly violate Condé Nast’s rights in this manner underscores the tremendous value that a cover feature in Vogue magazine carries to amplify sales of an album that was to be released days after Defendants commenced their deceptive campaign,” reads the complaint. “This of course was Defendants’ aim.”
Fascist kleptocrats sure do love their lists, don’t they? Way back in March, when Vladimir Putin decided to invade a sovereign neighbor, we discussed how Russia was contemplating simply legalizing software piracy in the wake of crippling sanctions to try to keep the Russian economy as stable as possible. That Russia would take such a step came to the surprise of exactly nobody, of course, but there were questions as to how such a thing would work with parties that are not sanctioning Russia, such as China.
DISH Network and the International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy have won a $15.7m judgment against iStar, a pirate IPTV provider found directly liable for infringing DISH copyrights. The court authorized domain seizures and restrained hosting companies in the U.S. and EU, but a DISH proposal for an injunction against unknown third parties was completely rejected.
A group of filmmakers has won over $4.2 million in damages from the defunct hosting company MICFO. The order is tied to a default judgment that finds the company liable for contributory copyright infringement through its VPN customers. It also opens the door to follow-up liability claims against these VPN providers.
YouTube's latest Transparency Report shows that fewer copyright holders used the Content ID system to protect their works. Despite the modest decline, more content was flagged overall, with over 750 million claims during the first half of 2022. Traditional DMCA takedown notices are on the rise as well, with an increase of more than 30% year-over-year.
Since 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has required services to accommodate "standard technical measures" to reduce infringement. The DMCA’s definition of standard technical measures (STMs) requires them to be developed by a broad consensus in an open, fair, multi-industry, and perhaps most importantly voluntary process. In other words, current law reflects an understanding that most technologies shouldn’t be adopted as standards because standards affect many, many stakeholders who all deserve a say.
But the filter mandate bill is clearly designed to undermine the measured provisions of the DMCA. It changes the definition of standard technical measures to also include technologies supported by only a small number of rightsholders and technology companies.€
It also adds a new category of filters called "designated technical measures" (DTMs), which must be "accommodated" by online services. "Accommodating" is broadly defined as "adapting, implementing, integrating, adjusting, and conforming" to the designated technical measure. A failure to do so could mean losing the DMCA’s safe harbors and thereby risking crushing liability for the actions of your users.€ €
Sent an email asking for permission to make a mirror/archive. This time it was for Pagat, a site with tons and tons of card games. And like last time, permission was given provided that I don't make any archives/mirrors public. Fair enough!
Probably all [neo]vim (in the following just abbreviated to vim) users know that hjkl is superior to the arrow-keys, but it seems like many vim users are still not satisfied with these and other methods of movement present in vim. That is why some of them created plugins like easymotion to jump to anywhere on the currently visible window with just two keys pressed.
A website is an online place where you can tell people to follow you on different social media so they might have a chance, if the algorithm allows it, to read what you hope to write in the future.
A social media is a platform where you can create an account, get an audience and ask them to follow you on another social media platform.
Finally got around to actually reading the Gemini subscription specification, which turns out to be pretty simple, assuming I read it aright. Also now with a RSS feed as integrating XML::RSS was pretty simple so I did that.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.