The polls are open for the first round of our Readers Choice 2022 Desktop Environment Poll to determine which desktop environment our readers used most in 2022. The voting on this round will determine what desktop environments and/or window managers make to to the final round of voting.
Two times in the past we’ve run polls focused on desktop environments, but this will be the first time we’ve pulled out all stops to make a DE poll central to our editorial calendar (February is DE month). In both of those previous polls, KDE won.
First up in the news, Mint 21.2 has the codename Victoria, OpenSuse updates, helloSystem says hello for the 0.8th time, new Firefox allows imports, Xfce goes Waylanding, Cosmic DE speeds up, OBS Studio fixes Linux Wayland bug, and Elementary has a new release;
Download
In security and privacy, we report on after log4j, Boldmove, and Malvirt;
Then in our Wanderings, Joe calls Texas for Icing, and Moss is having New Phone Fever; Bill is in Colorado doing a rescue and will be back next episode.
In our Innards section we discuss what you can do with old Android devices;
Okay just a short status update.
In the current difficult economic times, internet radio’s virtue of having no sign-up or subscription charges is very attractive. There are a huge range of stations available from around the world. If you like classical music, pop music, folk music, news, talk radio, and much more, internet radio has something for everyone wherever you live (providing you have a net connection). Internet radio offers every format that is available on traditional broadcast radio stations.
cTune is an ncurses based internet radio player written in C. This is free and open source software.
You probably have a few collections that are continuing to grow. Keeping track of your collection as it grows becomes increasingly more complicated. In this scenario a collection manager can be extremely useful. Armed with this software you can keep track of your collection. Moreover, collectors may have no accurate way of measuring the value of their collection for insurance purposes without having an accurate record.
There is a wide range of collection manager software available for Linux. However, the majority of this software is specialized, focusing on one or two different collectable items. The purpose of this review is primarily to identify the finest collection manager software which track a diverse range of items. This type of software has the advantage that users can keep track of all of their different collection types using a single software application. However, specialized collection managers are still worthy of a mention.
BitTorrent is a popular alternative to HTTP to share or download files over the internet. You may know that numerous BitTorrent clients are available with different features and configurations. Transmission is one such BitTorrent client that is open-source and lightweight.
The app's latest release arrives nearly two years after its last stable release. While no new releases were seen during this time, the project was in active development.
Version 4 of the most widely used FOSS BitTorrent client is here, and it's worth a look if you have any difficulties with streaming media services.
Transmission is the default BitTorrent client for quite a few Linux distros. As a general rule we advise against running anything-point-zero releases of, well, pretty much anything if you have any choice in the matter. Saying that, though, Transmission 3.0 came out nearly three years ago, in May 2020, and there was never so much as a zero-point-one version. It just worked from the day it appeared. That is pretty much unheard of these days, and as such, we are guardedly hopeful that although it's apparently a total rewrite in C++ – famously a bad idea – 4.0 should be pretty good.
The GStreamer community recently announced the release of version 1.22 of the open source multimedia framework, and once again Collabora has made a number of key contributions. In this cycle, 17 Collabora engineers contributed 227 patches to the core GStreamer repository!
As spotlighted in the previous release, our contributions focused on making GStreamer the best framework for multimedia features on embedded platforms. We're particularly proud of our work on the support of hardware codec accelerators, also known as "stateless codecs".
It’s possible to animate gap, grid-template-columns, and grid-template-rows.
Almost 6 years ago I wrote a blog post on CodePen titled “Animating CSS Grid Layout properties”. A lot has changed since then, especially recently, and I wanted to update the post, but the blogging feature on CodePen has been sunset and I can’t edit the post anymore. Since animating grids is topical again, I added it to the series.
You do not have to follow these rules every time. If you have a good reason to break any of them, do. But they are safe to follow every time.
Konveyor Move2Kube assists developers in migrating projects from platforms such as Cloud Foundry and Docker swarm to Kubernetes and OpenShift. Move2Kube analyzes your application's source code and generates Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) artifacts such as Kubernetes YAMLs, Helm charts, Tekton pipelines, and so on.
Powering Move2Kube is a transformer framework that enables multiple small transformers to be chained together to transform the artifacts completely.
Many different transformers get involved when transforming a Java or Node.js project to create all the destination artifacts. This allows for the reuse of transformers in various end-to-end flows. Each transformer is capable of performing multiple activities.
Both new and experienced users of the popular MySQL database system can often get confused about how temporal values are handled by the database. Sometimes users don't bother learning much about temporal value data types. This may be because they think there isn't much to know about them. A date is a date, right? Well, not always. Taking a few minutes to learn how MySQL stores and displays dates and times is beneficial. Learning how to best take advantage of the temporal values in your database tables can help make you a better coder.
Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool.
Wine can be installed on Linux by using the package manager of your Linux distribution or by downloading the source code and building it manually.
Tutorial on the different instructions to create, modify, lock or unlock, and delete new users by utilizing the useradd, usermod, and userdel instructions.
Practical tutorial on how to use the pacman instruction on Arch Linux, its updates, upgrades, download, installation, removal using some of its useful flags.
Guide on how to install Slack on Arch Linux to help the teams collaborate more effectively, communicate more effectively, and speed up the overall development.
Tutorial on how to take screenshots in the Arch Linux system using the keyboard shortcuts, the built-in screenshot utility, and third-party software utility.
Enhance your Linux knowledge and take it to the next level with Docker.
Practical tutorial on the importance of using the Network Manager on Arch Linux to manage the different internet connections, especially the wifi networks.
In this guide, we studied Ansible's debug module in this guide. We have used Ansible's module function debugging capabilities in the playbook.
Practical tutorial on how to use the FFmpeg open-source multimedia framework to create a video from a series of images and convert multiple images to a video.
Guide on the concept of how to find the existence of web elements in Selenium WebDrivers to determine whether an element exists or not using different methods.
Comprehensive tutorial on the use of the Linux mount command to attach a file to a specified mount point in the current file system using several examples.
Tutorial on the use of the user management utility in Linux and the different Linux Mint instructions to add the new users using the add user command.
Practical tutorial on how to install the official NVIDIA drivers on Linux Mint 21 to check whether you have the NVIDIA GPU installed on your computer/laptop.
Steam is one of the finest platforms for gamers. With the help of Steam, you’re free to enjoy the best games right away! All you need is just tinkering with the system and setting the tools properly. How to install and get started using Steam on Arch Linux is shown.
Practical tutorial on how to create a system timer by creating a test script, service file, timer file, and how to troubleshoot and diagnose the timer.
If you're running Ubuntu 22.04 on VirtualBox, you’ve probably noticed that the display resolution can be a bit limited.
The concept of roles and how to construct a role in Ansible was covered in this article. The roles' hierarchical structure has been also covered.
Comprehensive tutorial on how to use the Ansible copy module using the various copy module’s mandatory and optional parameters and putting it into practice.
Practical guide on how to copy an SSH key in Ubuntu to transfer the files and access the operating systems remotely using the SSH command along with examples.
Game developers might want to begin to look closer at this one! The free and open source Godot Engine is about to have the biggest update ever with 4.0 that now has a first Release Candidate. Since it's such a massive overhaul it would be close to impossible to list everything that has changed since Godot 3.x!
Command & Conquer - Combined Arms is a free and open source game pack made with the OpenRA game engine, the bundles together forces from various classic Westwood RTS games including Allies, Soviets, Nod, GDI and the Scrin.
The Callisto Protocol, the horror game that was inspired by Dead Space, has recently gained a hardcore mode and a dedicated Steam Deck upgrade too.
Anodyne from Analgesic Productions recently celebrated a 10th anniversary, and the community delivered in style with a full fan remake for modern platforms thanks to the previous source code release. The original is not open source but "source available", since it has a custom license with the new fan remake available under the same licensing.
Splittown is an upcoming point and click adventure about the Cold War, where the world is split in two and now there's a Linux demo. Their plan to release this was noted in a previous article, where the developer reached out to me after for some pre-release testing and it was looking great!
A slightly spooky and weird exploration game about taking snaps, Interior Worlds seems interesting and it's coming to Linux too. Speaking to the developer, they noted Linux support will come slightly after the Windows release.
Need some more quality games? Humble Choice for February 2023 is up with a fresh set of games and there's some good stuff included like Fallout 76. This is Humble's optional monthly subscription that gives you a fresh set of games to keep every month, plus a discount in their store and more.
Trackmania has released on Steam recently and thanks to the recent Ubisoft Connect fixes from Valve in Proton 7.0-6, Trackmania works great on Steam Deck. It's free to play and has in-game purchases for the full content, however you can play rather a lot without spending a penny.
With some really slick animations, the customizable platform fighter Fraymakers has launched in Early Access on Steam with Linux support. It went into Early Access on January 19th that somehow I forgot about, even though I purchased it and played it€ — woops. I'm only human right?
A name I've not heard for a while that I seemed to miss some emails on recently. Colony building sim Maia, from developer Simon Roth, had a rather big upgrade. This is the first major update since early in 2021.
When working on GTK 4, special care was taken to ensure that most of a
GtkTextView‘s content could be rendered without GL program changes and maximal use ofglDrawArrays()with vertices from a VBO.That goes a long way towards making smooth scrolling.
In recent releases, GTK gained support for scrolling using more precise scroll units. On macOS with Apple touchpads, for example, that might map physical distance to a certain number of logical pixels within the application.
If you’re at 2x scaling, you might get values from the input system with “half pixel” values (e.g.
.5) since that would map just fine to the physical pixel boundary of the underlying display server.
Tutorial on the 30 best GNOME shell extensions for Ubuntu to help tweak the GNOME desktop environment and improve your overall GNOME desktop working experience.
Before the immutability became hype, Endless OS provided a productive desktop experience based on OSTree. It is packaged from Debian and Ubuntu but is being developed independently. Thanks to OSTree-based internals, Endless OS works in its user space while giving you the best desktop experience.
It's a perfect distribution for schools, small-scale deployments, labs and offline use cases.
A new release, i.e. Endless OS 5.0, is now available. Here's a quick recap of the features with an in-depth review.
Endless OS is an app-centric operating system that pitches itself as an intuitive smartphone-like experience on a desktop.
The last major release came back in November 2021 as Endless OS 4.
Since then, the co-founder of elementary OS, Cassidy James, has joined the Endless OS Foundation as a 'Partner Success Engineer'.
Endless OS is a Debian-based, fully desktop-oriented Linux operating system. Despite its strong desktop focus, it only occasionally falls under the radar, unlike other niche-leading distros such as Linux Mint, Fedora, Manjaro, and so on, because the approach is quite different here. So, let’s first clarify for readers what this is all about.
Endless OS features a custom desktop environment as the OS is designed to provide offline access to information and educational content. To achieve this, it comes preinstalled with various apps and tools for productivity and entertainment. Moreover, it gives access to an extensive library of educational content without needing an internet connection.
Hackweek 22 took place last week. During this week all the SUSE employees are free to hack on whatever they want. This one of the perks of working at SUSE ðŸËŽ.
This time my personal project has been about building a unikernel that runs WebAssembly.
Tekton grew out of the Knative project and has subsequently been backed by Red Hat as being the future for all things pipeline in Red Hat OpenShift. Back in 2018, when I first heard about Tekton, my first reaction was “What problem are we trying to fix here?”. After all, I know Jenkins, and I like Jenkins—so why would I want to face the learning curve of new technology when what I have now already works well?
Whenever I asked the question “Why is Tekton better than Jenkins?” the most common answer is, “Tekton is cloud native,” usually followed by silence or a very quick pivot to something else. So I went away and looked for a clear definition of ‘cloud native’ expecting to have the eureka moment.
Enterprises are dealing with vast amounts of data segmented across domains, leaving them needing help to identify it or capture critical insights. Furthermore, the competitive business landscape has intensified post-pandemic and spurred the realization that digital transformation is a requirement—not merely a "nice to have".
We see new business models emerging across all industries, forging new partner alliances to leverage the data within a company’s ecosystem for the next breakthrough product or service.
This article demonstrates the steps required to add the JBoss EAP Maven Plugin to an existing JBoss EAP 8-Beta application. We will also test our plugin locally and then build and deploy our application to OpenShift using Helm via the OpenShift UI and the Helm CLI.
SparkyLinux still offers four different desktop editions, LXQt 0.16.0, Xfce 4.16, KDE Plasma 5.20.5, and Openbox 3.6.1, and benefits from all the upgrades found in those environments. The biggest addition to SparkyLinux is the change made to the Sparky Live USB Creator.
With the new release, it is now possible to create live USB installations with persistent storage. That means you can take a version of SparkyLinux with you, wherever you go, that will include any data you've saved to the USB drive.
The ComfilePi CPi-C070WR4C is a 7-inch industrial Panel PC powered by a Raspberry Pi CM4 module with GPIO, RS-232, RS-485, and I2C interfaces as well as the ability to add two more RS232 interfaces and several 12V-24V DC inputs and outputs through an I/O board connected to the GPIO port of the panel PC.
The new panel PC is an update to the ComfilePi Industrial Touch Panel PC introduced with a Raspberry Pi CM3 module in 2017. Besides upgrading to a more powerful Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, COMFILE also makes use of an RS-485 port that utilizes a full UART interface that does not exhibit the limitations of the mini-UART interface, and also added the CP-IO13-4C I/O board for even more expansion capabilities.
After recently launching the NUCS 1300 BOX Series last month, ASRock has just presented their new 4X4 BOX 7000/D5 Series. These new Mini-PCs come equipped with dual 2.5 GbE ports, Wi-Fi 6 E/BL5.2 connectivity and DDR5 support.
With every update, LibreOffice becomes the best alternative to Microsoft Office and the first choice for Linux users. After six months of continuous development and efforts of 144 contributors (Thank you!), the Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 7.5, which brought many notable improvements.
The world in 2023 looks different from when the Big Data alarm bells started going off. The data cataclysm that had been predicted hasn’t come to pass. Data sizes may have gotten marginally larger, but hardware has gotten bigger at an even faster rate. Vendors are still pushing their ability to scale, but practitioners are starting to wonder how any of that relates to their real world problems.
Guide on the pthread library of POSIX standard to increase the speed of the finished program by executing multiple threads in parallel with the main function.
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in 'registers' and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register. Generally, we can do so while programming with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit integers.
After a whole lot of bashing my head against the desk I finally managed to find out what Acrobat reader's "error 14" means, I managed to make both font subsetting and graphics generation work. Which means you can now do things like this:
After this improving the code to handle full PDF graphics seems mostly to be a question of adding functions for all primitives in the PDF graphics model. The big unknown thing is PDF form support, of which I know nothing. Being a new design it probably is a lot less convoluted than PDF fonts were.
Practical tutorial on the use of Web Automation in Selenium with the Python language to allow an automatic testing of the website without human interaction.
Comprehensive tutorial on how to use the selection sort in Python to arrange all the elements in ascending or descending order based on the requirements.
Practical tutorial on insertion sort to sort all the elements of an array in Python and handle the data with a small range or sorting a partially sorted list.
This article has covered the creation and use of Django applications on Ubuntu servers. To make the process simple to grasp, we have divided it into steps.
The unidentified dead will be buried after 24 hours and after taking their DNA sample, fingerprint, and photograph.
Several NGOs set up initiatives to help the animals in need.
Stretched rescue teams are toiling in Turkey and Syria, searching for signs of life in the rubble of thousands of buildings toppled by a catastrophic earthquake. The death toll passed 11,000 in the deadliest quake worldwide in more than a decade. Hope for finding survivors is fading. Amid calls for the Turkish government to send more help to the disaster zone, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan toured a “tent city” in hard-hit Kahramanmaras.
In Star Trek, dilithium crystals — whatever those are — are critical to the operation of a starship’s warp drives. But a Texas professor thinks he can make a baby step towards a warp drive using ethylene glycol, which is commonly found in antifreeze.
CNN's Nick Paton Walsh is on the ground in Turkey, where search-and-rescue efforts continue at the epicenter of a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake that caused hundreds of buildings to collapse, trapping thousands of residents.
When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant, I was a beast before you. Psalm 73: 21-22 South African has a long history of the liberatory struggle.
Those images from the December blizzard engulfing Buffalo in upstate New York were shocking. Hard to grasp the reality. That ghostliness was not only from the icy, white shroud covering everything. There were also the deaths of citizens who ventured outside, or who simply couldn’t get back home.
That calamity was especially unsettling for those of us who live hardly 250 miles from there. By contrast we were covered by a pretty layer of two inches of snow. Whatever cold reached us not far south of Buffalo was discomfitingly bearable. We carried on with our daily affairs, simply taking care to cover up with an extra layer of wool and€ ensuring we had a good supply of fuel oil.
So, over the last few weeks, we’ve written a bunch of articles about DoNotPay, highlighting some pretty significant questions about the company, its CEO, and the services it offers. To date, the CEO of the company, Josh Browder, has not responded particularly well to the concerns people are raising, and is acting like someone trying to hide things, rather than address the underlying issues.
Magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes struck Turkey near the Syrian border Monday, causing mass devastation in both countries. At least 5,000 casualties have been reported as of Tuesday morning, and rescue efforts are still underway. The WHO predicts that the final death toll could reach 25,000. The 7.8 earthquake, the largest recorded in Turkey since 1939, struck a region that has already been wracked by the Syrian civil war, compounding the existing humanitarian crisis in the region. Our guest is Evren Uzer, an associate professor of urban planning at The New School. After the ðzmit earthquake of 1999, which killed more than 17,000 people in Turkey, Uzer worked to provide post-earthquake housing to survivors.
"The equivalent of volcanoes on their surface."
[Jacek Fedorynski] had an old Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D mouse with a serial interface which made it impossible for him to use with modern hardware and software. The problem he faced was two pronged – the absence of serial interfaces in the hardware and the lack of appropriate drivers for the operating system. So he built a low cost, simple adapter to use his RS-232 Magellan/SpaceMouse with modern software.
For their first custom, hand-wired keyboard, [terryorchard] aka [70rch] didn’t want to mess with making a total split, and we don’t really blame them. However, as you can see, they ended up with a monoblock split, which aside from being our own personal preference, looks fantastic, and also happened to be what fit on the print bed.
We’re not sure if there’s any single characteristic that qualifies someone as a hacker. After all, we’re a pretty eclectic bunch, with skills that range all over the map, and what one person feels is trivial, others would look upon as black magic. But there’s one thing we’re sure of: if you find yourself reading the original POST code for the PC-XT motherboard just to get a keyboard working, you’re pretty much our kind of people.
Model trains are good fun, though few of them serve any purpose beyond amusement or authentic railway simulation. [ProjectAir] decided to put his model train to practical use by having it deliver fresh espresso, and faced plenty of difficult challenges along the way.
If you zoom into the screen you are reading this on, you’d see an extremely fine pattern of red, green, and blue emitters, probably LEDs of some kind. This somewhat limits the resolution you can obtain since you have to cram three LEDs into each screen pixel. Engineers at MIT, however, want to do it differently. By growing thin LED films and sandwiching them together, they can produce 4-micron-wide LEDs that produce the full range of color, with each color part of a vertical stack of LEDs.
The toxic materials that have come to be known as "forever chemicals" because of their ability to build up in the environment, wildlife, and humans could soon be on their way out in the European Union, after officials began consideration of ban on more than 10,000 chemical substances in the PFAS family.
U.S. drug policy reform advocates condemned President Joe Biden's commitment to "accelerating the crackdown on fentanyl trafficking" as part of his administration's strategy for tackling the opioid crisis, a policy the White House announced in a preview of Tuesday night's State of the Union address.
A new report out Tuesday from the U.N. Environment Program warns that as many as 10 million people could die from so-called "Superbugs" annually by 2050 as the result of antimicrobial resistance driven by environmental pollution and irresponsible practices from a range of industries.
Doctors fear that cases related to the discovery of multiresistant bacteria in Dicillin could be just the tip of the iceberg
It's important to know.
We can do this.
People who struggle with chronic constipation have a new drug-free option to help get things moving again.
In early 2020, as they tried to fight covid-19 across two rural counties in North Carolina, the staff of Granville Vance Public Health was stymied, relying on outdated technology to track a fast-moving pandemic.
The analysis found that wearing masks in public "probably makes little or no difference."
The Mandarin name of the company “å±±ä¸ËèâÂ,” literally means “hill blue,” as it managed to cultivate the fruit at the foothills of Alishan, a mountain range in central Taiwan, with the expertise of a team led by Li Kuo-tan (æÂŽåÅâ¹Ã¨ÂÅ¡), a professor at NTU’s Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture. According to Li, the team spent over 15 years developing the technique to grow the delicate fruit as three factors—blueberry variety, soil, and weather—are all important.
Years of effort have paid off. A sprawling 30-hectare farm down the hills of Chiayi’s Alishan and along the Bazhang River can now mass produce the berry, harvested between December and May.
Tonight is President Biden’s State of the Union address, and according to notes released from the White House, he will (for the second year in a row) throw in something blaming the internet for harming kids’ mental health, and pushing for things like a ban on targeted advertising. He did the same thing last year as well. Here are the notes that the White House released:
"Over 100,000 of our loved ones being lost to avoidable overdoses a year is not because of a lack of enforcement, it's a direct result of it," the director of the Drug Policy Alliance argued.
Since US Food and Drug Administration gave its approval in 2006, a generation of young women has received the HPV vaccine, which prevents almost all cases of cervical cancer. And earlier this year, the American Cancer Society reported some heartening news: From 2012 to 2019, incidence rates of cervical cancer dropped 65 percent in the United States among women in their early 20s. And overall US cancer mortality rates have dropped by over 30 percent among all ages since 1991.
In the last year or so there have been many people who complained about China’s “vaccine nationalism.” This generally meant the country refused to approve the U.S. mRNA vaccines. The claim was that our mRNA vaccines were far superior to China’s old-fashioned dead virus vaccines. The argument went that the country needed to maintain its zero Covid policy, otherwise, the pandemic would devastate its unprotected population.
Well, we have now gotten the opportunity to test that claim. There is little doubt that the abrupt ending of pandemic restrictions led to much death and suffering in China. The government is not being open about the pandemic toll, but even the high-end estimates put the number of deaths at around 1 million.
During World War II, the United States faced a labor crisis. Young men were at war, and work was still needed at home. But the young women who could replace them in the factories were often busy looking after their children. In response, the US government offered child care to any community where women’s labor participation was needed for the war effort. The federal government allocated about $52 million, with $26 million added by the states, adding up to about $1.5 billion in 2023 dollars. Families paid 50 cents per day (or about $7 today), which also covered lunch and snacks. Around 600,000 kids received child care through this program.
Last week, we wrote about the positively ridiculous lawsuit filed by the Seattle Public School district against basically all of social media claiming social media was “a public nuisance.” As we noted, the school district appeared to be wasting taxpayer money, that could have gone to educating their kids, on this lawsuit that screamed out to the public that the school district had totally failed in educating their children how to be good digital citizens, how to use the internet properly, and how to be prepared for living life in the age of the internet.
Mozilla, Open Web Docs and partner organizations met in London in January to create a joint roadmap forMDN, improve planning and collaboration, and cement a shared vision for the project’s future.
A project with the size and complexity of MDN – a collaborative undertakingto document web platform technologies – requires great effort to keep content up-to-date, accurate and accessible for the broadest audience. Coordinating the activities of staff, partners and a community of volunteers and contributors who work on different areas of the website requires considerable focus and proactive planning.
Microsoft Corp said it was investigating issues with email service Outlook as users in North America faced problems with accessing, sending or searching emails on the platform.
Microsoft’s stalled $68.7 billion deal to buy video game company Activision Blizzard has hit a fresh hurdle in the United Kingdom. Britain's antitrust watchdog said Wednesday that the deal will stifle competition and hurt gamers. The watchdog's investigation found that the deal could strengthen Microsoft’s position in the growing cloud gaming market.
I've moved on to NetBSD's excellent pkgsrc tool for most of my macOS package needs, but I still use Homebrew to install graphical applications.
Today I attempted to upgrade a package, but in my half-asleep stupor I deleted the bundle from the Applications folder first. Derp.
Programmers generally write their source code for two audiences. First, for the computers that are going to execute the code. Second, for other programmers to update, adapt and maintain the code at a later date. It is this second aspect which gives open-source software its broad appeal: everyone is able to see the code, understand it, and use it safely in the knowledge that they understand it.
I have installed GNU/Linux on many a computers in ~20 years (some automated, most individually). In the University, I used to be woken past midnight by someone knocking at the door — who reinstalled Windows — and now they can’t boot because
grubwas overwritten. I’d rub the eyes, pickup the bunch latest Fedora CDs and go rescue thebeastmachine. Linux installation, customization and grub-recovery was my specialization (no, the course didn’t have credit forthat).
Cybereason GootLoader as a ‘severe’ threat, as the malware uses a combination of evasion and living off the land techniques, making its presence difficult to dectec.
It may be possible to recover some virtual machines impacted by the ESXiArgs ransomware and CISA has released a tool for the task.
Web attack vector closed after failed fix
Bill Toulasreported the findingsfor Bleeping Computer:
According to a study by website security company Sansec, roughly 12% of online stores forget their backups in public folders due to human error or negligence.
Toyota Motor Co. has been hacked again, but fortunately for the Japanese car giant, this time the hacker was a security researcher with no ill intent. Security researcher Eaton Zveare said Monday that he gained access to Toyota’s Global Supplier Preparation Information Management System in October.
The ransomware group LockBit has claimed responsibility for the January Royal Mail cyberattack and today is making threats to Britain’s centuries-old service. After the attack happened on Jan. 12, the Royal Mail said it had to close down international shipping because of “severe service disruption.”
San Diego healthcare services provider Sharp says patient information was compromised in January data breach.
A free, sovereign and GDPR-compliant recursive DNS resolver with a strong focus on security to protect the citizens and organizations of the European Union.
A new podcast out today called “Alphabet Boys” documents how the FBI disrupted racial justice organizing after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, including paying an informant at least $20,000 to infiltrate and spy on activist groups in Denver, Colorado. The informant also encouraged activists to purchase guns and commit violence, echoing the FBI’s use of the COINTELPRO program to sabotage left-wing activist groups in the 1960s. For more, we’re joined by three guests: journalist and creator of the “Alphabet Boys” podcast Trevor Aaronson, Denver-based activist Zebbodios Hall, who was one of many activists targeted by the FBI’s infiltration, and former FBI special agent and whistleblower Mike German, who left the agency after reporting misconduct and mismanagement in its counterterrorism efforts.
For at least 7 months, several different types of ongoing denial of service (DoS) attacks have affected the Tor network. At some points, the attacks impacted the network severely enough that users could not load pages or access onion services.
We have been working hard to mitigate the impacts and defend the network from these attacks. The methods and targets of these attacks have changed over time and we are adapting as these attacks continue. It's not possible to determine with certainty who is conducting these attacks or their intentions.
The team that runs the primary Snowflake bridge is raising funds to pay for server operating expenses such as bandwidth, hardware, and maintenance.. You can help the project by donating to the project on Open Collective:
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (known as Tortuguita) on 18 January by Atlanta police has garnered international headlines as the first killing of an environmental activist by police in the US. This may or may not be true. But Terán’s shooting (we now know he was shot at least 13 times) was not the first killing of a forest activist in the US. I have profiled two previous deaths: redwood forest defender David Chain and Navajo activist LeRoy Jackson.
The Navajo environmentalist Leroy Jackson had been missing for eight days when an anonymous tip led New Mexico state police to a white van, its windows concealed by towels and blankets, parked at a rest stop atop the Brazos Cliffs south of Chama, New Mexico. The doors were locked; a putrid odor emanated from inside.
Emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, lethal autonomous weapons systems, and hypersonic missiles pose a potentially existential threat that underscores the imperative of arms control measures to slow the pace of weaponization, according to a new report published Tuesday.
Tuva Govenor Vladislav Khovalyg writes on Telegram that Russia’s Defense Ministry has agreed to move a group of indigenous Tyvan draftees to a different formation of the Russian army, after they complained of being abandoned without command, and later intimidated by members of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” militia.
Prosecutors have requested a 23-year prison sentence for former Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, Russian state media reported on Wednesday.
Part of a five-story residential building in Efremov, in the Tula region, collapsed, killing five people, according to local emergency services. They say the accident was caused by “malfunctioning gas equipment.”
A mobile clinic€ is trying to restore medical services€ to€ villages once occupied by Russian forces as fighting rages nearby. “They’ll never beat our people,” a specialist with the team said.
The revelation came in Memphis police documents related to the firing of five officers who have been charged with murder in Mr. Nichols’s death.
The war-weary people of Casamance are desperate for peace, but timber and cannabis trafficking continue to fuel conflict. An agreement signed in August 2022 between a factional leader of the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MFDC) and Senegal brought some hope that the 40-year conflict might be nearing an end.
Russia's budget deficit widened sharply in January, as the latest sanctions on Russia's energy exports — and the mounting expense of its brutal war on Ukraine — may be starting to erode the Kremlin's heavily fortified finances.
Fire crews were still engaged in damping-down operations Wednesday morning at the site of a drone production facility near Rīga that was gutted by fire on Tuesday, reported Latvian Radio.
In the city of Mārupe, near Riga, a fire broke out at a factory belonging to the company Edge Autonomy, which manufactures drones.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has made a rare trip out of Ukraine, daring to visit Britain in a bid for more advanced weapons as Kyiv braces for an expected Russian offensive and hatches its own plans to retake land held by Moscow’s forces.
An international team of investigators has suspended its criminal investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, saying they have insufficient evidence to launch any new prosecutions. Dutch prosecutor Digna van Boetzelaer said Wednesday that “the investigation has now reached its limit.
Reprinted with permission from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Nikki Haley will reportedly announce the start of her campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on February 15, becoming the first GOP 2024 candidate after Donald Trump.
Rescue workers are rushing to Turkey and Syria following the series of earthquakes that have claimed more than 5,000 lives. “This is a crisis on top of multiple crises in the affected region,” said an officer with the World Health Organization.
The Kashmir conflict is currently the oldest unresolved international conflict in existence. Pakistan views Kashmir as the source of its main political disagreement with India. The world community, with the exception of India, agrees.
International prosecutors found that evidence of Vladimir Putin's involvement was not concrete enough to secure a criminal conviction.
Russian authorities are using the threat of new criminal cases to pressure prisoners into joining the Wagner mercenary group, the independent media outlet Agentstvo reported on Wednesday.
Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the […]
Jeff Gerth’s investigation for The Columbia Journalism Review exposes the dark heart of the news media’s coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.
Bennett says the US and its Western allies decided to 'keep striking Putin' and not negotiate.
Last year, right after Russian troops entered Ukraine, I said that we were already in World War III between the US/NATO and Russia (“WWIII is not a remote possibility. We are already in it”). I’ve repeated that a number of times, and in October, gave even odds on the chance of nuclear war. Since then, actions and statements of principals on both sides of the conflict have only confirmed and worsened that assessment.
Regarding statements, we had Ukraine’s former president, hand-picked by Victoria Nuland, admitting in November that Ukraine used the Minsk Agreements to build a NATO army, to “train the Ukrainian military together with NATO to create the best armed forces in Eastern Europe, created according to NATO standards.” That admission was confirmed in December by Angela Merkel, who said that Minsk “was an attempt to buy time for Ukraine… to become stronger, as you can see today.” It was re-confirmed by François Hollande, who said,€ “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point.”€ And it was quite emphatically confirmed in January by Ukraine’s Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, who said that Ukraine has “already become a de facto member of the NATO alliance” that is “carrying out NATO’s mission today,” “defending the entire civilized world, the entire West,” and would “absolutely” enter formally into NATO.
Russian nationalist mercenary Igor Mangushev, who was an active participant in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beginning in 2014, has died in a hospital in the annexed part of Ukraine’s Luhansk region, Russian state media reported on Wednesday.
Maybe the problem isn’t the stacks of classified documents sitting around the houses of presidents, vice presidents, and other administration officials. Maybe the problem is the system that declares all these pieces of paper too secretive to be handled carelessly or hoarded impertinently.
Moscow State University’s (MGU) website no longer includes any mention of Maria Pevchikh. The journalist and chief of investigations for Alexey Navalny’s team studied in the university’s sociology department.
What can we do to break this forced device upgrade cycle? Should we expect app store owners to take more responsibility? Do we need legislation? How can we make sure that in 2027 I’m not again writing that I need to buy a new mobile device
(sidenote: I’m not going to bet on that being a phone ) although I still like my old one?
If the already critically endangered elephants become extinct, rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest rainforest on earth, would lose between six and nine percent of their ability to capture atmospheric carbon, amplifying planetary warming.
A Norfolk Southern train transporting industrial freight through eastern Ohio exploded around 9 p.m. last Friday. Fifty of its cars derailed, including many carrying toxic chemicals. The explosion could be heard throughout the small town of East Palestine, and the subsequent fire lit up the night sky a bright orange, producing so much smoke that it was detected by nearby weather radar. The fire was still smoldering over two days later, preventing first responders from approaching the scene.
An inter-union alliance of rail workers argued Tuesday that the massive freight train crash in East Palestine, Ohio late last week was a predictable consequence of Wall Street-backed policy decisions that have hollowed out the industry's workforce, pushed remaining employees to chronic exhaustion, and sacrificed safety for profits.
It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco.
It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco.
The summer before, I’d moved here from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its perpetual gray drizzles and, on the 60-odd days a year when the sun deigns to shine, dazzling displays of greenery. My girlfriend had spent a year convincing me that San Francisco had much more to offer me than Portland did for her.
President Joe Biden said during his State of the Union address Tuesday that the climate crisis is an "existential threat" and political leaders have an obligation to confront it.
The case was part of a crackdown on an old-school financial crime in the crypto world.
The United Airlines flight from San Diego International Airport to Newark Liberty International Airport had been in the air for a matter of seconds Tuesday morning when the emergency erupted in its cabin, according to officials and data from the flight tracking site FlightAware.
Flying 10,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, in a plane outfitted with infrared imaging equipment, researchers could see methane gas bubbling under water, likely from an undetected pipeline leak.
Over the course of several flights in 2021, they spotted frequent gas plumes from platforms, storage tanks, and pipelines offshore, leading the team to believe that the 151 platforms near the Louisiana coast had a much higher methane leak rate than what’s been measured for onshore oil and gas production.
We're in serious trouble without them.
A few more words about the constitutional status of animal cruelty laws
“As we await final delisting, we must do all that we can to ensure public safety, to stop the risks to human life, and to prevent further livestock depravation that is devastating Montana agriculture,” Senator Daines (R-MT)€ € stated in a 2020 interview concerning the grizzly bears’ status in the state.
Are grizzly bears sex-trafficking livestock?€ Thankfully Senator Daines is on top€ of this immoral act.
“Hey”, squeaked one furry lemming to another (in lemming-lingo, of course). “I saw you trying to slip away from the crowd! Do you want to betray us good lemmings. Maybe you’re a fox-lover, even a wolf-lover. You’d better keep in line till we reach our proper goal.”€ € As lemming-lovers sadly know, that goal could be over the cliff into the sea. And I don’t think lemmings can swim!
Is such a cliff perhaps near the Black Sea? Or along the Dnieper? And are there any today who – like lemmings – keep in the crowd?
China is planning to offer free fertility treatment to citizens under its national insurance scheme in a bid to reverse its plummeting birth rate.
This is a proposal to the Biden administration on how it might get the debt ceiling law declared unconstitutional by a federal court before the likely default date in June.
2022 ended up being a historic year for the Danish shipping giant, which saw a surplus of 203 billion kroner
The company is cutting 15 percent of its work force, or about 1,300 jobs, citing “the uncertainty of the global economy.”
The cost of living refers to the amount of money required to support one's necessities, such as housing, food, clothing, transportation and insurance. For a college student who is responsible for their own fees, those expenses are stressed by tuition and limited time. When inflation is taken into consideration, is it possible for college students...
From my UCLA colleague Prof. Stephen Bainbridge.
Last night, President Joe Biden called out Congressional Republicans for their plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. Several Republicans erupted in outrage, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) yelled “liar.” In response, Biden said “I enjoy conversion…as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” and urged the entire room to “stand up for seniors.” Many Republicans in the room, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, stood up and applauded.
Congressional Republicans made a show of jeering President Joe Biden Tuesday night when he said during his State of the Union address that some in their ranks have expressed support for cutting Social Security and Medicare—and even sunseting the programs completely.
The Biden White House made clear on Monday that it opposes the creation of commissions to devise changes—and possible cuts—to Social Security and other U.S. trust funds, rejecting an idea embraced by Republicans and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin amid a dangerous standoff over the nation's debt ceiling.
A World Fragmented by Inequality.
Navalny associates have found foreign assets belonging to Mkrtich Okroyan, the chief designer of the Soyuz factory, which produces, among other things, engines for Kh-22 missiles. In mid-January, one such missile partially destroyed a residential building in Dnipro. The factory has not come under Western sanctions.
For the third time in less than a month, hundreds of thousands of workers across France participated Tuesday in strikes and rallies to protest President Emmanuel Macron's unpopular plan to force people to work longer before they qualify for a full pension.
A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers — politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires — met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered — their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport — to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.
Last year marked the first time in history when international sanctions were imposed on an economy as large as Russia’s. The results have been impressive. If assessed in terms of the difference between expected growth and actual GDP contraction, that negative effect comes to about 6 percent. Still, this is nowhere near the projected decline of 8–12 percent, anticipated by Russia’s Finance Ministry and the Central Bank. Why didn’t Russia’s economy collapse in 2022? In an article written for Re: Russia, UCLA economist Oleg Istkhoki explained how the interaction of sanctions against different economic sectors and Russia’s fiscal policy forestalled the crisis that may, nevertheless, thrust its full weight upon the country’s economy in 2023.
Americans scored a tax victory with last summer's Inflation Reduction Act, raising hundreds of billions of dollars for climate, health and debt reduction, and breaking a long streak of little progress or even backward movement on tax fairness. Now, with fears of gridlock in a divided Washington, tax justice champions are building momentum in other places where there's dire need for better tax policy: the states. We can upgrade communities across the country by making 2023 a year to win tax improvements in statehouses.
The sale of theNational Enquirer, a storied gossip rag that became engulfed in scandals in recent years, represents the latest American tabloid giant to change hands as the era of print gossip fades away.
Why it matters:A small group of powerful voices has been replaced by hundreds of digital influencers and gossip sites that run the same rumors, often with even less accountability.
Upon the U.S. informing Mexico that it plans to reinstate the policy, the Foreign Affairs Ministry said it won't accept the change.
In 2023, the US is expected to make significant changes in its force posture in the Indo-Pacific region. And this began with the transformation of the US-Japan alliance started with the announcement of Japan's hosting of the first Marine Littoral regiment.
Managers will reportedly be told to become individual contributors or exit.
Last month, Israeli forces entered the Jenin refugee camp and killed nine Palestinians. The next day a 21 year old Palestinian killed seven Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. The Palestinian man, named after a grandfather who had been stabbed to death 25 years earlier by a Jewish Israeli, was seeking revenge for a young Palestinian relative killed by Israeli forces two days earlier. This unending cycle of violence seems almost incomprehensible. Israel was supposed to be a safe-haven for a people forced to endure hundreds of years of dispossession and oppression, but is instead beset by almost constant and unceasing violence.
I was part of a small delegation of Arab Americans invited to meet with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken the day before his recent visit to Egypt, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Our meeting came on the heels of two tragic days in Israel/Palestine.
Last week, PayPal and Workday also announced rounds of job cuts, eliminating 7 percent and 3 percent of their workforces, respectively.
Along with the 15% reduction in the workforce, Zoom is also making changes in team structure and several members of its leadership team will take pay cuts.
The company’s layoff announcement marks the latest round of job cuts in the tech industry, as Dell on Monday announced plans to cut 6,650 jobs. In January, Google revealed plans to lay off more than 12,000 workers, Microsoft disclosed plans to cut 10,000 employees and Salesforce announced plans to lay off 7,000 workers.
The violence “undermines people’s fundamental right to vote,” said Anietie Ewang, HRW’s Nigerian researcher, who called on Nigerian officials to install secure systems that would allow Nigerians to vote safely.
Within a few weeks, an estimated 4,000 prisoners, most of whom were MKO members, had been executed. But as the killing machine was already operating swiftly, the committee decided to hang other political opponents in custody, too, including unrepentant communists. They circulated a questionnaire among these “infidels,” asking them if they believed in Allah, the Prophet Muhammed, the Quran, and if they prayed five times a day. A “no” in response to any of these questions was enough to send the respondent to the gallows. That summer, families who went to prison to pick up their loved ones returned home with only a plastic bag containing a few belongings. Most never received the remains of their dead—the majority of the victims had already been buried in mass graves under cover of darkness. Families were not even allowed to hold funerals because the regime feared that public awareness of the executions would cause rioting.
The 1988 massacre was an evil so egregious that it changed the course of Iran’s future. When Ayatollah Montazeri, the cleric expected to succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader, heard of it, he summoned the committee. Furious, Montazeri ordered that the four men immediately discontinue the executions. A recording of the meeting leaked after Montazeri’s death reveals his outrage and horror. Admonishing them, he warned that they would be remembered as sinners by future generations. For this objection to the Supreme Leader’s fatwa, he was soon removed from his position of successorship to Ayatollah Khomeini. Montazeri was first marginalized and ultimately placed under house arrest until his death in 2009. Ayatollah Khamenei, a cleric in the mold of Khomeini himself, became Iran’s next Supreme Leader instead.
President Biden delivered his second State of the Union speech Tuesday and discussed his administration’s support for Ukraine, growing tensions with China and other international challenges. Foreign policy scholar and former Bernie Sanders adviser Matt Duss says one major missing theme was the “global war on terror.” “We need to acknowledge that this war is still very much ongoing,” says Duss, noting that thousands of U.S. troops are deployed around the world. He also says that while the Biden administration’s approach to the Chinese balloon that entered U.S. airspace was calm and measured, the strong anti-China position that seems to divide much of Washington is a concern. “This idea of trying to create political unity around … any external threat has a very bad history,” says Duss.
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday, touting his administration’s achievements and laying out his plans for the next two years under a divided Congress, including on immigration, the economy, the climate crisis and more. We speak with Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez, who delivered a response to Tuesday’s speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, and economist Dean Baker, who both applaud Biden’s focus on income inequality and making the rich pay more in taxes. “He’s clearly moved to the left,” says Baker.
About a month ago, we wrote an article pulling together a variety of sources, including an NBC News investigation, that suggested that Elon Musk’s Twitter was doing a terrible job dealing with child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. This was contrary to the claims of a few very vocal Elon supporters, including one who somehow got an evidence-free article published in a major news publication, insisting that he had magically “solved” the CSAM issue, despite firing most of the people who worked on it. As we noted last month, it actually appeared that Elon’s Twitter was not just failing to deal with CSAM (which is a massive challenge on any platform), but that he was actually going backwards and making the issue much, much worse.
Since Anchorage Mayor Dave Bronson took office in July 2021, he and his administration have been criticized for their words and their deeds. Top officials have been fired or have resigned. Lawsuits have been filed against the city, and complaints have been filed with the office of the city’s ombudsman, who told city prosecutors that employees are worried about being spied on.
Bronson was narrowly elected on a wave of support from conservative voters who opposed COVID-19 mandates and were frustrated with the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis.
In August 2021, two city of Anchorage officials toured the wood-paneled halls of the Golden Lion Hotel, known for the 200-pound taxidermied lion that once stood among the teal lounge chairs in its lobby.
At the time, Anchorage was seeing a soaring number of overdoses. The city faced a deadline to use proceeds from a utility sale to launch a new treatment center and needed a place to put it. The hotel, built in the 1970s, had 85 rooms, including suites that might house visiting doctors. The ballrooms could serve as meeting areas or host group therapy sessions. There was even an old salon that could be used for job training.
Seattle was born in the global marketplace. The big trees that greeted the first settlers became the city’s earliest major industry, timber. Seattle had the broad, deep Puget Sound to ship boards around the Pacific, building cities from San Francisco to Manila. Old growth trees logged on the hills were sent down a muddy “skid road” to Henry Yesler’s sawmill on Elliott Bay. The trees skidded down first, then the workers spending their earnings on booze. That was the origin of the term “skid row.” The mill is long gone, but the troubled and addicted still sleep in doorways in what is today the Pioneer Square neighborhood.
In The Pacific Raincoast, an ecological history of Washington and Oregon west of the Cascade Mountains, author Robert Bunting notes that this early link to the global economy imbued Seattle with the boom-and-bust gold rush mentality that has since gone through iterations from aerospace to computers. That mentality was fortified when Seattle became the jumping off point for the 1890s Yukon Gold Rush. Donald Trump’s German immigrant grandfather, Frederick Trump, came to Seattle then to make his fortune. On Pioneer Square he operated what was called a “fancy restaurant,” said to offer services to meet human hungers beyond food and drink, before he moved on to make the original Trump family fortune up in the Yukon.
Ross Douthat confesses to having an obsession with the so-called “baby bust.” The New York Times columnist has brought up the supposed perils of low birthrates in countless columns (e.g., 12/14/22, 3/27/21, 12/2/12), and it played a prominent role in his 2020 book The Decadent Society.
We’ve noted for a while how most of the hyperventilation about TikTok is of the manufactured moral panic variety. We’ve also noted how the folks who’ve been the loudest about TikTok’s privacy and security threats spent decades fighting against competent oversight or privacy legislation, yet now want to pretend that banning a single app somehow fixes the broad problems they themselves created.
The Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), Russia’s chief business lobbying group, has proposed raising the 20 percent income tax on Russian businesses by 0.5 percentage points in 2023, the independent news outlet The Bell reported on Wednesday, citing knowledgeable sources.
This year, the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival claims that the city will become ‘the puppetry capital of the world’. This is not a reference to hedge fund managers and Mayor Lori Lightfoot, but to the genuine wood or paper article. The city faces still competition with venerable international puppet fests such as Charleville-Mézières (France), Opole in Poland, and the Skupova PlzeÃ Ë in the Czech Republic. There is also the PIF in Zagreb (Croatia, notably featuring puppet works in Esperanto), the Hungarian festivals of Pécs and Békéscsaba, the Bulgarian puppet play festival of Varna, and the great Italian fete of Cervia in Emilia-Romagna. And beyond Europe, there is the Lida Festival in Japan, and other global puppet meets in Jakarta and Bali, New Delhi, Tehran, Lahore, Mexico, Niger and Togo, and Australia. The United States itself can boast of several major annual puppetry events in the Midwest, Atlanta, New York (Coney Island), and California.
But if Chicago does not yet lead the world, it is certainly on the right track. This was proven last week by the festival’s staging of the Koryū Nishikawa Troupe’s beautiful puppet play on the works of the great Japanese modernist writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927). Akutagawa is probably best known as the author of “Rashà Âmon”, filmed by Kurosawa’s in 1950. Like Baudelaire or Poe, he remains an archetypal poet maudit, wending his unsure way through the crises of the Taishà  era, garnering respect and feuding with his contemporaries, dying young. Traditional Japanese puppet master Koryū Nishikawa V has joined forces with Chicago’s own Tom Lee to create a multimedia piece depicting scenes from the master’s work and life. It is a stunning show.
Review of Un-American: A Soldier’s Reckoning of Our Longest War, by Erik Edstrom’s (Bloomsbury, 2020); Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming, by Lyle Jeremy Rubin (Bold Type Books, 2022), and Paths of Dissent: Soldiers Speak Out Against America’s Misguided Wars, edited by Andrew Bacevich and Daniel Sjursen (Metropolitan Books, 2022).
One frequent casualty of war is the confident belief shared by new soldiers that their cause is€ just and worthy of great personal sacrifice. After Al-Qaeda downed four civilian air liners and caused nearly three thousand deaths on September 11, 2001, US military recruiters were flooded with eager volunteers. Patriotic fervor, coupled with an urge for revenge and a desire to make the world a safer place, motivated many young men and women to enlist.
The 2024 presidential election campaign is off and running and, sadly, the Republicans are in a good position to win the election.
Pres. Joe Biden is rumored to be planning to announce his intention to run for reelection in 2024. While some have raised concern that he will be 82 years old if elected, deeper concerns involve whether voters will support him — and other Democrats — if the economy further stumbles and inflation is not contained. This is especially the case given that women and young voters might not vote as the post-Roe anti-abortion condition becomes more normalized.
You didn’t have to listen to Joe Biden’s third State of the Union address to get the message that the 46th president is fully engaged with his bid for a second term. Even before the speech was delivered, Biden’s team had revealed plans to travel Wednesday morning to the Laborers Apprentice and Training Center in Wisconsin’s vote-rich Dane County. Out of all the places he could have chosen, the president was headed to the Democratic heartlands of what for decades has been the most consistently contested presidential battleground state in the nation.
On December 31, Chief Justice John Roberts published his year-end report on the federal judiciary. As is tradition, the report was a short, perfunctory memo that came and went without any lasting impact. By comparison to the State of the Union—during which the president lays out his agenda for the coming year—the court’s year-end report strives to stay away from controversy or newsworthiness. Instead, it stays in the safe space of hokey themes wrapped in neat historical anecdotes. It’s best to think of it as Roberts’s yearly self-portrait.1
In 2019, I screened a series of films in my apartment organized around the theme of “Obama Baroque,” a term coined by the art collective DIS, which defined it as “renewed comfort in consumptive excess” following the 2008 financial crisis. Even then, the cultural products of the Obama years felt like artifacts from another era, ready to be historicized—bizarrely optimistic about the power of individuals in the face of obvious, planet-wide decline. Some of the criteria I developed for choosing the films were empirical—made between 2008 and 2014, with a budget in excess of $50 million—and some were thematic (“vague gestures toward anti-capitalist critique”). There was never any question that the first film in the series would be James Cameron’s space epic Avatar.
For an entity that spends nearly half a billion dollars every election cycle, surprisingly little is known about the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). As the political arm of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, the DCCC (or “d-trip” in Beltway lingo) is responsible for raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Democrats win congressional elections. The committee spent $354,623,642 on the 2022 midterms, according to its filings with the Federal Elections Commission.
To challenge establishment Democratic leaders who focus on the so-called "electability" of candidates and, in many cases, withhold funding that could be the deciding factor in whether they win or lose, former U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes on Tuesday announced the launch of a new political action committee aimed at helping supposedly long-shot contenders.
The "news broadcasters" appear stunningly real, but they are AI-generated deepfakes in first-of-their-kind propaganda videos that a research report published Tuesday attributed to Chinese state-aligned actors.
The fake anchors -- for a fictious news outlet called Wolf News -- were created by artificial intelligence software and appeared in footage on social media that seemed to promote the interests of the Chinese Communist Party, US-based research firm Graphika said in its report.
This is the second “Simpsons” episode with an unflattering China reference to be cut from the streaming service in Hong Kong, a former British colony that was promised a high degree of autonomy when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. The previous episode, which refers to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and originally aired in 2005, has not been available in Hong Kong since Disney+ launched there in 2021. The service is not available in mainland China.
The Lahore High Court (LHC) on Monday allowed the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block the websites sharing ‘objectionable material’.
The Investigative Committee of the Tver region has opened a criminal case for failure to comply with the requirements for “foreign agents” against Artem Vazhenkov, coordinator of the election monitoring organization Golos and host of the YouTube channel Avtozak LIVE.
“This doesn't feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said of a possible sequel. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that's a first-person story. That's an I' story.”
It had been more than 30 years since the Iranian regime issued a death sentence against Rushdie for blaspheming Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. The attack was a tragic revival of an episode that had seemed resigned to the past. For the last several years, Rushdie had been living a relatively open life as a literary figure in the United States and although he will not be making more public appearances to promote Victory City, he says he's grateful to have the focus shifted back to his words.
For Rushdie, keeping a low profile would be capitulation. He was a social being and would live as he pleased. He even tried to render the fatwa ridiculous. Six years ago, he played himself in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David provokes threats from Iran for mocking the Ayatollah while promoting his upcoming production “Fatwa! The Musical.” David is terrified, but Rushdie’s character assures him that life under an edict of execution, though it can be “scary,” also makes a man alluring to women. “It’s not exactly you, it’s the fatwa wrapped around you, like sexy pixie dust!” he says.
The freedom of speech is one of the most cherished freedoms. The Constitution of India, too, declares that Indians possess this freedom, but makes it subject to the interest of public order, or the sovereignty and integrity of India.
It was the threat that had foreshadowed Rushdie’s life and career for over three decades since the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses‘ (1988) and the issuance of the infamous fatwa by Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989 for insulting Islam in the novel. Now, it seemed to have made good on its sinister promise.
But there’s something about Rushdie that spells insouciance and dig-one’s-heels-in resilience. Six months later, Rushdie is back with a new novel, ‘Victory City‘ (Hamish Hamilton), and with his spirits intact. In an extensive piece in The New Yorker magazine, for which the writer spoke to its editor David Remnick, new details have emerged about the attempted assassination and its aftermath.
Pakistan’s lower house of parliament has passed legislation to make the country’s blasphemy laws stricter even as their blatant misuse again came to light in a threat to falsely charge a Christian woman.
The woman, a Catholic widow, was terrified after a Muslim colleague threatened to file the false blasphemy charge because she refused his demand to commit wrongdoing in their work, she said.
Network data confirm the restriction of Twitter on multiple internet providers in Turkey as of Wednesday 8 February 2023.
Russian authorities have blocked the website of the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), says digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda. No reason for the blocking has been reported.
Liya Akhedzhakova, the 84-year-old star of Russian film and theater, told Novaya Gazeta that Moscow’s Sovremennik theater, where she had worked for nearly half-a-century, has decided to remove its production of D. L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” from the repertoire.
IHC Chief Justice Aamer Farooq resumed hearing the petitions of a faction of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) and Islamabad High Court Journalists Association (IHCJA).
He inquired from Information Secretary Shahera Shahid about the direction issued during an earlier hearing to draft the law for the electronic media journalists.
In just a few days the€ Night Carnival for Julian Assange€ will be coming to central London. It will meet at€ Lincoln’s Inn Fields (nearest tube Holborn)€ at 4pm on Saturday 11 February€ and marching Parliament Square and then to a rally in the€ Emmanuel Centre€ just around the corner from Parliament.
Nearly half of all women killed in this country are murdered by a current or former intimate partner, and half of those homicides are committed with the aid of a gun. A woman is five times more likely to be murdered when her abuser has access to a gun than when they don’t. Almost a million women have been “shot or shot at” by an intimate partner, according to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence.
Labor advocates on Tuesday decried a business-backed bill introduced by Republican state lawmakers in Iowa that would roll back child labor laws so that teens as young as 14 could work in previously prohibited jobs including mining, logging, and animal slaughtering—a proposal one union president called dangerous and "just crazy."
Students organized “Cops Off Campus” protests on Monday evening, saying the event was aimed to show solidarity and support for the Black community and to advocate for police abolition.
The return to more in-person settings is a significant development in the changing world of work, especially given workers have had the upper hand when it comes to bargaining for flexibility during the hiring crisis. But as economic uncertainty looms, and companies axe jobs on a wide scale, the power dynamic is swinging back towards employers: many may be using the downturn as an opportunity to enforce or overhaul their working practices. For affected workers, fears of recession and layoffs mean many will have to head back to the office – at least for now.
DHS said in a release Tuesday that it adjusted its policies to be in line with an executive order that President Biden issued in May that requires the department to meet or exceed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) guidance on use of force.
Exquisitely merging their sacrosanct tenets - reproductive rights, church/state separation, the freedom to offend and artful devil's advocacy - The Satanic Temple is opening a "religious abortion clinic" to offer free, virtual, medication abortion to "involuntarily pregnant women" who need it. The "non-theistic" group, with "Satanic good works" from food drives to After-School Satan Clubs, named the clinic for Alito's mother, because, "In 1950, (she) did not have options, and look what happened."
Research published Monday shows that Google is targeting lower-income users with advertisements for so-called crisis pregnancy centers, anti-choice organizations known to steer people away from accessing abortion care.
For 50 years, Roe v. Wade shut down the biggest ambitions of the anti-abortion movement. Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned that decision, unleashing a flurry of abortion legislation across the nation. And anti-abortion advocates have eager partners in Republican-controlled legislatures across the country.
“It’s exciting because our hands have been untied,” Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, said. “We’re going to see what we can do and do it.”
For the second time in six months, a federal agency reprimanded a Louisiana developer for its failure to offer an adequate assessment of the harm that its proposed $400 million agricultural development would cause to neighboring Black communities and historic sites.
In a forceful letter dated Dec. 23, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected claims by the developer, Greenfield LLC, that its massive grain transfer facility in St. John the Baptist Parish upriver from New Orleans will have “no adverse effects.” The Corps is considering a permit application by Greenfield to build on federally protected waters and has the power to halt the project.
Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez of Illinois praises President Biden for proposing a path to citizenship in his State of the Union address on Tuesday for the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country. “My problem is the militarizing of the border,” she adds. Ramirez, who delivered a response to the State of the Union speech on behalf of the Working Families Party, says compassion should be at the center of the debate on immigration. “People are escaping poverty. People are escaping death,” she says.
Canadian hardcore punk band Fucked Up recently released their sixth full-length album “One Day.” As denoted by the album’s title, each band member committed to a self-imposed time frame of 24 hours to write and record their contributions. Compared to their previous ambitious standards, the album is more straightforward but still carries considerable weight. It also features a few poignant social commentaries.“Broken Little Boys” explores the generational cycle of toxic masculinity. Another song, “Found,” which is Shadowproof’s protest song of the week, chronicles how Indigenous people have been displaced andmurdered to build highways and “temples of police and landlords.” All for the worship of money.The track was inspired by guitarist Mike Haliechuk’s experiences living on one of the oldest streets inNorth America and his observations of the tragic consequences of colonization and gentrification.“I used to live on Davenport Road, which is one of the oldest streets in North America and has been aFirst Nations trail for thousands of years, running along the north shore of Lake Iroquois, which recededafter the last ice age,” Haliechuk recalled. “Just to the east was Taddle Creek, which wasburied underground during the 19th century to build the streets I walk on. I thought about gentrificationa lot, watching little stores get swallowed up by big buildings until I realized I am one of those bigbuildings.”
President Joe Biden delivered his second State of the Union address Tuesday, his first before a divided Congress where Republicans now hold a slim majority in the House of Representatives. Biden, who is widely believed to be gearing up for reelection in 2024, repeatedly asked lawmakers to work with him to “finish the job.” Biden spoke exactly a month after the fatal police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, honoring his parents, who were in attendance, and demanding more police accountability. Color of Change president Rashad Robinson says it was an emotional moment worth recognizing, “but we have to go the extra mile at helping the public understand why change hasn’t happened, who is standing in the way of change.” He says Republicans, backed by big-money donors, have effectively foreclosed the chance of meaningful legislation on policing for the next two years.
Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Tuesday that he will join rail workers later this week to launch a fresh push for at least seven days of paid sick leave, an effort that comes months after Congress and the Biden White House forced workers to accept a contract without a single paid sick day to avert a potential strike.
Warren Finch presented on 'Preparing for IPv6 Implementation using Artificial Intelligence' at mmNOG 5, held in Yangon, Myanmar from 14 to 15 January 2023.
Paul Wilson participated as a panellist in the 'State of the IPv4 Address Market' session at PTC'23, held in Hawaii, USA from 15 to 18 January 2023.
How can we scale the root zone service to meet the growth of query rates?
It’s always fun when the USPTO demonstrates its internal multiple personality disorder on intellectual property concerns. That’s probably a tad harsh; after all, the USPTO is made up of people, and different people will view similar situations differently. Unfortunately, part of what the USPTO is supposed to uphold and set are standards for intellectual property matters. Standards which should be applied evenly throughout all the requests that come its way.
Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–75), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation.
Getty Images has filed a new lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Stability AI Inc. The stock photo provider has recently made this lawsuit made public and has accused the AI firm of misusing its photos to train its Stable Diffusion AI image-generation system. According to a report by Reuters, the company has alleged that Stability AI has misused over 12 million Getty photos. The lawsuit was filed in the federal court of Delaware, US. This lawsuit follows a separate Getty case against Stability in the UK. The latest case is also related to a class-action complaint that was filed by various artists in California. These artists also accused Stability and other companies related to the “fast-growing field of generative AI.” The report claims that both Getty and Stability are yet to comment on the new lawsuit.
Before discussing the ethics of “AI,” let’s recall a traditional definition of ethics as a set of principles or values that guide behavior and decisions. Where personal ethics are based on an individual’s values and beliefs, societal ethics are the acceptable or unacceptable behaviors in a particular society. For me, Kant’s categorical imperative is still the most natural instantiation of an ethical framework.
However, when it comes to the ethics of “AI”, it’s important to consider the perspective of the companies creating “AI” models. For a US company, a cynical definition of ethics could be a set of guidelines designed to prevent offense or legal liabilities. Where ethical behavior boils down to avoiding negative consequences and protecting the company’s own interests. In other words, “AI” should not offend and “AI” should minimize the legal liabilities and risks to a company. It is easy to collect data points that argue for this cynical definition.
Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos that highlight the benefits and barriers of open culture as well as inspiration and advice on the subject of opening up cultural heritage. Nicole is at the time of the recording the Director of Global Strategic Initiatives at CLIR which is the Council on Library and Information Resources where she works to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
The International Broadcaster Coalition Against Piracy (IBCAP) is celebrating two court judgments with a combined damages award of more than $32 million. The original lawsuit, filed by IBCAP member DISH Network, requested $16 million in damages. When one defendant filed for bankruptcy, a chance to double up raised its head. At least in theory, another $16 million opportunity awaits.
The legal battle between game developer Bungie and cheat seller AimJunkies continues. Last week, Judge Zilly denied Bungie's motion to dismiss a contract breach claim. In addition, third-party cheat developer James May can continue his 'hacking,' theft, and DMCA violation claims.
You might recall that during pandemic lockdowns, AMC executives threw a massive temper tantrum because companies like Comcast/NBC began experimenting with slightly more innovative release windows. AMC was mad because the pandemic highlighted how the 90-day gap between the time a movie appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release was exposed as both dated and stupid.
Hello, Chris, thank you for your reply. Please forgive the very long delay in responding. Between family, work, other responsibilities, and my astronomy and amateur radio projects, it was hard to find time to sit down and write a thoughtful response, which would hopefully address most of the points of discussion you brought up.
I am writing about Knives again, of course. I think I'm slowly approaching the end. Not sure whether I really want to write something about romance and family building but I feel like I should. The PDF has 29 pages now.
Lyrics added for Forged in Crimson, thanks to today’s dev blog update.
systemd isn't for me. i'm not necessarily anti-systemd overall[a]; but i don't want systemd for my particular use-case. It feels vastly overengineered for my practical needs, and way too complex for me to be able to get something of a handle on. Having been using Unix-y systems as my daily drivers for almost two and a half decades, i'd prefer to have the option to do some plumbing occasionally if necessary, rather than crossing my fingers and hoping that a massive code base and its magic does what i need it to do.
The exponential growth in the development of Artificial Intelligence is rather interesting to watch, if not without concern as well. I personally look forward to its rise in some ways, given that it feels like this is the first big shift in the Tech Industry since the dawn of Web 2.0.
The start of almost every package journey starts with versions. This is how one distinguishes between different copies and hopefully makes sense of when to get the latest version verses only updating a few or not updating at all.
A while ago, I announced my plan to rewrite how Trantor deals with TLS. I finally found the motivation to do it. The plan was quite in the right direction and I'm at the point where I can start testing the new code. To test in a real world environment, I think it's easier and better to use my capsule as an experiment. If you find it suddenly stops working, you know why and please let me know.
The experiment will start the night this post published and last for a few weeks to a month. I'll update once everything is stable.
Hark, implementers of Gemini!
I had briefly thought to call this piece "Taking Back Control" before I quickly remembered that old cliché has become a slogan of the jingoistic proponents of Brexit. Such true believers loudly announce the idea that Nirvana will be easily achieved once we leave the European Union and "take back control" of our Manifest National Destiny. And collectively, we bought it. Sigh.
Just some quick rant about how Trantor does it's SSL stuff. For thoes who don't know. Trantor is a TCP library that I also maintain as a part of the Drogon web application framework. Personally, I think trantor is easier then boost::asio to use, and it's also more efficient. It also comes with integrated SSL support using OpenSSL or LibreSSL. However, the code for that is just.. yeiks.
I'm not just writing a blog to complain about stuff. I'm also thinking trough why the current design is bad and how I'm going to fix it. So, let's start with the current design.
Quick note about gmi2xhtml, now it supports commented lines. It is not in gemtext specification, but I wanted it.
As suggested, I followed the "3 firsts char in a line" rule. If a line starts with "//", it is a comment.
AV1 is implemented in libaom and svt-av1. Libaom is the reference codec, it produces smaller files than svt-av1 but it is slow. The svt-av1 encoder is optimized for speed and produces bigger files than libaom.
I usually encode videos in 2 passes, libaom uses my 16 cores at 33% in pass 1 while svt-av1 uses the 16 cores at 100%. In pass 2, libaom uses 2 cores at 100% and svt1-av1 uses the 16 cores at 100%.
Mix, cover, leave in the garage overnight (~282 Kelvin this morning). This treatment will tend the dough towards the sour side, and probably also more flavor development as the bugs wake up and (slowly) do their thing.
It might be good to know the water percentage of the starter, but that's not this universe. In hindsight, more flour (and therefore also water) would likely be necessary to reach the 100g of flour typical for a calzone or thin pizza crust to fill a 10" skillet.
Recently I've been working on a general Gemini proxy, to fetch HTTP/HTML resources and convert them on the fly to gemtext. The plan is to replace the public instace of Duckling with something a bit more feature-ful.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.