ABOUT four months ago I left my job at Sirius ‘Open Source’ (one of the first FSF sponsors) after nearly 12 years at the company. I will be publishing a lot more about how this company robbed its own staff, probably posting an update just once or twice per week. The company is under investigation at the moment; it’s also losing some very big clients.
“My plan is to devote a lot more time/energy to these Internet issues; they’re about as important as Software Freedom and are arguably a prerequisite.”I left my job when I was 40 and since then I’ve focused on many other things. I didn’t lack projects to work on and I finally had a lot more time in my hands. As noted here last night, one aspiration of ours is to curate what’s left of the World Wide Web algorithmically, seeing that a lot of today’s Web is spam or sponsored propaganda. Gemini does not have this issue (yet).
Another issue is censorship; Ryan just wrote about that, based on his own experience. My plan is to devote a lot more time/energy to these Internet issues; they’re about as important as Software Freedom and are arguably a prerequisite. The photo at the top is me by the way, I stumbled upon it last night when searching old photos because my sister gets married later today. She’s a Debian user and programmer, leading a small team despite being in her mid 20s. She is also my closest sibling. █
Minutes after posting the commentary on the NBC news article about Apple (post prior to this one), my blog became “suspended”.
I didn’t know what was going on, so I assumed I had been cancelled again, like Reddit, where if you post anything anywhere some special snowflake decides (often through a bot designed to sniff out no no words) that you should be banned.
Automattic (WordPress.com) refuses to say what led to the ban, but it’s quite obvious through my history of posts about Apple’s censorship, proprietary software, the Microsoft Stabber, etc. that there are probably outfits that would rather that I just go away and not come back.
Automattic says that there’s no robot going around killing blogs without human review, but beyond this, I have no idea and I’ll never be able to prove anything.
Things became a little more complicated when I went ahead and shut down my account, and then someone suggested I should appeal the ban.
I think I’ve been on the “modern” Internet too long where people just silently “murder” your account with a gun pressed up to a pillow and was just no longer thinking in terms of “You can appeal this and there’s actually going to be someone that considers it.”, because again, Reddit.
I deleted my account at Reddit a while back because I was running into issues where I would say something like “That’s crazy!” in response to something incredulous and I would get banned, by a bot, which said “You said crazy, and crazy is an ableist term!” *spank spank spank*
Combined with the fact that Reddit just went and handed over tons of data about some users on one of its forums to a copyright troll didn’t help all of this go down much better. It got me thinking, you know, if you browse around, they’re watching you. Logging you. Would it not be best if they didn’t have that data?
So I’ve been increasingly “disconnecting” from proprietary “social” media, because it’s all rather bullshit anyway, full of trolls and creepy companies.
After this run in with Automattic I’m seriously considering just backing up this entire blog and self-hosting so that nobody else can “complain”.
You know, the whole thing about “You violated the terms!” Oh, what terms? “TERMS!”
Apparently this is just how Automattic rolls.
And why should we be surprised in this day and age? █
Video download link | md5sum 388650e7d4e9f734a4572fd0265c3c95 Free Speech Online, Banking Digitally, and More
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: A “society of sheeple” (a term used by Richard Stallman last week in his speech) is being “herded” online and offline; the video covers examples both online and offline, the latter being absence of ATMs or lack of properly-functioning ATMs (a growing problem lately, at least where I live)
THE video above is an outline of topics we’ve been covering, dealing with, barely coping with (like struggling to get cash out of ATMs where I live), and may cover some time soon. One recurring theme will be “online” banking or banking with “apps”.
The video starts by discussing online censorship. Days ago a longtime contributor, Ryan Farmer, had his blog suspended for no sane reason! None at all! If one tries to access anything on his blog it says “baronhk.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site.”
This deletion was actually a protest after he had been unjustly suspended, having published this article (OMG! Someone call the cops! The headline had the string “porn” in it!).
There will be a lot more details in IRC scrollbacks, including today’s (to be publish shortly). As an associate noted on the day of the suspension, “hugo or jekyll or pelican would be a better choice than wordpress.com” (where the ban/suspension happened; we’re in discussion with them about restoring the blog).
“The video starts by discussing online censorship.”Free speech online is threatened. Self-hosting is one way to curb this trend. We’ve spoken strongly in favour of self-hosting for several years already, cautioning about the inflation of censorship in the COVID-19 era. Yes, it predates COVID-19, but it has been getting a lot worse in recent years.
After discussing Ryan’s situation I pivot to a completely different topic, namely ATMs (or “cash machines” as we call them here). Our ATM journeys are over for now because machines that dispense cash have become less dependable. We’ve surveyed quite a few machines over the past fortnight. Got cash? One nearby shop let an ATM run out of it (it already had a chance to restock when it cautioned it had run low) and there are a lot fewer bank branches/offices in the city, so contingencies are very limited and overcrowded, maybe by intention. They try to herd all the “clients” into their “apps” and “sites”. The video above speaks of some recent experiences of mine. It focuses on NatWest, but I tried in 3 different banks. They’re all acting similarly. They used to offer actual services, but they are “consolidating” though (fewer staff, fewer services, fewer places you can go). In the case of NatWest, they have just 2 branches left in the centre of town. There used to be a lot more.
In some places it’s even worse; some banks “have only a single office with highly restricted visiting hours,” somebody recently told me. Speaking of this from a surveillance/tracking perspective, there’s much to be said about the “war on cash” and what happens when clients cannot withdraw physical money. More people need to protest this “war on cash”; one person mentioning the problem is better than zero people naming the problem, e.g. cashless ATMs (literally no cash in them, one can just do an account’s balance check!).
“A society that cannot pay anonymously is a society that’s easier to censor, surveil, and abuse in all sorts of other ways.”These things won’t be improving. We’re heading down a dark path.
“Once people accept that there is no cash in the ATMs they will get removed because few will complain at that point,” one person told me. “That’s an other problem which Microsoft has provided: getting people to accept abuse without complaining and a general learned helplessness about the situation. Worse, many people have become Microsoft sympathisers due to disinformation and just plain “magical thinking” about the situation. [...] there is a lot of disinformation out there combined with wishful, unrealistic thinking and denial of empirical facts. Then there is the learned helplessness which is even more harmful. Microsoft [leads to] incompetence. Their sales pitch is that it is so simple that trained monkeys can run it, but then when it inevitably fails to work as advertised, whine that it is too hard and that they lack the knowledge and skill to make it work. In truth those products only have to look good enough to make the sale to the manager with purchasing authority. After that, it is the fault of the “IT” dept for not making it work, even though it doesn’t have the possibility to work. Managers love Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange because the latter loses mail left right and center, giving them plausible deniability for their claims that the mail was lost when they neglect a task. [...] hey love Microsoft Exchange because then people have to give them the benefit of the doubt about the mail having been lost whenever they use that excuse.”
Either way, back to ATMs, we need to encourage people to still use them and still pay with cash. Otherwise, we’re going to lose them. A society that cannot pay anonymously is a society that’s easier to censor, surveil, and abuse in all sorts of other ways. █
Summary: In order to separate the wheat from the chaff we’ve been working on simple, modular tools that process news and help curate the Web, basically removing the noise to squeeze out the signal
THE concept behind Free Software emanates from many programmers’ desire to not only produce useful software but also to share this usefulness with many other people, either in exchange for recognition or further improvements to that software.
Lately we’ve developed a number of programs (Free Software of course, GPLV3-licensed) that help produce/curate Daily Links. Some time later this month or next month we’ll properly explain what they are and how they work. Other people too deserve access to the toolsets. █
Framework is a company that specializes in providing modular laptops that feature open-source hardware modules.
At their Next Level Event 2023, the company showcased something new and a few updates to its previous laptop lineup, but it was the 16-inch laptop that caught our attention.
If you are a gamer, creator, developer, and a power user looking for customizability on a laptop, you are about to get excited!
In Ventoy 1.0.90, the devs added support for new GNU/Linux distributions, including Chimera Linux and the recently released LibreELEC 11.0 and later versions. With this, Ventoy now supports more than 1,100 ISO images!
Fans of the Fedora Linux distribution will be happy to learn that this new Ventoy release optimizes Fedora Linux ISOs’ boot process and improves the detection of the Fedora Rawhide install media.
For our web server’s current usage, these settings are okay. But they’re unfortunately dangerous, because we allow people to run CGIs on this server, and the machine is unlikely to do well if we have even 1,000 CGIs running at the same time. In practice not many CGIs get run these days, so we’re likely going to get away with it. Still, it makes me nervous and I wish we had a better solution.
I’m writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum’s The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I’m also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember details.
This is my long-delayed attempt at writing about my experience in writing VisiCalc and the many design decisions that we made along the way. But even after nearly a quarter century I remember many of the details though maybe my memories have evolved. The process of writing down this experience is already evoking many memories and, unless proven otherwise, I’ll assume that they are memories of real events but others may view it differently and I will try to correct the more creative aspects of my memory.
Even simple decisions were only simple in context. They were all intertwined and I will try to reduce the confusion by separating aspects of implementation, design and business.
For more details on the history of VisiCalc and even a version that still runs on the IBM PC, see Dan Bricklin’s VisiCalc History pages.
The Czech Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Czech LibreOffice User Guides in the LibreOffice Bookshelf. Thanks to the efforts of Zdeněk Crhonek and Stanislav Horáček, the bookshelf has now all recent user guides in Czech, available in PDF, OpenDocument (LibreOffice’s native file format) and HTML for online reading…
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest Budgie Desktop 10.7.1 in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu Budgie is one of the official Ubuntu flavors features the Budgie desktop. While Ubuntu Budgie 22.04 ships with Budgie Desktop 10.6.1, the latest version has reached v10.7.1.
In this guide, we will provide tips and tricks for developers on how to streamline their workflow using Tmux. We will cover the creation and management of Tmux sessions, window and pane manipulation, and customization options. We will also explore some popular Tmux plugins for further customization.
The Tor Browser is a powerful tool for those who value privacy, anonymity, and the ability to access restricted content online. It offers a unique browsing experience by encrypting your internet traffic and routing it through a network of volunteer-operated servers, known as the Tor network.
The Cinnamon desktop environment is a modern, sleek, and highly customizable alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment found on Debian. Created as a fork of the GNOME Shell, Cinnamon focuses on offering users a more traditional desktop experience.
NGINX is a powerful, open-source web server, reverse proxy server, and load balancer that has gained significant popularity in recent years for its flexibility, performance, and scalability.
ModSecurity is a popular and powerful open-source web application firewall (WAF) designed to protect your server from various web-based attacks. As a module for the Apache HTTP Server, it provides real-time monitoring, logging, and access control capabilities to secure your web applications from common exploits and vulnerabilities.
Introduction Karoshi V13 server and LinuxSchools V14 server are built using Ubuntu LTS releases and when they reach the end of update support will either have to be re-installed with the newest version or updated to the newest version.
Delimited files are a common format for data storage and exchange. These files store data in a tabular structure, where each data value is separated by a specific character, known as a delimiter.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SMPlayer on Fedora 37. For those of you who didn’t know, SMPlayer is a free, open-source media player that supports a wide range of audio and video formats.
So far in our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927, we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, and Best Adaptation winner To And Again. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: The Pigeon Wager by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games.
We have had to do some repairs to our Discord channels, everything should now be up and running. We had a childish team member exit and tried to sabotage the discord channels
3.0 i386 packages haven’t been built for the release yet. There are some older ones available but without the full desktop environment. We’ll be building those this weekend. We’re uploading some ISOs but still need to do final testing on them…
The fourth RC build of the 13.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Please note that a fifth RC build will be arriving very soon with one more
bug fix; 13.2-RC5 is expected to be the final release candidate.
Installation images are available for:
o 13.2-RC4 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.2-RC4 i386 GENERIC
o 13.2-RC4 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.2-RC4 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.2-RC4 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.2-RC4 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.2-RC4 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.2-RC4 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 RPI
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.2-RC4 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.2-RC4 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.2-RC4 riscv64 GENERICSD
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally,
the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.2/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use Git to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.2" branch.
A summary of changes since 13.2-RC3 includes:
o A fix to recalculate mitigations after reloading microcode on resume; this
unbreaks suspend/resume on some laptops.
o A fix to stack unwinding of kernel dumps on arm64.
o A kernel panic fix in carp(4).
o Fix bug resulting in misdetecting endianness on any platform when using
endian.h sometimes.
A list of changes since 13.1 is available in the releng/13.2
release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.2R/relnotes/
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.2-RC4/
BASIC-CI images can be found at:
https://download.freebsd.org/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.2-RC4/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \
-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
-netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
A veteran of the enterprise software industry, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen has spent nearly two decades at Red Hat, a global leader in open source solutions. Since joining Red Hat in 2004, he has held various senior management positions overseeing sales, marketing and operations, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of North America, and before that of APAC.
Melissa Di Donato, the current CEO, has decided to step down as she embarks on the next chapter of her career. Under her leadership SUSE listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 2021 and became one of Europe’s most valuable public software companies. During her tenure, SUSE has also completed the strategic acquisitions of Rancher and NeuVector, which position the Company strongly in the high growth markets of container management and security. SUSE has increased its revenues by over 60% and its adjusted EBITDA by over 70% under Melissa Di Donato’s leadership.
The SparkFun Thing Plus NINA-B306 is a compact embedded device optimized for portable and wireless applications. This product is enabled with BLE 5.0 connectivity and it features a MicroSD card slot, 6-DoF IMU, an Environmental sensor and LiPo battery management.
The upcoming Open Source board will be equipped with a 32-bit Renesas RA4M1 processor instead of the 8-bit ATmega328P chip. Moreover, there will be a UNO R4 version featuring an ESP32 module for wireless connectivity.
The history of making is now ready for the future: a 32-bit UNO will soon be available thanks to a powerful Renesas processor Here at Arduino we are thrilled to announce a new, revolutionary revision of the iconic UNO board, which will expand the concept of the open-source brand’s most iconic and popular product…
In today’s installment of Betteridge’s law enforcement, here’s an evil USB-C dock proof-of-concept by [Lachlan Davidson] from [Aura Division]. We’ve seen malicious USB devices aplenty, from cables and chargers to flash drives and even suspicious USB fans. But a dock, however, is new. The gist is simple — you take a stock dock, find a Pi Zero W and wire it up to a USB 2.0 port tapped somewhere inside the dock. Finding a Pi Zero is unquestionably the hardest part in this endeavor — on the software side, everything is ready for you, just flash an SD card with a pre-cooked malicious image and go!
You’ve got to hand it to [Carl Bugeja] — he comes up with some of the most interesting electromechanical designs we’ve seen. His latest project is right up there, too: a single PCB that folds up into a four-wheel motorized rover.
Last year, Apple eliminated the SIM card tray from the iPhone 14 to free up space. That means the SIM card, which acts as a key that connects your phone with cellular networks, is being phased out for Apple phones.
Where Apple leads, others typically follow, so you can expect handset makers like Samsung and Google to also go all-in on eSIM — a digitized SIM card embedded into the phone’s computer chip that you can activate with any cellular network’s service plan.
With three days of three parallel conference tracks with tightly packed 20 minute slots I only got to see a small
subset of the talks, focusing on the topics most relevant for KDE Itinerary.
Some takeaways for me:
OSM core data model evolution: The initial steps discussed here aren’t directly impacting KDE’s uses of OSM data yet,
the possible improvements for more efficient and accurate tile expiry are something potentially interesting for our raw data
tile server though (although we currently don’t implement any form of tile expire yet).
Indoor positioning (with GPS usually not available inside buildings there is no similarly prevalent solution yet, let
alone one that works without needing extra infrastructure in the building and without
requiring non-standard/not-yet-standard hardware in phones): Two possible approaches for this were presented, one using
common inertial sensors and map matching to compensate the drift, the other using a camera and a SLAM-like algorithm.
Nothing published yet unfortunately, so we have to see how well those actually perform in practice.
Indoor map data: I found it particularly interesting to see for which very different usecases people need
the same kind of data, from navigating through a train station to city-scale earthquake risk assessments with a scary level of detail and accuracy.
I also did my first major conference talk in German there, which I hopefully managed to do without using
an English term for every other word.
I reckon my compiler isn’t doing more when it comes to high-level optimizations, so the gains must be from the code generation side. This makes sense, as most compilers are multi-target, with backends designed for modern RISC-like systems, not the ancient 6502. It doesn’t matter how good GCC or LLVM’s high-level optimizations are if they falter at the last leg of the race.
Still, my compiler also beats those designed for retro and embedded systems, like VBCC, SDCC, and KickC. For this reason, it seemed like a good idea to write about my technique.
I will demonstrate how to generate a 1,000 row and column matrix with random numbers in R, and then save it in different file formats. I will also show how to get the file size of each saved object and benchmark how long it takes to read in each file using different functions.
As the much villified theme for star trek enterprise says “its been a long road getting from there to here” i am almost done with all of the work that needed to be done to get us to Catalina compatibility in GNUstep. The reason this is still significant is because Apple hasn’t made many changes to either the Foundation or AppKit APIs since then. I have been workinf hard over the last three years. All of the new classes are fully tested. Once this effort is completed I am going to focus on printing, which has always been a problem in GS. And possibly a “reference” distribution.
Content negotiation is a feature of HTTP that lets clients ask for, and servers return, different content types based on the request’s Accept header.
Sounds great, right? Well, no. Content negotiation is the classic example of an idea that sounds good in theory, but for the vast majority of web developers, turns out to be net harmful in practice.
Swedes have a reputation for being private people, so it might seem paradoxical that details from age to salary to your home address are easily available to anyone who knows where to look.
Tedium continues on its long journey to fill its glossary with hundreds of entries, and today’s list takes a long, hard look at all things food-related.
Tolkien Reading Day is an annual event held on the 25 March to celebrate and promote the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was founded by The Tolkien Society.[1]
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Docker, mostly about their boneheaded reversal following their boneheaded apology for their boneheaded decision to eliminate free teams. I don’t really care much about this event in terms of how it impacts my professional work. I long ago wrote off Docker, Inc. as a positive part of the DevOps ecosystem. But what’s very interesting to me is how we got here: The story of Docker, Docker Inc., Docker Hub, and their relation to the broader world of containerization is endlessly fascinating to me.
How is it that Docker Inc., creator of one of the most important and ubiquitous tools in the modern software industry, has become such a backwater of rent-seeking and foot-shooting? Silicon Valley continually produces some astounding failures, but Docker stands out to me. Docker as a software product is an incredible success; Docker as a company is a joke; and the work of computing professionals is complicated by the oddly distant and yet oddly close connection between the two.
Last week we checked out the hardware for the GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router kit with three nRF52840 Thread Dev Boards, and I’ve now had time to work with the kit, so I’ll report my getting started experience in the second part of the review. GL-S200 Initial Set Up I connected the WAN port to my Ethernet Switch itself connected to my modem router and the LAN port to my laptop, so I could access the web interface using the default IP address (192.168.8.1). The GL-S200 uses the same Admin Panel as other GL.iNet routers such as the Beryl AX router we reviewed at the beginning of the year.
The zealots are out in force these days, feverishly banning pernicious texts like Sneezy the Snowman, Grandmama’s Pride, A Storm Called Katrina and Dim Sun For Everyone because they’re “putting children at risk” while they quietly sit through live-shooter drills. Happily, some are calling out concerns “their kids’ minds may be opened by a book.” Among them is Grace Linn, 100, whose husband died long ago fighting her era’s brownshirts. “Fear is not freedom,” she says. “Fear is control.”
“The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo-signals with mindfulness therapy seem to produce better results,” lead researcher Elisa Vigna said.
To get a better idea of how many seashells are on Dutch beaches and in the sea, interested people could count shells on beaches in the Netherlands on Saturday. Several organizations have declared Saturday as shell counting day for this purpose.
Union negotiators for about 30,000 school support staffers in California’s Los Angeles County struck a historic deal with the second-largest district in the United States on Friday after a three-day strike.
I just finished the Software Quality Management course. It was a fun course that focused on the maintainability of code and measuring objective quality metrics. As is usual in a Master you read a lot of papers on the topic, from McCabe’s complexity measure to Fuggetta et al. on the evolution of the software development process. All these papers were very interesting and have given me insights into the evolution of software development. It was enlightening to offset those papers with my own experience.
Most of the papers are from the late 1990’s up to the early 2010’s. During that time I worked in Silicon Valley and within the Dutch startup environment. All these companies were on the frontline of new technologies and methodologies. The papers hit home most of the time. Several papers on the implementation of Scrum and how software evolves felt a bit one-sided from an academic point of view, but that did not bother me too much.
Being a software engineer and a writer, my opinion is likely biased in favour of this opinion. However, I have noticed that as I have progressed in my job, I have found writing to also be much more important. Whether it’s writing documentation, reviewing code, planning features, analysing future architecture, or even just helping other engineers. There’s a huge benefit to being able to write clearly, and to be able to explain your thoughts to your future self, and others.
By the 1930s, education was one plank in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed Economic Bill of Rights, his ambitious social contract that included the right to a “useful and remunerative job” that paid enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and fun, alongside the rights to a decent home, to adequate medical care, and to live free of economic want or worry. Education made the list as part of Roosevelt’s broader vision for expanding social democracy, Shelton argues, rather than as a means of helping Americans achieve economic success.
But within a matter of decades, that vision would begin to shrink as the “education myth” took hold. Shelton’s real — and infuriating — contribution here is to document the extraordinary coalescing of political elites around the idea that education is the best, even the only way, for Americans to realize economic security. By the 1960s, this view would all but choke off more radical plans for political and economic equality. The “Freedom Budget” — the massive spending plan proposed by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin in 1966 to provide all Americans with access to a job, living wage, housing, and health care — was never taken up by Congress or President Lyndon Baines Johnson. An effort by Senator Hubert Humphrey and Representative Augustus Hawkins to enshrine guaranteed employment into law a few years later wouldn’t fare much better.
The Softbank-owned British processor designer has reportedly approached several of its largest customers about increasing fees for its blueprints, and charging device makers directly rather than licensing designs to chipmakers.
Citing multiple industry executives and former employees, the Financial Times reports that Arm’s revised license model would see the company charge based on the value of the end device — a smartphone or tablet, for example — rather than the value of the chips based on its designs.
Have you ever thought how amazing it is that every bit of DRAM in your computer requires a teeny tiny capacitor? A 16 GB DRAM has 128 billion little capacitors, one for each bit. However, that’s not the only densely-packed IC you probably use daily. The other one is the image sensor in your camera, which is probably in your phone. The ICs have a tremendous number of tiny silicon photosensors, and [Asianometry] explains how they work in the video you can see below.
The news emerged yesterday that Gordon Moore, semiconductor pioneer, one of the founders of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and the originator of the famous Moore’s Law, has died. His continuing influence over all aspects of the technology which makes our hardware world can not be underestimated, and his legacy will remain with us for many decades to come.
Many of the clocks we feature here on Hackaday are entirely built from scratch, or perhaps reuse an unusual display type. But sometimes, an old clock is just perfect as it is, and only needs a bit of an upgrade to help it fit into the modern world. One such example is the lovely 1960s Copal flip clock (in German, Google Translate link) that [Wolfgang Jung] has been working with — he managed to bring it squarely into the 21st century without changing its appearance one bit.
This is a post about a beloved old motherboard, and my journey to get it working. I love seeing the process of people on YouTube doing this, so I thought I’d try something similar by “live blogging” the experience. It was a lot of fun :).
How I got this board
[...]
Aside from some dust, it was in remarkable physical condition. As you can see in the lower-right corner near the AT keyboard connector, the Ni-Cd battery was long since removed, which thankfully saved the board from any leaking acid. All the manufacturer date codes I can see show 1991, and the AMI BIOS sticker is from 1989.
In the lower-centre we have the AMD Am386SX/SXL-25 CPU. If I remember correctly, the SXs were “binned” versions of the DX that didn’t include a floating point unit. A math coprocessor could be added retroactively on boards that supported them, such as this one with the empty brown socket between the CPU and rectangular timing crystals. While being a 32-bit part, the external bus also only ran at 16-bit.
The House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, said, “TikTok collects nearly every data point imaginable – from people’s location to what they type and copy, who they talk to, to biometric data and more.”
“SB152 requires social media companies to verify that users in the state are 18 or older to open an account,” said Cox via Twitter. “Minors will need parental consent to create an account.”
“HB311 prohibits social media companies from using a design or feature that causes addiction for a minor to the company’s social media platform. This bill also makes it easier for people to sue social media companies for damages.”
Governor Cox also signed a second bill on Thursday that will prohibit social media companies from employing features or design techniques that could cause a minor to form an “addiction” to their online platforms.
The Utah measures come at a moment of heightened public concern and political action over powerful social media algorithms that may entice young people to spend hours online.
When a stubborn pain in Nick van Terheyden’s bones would not subside, his doctor had a hunch what was wrong.
Without enough vitamin D in the blood, the body will pull that vital nutrient from the bones. Left untreated, a vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis.
Evolutionary biologist Florence Débarre has long been searching for gene sequences from the market in Wuhan. Recently, she made an astounding discovery. What does it tell us about the origins of the coronavirus and the resulting pandemic?
The United Nations nuclear watchdog has said Director-General Rafael Grossi will travel next week to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, which was seized by Russian forces shortly after they invaded Ukraine.
Users can remove sensitive information or some other parts of photos, screenshots, and other images by cropping them using the Snipping Tool app. The problem is that for the Windows 11 app – as well as Microsoft’s Snip & Sketch cropping tool in Windows 10 – the file of the cropped image still includes the cropped out portions, which can be recovered and viewed.
France’s National Assembly is due to adopt a law on Tuesday ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. Article 7 is the most controversial aspect of this law, as it will allow AI video surveillance to be used to detect abnormal behaviour. Human rights organisations and the French left have condemned the measure.
[Machining and Microwaves] got an interesting request. The BBC asked him to duplicate the Great Seal Bug — the device the Russians used to listen covertly to the US ambassador for seven years in 1945. Turns out they’re filming a documentary on the legendary surveillance device and wanted to demonstrate how it worked.
Sergey Aksyonov, the Kremlin-appointed governor of annexed Crimea, has created his own private military company called Convoy and headed by Konstantin Pikalov (call sign: Mazai), a former Wagner Group leader whom publication Vazhniye Istorii (Important Stories) called Evgeny Prigozhin’s right hand man. Meduza summarizes Vazhniye Istorii’s reporting on the group, its origins, and its links to both Wagner Group and official Russian military structures.
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has opened a criminal case, under the statute on “fakes” about the Russian Army, against Konstantin Sonin, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and a former professor at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.
Russia on Saturday accused Azerbaijan of violating the Moscow-brokered ceasefire that ended the 2020 war with Armenia, by letting its troops cross over the demarcation line.
Iran-backed fighters were on alert in eastern Syria on March 25, a day after U.S. forces launched retaliatory air strikes on sites in the war-torn country, opposition activists said.
The pro-Kremlin speaker of the lower house of Russia’s parliament has called for his country to ban the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC) after it issued an arrest warrant on possible war crimes for President Vladimir Putin.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin-connected businessman who controls the Wagner mercenary group, has defended the firm’s practice of recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says Moscow has reached agreement to station tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of close ally Belarus, which borders both Russia and Ukraine.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said on air on state-run television network Russia 24 that Russia intends to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on state television Saturday plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus—an escalation anti-war campaigners had been warning about and that alarmed disarmament advocates and experts.
The March 13 Biden-Albanese-Sunak summit in San Diego to demonstrate alliance solidarity and to sign the multi-billion AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, US) nuclear submarine deal accelerated the pace of the U.S. and China sleepwalking toward catastrophic war. Compounding the dangers that came with the creation of the alliance in 2021 as part of the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific military buildup, the new deal also adds to the mountain of obstacles blocking the way to the U.S.-Chinese cooperation that is essential if the climate emergency is to be reversed, the world’s nuclear arms races stanched, and if the planet’s two most technologically advanced nations collaborating to prevent pandemics and discover cancer cures.
The West’s steady criticism of Hungary on democratic and cultural issues makes the country’s right-wing government reluctant to offer support on practical matters, specifically NATO’s buildup against Russia.
Hungary’s foreign minister says the West’s steady criticism of his country on democratic and cultural issues makes the right-wing government reluctant to offer support on practical matters, specifically NATO’s buildup against Russia. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó also said that Hungary has not voted on whether to allow Finland and Sweden to join NATO because its lawmakers are sick of those countries’ critiques of Hungarian domestic affairs. Szijjártó spoke to the The Associated Press at the United Nations on Friday. The European Union, which includes 21 NATO countries, has frozen billions in funds to Budapest and accused populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban of cracking down on media freedom and LGBTQ rights.
A Hungarian official has said that the country would not arrest Russian President Vladimir Putin if he entered Hungary, despite the International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for alleged war crimes.
A letter containing white powder sent Friday to the office of the Manhattan district attorney weighing charges against former President Trump contained no “dangerous substance” inside, according to multiple reports.
Buying silence is as old as Genesis. Among the hushers: Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Bette Davis, and a U.S. President with a special friend called Jerry the Penis.
Members of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees rebuked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in a letter Saturday for refusing to cooperate with their probe into the Stormy Daniels “hush money” case he’s pursuing against former President Donald Trump.
Top House Republicans said in a letter Saturday that they’re considering legislation to “protect” current and former presidents from “politically motivated prosecutions” in response to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into former President Trump.
Former President Trump on Saturday blasted the wide-ranging investigations against him, telling thousands of supporters at a rally in Texas that his personal life “has been turned upside down” because of “prosecutorial misconduct by radical left maniacs.”
Why it matters: In a rambling speech at the Waco airport, Trump made his most extensive comments yet on the legal jeopardy he faces, starting with the New York probe into alleged hush money he paid to a porn star over an affair she says they had.
Fierce fighting continues near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, with Russia launching dozens of attacks over the last 24 hours, Ukraine’s military said in a March 25 briefing.
Idaho Gov. Brad Little has signed into law a bill allowing firing squads to execute death row inmates when lethal injection drugs are unavailable. The move makes Idaho the fifth U.S. state to authorize the execution method. The new law will give the Department of Correction up to five days after a death warrant is issued to determine if lethal injection is available. If not, the execution must be done by firing squad. The Death Penalty Information Center says Idaho joins Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina as the states allowing firing squads. South Carolina’s law is on hold because of a legal challenge.
The top commander of Ukraine’s military says his forces are pushing back against Russian troops in the long and grinding battle for the town of Bakhmut. British military intelligence published on Saturday said Russia appeared to be moving to a defensive strategy in eastern Ukraine. However, the Ukrainian military cautioned that Bakhmut remained Russia’s main point of attack for now. The town is the focus of the longest battle of the 13-month war in Ukraine. Russia has deployed both regular soldiers and fighters of the mercenary Wagner Group in the campaign to seize Bakhmut. Russian forces must go through the town to push deeper into other parts of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.
The Central American country changed diplomatic recognition to Beijing, leaving 12 nations and the Vatican still recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign state.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky says that Ukraine cannot begin a counteroffensive campaign due to a lack of weapons and ammunition, reports Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun.
The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) published a report on the treatment of war prisoners, which says that both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have participated in extrajudicial executions of military personnel.
Honduras has announced that it is ending its decades-long diplomatic relations with Taiwan, bringing it closer to China as it expands its footprint in Central America.
The United Nations has expressed deep concerned over what it says were summary executions of prisoners of war (POWs) by both Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
Of course, when they happen, they’re followed by heartbroken communities, thoughts and prayers, and a heated debate over gun laws… and then the trend repeats.
More than 5,000 former criminals have been pardoned after finishing their contracts to fight in Russia’s Wagner mercenary group against Ukraine, the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Saturday.
Sharon Basch is an Israeli American who spent the last two years living in Israel before starting her JD at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
Yoav Gallant, who oversees Israel’s military, is the first minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to criticize a plan to weaken the judiciary. His comments follow fears that weeks of unrest have undermined military capacity.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on Saturday called on the government to halt legislation on changes to the judiciary, saying the bitter dispute over the measures poses a danger to the country.
People who would not be allowed anywhere near the battlefield in a U.S.-led war are active on the Ukrainian front, with ready access to American weapons.
Rattled by China’s military buildup, nations across the region are bolstering defence budgets, joint training, weapons manufacturing and combat-ready infrastructure.
Olesya Krivtsova, a 20-year-old university student, faced up to a decade in prison for “justifying terrorism” and “discrediting the Russian armed forces”. She has now fled to Lithuania. Many Russian officers “got kicked in the teeth” for her escape and started threatening her family, Kritsova says in an interview with LRT.lt.
“The rebels block the private jet area at Eindhoven Airport. The entrance to the VIP lounge is occupied and the Luchtfietsers are also present at the airport. The activists do not enter the runway in order not to disturb other flights to and from the airport,” said XR.
The 2035 goal is challenging – and achieving it has become more difficult as Finland’s forests will not be as big a carbon sink in the future as had been assumed, said Petteri Taalas, head of the World Meteorological Organisation.
In the world’s highest mountain range, global warming threatens thousands of glaciers, resulting in increasingly frequent natural disasters: landslides, avalanches and glacier collapses. Our reporters Alban Alvarez and Navodita Kumari travelled to the small northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, where these disasters are compounded by a rush to develop infrastructure such as hydroelectric dams.
French President Emmanuel Macron strongly condemned violence that erupted in Thursday’s demonstrations against raising the French retirement age and said he would not give in to it.
The European Union and Germany have reached a deal on the future use of combustion engines, officials said on Saturday, an issue that has been closely followed by the auto industry.
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic Friday accused the French police of using violence and excessive force against protestors demonstrating opposition against French President Emmanual Macron’s circumventing an outvoted pension reform bill increasing the retirement age from 62 to 64, without a parliamentary vote.
Tensions are rising in France after President Emmanuel Macron in a televised interview Wednesday refused to compromise on the government’s controversial pension reform bill. As peaceful demonstrations turn to social unrest, police forces are picking up their batons and using them on protesters.
The sun was beating down and my ears were ringing. My hands gripped the megaphone as we chanted, “No more drilling, no more drilling, no more drilling on federal lands!” The words we chanted were President Joe Biden’s verbatim, a broken promise made on the campaign trail in 2020. Just over a week after approving a massive oil drilling plan in the Arctic called the Willow project, President Biden hosted a conservation summit at the Department of the Interior. Youth climate justice organizers from Zero Hour protested alongside allied organizations outside the summit for hours, determined not to let Biden forget his broken promise. Administration officials and the president himself entered and left the building, pretending to ignore us and our demands, but we didn’t quiet down. We don’t plan to stop protesting the outrageous decision any time soon.
The IPCC’s 6th Assessment Synthesis Report released this week summarizes what we already knew: that the climate crisis, whose visibility has grown more pronounced over every season, is unequivocally happening.
Emergency officials in Mississippi say 23 people have been killed by tornadoes that tore through the state on Friday night, destroying buildings and knocking out power as severe weather that produced hail the size of golf balls moved through several southern states. The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency confirmed the death total early Saturday with dozens of injuries and four people missing throughout the state. The agency says in a Twitter post that search and rescue teams from numerous local and state agencies were deployed along with personnel to assist those impacted by the tornadoes. The rural towns of Silver City and Rolling Fork have reported severe destruction as the tornado swept northeast at 70 mph without weakening.
Rescuers combed through rubble on Saturday after a powerful storm tore across Mississippi overnight, killing at least 25 people there and another in Alabama, leveling dozens of buildings and spawning at least one devastating tornado.
French police again clashed with protesters Saturday as campaigners sought to stop the construction of reservoirs in the southwest, the latest in a series of violent standoffs as social tensions erupt nationwide.
The financial services industry has always been a leading consumer of tech with big information technology budgets. The recent banking crisis will add even more headwinds to the already challenging IT spending climate and several tech firms are exposed.
The Reserve Bank will soon get the final two pieces of the economic puzzle that will inform its key April cash rate decision. Both a pause and another hike are still in play, with analysts undecided on which way the central bank will go.
The secretive Future Fund’s chairman Peter Costello might not like it, but Freedom of Information requests are peeling back the lid on the Fund’s weighty overseas investments. Philip Dorling and Rex Patrick report the more controversial ones.
Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Oil are the top of the pops in a newly released list of Future Fund Investments across the United States, United Kingdom and a range of tax havens, notably among the Cayman Islands.
In a new bid to end the use of shell companies to hide crimes and avoid taxes, the federal government will require clear records of corporate ownership. Will provincial governments follow?
We’ve been trained to think that endless rule by tiny minorities of really horrible people is the natural order of things, but that turns out to be just another lie.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has reasserted the bloc’s “commitment to support the Belarusian people” on the occasion of Belarus Freedom Day on March 25.
At the three-day meeting this week in Moscow, the Russian president’s desperation met the Chinese leader’s opportunism. The visit marks an inflection point for global order.
To react to Beijing’s growing economic power by increasing Western military power is hopeless. It is harder to think of a more stupid example of lashing out in blind anger.
Brazil’s presidential palace says that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has canceled his trip to China after contracting pneumonia. The 77-year-old Lula was admitted to a hospital in the capital of Brasilia with flu-like symptoms and was diagnosed with “bacterial and viral bronchopneumonia due to influenza A,” the palace said in a statement. The leftist leader’s health was reassessed on Saturday and, despite improvement, he was advised to “postpone the trip to China until the cycle of viral transmission ends,” the note said. is press office later confirmed that the trip had been canceled. Chinese authorities have been informed.
Criminal justice and election officials, along with voting rights advocates, are working across the United States to expand voting among jail detainees. The effort is an acknowledgement that tens of thousands of people being held pretrial haven’t lost that fundamental right to vote. In Chicago, hundreds of people in the Cook County Jail have been voting in this year’s mayor’s race. Other places where voting rights advocates have worked with local election and jail officials to offer voting for detainees include Denver, Harris County, Texas, Los Angeles County and the District of Columbia. In Illinois, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says voting brings a sense of empowerment and is a way to inspire change.
Hundreds of supporters of the Hong Kong men’s football team have queued up in the hope of snatching up what may be the last jersey of its kind before the Hong Kong Football Association (HKFA) adds “China” to its name.
After more than five years navigating the bureaucratic maze of Hong Kong’s asylum system, John faces a new fear: deportation under a recently amended “removal policy”. “When you’re running for your safety, you never know where you go.
Todd Hayen There is an awful lot of “I know I’m right” chatter going around on both sides. I am just curious, what makes you so sure you are right? And what makes them so sure they are right?
It is a pattern we see again and again: New political hopefuls are elected to office espousing progressive values and vowing to challenge the status quo in Washington, D.C. They are sent off with high hopes. But then, over time, the change they promise never materializes.
The article I’m responding to directly, and then expanding out from, is titled Tech Entrepreneurship and Shifting Sentiment. Go read it, and if you can make it to the end without at least one giggle, snort, or eyeroll, you’re doing better than I did. The author correctly identifies that the sentiment has shifted against the tech industry, but then proceeds to hypothesize about some reasons, and… well, I think it’s safe to say that they’ve not made it outside their little social bubble of “tech startup” workers in a long, long while.
The monster redundancy process involves some 2.5 percent of the existing 738,000-strong workforce that are spread across offices and operations in more than 200 cities in 49 countries.
Chew also asked the app’s devoted users to “let me know in the comments what you want your elected representatives to know about what you love about TikTok.”
I have a very rough draft of this article; I’d love to hear comments on it, of course, but I’d also like to workshop it by Zoom, in case some people are interested.
Targeting educators was a priority with strict penalties imposed on what could be taught, leading to the firing of thousands of university professors and teachers, while others
An anti-terrorism court here on Friday convicted a man on the charges of committing blasphemy and other religion-related offences on social media and sentenced him to death and imprisonment on multiple counts.
A total Rs1.2 million fine was also imposed on the convict.
Although many cases involve Muslims accusing fellow Muslims, rights activists have warned that religious minorities — particularly Christians — are often caught in the crossfire, with blasphemy charges used to settle personal scores.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Thursday delivered its judgement, wherein it held that the freedom of expression of an eyewitness to a road accident is protected by Article 10 (freedom of expression) of the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention).
Russian president Vladimir Putin gave an interview to the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Corporation, which ran the interview on state-run television network Russia 24. During the interview, Putin Western countries’ plans to supply Ukraine with weapons and ammunition, as well as the current state of Russia’s military-industrial complex. The Russian president also announced his plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of neighboring Belarus. Meduza shares the most important parts of Putin’s remarks.
The most significant part of the law, a permanent version of a 2019 measure, may be its impact on the “lay faithful,” who will be more accountable for abuse.
Paul Rusesabagina, a critic of Rwanda’s president, was tricked into entering the country, then sentenced to 25 years after what his supporters called a show trial.
The United States is in the middle of a long-overdue resurgence in labor organizing, antipathy to corporate power, and class analysis. This is terrifying to business executives and the ultra-rich, especially those affiliated with the Democratic Party. What was once the party of Bill Clinton sounds more and more like the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt again, as ever-greater numbers of Democratic voters bring back good-old American “us vs. the bosses” economic populism.
The Supreme Court of India Friday delivered its ruling wherein it held that the affinity test is not a litmus test to decide a caste name and is not an essential part of the process of the determination of the correctness of a caste/tribe name in every case.
Law enforcement had searched his home on suspicion of drug trafficking and kidnapping, but found no evidence and filed no charges against him. He says they kicked down his door, broke his video surveillance system, stole money from him and frightened his family.
Afroman, whose real name is Joseph Foreman, told NPR in a phone interview that what he did next was his “smartest, most peaceful solution.”
“I asked myself, as a powerless Black man in America, what can I do to the cops that kicked my door in, tried to kill me in front of my kids, stole my money and disconnected my cameras?” he says. “And the only thing I could come up with was make a funny rap song about them and make some money, use the money to pay for the damages they did and move on.”
Do you have a friend, maybe an ex-girlfriend or an ex-boyfriend, who won’t stop texting you? Then you know how annoying it is, and difficult it is, once they have your number, to block them.
In a recent New York Times article, tech writer Kevin Roose reported a bizarre encounter he’d had with a Bing chatbot in which it had told him, among other things, that it dreamt of being human…
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel would not commit during a Senate hearing Wednesday to reconsidering the decision to roughly quadruple the price of his company’s COVID-19 vaccine once government purchases end.
Do we not need to change the current culture of greed into a culture which understands that science and medical breakthroughs should work for ordinary people, and not just enrich large corporations and CEOs? And, in that respect, it is important to remember the contributions of great scientists like Dr. Jonas Salk who, in the 1950s, invented the vaccine for polio. Salk’s work saved millions of lives and prevented millions more from being paralyzed.
It has been estimated that if Dr. Salk had chosen to patent the polio vaccine he would have made billions of dollars. But he did not.
When asked who owns the patent to this vaccine Dr. Salk said: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
Last month, Moderna told investors that it had settled on a $400 million “catch-up payment” to the NIH for using the agency’s patented technology in its vaccine. At the Senate hearing, Bancel said that the company has decided to “abandon” its patent in the dispute. “We are moving on because we cannot agree on what happened,” he said.
Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana acknowledged that “Americans pay too much for prescriptions drugs” but took issue with the title of the hearing — ‘Taxpayers Paid Billions For It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?’ — which he thought inappropriately “presumed guilt.”
With Sci-Hub and Z-Library making headlines over the past few months and the Internet Archive’s legal battle still ongoing, publishers seem prepared to defend every last inch of their rights. That includes Cengage, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, as they investigate what appears to be a blatant pirate ebook platform. A closer look reveals even more dubious activity.
Internet Archive vowed to appeal after a U.S. district court judge on Friday sided with four major publishers who sued the nonprofit for copyright infringement.
The Internet Archive’s online book lending library is not protected by the fair use exception to copyright. Major book publishers successfully argued that the Archive’s lending of scanned books amounts to copyright infringement. In a decision published Friday, a New York federal judge found that the Archive’s fair use defenses weighed strongly against the digital book lending operation.
A federal judge has sided with four publishers who sued an online archive over its scanning of millions of copyrighted works and offering them for free to the public
The spell slot system as implemented in 5e was first seen in a video game called Wizardry; they called it “spell points” in that game but you had separate pools of “level 1 spell points”, “level 2 spell points” and so on, just like 5e’s slots.
So for a more JRPG-like vibe, you could lean into that. Call slots spell points or mana points or magic points or whatever game you’re more familiar with—not only video games, there are other table top games that uses MP. The hack, compared the cockamamie spell point system option in the DMG, is to just keep “the separate pools per level”, just like slots work non—i.e. don’t change anything, it’s just a new name for them.
Docker, Inc. celebrated the 10th anniversary of the namesake artifact used widely for building cloud-native applications by announcing alliances with Ambassador Labs to improve the developer experience and Hugging Face to make it simpler to launch and deploy machine learning applications on a cloud service using DockerFile. In addition, Docker,
Hello and welcome to the 501st episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we talk with Mooneer Salem, K6AQ, primary developer on the FreeDV team.
There is a staggering amount of proven open source software available to download. But it’s really difficult to keep up with the cream of the cream. That’s where this compilation aims to help.
We select the best-of-breed GUI (Graphical User Interface) software ranging from projects coded by individual programmers, small teams of enthusiasts, extending to large multinational corporations. The compilation largely reflects software that our volunteers use as their daily drivers.
We mostly recommend cross-platform software, but, where appropriate, make some exceptions. We include a select few proprietary applications along the way. We try to avoid duplication as much as possible. A few of omissions will definitely raise some eyebrows. For example, there’s no room for Firefox even though it’s open source software (unlike Chrome) and some of our volunteers strongly prefer it over any other web browser.
UNRAR is a free command utility (GPL licensed) on Linux systems for decompressing and extracting files that are compressed and archived in the RAR archive format. RAR is a popular archive format that is proprietary but commonly and widely used to compress large files.
Glances is a free open-source command line software solution for Linux systems to monitor computer activity in real time. It can be considered a good alternative to top/Htop command line system monitoring tools for Ubuntu. Here in this tutorial,
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to enable mod_headers on Apache web server. The tutorial is intended for Debian / Ubuntu or some derivatives of these. Let’s go. Introduction According to the information provided by Apache This module provides directives to control and modify HTTP request and response headers.
A quick and simple guide to fix pip command not found in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. You might have encountered the |pip command not found” error while installing any Python package or module. This error occurs when the system cannot locate the pip package manager used to install and manage Python packages.
This guide provides tips for quickly switching between Tmux sessions and windows, including keyboard shortcuts, navigation commands, and customization options.
In this guide, we will provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to install Ruby on Ubuntu. We will cover the installation process using both the command line and package manager, as well as how to check the installation to ensure it is working correctly. We will also explore some popular tools for setting up a development environment, including Ruby on Rails.
How do I change the log retention policy in elk stack? In this tutorial, you will learn how to configure log retention period in ELK stack. Elasticsearch uses ILM (Index Lifecycle Management) policies to define what actions to be applied to indices according to your performance, resiliency, and retention requirements.
XAMPP is a popular solution for web development and testing on a local machine. However, once you have completed your web application, you will need to deploy it to a web server to make it available to the public.
XAMPP is a popular web server solution for developers who need to test and develop web applications on their local machines. However, like any other software, XAMPP can be vulnerable to security threats if not configured and managed properly. In this article, we will discuss best practices and tips for securing XAMPP.
XAMPP is a free and open-source web server solution that includes Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl. It is widely used by developers for testing and developing web applications on their local machines. Configuring XAMPP for your development environment can be a straightforward process if you follow the steps outlined below.
Wildfly is a simple, lightweight, and flexible application runtime used to build Java applications. This tutorial will show you how to install Wildfly with Nginx as a reverse proxy on Ubuntu 22.04.
If you’re serious about container security, then you know it all begins at the beguine…images. No matter how much work you put into locking down your deployments, your network, and your infrastructure, if you base your containers on images with vulnerabilities, those deployments will simply not be secure. And simply trusting that a random image pulled from Docker Hub is enough is a big mistake.
Sure, there are verified images to be had on Docker Hub, but those verifications cost quite a bit for a company, so not every image is verified. And although you can generally trust verified images, it’s best to know, first-hand, that trust is warranted.
And as far as unverified images, every single one you attempt to use could cause you problems. To that end, you must scan them for vulnerabilities. If you find an image contains vulnerabilities, at least you’re informed and, in some cases, you could mitigate a vulnerability by updating the packages contained within an image.
Fortunately, there are a number of tools you can use to scan those images. One such tool is built right into Docker, called docker scan. It’s very easy to use and reports back very simple information about any known vulnerabilities it finds.
With the new XwaylandVideoBridge utility, you can now screencast native Wayland windows from Xwayland apps like Discord (Aleix Pol Gonzalez and David Edmundson, Link)
Dolphin now has an option to not change the information and preview shown in the Information Panel when hovering over files, and to instead only do so when deliberately selecting files (Oliver Beard, Dolphin 23.08. Link)…
Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockefile from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief…
This week we released only 5 snapshots, but one was hefty in size and we needed the extra time for the mirrors to settle again and get the bandwidth back under control. The large snapshot was due to the change in the default compiler: Tumbleweed has been rebuilt entirely using GCC 13. The released snapshots were numbered 0316, 0317, 0318, 0319, and 0321.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I have weekly office hours most Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time). Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
This article describes one method of restarting PCI devices. It demonstrates restating a wireless device. But the concept should work on any device whose device driver has adequate hotplug support.[1]
Computers typically consist of several interconnected devices. Some devices can be physically disconnected and reconnected with ease (for example, most USB devices). Others might require a specific interaction with the operating system or specific software. And others will require a full reboot.
Built-in laptop wireless cards are PCI devices that could fail at runtime but might not be easy to physically disconnect and reconnect without a full reboot. In many cases these devices can be restarted through Linux’s sysfs interface without having to do a full reboot of the computer.
This article will specifically demo how to restart an Atheros wireless card which has locked up.
The Fedora Project released Fedora 38 beta images. The Fedora Sway Spin and the Fedora Sericea ones are in the long list of released images!
This is a critical point in the release of those Fedora artifacts based on Sway since it is the first time it has been possible to test them for the wider public. Although the Fedora Project has been creating Sway artifacts for a couple of months, those were based on Rawhide, which is “a not always stable” version of Fedora, since it tracks far in the future (4-10 months) versions of Fedora.
Enterprisers Project ☛ ChatGPT: Top 3 industries that can benefit now [Ed: Red Hat keeps prompting this overhyped proprietary spyware of Microsoft; who does Red Hat truly work for these days?]
When Twitter fired half of its employees in 2022, and most tech giants followed suit, I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I think little will change for those companies. After being employed in the tech sector for years, I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work. I don’t mean we don’t work hard; I mean we almost don’t work at all. Nada. Zilch. And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers. All of this while being paid an amount of money some people wouldn’t even dream of.
What is happening right now in tech may be one of the greatest market inefficiencies—or even deceptions—in history. I am writing this article because I think outsiders deserve to know what’s really going on in the field.
At some point in your career you will be asked to manage a project. This can be intimidating, it can be scary, but it doesn’t have to be. We can leverage some time-honoured techniques, and adapt them to the unique approach required for software projects to deliver on time, on budget, and with success.
This article is a collection of techniques I’ve learned for managing projects over time, that attempts to combine agile best practices with project management best practices. If you study project management to any level of depth, it is inevitable that you will come across the Project Management Institute, or PMI. The PMI is a global professional body that provides training and certification in project management topics. PMI provides different certification options, including some for Agile processes and Scrum.
Technical debt is an often debated topic. Like most concepts in software, it isn’t particularly difficult to find arguments supporting opposite sides of the spectrum – in a single minute of searching I was able to find that some believe that technical debt doesn’t exist, while others feel that technical debt is the most important aspect of product development. From the conversations that I’ve had with others in the industry, both within my place of work and with technical leaders from other companies, I’ve come to believe that one of the root causes of the gap between these viewpoints is primarily definitional.
Part of the reason that some people don’t like the term “technical debt” is that they feel it becomes an excuse. To these individuals, everything that software engineers don’t like within the system on which they’re working gets labeled as debt, and that debt becomes a boogeyman that gets blamed for all of their problems. Those on the other side of the argument feel almost the exact opposite: technical debt gets little attention and they’re forced to spend inordinate amounts of time struggling against implementations and concepts that make it more difficult to make changes than it otherwise could be. An interesting realization (and something that makes this conversation particularly difficult) is that both groups can be right at the same time. This can be true only because the two groups are misunderstanding one another. But where does this misunderstanding come from?
In the thread, he recalls the adage “prefer composition over inheritance”. This is a well-known principle of good OOP code, and yet inheritance is commonly used where composition would serve better; the question that comes to my mind is, “Why?” I think I have at least a partial answer, but let me meander a bit before getting to it.
The thread gives an example use case of a map that counts explicit insertions, which is the example I’ll use here. If you inherit and override the put() method, the behavior you get may be wrong, or may be right in one version and wrong in the next. On the other hand, you didn’t have to write a lot of code.
(One post, an oldie but a goodie, that significantly influenced my thinking on this matter, suggests that you should never override a method that was not designed to be overridden, and talks about how building this into the language slightly improves ergonomics when you do override.)
Suppose I did the “right” thing and used composition (in this case, also delegation, and also the decorator pattern, for people who think in GoF design patterns). I would have to implement the map interface, calling down to a map implementation that stores the actual data. To implement the Map interface in Java I would need to implement 25 methods! Most of them would be boilerplate, just passing the arguments to the equivalent method on the delegate. Other languages are not better (the Haskell Data.Map module has more than 100 functions).
Reading the thought-provoking “Patterns & Abstractions” post reminded me of a long-held opinion I have about programming language design: we have a tendency to keep adding features to a language until it becomes so big [1] that its sheer size makes it difficult to use reliably. Since most of us spend most of our time programming in one language, it can be difficult to see a common trend amongst languages in general.
I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. I miss an awful lot about it and I might leave Mastodon too.
Yes, you read that right. I’ve decided to re-join Twitter. There’s a lot of stuff I miss from the social network – the community, the threads, the hot takes. the fun.
I feel like Mastodon is becoming way too serious…it needs more of those fun-time Twitter folk. Because I intend for Twitter to be my primary social network, I’m thinking about putting my Mastodon profile out to pasture too.
But what lead me to these decisions? Well dear reader, that’s a looooong story. So I decided to do a video about it instead of writing War and Peace.
As a business community, we’ve tried to shame execs into being on social media for at least 10 years, and the results are decidedly mixed. Despite the expectations from employees and consumers, only half of the CEOs in the S&P 500 are on social media.
In large organizations, culture is key. The values and habits of an organization, and what it rewards and punishes, are the background radiation driving towards discrete outcomes in a world of infinite possibility.
Your culture is a living thing – it changes and adapts to new teammates, external forces, and the broader environment. And sometimes it gets sick; sometimes your culture gets a virus.
A Culture Virus is a contagious idea that hooks into your culture like a pathogen, passing from person to person, and very often preying on the weak and struggling – the people who are susceptible to convenient excuses.
Below we’ll work through examples of common culture viruses that can occur as companies grow. These elements of culture aren’t matters of style – if you let them creep into your company, they will meaningfully deflate, devalue, and debase your company.
Most Intel processors do not come with a MIPI CSI camera, but some Alder Lake-N processors do, and Leopard Imaging has designed the LI-ADL-ADP-IMX415-MIPI-081H MIPI CSI camera module that is compatible with the Intel ADL-N CRB (Alder Lake-N Customer Reference Board) and custom Alder Lake-N boards equipped with a compatible MIPI CSI connector. The 13MP camera supports resolutions up to 3864 x 2176 and works with boards and embedded systems based on Intel Atom processors x7000E Series, Intel Core i3-N processors, and Intel Processors N-Series processors.
A nearly six-hour grilling of TikTok’s CEO by lawmakers brought the platform’s 150 million U.S. users no closer to an answer as to whether the app will be wiped from their devices.
After nearly two years and $1.4 million spent, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released an external review of its overseas operations that barely mentioned recent corruption scandals and offered a series of recommendations that critics dismissed as overly vague. Much of the report outlines the DEA’s 69-country “foreign footprint,” while lauding its efforts to plug gaping holes in the oversight of undercover money laundering operations. The probe followed reporting by The Associated Press on a disgraced former DEA agent who confessed to laundering money for Colombian drug cartels and skimming millions to fund an international joyride of parties and prostitutes.
A Minnesota utility has begun shutting down a nuclear power plant near Minneapolis after failing to stop the release of radioactive material. Officials say it is not dangerous, but nearby residents are concerned. Xcel Energy started shutting down the plant in Monticello on Friday. The utility’s president says after it cools over the next few days, workers will cut out a pipe that is over 50 years old and had been leaking tritium. He says Xcel will then have the pipe analyzed in hopes of preventing similar leaks in the future. He says the spill has not left the utility’s property.
We first published our hugely popular cribsheet in September of 2021 in response to dozens – even hundreds – of reader requests for sources and data. It was intended as a resource and link dump as much as an article, and intentionally free of interpretation, editorialising or opinion.
This was a very difficult opinion to write because there are many people I love who have been vaccinated and I don’t want to be the one in any way to upset or put fear into them. I was reluctant to publish this but having just watched Piers Morgan being interviewed by Triggernometry…
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Thursday blocked President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal employees. The decision came from an en banc rehearing of the appeal, which was previously decided in favor of the government by a three-judge panel of the same court.
The U.S. government’s cybersecurity agency ships a new tool to help network defenders hunt for signs of compromise in Microsoft’s Azure and M365 cloud deployments.
Engines in OpenSSL have a long history of providing new algorithms (Russian GOST hash/signature etc) but they can also be used to interface external crypto tokens (pkcs#11) or even key managers like my own TPM engine. I’ve actually been using my TPM2 engine for nearly a decade so that I no longer have to have an unprotected private keys anywhere on my laptops (including for ssh). The purpose of this post is to look at the differences between Providers and Engines and give advice on the minimum necessary Provider implementation to give back all the Engine functionality. So this post is aimed at Engine developers who wish to convert to Providers rather than giving user advice for either.
a well faked Mail Attachment.pdf.zip was opened by a team member, infecting a (Windows 10?) PC in the background browser login tokens in the form of cookies & browser passwords were exfiltrated mail attachments are STILL the #No1 threat…
In case you don’t have enough to worry about, people are hiding explosives–actual ones–in USB sticks:
In the port city of Guayaquil, journalist Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa private TV station received an envelope containing a pen drive which exploded when he inserted it into a computer, his employer said.
Software maker Fortra told its corporate customers that their data was safe — even when it wasn’t — following a ransomware attack on its systems, TechCrunch has learned.
… TechCrunch has heard from two victim organizations that only learned that data had been exfiltrated from their GoAnywhere systems after they each received a ransom demand. Both organizations had been previously told by Fortra that their data was unaffected by the ransomware attack.
Hackers have managed to steal $500,000 worth of tokens from layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum’s March 23 airdrop. The theft was carried out through the use of vanity addresses, customized cryptocurrency addresses that contain specific words or phrases chosen by the user to make them more personal and identifiable. While vanity addresses offer a level of personalization and identification, their safety is questionable, as they can compromise the security of users’ private keys.
The hacker compiled vanity addresses that were eligible to receive ARB tokens and generated similar addresses using vanity address generators. This allowed them to redirect the airdropped tokens to their own addresses, making it impossible for the original owners to claim their ARB tokens. Several crypto users have expressed sadness about their stolen ARB tokens, with many being unaware of the reason behind the loss and having no idea what to do about it.
Some United States Postal Service workers in the eastern North Carolina and Jacksonville area are missing paychecks due to a cyber attack.
The mail service is conducting an investigation, but employees are unhappy with the outcome so far, they said.
Larisa Covington, from Jacksonville, said in February she was expecting her direct deposit to hit her account and realized her banking information had changed to one she had never heard of.
An affidavit by FBI Special Agent John Longmire in support of the criminal complaint against Conor Fitzpatrick, aka “Pompompurin” (Pom), the owner of BreachForums, states that since “on or around March 2022,” HHS-OIG investigated an administrator and certain members of BreachForums. The affidavit does not explain why HHS-OIG started investigating Pom or some of the new forum’s members. There had never been any public statement suggesting that HHS-OIG had been involved in investigating or seizing RaidForums, BreachForum’s predecessor, which had been seized in February. So why did HHS-OIG start investigating Pom and some BreachForum members in March 2022?
The United Nations said Friday it was “deeply concerned” by what it described as summary executions of prisoners of war carried out by Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield. Earlier in the day, Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev said Russian forces may have to advance as far as Kyiv or Lviv to destroy “infection” in Ukraine.
Mohamed ElBaradei was director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 until 2009. In an interview with FRANCE 24, he reflected on the US-led invasion of Iraq 20 years ago this week, which he opposed. “If I now look in hindsight, it was not really about weapons of mass destruction. It was about regime change,” he said. ElBaradei added: “They (the US) thought the best pretext was to say that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda and had WMDs (…) They didn’t really have any evidence. It was all about belief. And they started a slew of deception and misinformation.”
Thursday, March 23, saw Defense Minister Ināra Mūrniece heading to Lithuania on a working visit, where she met with Lithuanian Defense Minister Arvydas Anušauskas in Vilnius.
Ukrainian minister of the Cabinet Oleh Nemchinov and Latvian Economics Minister Ilze Indriksone met Thursday in Rīga and agreed on bilateral economic cooperation in trade, transport, energy and investments, Latvian Television reported on March 23.
President Joe Biden says the U.S. will respond “forcefully” to protect its personnel after U.S. forces retaliated with airstrikes on sites in Syria used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
U.S. officials said the main air defense system at the coalition base was “not fully operational” at the time of Thursday’s attack, which killed a U.S. contractor and wounded six other Americans.
President Joe Biden says the U.S. will respond “forcefully” to protect its personnel after U.S. forces retaliated with airstrikes on sites in Syria used by groups affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The U.S. strikes followed a suspected Iranian-linked attack Thursday that killed a U.S. contractor and wounded six other Americans in northeast Syria. “The United States does not, does not seek conflict with Iran,” Biden said in Ottawa, Canada, where he is on a state visit. But he said the U.S. is prepared “to act forcefully to protect our people. That’s exactly what happened last night.” Activists said the U.S. bombing killed at least four people.
The US conducted an airstrike in Syria against what it said were Iranian-affiliated facilities after a suspected Iranian drone on Thursday struck a facility housing US personnel in the country, killing an American contractor and wounding five US service members.
Georgia authorities say state troopers in January fatally shot an environmental protester who had fired at authorities after a trooper shot pepper balls into the protester’s tent. That’s according to incident reports obtained Friday by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The records offer the most complete account yet of authorities’ version of the Jan. 18 killing of Manuel Paez Terán, who went by the name Tortuguita. The newly obtained incident reports say Paez Terán briefly spoke to officers while inside a tent and refused to leave, prompting authorities to fire pepper balls. Authorities say Paez Terán then fired multiple shots, and six officers returned fire, shooting the activist more than a dozen times.
A powdery substance was found Friday with a threatening letter in a mailroom at the offices of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. It’s the latest security scare as the prosecutor weighs a potential historic indictment of former President Donald Trump. The letter said, “Alvin, I am going to kill you,” according to a person familiar with the matter. The person was not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation and did so on condition of anonymity. The discovery, in the same court building where a grand jury is expected to resume work Monday on the Trump case, came amid increasingly hostile rhetoric from the Republican.
The government confirmed last week that selected Royal Australian Navy surface ships and submarines will in the foreseeable future be equipped with US long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Although U.S. officials have cautioned against seizing Russia’s reserves in foreign banks, others say it’s “crazy” not to after Moscow’s war of aggression.
Both sides expect a Ukrainian offensive while the Bakhmut fight continues, but the head of the Wagner mercenary group said Russia must be clearer about its goals.
On March 20, 2023, the Atlantic Council’s Iraq Initiative hosted a discussion with a number of young Iraqi civil society activists and prospective leaders to reflect on the 20th anniversary of the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Supporters of four right-wing Serbian opposition parliamentary parties demonstrated in Belgrade, blocking traffic and demanding the government reject a plan agreed by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti on the process of normalizing relations.
The U.S. Treasury Department on March 24 issued new Belarus-related sanctions against nine individuals and three entities in response to an ongoing crackdown on the country’s pro-democracy movement and civil society.
Over 100 Barristers Thursday signed a declaration calling upon the UK government and colleagues to address the causes and consequences of the climate crises and to advance a just transition to sustainability, posing concerns over how serious governments around the world are taking the climate emergency.
The Biden administration’s recent leasing and permitting actions raise questions about the prudence of new oil development during a global push toward cleaner energy.
Offshore oil is booming. According to the research firm, Rystad, spending on offshore oil investments exceeded $100 billion in 2022 for the first time in a decade, and will do so again in 2023 and 2024. Norway, the Scandinavian country that has positioned itself as a climate leader, is driving some of this boom.…
The co-founder of Singapore-based crypto fintech firm Terraform Labs was detained in Montenegro yesterday (Mar. 23). Do Kwon was wanted by the South Korean police, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and Interpol—the latter issued a red notice for his arrest last September.
Montenegro has charged South Korean citizen Do Kwon, the former CEO and co-founder of cryptocurrency company Terraform Labs, with forgery after police confirmed his identity and that of another South Korean, Chang Joon, who was also charged.
The climate minister, Lars Aagaard, and the German economy and climate minister, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, signed an agreement on Friday morning in Copenhagen to build a land-based hydrogen pipeline from Denmark to Germany, which will commence operations in 2028.
The Court of Economic Affairs has approved the liquidation application of Baltic International Bank submitted by the Bank of Latvia, the LETA news agency reported March 24.
Provisional data compiled by the Central Statistical Bureau and published March 24 of Latvia show that in 2022 the annual average purchase price of raw milk grew by 153 euros per tonne (EUR/t) or 48.2 % reaching 471 EUR/t.
The Economic Affairs Court of Latvia (ELT) on March 24 charged several customs officers with bribery in one of the so-called “Terehova cases”, according to LETA.
French President Emmanuel Macron strongly condemned violence that erupted in Thursday’s demonstrations against raising the French retirement age and said he would not give in to it.
A recent poll showed that almost 70 percent of the citizens reject President Macron’s pension reform proposal, which intends to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64.
Over a million people protested across France Thursday to oppose President Macron’s proposal to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64. Amid violent nationwide demonstrations, unions called for strikes to coincide with King Charles III’s visit.
Scattered protests in France continued Friday, following Thursday’s mass demonstrations over nationwide opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s controversial pension reform bill.
After ramming through a law raising the retirement age without a full parliamentary vote, the French president faces something approaching a constitutional crisis.
Opponents of pension overhaul, mostly young people, hold nightly “wild protests,” marked by vandalism, saying it is the only way to make their voices heard.
The three-day walkout included Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, gardeners, bus drivers, cafeteria workers and special education assistants.
Mortgage rates have taken would-be buyers on a ride this year — and it’s only March. Generally, home buyers can anticipate mortgage rates to move down through the rest of this year as the banking crisis drags on, which could cool down inflation. But there are bound to be some bumps along the way.
A new interest rate prognosis from Swedish state-owned SBAB bank predicts that Sweden’s central bank will hike key interest rates substantially in April, but will be able to lower them again as early as November.
Boston, Massachusetts is one of the oldest cities in America, founded in 1630, more than a few years before the advent of modern motor vehicles. In the 1980s, traffic in downtown Boston was nearly unbearable from the tangled streets laid out centuries ago, so city planners and state transportation officials came up with what they considered a grand plan. They would reroute the elevated highway and so-called “central artery” of Interstate 93 into a tunnel below downtown and extend Interstate 90 across the inner harbor to the airport in another tunnel. Construction started in 1991, and the project was given the nickname Big Dig because of the sheer volume of excavation required for the two tunnels. In terms of cost and complexity, the Big Dig was on the scale of the Panama Canal or Hoover Dam. It featured some of the most innovative construction methods of the time, and after 16 years of work, the project was finished on time and under budget…[Grady makes a skeptical face into the camera]
Mary Lou McDonald’s star is rising in Ireland, which could put her in a position to push for reunification with Northern Ireland. DER SPIEGEL speaks with her about why she thinks success might be possible.
Utah’s Gov. Spencer Cox signed a pair of measures requiring parental consent before kids can sign up for sites like TikTok and Instagram. The new laws also limit time spent on social media and require age verification for anyone using social media.
When TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew showed up on Capitol Hill this week to testify at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington, immediately set the tone for the ordeal.
As investigations relying on the witness testimony of Michael Cohen and Evan Corcoran converge this week, it’s a reminder that for at least seven years, Trump’s lawyers have exposed themselves legally in assistance of Trump’s cover-ups.
The ruling paves the way for testimony from Mark Meadows and others. Separately, a Trump lawyer appeared before a grand jury looking into the former president’s handling of classified documents.
The Manhattan district attorney is resisting demands by House Republicans that he provide information about the hush money inquiry, setting up a potential legal showdown.
A judicial overhaul has prompted many military reservists to avoid volunteer duty. Military leaders have privately warned that this might require scaling back operations.
Editors remain cautious about the use of artificial intelligence in reporting. But used responsibly, they say, it can free up local journalists while augmenting their coverage – for instance, with AI-produced summaries of city council meetings.
Bishkek’s Lenin District Court has ordered an examination of the language used in a video the government cited when it halted the operations of RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, saying it contains elements of inciting ethnic hatred and war propaganda, an allegation the broadcaster has rejected.
Imprisoned Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny has been placed in a punitive solitary confinement cell for the 12th time since mid-August, his Telegram channel said.
Estonia has declared a staff member of Russia’s Embassy in Tallinn persona non grata for “directly and actively undermining Estonia’s security and constitutional order, spreading propaganda that justifies Russia’s military action and causing divisions in Estonian society.”
Hong Kong’s ice hockey body has been accused by the city’s Sports Federation & Olympic Committee (SF&OC) to be “all talk and no action” over a national anthem blunder at an international competition. It added that the organisation had problems with its administration.
A digital artist who hid the names, ages and jail terms of convicted Hong Kong protesters in a SOGO mall video billboard installation says organisers have been forced to remove it.
Russia’s Justice Ministry has added blogger Ilya Varlamov and lawyer Pavel Chikov of the Agora legal defense organization to the “foreign agents” registry.
Press freedom groups have condemned the harassment and surveillance of local journalists, after an HKFP court reporter was followed from her home to her workplace for over an hour by two men with earpieces on Wednesday. The duo tailed the reporter during morning rush hour, despite efforts to board and alight different trains.
Al Jazeera released the first of four parts to their explosive documentary on corruption and looting in Zimbabwe yesterday. Titled ‘Gold Mafia’ the documentary exposes the dealings of some government officials, prophets, pastors, and businesspeople profiting from the illegal movement of gold. Reactions to the docu have been mixed.
Over the past few months, 42 activists have been charged with “domestic terrorism” under Georgia state law. Their acts of “terrorism”? Alleged property damage and trespassing while protesting. These prosecutions exemplify a highly problematic trend of the government — both state and federal — using domestic terrorism powers to punish dissent.
UK charity organisation Refugee Action Thursday reported that the UK’s asylum housing system is “cruel by design,” and outlined the poor conditions and systems of racialised segregation towards the asylum seekers.
A special House committee hearing on Thursday included testimonies from two Uyghur women detained by the Chinese government in “reeducation” camps. The U.S. joins a global effort to raise awareness of the mistreatment of the Uyghur community in China.
Ticketmaster is reportedly grappling with yet another class-action lawsuit – this time over the price of Drake tickets in the artist’s native Canada. Regional outlets including the Toronto Star just recently shed light upon the complaint, which represents the latest in a long line of cost-centered actions against the Live Nation-owned ticketing platform.
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator will narrow the focus of its probe into Microsoft Corp.’s plan to buy Activision Blizzard Inc. for $68.7 billion. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, disclosed the development today. Microsoft announced its plans to acquire Activision Blizzard early last year.
So far, established European Patent Office case law requires that, in order for the examiners to account for data submitted after filing a patent, it must be plausible from the application as filed, in combination with common general knowledge, that the technical effect was already achieved at the date on which the patent was filed.
Unified added 7 new PATROLL contests, with a $2,000 cash prize for each, seeking prior art on the list below. The patents are owned by Entropic Communications, an NPE and SoftBank subsidiary. The contests will all end on May 15, 2023. Please visit PATROLL for more information or click on each link below.
The Registrar of the Unified Patent Court has provided information on most commonly identified issues regarding the sunrise functionalities of the Court’s CMS.
On March 22, 2023, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 10,339,576, owned and asserted by Virtual Creative Artist, LLC. The ’576 patent is directed towards a process for creating and publishing media content on an electronic exchange.
It’s neither OK that Elvira and Scrooge are siblings nor that they are Donald’s parents (kind of contradicts Scrooges early appearances in Barks). It’s even less OK that they are both those things. That book came out in Swedish in 86 (two years after its original Italian publication), I saw it and always wanted to read it, but when I did get a chance to a few years later, in the later eighties, I was super weirded out and not happy. (The Swedish book also contained two Lockman/Strobl stories and they were pretty good.)
I have found myself more relaxed with certain aspects of my body the past few months.
I remember as a teen, it was basically normalized to be obsessed about your body in a way that doesn’t even make sense and that you hopefully, usually, grow out of; at least I did, gradually, but did most of my growing the past year or so, I think.
The playtest for the version of D&D that’s codenamed “D&D One” has Guidance and Resistance spells be post-hoc instead of pre-hoc and I thought that seemed great at first but through playtesting we’ve run into trouble. The more we use it, I’ve gone from “sure, that makes sense” to hating it, but my players are becoming more entrenched in loving it.
To me it feels like retconning and I’m not into it. Jarring and unfun.
I like fortune at the end and dislike “fortune in the middle” mechanics, like how you can retcon your attacks by spending points, and this is even worse since what you add retroactively is even more dice. It’s “fortune in the middle and then even more fortune”.
When 5e was being playtested, the proficiency bonus wasn’t a static +2, +3, +4, +5, or +6. It was a d4, d6, d8, d10 or d12. The character sheet was much simpler, too. You had your basic ability modifiers and then you would just note if you were proficient. So if you had +3 strength, you’d roll d20+3 if you weren’t proficient but if you were, you’d also toss on a d4 (at lower levels, and more at higher levels).
I love what RPG designers call “Fortune at the End”; making your decisions before the roll and then the roll shows you what happened. You have all kinds of ways to influence the roll but you do that first, and then there’s the showdown. Poker and roulette are similar in that regard. You think you’ve figured out when to hold’em and now it’s time for a prayer on the flop. I hate fighting in real life but these kinds of mechanics feel, to me, appropriate to how a good swashbuckling movie should feel. You’ve swung your sword or drawn back your bow and now all you can do is see how it landed.
This is contrasted with “Fortune in the Middle” or “Fortune in the Beginning”, where you roll your dice but then you get to fiddle endlessly with the result with points and chips and spends and this and that and the other. Legalized fudging. Not my jam. I want tension and release, not tension and hold-on-let-me-just-tweak-some-levers.
There’s a recent post by Lesogorov about SystemD-free distros that’s worth a read if this sort of thing interests you.
Around 2017 I started migrating away from using old crappy X86 desktops as home servers to a small army of Raspberry Pi’s. I immediately ran into a few SystemD related issues that somewhat soured my feelings towards it.
[...]
The heart of the issue is that SystemD was attempting to mount all disks before that disk had even finished spinning up, causing the mount to fail because the kernel didn’t even know the disk existed yet.
[...]
I’ve since found Void. I am extremely positive about Void. It’s not perfect, but it really is very good. I love that it uses Musl libc. It uses Runit for init and process supervision, which is crazy simple.
[...]
I’ve got Alpine in a VM for evaluation. I have to say, I’m totally impressed. I can see this replacing Arch as my development environment because it’s actually up to date (Void lags just enough to annoy me) and it is also Musl libc based. There are a couple things I’m not entirely happy with though. I don’t particularly care for BusyBox, as I’ve seen the code, and I’m also not entirely happy with the way packages are split.
[...]
This is not a great tendency. I’d point out that Unix was originally brought up in large part because Ken Thompson needed an OS to run his Space Travel video game on the PDP-7. A few collaborators, notably Dennis Ritchie, who were frustrated with how large Multics had grown, chipped in and it took off.
[...]
Would I recommend a non-systemD distro? Depends. If a person has a bit of experience Void makes a great server and a decent desktop. I actually think Alpine makes a great desktop, but you have to have some knowhow to bring it up. I wouldn’t recomment Artix.
It feels like the web has really changed a lot over the past decades, but innovation in web browser workflows has been stagnant by comparison. For the most part everyone is still just doing the address bar and horizontal tab list at the top of their screen, and it’s only been fairly recently that some browsers like Vivaldi and even Edge have started experimenting beyond that.
I gave Vivaldi a try yesterday and really liked it. I had it set up with a vertical tab bar on the left and a side panel with various bookmarks at the right, a setup that I think makes a lot of sense since I can sometimes end up with dozens of tabs. Hardly any websites make full use of the available screen width anyway. I almost stuck with Vivaldi, but a couple obscure bugs with keyboard shortcuts had me coming back to Firefox in the end.
“Retro-grouch” is a facetious term I believe was originally meant pejoratively to denote a bike geek out of step with the current trend in new bicycle technology. Now I see it laughingly and affectionately adopted by many folks passionate about steel all-terrain bicycles, practical commuter accoutrements, and resistance to keeping up with new, useless, expensive bike technology ‘innovations.’
I favor just this kind of riding for a few reasons. It values tried and true tools and technology. We don’t need to adopt hydraulic brakes, tubeless tires, and internal routing. These things are more expensive in the first place, and require new tools and specialized parts, and often expert level knowledge. Alternatively, classic bike setups can be understood reasonably by me, an amateur, through experimentation, how-to books and tutorials, and they use fairly universal swappable parts.
The main reason is I’m kind of tired of the amount of spam bots that keep signing up to my Gitea. The juice of self-hosting a public-access git forge, even locked down to prevent arbitrary repo creation, that juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.
One of my core principle to IT: Try to use different stuff. Don’t be afraid of the _weird_ things. In a lot of cases, the weirdness is your friend. Usually the weird is a deisgn or feature to solve a need that is not met by the mainstream. Even if not, there’s a lot to learn from the weird.
This is why I write web services in C++, investigate GNUnet, use a TLS library that’s not OpenSSL, maintains OpenBSD support for libraries, and so on. Maybe Gemini to a certain degree. See, I run into problems. A lot of them. I see certificates breaking, connection reset and even code that just don’t work on certain OS-es that is not used widely. But I also learned a lot from the process. The fact that OpenSSL is not fully compliant to the RFC, that opening a file is not always possible even if permission is correct.
One thing to know with houserules is that you’ve got to know when to walk away if the houserule is about a part of the game that’s not mainly under your purvey.
I proudly announce that I’ve released Gemtexter version `2.0.0`. What is Gemtexter? It’s my minimalist static site generator for Gemini Gemtext, HTML and Markdown written in GNU Bash.
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