Recently Framework excited everyone over their big DIY laptop upgrades, and now they're giving more detail on the Framework 13 Laptop with AMD Ryzen. They weren't able to originally reveal what AMD chips they would be using, but now they are.
The developers at Fedora are in the final stages of integrating Linux kernel 6.3 (just released last week) into Fedora, and they need interested Fedora users to help with some testing if they can. For those that are interested, the project has organized what it calls a “test week,” which will run from Sunday May 7 through Sunday May 14. If you’re a casual user who never works in a command line, this isn’t for you, but if you know your way around Linux — and you’re a Fedora user — this might be a way for you to do some good old-fashioned payback to the devs behind your Linux distribution of choice.
Sounds good. But how can you choose the perfect font? There are hundreds and thousands of options out there.
For starters, you can select a font optimized for technical documents or coding because those have good readability. Next, you can filter foss projects (if that matters to you) and check if those fonts scale well with high-resolution monitors (per your requirements).
Fret not; to give you a head start, we have picked some of the best fonts fit...
Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open source software in this series.
Some of the programs in this series are purely cosmetic, frivolous pieces of fun. Candy at their finest. But we also include some programs that aren’t purely decorative.
There’s a diverse range of programs included in this series. Programs such as eDEX-UI and Variety are actually highly practical programs. ASCIIQuarium has soothing and relaxing qualities for your desktop. Other programs included in this series (such as lolcat, cacafire) are included purely for their decorative qualities. And then there’s some really fun software that just raises a smile or two.
cbonsai is a bonsai tree generator, written in C using ncurses. It intelligently creates, colors, and positions a bonsai tree in your terminal.
Today, we will see one of the post installation steps in Fedora desktop. This brief guide explains how to enable minimize and maximize buttons in application windows in Fedora GNOME Workstation and Silverblue editions.
Think for a moment about what happened when you browsed to the current page. You either clicked on a link that you received via a newsletter, or on the link on the homepage of Tecmint.com and then were taken to this article.
In a few words, you (or actually your browser) sent an HTTP request to the web server that hosts this site, and the server sent back an HTTP response.
Well, the answer to the ‘why?’ question is quite simple: because I dual boot between MacOS and Fedora on my Mac Mini. This means in order to use the same pair of headphones on MacOS and Fedora, I need them to use the same key, so the headphones think they are always connected to the same machine.
Viewing low resolution images on the big screen looks blurry, right? Then it's time to introduce with Upscayl, which helps you to increase the resolution of the image which is powered by advanced AI models.
RubyMine is a popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Ruby and Rails development. If you are using Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 LTS, you can easily install RubyMine using the Snap package manager. In this article, we will discuss how to install RubyMine on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 LTS using the Snap method.
When it comes to audio players on Ubuntu, there is no shortage of options. However, one particular software stands out for its rich set of features, lightweight footprint, and compatibility with a wide range of audio formats: the QMMP player.
DeaDBeeF is a powerful, lightweight, and highly customizable music player designed for the discerning Ubuntu user who values a no-nonsense approach to their music collection. With its extensive range of features and compatibility with numerous audio formats, DeaDBeeF is the perfect solution for users who want to optimize their music listening experience on Ubuntu.
If you use Secure Shell to log into remote Linux servers throughout the day, you should consider using a config file to make your life easier. Here's how.
A while back I posted some miscellaneous notes on card games played by aliens. Dave Turner has written a response in the same mode, titled “Rarely seen game mechanics”. If you like my blog, you will probably enjoy this article of Dave's.
After a bunch of early testing builds, the developer of the free and open source tabletop sim Tabletop Club has announced the first stable release. While this is the first "official" release, it's only the beginning for the project. It's already quite playable, and easy for you and friends to jump into thanks to it not requiring an account, just a hosted room code you can send to friends.
Continuing my quest to have no free time ever, I have been checking out Soul Survivors that's now available in Early Access. It may be yet another (there's lots now) Vampire Survivor-like but that's not a bad thing at all. In fact, I'm actually rather enjoying Soul Survivors. Stride PR sent over an key and my early impression here is that it's really fun.
One for game developers here and anyone tinkering around with graphics APIs, as AMD has announced the next upgrade to their Render Pipeline Shaders SDK and now it has Linux support.
Another juicy milestone for Valve with the Steam Deck, as it now has over 9,000 games rated as either Verified or Playable.
A bit like a slightly creepier Pokemon Snap, the indie hit Penko Park from developer Ghostbutter has just released Native Linux support. Penko Park is a game about exploring an abandoned wildlife park. Armed with nothing but a camera, there's over 140 strange creatures to snap at your own pace.
We have been busy this past month! We released KDE Gear 23.04, which now contains most of the Plasma Mobile applications. The development of Plasma Shell based on Qt6 is progressing.
Want to help with the development of Plasma Mobile? We are desperately looking for new contributors, beginners are always welcome!
Take Plasma Mobile for a spin! Check out the device support for each distribution and find the version which will work on your phone.
Even if you do not have a compatible phone or tablet, you can also help us out with application development, as you can easily do that from a desktop!
View our documentation, and consider joining our Matrix channel, and let us know what you would like to work on!
Our issue tracker documentation also gives information on how and where to report issues.
The long delay before GNOME announced their search for a replacement suggests they may have had somebody else in mind. This would imply McGovern was pushed out and then the replacement candidate subsequently disappeared leaving GNOME empty handed.
The two month gap between McGovern leaving GNOME and starting at Ruby Central and his attempts to set up a consultancy web site, Tenterfell.com also suggest he didn't know exactly where he was going next.
The GNOME vacancy is still open. They are openly offering a salary of $150k and one interpretation of this figure is that salaries are rising and this simply isn't enough money to get a developer who is willing to suffer the politics of an open source organization while still keeping abreast of the technical work.
Both Neil McGovern and Molly de Blanc had been very active in discrediting Dr Richard Stallman. Github activity suggests they were doing that during GNOME working hours.
Moreover, McGovern presided over the decision to hire de Blanc. It looks like de Blanc had been romantically involved with McGovern's Debian/DebConf world. Independent members of the GNOME community were always uncomfortable with the perception that McGovern hired somebody's girlfriend. McGovern gave de Blanc a big title, Strategic Initiatives Manager but there is no sign of what she actually did.
Snapshot updates of openSUSE Tumbleweed were frequent and consistent this week while another development project seeks to get things moving.
A post to developers on the Factory mailing list titled openSUSE ALP: Call for Volunteers aims to gain contributors for rebuilding an openSUSE Leap 15 successor based on a forthcoming commercially available ALP distribution being pioneered by SUSE.
Banana Pi provides an Android 12 image for the BPI-W3 SBC as well as Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 images built with Armbian (no official support yet). You’ll find those along with the PDF schematics, datasheets, and a link to the Linux 5.10.110 BSP in the wiki.
The company sells the Banana Pi BPI-W3 SBC on Aliexpress for $162.10 plus shipping. It’s priced quite higher than the more popular Orange Pi 5 and Radxa ROCK 5B SBCs, but it does offer extra features especially compared to the low-cost Orange Pi 5 LTS board. Whether that matters depends on your application. Banana Pi is probably seeing the board as a way to promote its BPI-RK3588 core module to B2B customers.
DFRobot launched today an ESP32-based development board that can be used in computer vision and signal processing applications. The compact module also includes Li-on battery charging features.
There are a lot of things you can do with today’s powerful microcontrollers, but sometimes you really need a full embedded Linux setup. [Dylan Brophy] wanted to make it easier to add Linux to his own projects and designed the BeagleStamp.
For the last two months I have been on a contract to enhance Quinn, the popular Rust implementation of the QUIC protocol. I hope to write one or two articles about my work at a later moment1, but today I want to offer you a partial (and runnable!) introduction to QUIC by implementing the hangman game over the network.
The internet isn’t just about browsers. Browsers are a critical part of the human experience on the internet and will always be core to our work at Mozilla. But the internet is bigger than browsers — it’s every piece of content, app and experience on your device. Our mission will always be to make the internet better for everyone, and because of that, just like with browsers over the last quarter century, we need to show a better way forward in problematic areas over the next 25 years. And today, I’m thrilled to share a new area of experimentation for us — social.€
A group of leading artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. committed on Thursday to open their models to red-teaming at this year’s DEF CON hacking conference as part of a White House initiative to address the security risks posed by the rapidly advancing technology.
Barracuda advises that protection against malicious HTML- based attacks should take into account the entire email carrying HTML attachments, looking at all redirects and analyzing the content of the email for malicious intent.
On the “proportion of unique attacks” Barracuda says that if you compare the total number of malicious HTML detections to how many different (unique) files were detected, “it becomes clear that the growing volume of malicious files detected is not simply the result of a limited number of mass attacks, but the result of many different attacks each using specially crafted files.”
I am aware of seven ur-languages in software today. I’ll name them for a type specimen, the way a species in paleontology is named for a particular fossil that defines it and then other fossils are compared to the type specimen to determine their identity. The ur-languages are: [...]
Whenever you enter a URL into a system, it must be parsed and validated. It is a surprisingly challenging task: it may require hundreds of nanoseconds and possibly over a thousand cycles to parse a typical URL.
Turned out that writing application was quite easy. First version was just a bunch of “if” all over the place. Then I rewritten it to be more user friendly — now it uses “switch/case/default” schema so for each unknown nibble’s value simple “unknown” is printed. This allows to catch moments when either application needs updates due to architecture changes or when SoC does not follow the rules written in armarm.
Yesterday I wrote an article describing one of the ways traditional Lisp macros can be unhygienic even when they appear to be hygienic. Here’s a horrible solution to that.
Python is everywhere. A list of supersets, subsets, major implementations, and transpiled languages that borrow from Python.
My nickname is OrangoMango, but my real name is Paul Kocian, and I live in Italy. I started programming at the age of 13 and learned the basics of Python by building simple programs and, later on, my first GUI applications. I started with a simple game where the computer asks a few operations, and the user must calculate the result in the shortest time possible without getting any of these wrong. Once I learned more advanced things like OOP programming, SQLite, and the Tkinter module, I started building applications like a login interface and then my first game using the tkinter canvas: Pong. At this time, I loved very much building games and learning how games are built on a low level, so I started coding FlappyBird and LavaPlatformer. As I was very new at game development, the code was written really badly when I read it now. At the age of 14, I started coding in Java, and a year later, I also started using the JavaFX framework. I started building very simple GUI apps and then games. I also joined the GMTK game jam in 2022. Now I’m 16 and try to further extend my experience with apps like a MySQL user interface and games like TrisGame, a basic multiplayer game, Projectile, and FoodDice.
I think Lucinda Williams came into my life through an act of fate: My dad had picked up a CD of her 2003 album, World Without Tears, at a garage sale, and it soon became one of the few that lived in the glove compartment of the family minivan. For years, that CD played on repeat, and Williams’s doleful, sultry wail would carry us through high mountains and low deserts, through tired silences and back-seat brawls.1
It took recovering from my preteen antagonism to fully admit the sheer prowess and sonic versatility of those songs, as well as those that appear on Williams’s 13 other albums, for that matter. Because her music blends the ambience of blues with the candid narratives of country and the cool fervor of rock, it can accommodate any mood, any landscape.2
The military fetish soaks into the traditional cybersecurity discourse and doesn’t help our reputation as bellicose obstructionists. In my new book, I shun metaphors of warfare in violence in favor of nature, nurturing, and nourishing to vanquish these aggressive tendencies.
But I also recognize that cybersecurity humans are often stubborn and so if they love Sun Tzu quotes, then I’ll show them how much their beloved would scorn traditional cybersecurity programs.
Whether they intend it or not, many security leaders are the “weak” generals Sun Tzu disdained, the wimpish princes he spoonfed “Baby’s First Warfare Advice.” When we obstruct our organization, we are “the bad guys,” the weak-willed generals who strip their own city of liveliness and liberty as defense against an approaching foe.
Google co-founder Larry Page can be served with court papers related to a case over Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. The U.S. Virgin Islands filed a civil lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase, where Epstein was a longtime customer, claiming the bank knew of his sex trafficking of numerous women.
The Virgin Islands previously issued subpoenas to Page's fellow Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as well as former Disney executive Michael Ovitz, Hyatt Hotels executive chairman Thomas Pritzker and Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire real estate investor.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is due to be deposed in the case in late May.
The medical examiner determined that Neely was killed by the chokehold, and his death has been ruled a homicide.
When social scientists talk about theory-building, they are using the word theory somewhat loosely. You may want to read it as knowledge-creation or abstraction-design instead. This should be of interest to software engineers!
Theory-building is often described as an inductive process11 Social Science Research: Principles, Methods, and Practices; Bhattacherjee; 2012. Available online.. It’s not – it’s abductive. What’s the difference? Let’s spend five minutes learning about applying science to software engineering – by first venturing into inference, and then coming back to software engineering.
As the White House on Thursday unveiled a plan meant to promote "responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence," a leading U.S. consumer advocate added his voice to the growing number of experts calling for a moratorium on the development and deployment of advanced AI technology.
On 7 October 2022, the United States government€ implemented€ export controls in an effort to hinder the development of China’s semiconductor industry. An expert on the subject€ told€ the€ Financial Times, ‘The whole point of the policy is to kneecap China’s AI [Artificial Intelligence] and HPC [High Performance Computing] efforts’.
It’s been a running battle in some quarters for years, whether analog sensor processing is better than digital. Proponents of digital are sometimes driven by lack of familiarity with analog circuitry, while analog die-hards point to delays and software crashes in microcontrollers. We’d probably toe the line that a mixture of the two skills is best, but [paul] has gone full-on for the analog side with his position and limit sensor for a remote telescope. The ‘scope had only one control wire carrying a digital signal, so how was he to get extra information down it? The solution was to overlay a DC voltage, and use a summing network composed of a series of op-amps to encode position and limit data as voltage.
What do you do with a Hue smart lightbulb? Well, if you are [Chris Greening], you take it apart and get hacking. If you ever wondered what’s inside, the teardown is pretty good, and you can also watch the video below. The potting compound, however, makes a mess.
While it’s true that keycap colorways abound these days, one can’t always find exactly what one is looking for. And once found, the set is often either prohibitively expensive, or it doesn’t come in the desired layout, or both. So, why not color your own keycaps?
Marie, a 24-year-old in the Bay Area, had her abortion while lying on her couch and scrolling on her iPhone. In between work shifts as a barista and college classes, Marie had googled “abortion” and ended up on the page of an online clinic that provides telehealth medication abortions—in this case Choix Health. Like many telehealth patients, she looked through social media and online reviews, and decided she could trust them. Rather than schedule an appointment at one of the overwhelmed abortion clinics across the country, and have to request time off work, take a long drive, and pass through a barricade of angry protesters, Marie texted with a nurse from the privacy of her home. After the nurse took her information to determine if Marie was a good candidate for a medication abortion, the clinic mailed the pills to her house. She describes her experience as easy, private, and quick, and she would recommend it to others.
“I order to fully recover, we must first recover the society that has made us sick.”
It seems safe to assume that most people, even those working in public health, don’t remember the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration. That’s where World Health Organization member states endorsed a goal of “health care for all by the year 2000,” and tied that aim to a set of objectives that, at least back then, seemed feasible to accomplish.
The NotPetya cyberattack didn’t involve military action and can’t be excluded from coverage under a warlike-act exclusion, New Jersey appellate division judges said in a decision released on Monday (Tuesday, Australian time).
The ransomware attack, attributed to the Royal ransomware group, struck the city on Wednesday morning, with local reports suggesting that the city was still struggling to respond to the attack today. The attack knocked offline city websites and services, but notable among them was the city’s 911 dispatch service, causing both local police and firefighters to revert to manual dispatching.
Other systems affected include those dealing with jail intakes and offense reports. The city’s court system was also knocked offline, causing jury trials to be canceled until further notice.
The department’s computer-assisted dispatch system is in the process of being brought back online, and calls are still being dispatched, the chief said. The system used by police for offense reports and jail intake is also affected, prompting personnel to conduct those tasks manually, García said.
The Dallas Police Department’s website, internal share drives and applications for personnel matters are also affected, according to the chief.
The ransomware attack, which was detected Wednesday morning, disrupted a number of servers of city services, including the Dallas Police Department website and the public library where online materials are currently unavailable.
There are some differences, of course. Like FinOps, where you no longer have to be a forensic accountant to understand your bill or a bulldog to guard against it running wild, if you own your hardware! But then that does also entail occasionally dealing with an alert that a disk has gone bad, and asking your white-glove service at the data center to change it.
But in the grand scheme of things, these are minor differences. It really shouldn't take long to teach someone who's proficient in the rental clouds how to run the same stack on owned hardware. (It surely must be an easier learning curve than getting up to speed with Kubernetes!)
The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too. What a win!
There are drone simulators out there designed for drone racing. Then there are simulators designed for consumer drones. But what about drone simulators designed to improve pilot skills for professional applications?
Enter Zephyr Drone Simulator, a drone pilot training simulator developed by the team at Little Arms Studios, a Virginia-based software company specializing specifically in drone simulation software. And while the software is used in high schools, its user base extends to serious, professional applications in higher education, public safety, business and workforce development, and even the United States Air Force.
The singer announced a 50/50 royalty split with anyone who released an AI-generated music track featuring her voice. Then she took that a step further by releasing the tools to help make it happen with her new Elf.Tech project. It allows users to upload or record a cappella recordings that will be transformed into a GrimesAI version of your vocal utilizing the artists sound.
“This is all a beta test so it may be imperfect at first,” Grimes wrote on Twitter when announcing the new tech. “But! Let’s try this out!”
The U.S. government this week put a $10 million bounty on the head of a Russian man who for the past 18 years operated Try2Check, one of the cybercrime underground’s most trusted services for checking the validity of stolen credit card data. U.S. authorities say 43-year-old Denis Kulkov‘s card-checking service made him at least $18 million, which he used to buy a Ferrari, Land Rover, and other luxury items.
Never mind the Supreme Court. Never mind the case law finding warrantless phone tracking not quite constitutional. Never mind the self-imposed restrictions enacted by federal law enforcement agencies that place warrant requirements on real-time location tracking or the federal court decisions codifying these voluntary efforts.
Passkeys offer a safer [sic] alternative to passwords and texted confirmation codes. Users won't ever see them directly; instead, an online service like Gmail will use them to communicate directly with a trusted device such as your phone or computer to log you in.
On the one hand, something has to be done. Oxford can't support the vehicle traffic it experiences today, and the amount of traffic is climbing. On the other hand, the protesters worried that the automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system would just be the start, and that the British state would eventually use its ubiquitous network of traffic cameras as a system of totalitarian control.
And – as the title of the article has it – the swivel-eyed loons have a point. The UK is a snooper's paradise. What guns are to America, CCTVs are to Britain. The country pioneered the use of ubiquitous "security" cameras, even as successive governments passed laws to suspend habeas corpus, criminalize literary works that "glorify" terrorism, created a nationwide system of curfews, and impose bizarre ASBO orders for "anti-social behavior."
There's nothing wrong with asking questions about how a grid of ubiquitous surveillance cameras can be abused, especially not in England – indeed, these are questions that should have been asked many years ago.
As a new world order takes shape before our eyes, the author, in a recent lecture, considers how Europe can best make use of its position on the eastern edge of the Atlantic world and the western edge of Eurasia.
The global infrastructure of the American military empire must be mapped before it can be properly dismantled. Meet the person who is doing just that.
By David Swanson / World BEYOND War Can you test yourself with this quick quiz? A picture can be worth a trillion words — or a couple of trillion dollars when it’s a picture of military spending. We’ve just published a new collection of maps for€ Mapping Militarism 2023.
The world is changing. In fact, it has been undergoing seismic change that long preceded the Russian-Ukraine war, and the recent U.S.-Chinese tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
At least 21 Russian cities have canceled their May 9 Victory Day parades, according to the independent outlet Verstka.
Russian troops attacked multiple Ukrainian regions with kamikaze drones on Wednesday night, Ukraine’s Air Force Command reported on Thursday.
A drone fired on the Ilsky oil refinery in Russia’s Krasnodar region on Wednesday night, causing a fire to break out, state media reported on Thursday.
The jury delivered guilty verdicts for Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of Proud Boys; Ethan Nordean, who was the leader on the ground in Washington; Zachary Rehl, a top Proud Boy from Philadelphia; and Joseph Biggs, one of the best known militants, with a big social media following.
After several hours of additional deliberation, the jury found a fifth Proud Boy, Dominic Pezzola, who smashed out a window at the Capitol, not guilty of the sedition charge. However, all five defendants were found guilty of secondary charges, including obstructing Congress.
Analysis of a related file revealed that in addition to 57 percent of 1,000 pieces of flagged content being from Islamic texts, approximately nine percent were violent material including crimes committed by members of the Islamic State (ISIS) and four percent called for violence or urged jihad. Twenty-eight percent of the flagged content could not be identified.
The EU also described the situation as a "hybrid attack," and suspected an attempt to destabilize the bloc. Many more migrants were also crossing from Belarus to Poland and Latvia. The accusation was that people from third countries were being lured to Belarus in order to get across the external border into the EU — and that the Belarusian state was helping them do it.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned this week that Afghanistan continues to face the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today, with a two-day summit in Doha ending without formal recognition of the Taliban government that has ruled the country since August 2021. Since their return to power, the Taliban have cracked down on women’s rights, including restricting access to education and banning women from working with international aid groups. Poverty has skyrocketed in Afghanistan as years of conflict, corruption and international sanctions have battered the economy. We speak with Farzana Elham Kochai, a women’s rights activist who was elected to the Afghan Parliament in 2019 before fleeing the country for safety, and Jumana Abo Oxa, who works with the Greek refugee project Elpida Home helping Afghan women lawmakers find refuge in other countries.
Most recently, the Office of the National Cyber Director, a two-year-old office leading the Biden Administration’s cyber agenda, released the much-anticipated National Cybersecurity Strategy, an astonishing document with a vision of securing “the full benefits of a safe and secure digital ecosystem for all Americans.” This strategy, built on the recent cyber executive orders out of the Biden administration, is an ambitious move by the White House to stay ahead of the curve on cyberdefense, seeking to both prevent cybercrime and actively disrupt criminal operations.
The Turkish military uses its drones at home and abroad in violation of international law, and foreign buyers also follow this practice. The country’s drone industry is aiming higher.
His remarks echoed international concerns, which have mounted over the past months, about Tehran's enriching uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels. Experts have said that the Islamic Republic has enough fuel to build several atomic bombs if it chooses.
The former chairman of the Proud Boys was among four members of the white nationalist and misogynist group convicted on Thursday of seditious conspiracy for planning and carrying out the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The members now face a maximum prison sentence of 20 years and numerous potential fines.
A man was choked to death on the F train in New York City this week. The victim, who appeared to be homeless, was allegedly being “hostile and erratic” on the subway, but he wasn’t being violent. He said that he was hungry and thirsty, and that he was prepared to die. Another man, whom reports have identified as a former Marine, put him in a choke hold and killed him. The murder happened in broad view of the other passengers and was captured on video. The alleged assailant was briefly questioned by police, then released. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says the investigation is “ongoing.” On Wednesday, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide, but no charges have been filed as of this writing.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among numerous progressives on Wednesday who expressed anger and disgust at the killing of Jordan Neely, an unhoused 30-year-old Black man who was choked to death by a fellow passenger on the New York City subway earlier this week.
Not your grandfather’s military-industrial complex.
The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it’s consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.
Hey China, quit threatening us! We’ll kick your ass.
In his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy reassured Americans that the decline the United States was facing after a century of international dominance was “relative and not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.”
Shouting obscenities and standing in front of rows of dead and bloodied bodies, Wagner Group paramilitary cartel head Evgeny Prigozhin delivered his boldest challenge yet to Russia’s military leaders, directly addressing Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and the country’s most senior general, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, blaming them and Russia’s elites generally for setbacks in Bakhmut (where Wagner Group has been fighting at heavy costs for months). In a graphic video uploaded to Telegram, Prigozhin says repeatedly that 70 percent of his mercenary group’s ammo needs have not been supplied: [...]
Chechnya head Ramzan Kadyrov wrote on his personal Telegram channel that Russia “needs to respond” to the organizers of yesterday’s drone attack on the Kremlin, but “not today, not tomorrow.”€
In Ankara, a scuffle broke out between members of the Russian and Ukrainian delegations during the Parliamentary Assembly of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (PABSEC).
On May 4, Moscow residents discovered that GPS services are malfunctioning in the city, according to Telegram channels Baza and Ateo Breaking. State broadcaster RBC reported that Russian Internet giant Yandex confirmed problems with GPS.
On the night of May 3, two drones attacked Vladimir Putin’s residence at the Kremlin. The Russian president himself wasn’t in the palace at the time, according to his spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Who organized the attack is unclear; the Russian authorities were quick to blame Ukraine, while Kyiv denied its involvement, suggesting the episode could be a false flag operation by Russia itself. Meduza spoke with political scientist Kirill Shamiev, a civil-military relations researcher and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, about who stands to benefit from the attack and what consequences it’s likely to have.
At the opening of his talk on “Secret Government Bunkers,” historian Dmitry Yurkov warned his audience that its provocative title wasn’t exactly true. “These bunkers are obviously no longer secret,” he said, “otherwise, I wouldn’t be sitting in front of you — but instead lying face down, in handcuffs, with my hands behind my head.” “We only deal with declassified documents,” he explained. Yurkov, founder of the Moscow-based Museum of Modern Fortification, gave his talk at the museum’s underground screening room “Bunker 703” on April 18, 2021. The talk was later uploaded to the museum’s YouTube Channel, “Underground Moscow.” Ten months later, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s censorship authority, attempted to block the video. In correspondence with YouTube’s legal support service, the agency claimed that Yurkov’s talk disclosed state secrets, citing a court decision.
A judge in California has dismissed a seven-year $100 million lawsuit against Greenpeace USA that threatened the group’s existence. Canadian logging giant Resolute Forest Products sued Greenpeace in the United States and Canada for defamation after the group exposed the company’s irresponsible practices, part of a pattern of corporations attempting to use the burdens of the legal process to intimidate, exhaust and censor activists. Known as SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) lawsuits, they are increasingly being used by the rich and powerful to silence critics. We are joined by Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace USA, to discuss the organization’s legal victory, as well as the continued work of advocates to pass anti-SLAPP legislation and promote free speech. “We took on this fight not just for Greenpeace, but for everyone who dares speak truth to power, and we knew we had to win this both in the courtroom and for the movement,” says Padmanabha.
The identity of "Satoshi Nakamoto" has inspired endless speculation, not to mention lawsuits. One person who was undoubtedly close to Nakamoto was the late Hal Finney; the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction. He died of ALS on 28th 2014. On 13th December 2022 someone sent Martin Shkreli a message signed with the private key for the wallet Hal Finney used in that first transaction. The signature is valid, and the message contents are "This Transaction was made by Paul Leroux to Hal Finney on January 12, 2009". This raises a number of questions, apart from "why Martin Shrekli?"
Although generally hydrogen is only mentioned within the context of transportation and energy storage, by far the most useful applications are found in industrial applications, including for the chemical industry, the manufacturing of steel, as well as that of methanol and fertilizer. This is illustrated by how today most of all hydrogen produced today is used for these industrial applications, as well as for applications such as cooling turbo generators, with demand for hydrogen in these applications rapidly increasing.
A coalition of climate groups this week called out the Biden administration's support for the partially completed Mountain Valley Pipeline, highlighting how its ongoing construction and potential operation threaten "the well-being of people, endangered species, streams, rivers, farms, national forests, and the planet."
The British oil behemoth Shell reported a record $9.6 billion in first-quarter profits on Thursday and announced $4 billion in stock buybacks, prompting fury from environmentalists and progressive lawmakers who say the fossil fuel industry's profiteering is grotesque amid a worsening climate emergency and cost-of-living crises across Europe.
Decrying the "national disgrace" of poverty wages in the world's richest country, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation that would raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over a period of five years.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday called for a 32-hour workweek with no pay cuts for U.S. employees, pointing to the overwhelmingly positive results in nations that have recently experimented with or enacted shorter workweeks.
A working paper unveiled this week by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley shows that large minimum wage increases can have positive effects on both earnings and employment, countering the notion pushed by corporate lobbying groups that significant wage hikes are job killers.
Mayor of Odesa Gennadiy Trukhanov has been arrested on charges of embezzling more than 92 million hryvnias (around $2.5 million), reports Ukraine’s Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecution (SAP) office.
After Richard Branson delivered some inspiring words from his seat aboard SpaceShipTwo Unity, he unbuckled himself and started to float around the vehicle’s cabin along with three other Virgin Galactic employees. Reaching an apogee of 86 kilometers (53 miles), the passengers enjoyed four minutes of weightlessness during the July 2021 flight that was live-streamed over the Internet to an audience of millions. After years of delays, SpaceShipTwo had finally demonstrated it was capable of taking paying customers to the edge of space. As far as victories go — it was pretty impressive.
A new report by Amnesty International documents how the Israeli government is using an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and control their movements. The findings are part of “Automated Apartheid,” which reveals an ever-growing surveillance network of cameras in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and in East Jerusalem — two places in the Occupied Territories where Israeli settlements are expanding within Palestinian areas. “Surveillance has been ramping up as illegal settler activity has also been ramping up,” says Amnesty researcher Matt Mahmoudi, who adds that the surveillance technology is part of an overall coercive structure used against Palestinians by Israel. “Effectively, facial recognition is augmenting, reinforcing, entrenching aspects of apartheid.”
Today, the European Commission recommended measures to fight “livestream piracy”. The text also advocates “blocking injunctions” targeted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including “dynamic” blocking injunctions that would allow industry to add new blocking targets without judicial review. The recommendation follows up on the European Parliaments draft resolution in 2021, which called for stricter measures against unauthorised livestreams of sports events. However, such radical measures would result in over-blocking and fails to address the real cause of using unauthorised live streams, argues MEP Patrick Breyer, who was a shadow rapporteur for the 2021 JURI report and voted against the text.
The United Auto Workers is withholding its endorsement of U.S. President Joe Biden in the early stages of the 2024 race in an attempt to extract concessions that would ensure the nascent transition to all-electric vehicles benefits labor as well as the environment.
The National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center of China and local infosec outfit 360 Total Security have conducted an investigation called "The Matrix" that found the CIA conducts offensive cyber ops, and labelled the United States an "Empire of Hacking".
The two orgs have been good enough to publish the first part of their work, titled Empire of Hacking: The US Central Intelligence Agency – Part I.
On Friday, I announced my intention to give away some Debian domains to help increase diversity of voices in the Debian Community.
For the last three years, I’ve written at length about the EARN IT Act. Now it’s back yet again. It has all the same problems as before. So I’m making sure Congress can’t ignore them.
Previously introduced in 2020 and 2022, EARN IT was recently reintroduced for the third time in the Senate and the House. The 2023 bill language is virtually unchanged from the 2022 version. (The two small changes to the bill are interesting ones, though, and I discussed them on a recent episode of the Moderated Content podcast hosted by two of my Stanford colleagues.)
I’ve repeatedly highlighted the threats EARN IT poses to encryption, privacy, and online speech, all without guaranteeing it would actually make children safer online. In particular, I’ve written about the Fourth Amendment problems with both the 2020 and 2022 versions of the bill. Because the 2023 version is just like last year’s, that problem hasn’t gone away.
One year ago, all 50 states and the District of Columbia announced a $141 million settlement with Intuit, the maker of TurboTax. The investigation, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, centered on how the company had steered customers into paying for tax preparation even though they qualified for a free government program. The attorney general said the probe was sparked by ProPublica’s reporting in 2019.
In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden on Thursday said he will use his authority as chair of the Senate Finance Committee to get answers from Republican megadonor Harlan Crow about his financial ties to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Documents obtained by ProPublica and published Thursday reveal that billionaire real estate tycoon Harlan Crow paid tens of thousands of dollars for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' grandnephew to attend a pair of elite private schools.
Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow paid tuition for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew for two years at two private boarding schools, according to a statement released Thursday by a longtime friend of Thomas’.
The statement came in response to a ProPublica story that disclosed Crow had paid the fees at two schools for Mark Martin, a relative who Thomas had legal guardianship of and said he was raising “as a son.” Thomas did not include the payments in the financial disclosures he is required to file each year.
The New Europe Observation network pushes its propaganda differently from other China-based troll networks, which often use bulk-spam techniques. Instead, it follows the kinds of tactics used by Russia’s Internet Research Agency troll farm. The actors behind New Europe Observation tried to hire astroturf protesters for offline demonstrations, registered a company in London, partnered with a Ugandan NGO, and reached out to native speakers of English, Russian, and other languages to write content for their phony outlets.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its Press Freedom Index 2023 annual report on Wednesday to mark World Press Freedom Day.
The index ranks countries on the press freedom environment for journalists. Of the 180 countries included in the ranking, 70% were branded as "bad."
Germany, although still considered "satisfactory," fell five spots in the ranking, down to 21st place, due to an increase in attacks on journalists.
The report focused its most dire warnings on the propagation of misinformation, made easier by the development of advanced technologies.
Several bluecheck Twitter accounts and a YouTube channel spread misinformation about heightened nuclear threats online last night, saying that Russian military jets were being armed with nuclear payloads aimed at Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
Unfounded speculation and blatant lies about global politics and war zones are common on social media, but are even more reckless given the volatile conflict between Russia and Ukraine and Twitter’s eroded moderations policies and new Twitter Blue scheme, where any bad actor can pay for the same verification that used to be reserved for legitimate news organizations.
A few weeks ago I wrote about an interview that Substack CEO Chris Best did about his company’s new offering, Substack Notes, and his unwillingness to answer questions about specific content moderation hypotheticals. As I said at the time, the worst part was Best’s unwillingness to just own up to what he was saying were the site’s content moderation plans, which was that they would be quite open to hosting the speech of almost anyone, no matter how terrible. That’s a decision that you can make (in the US at least), but if you’re going to do that, you have to be willing to own the decision that you’re making and be clear about it, which Best was unwilling to do.
As the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee considered a series of bills on Thursday, the ACLU and other digital rights advocates warned against federal legislation that would promote censorship, disincentivize protecting users with strong encryption, and expand law enforcement access to personal data.
In response to the Russian media crackdown, Helsingin Sanomat began publishing many of its own stories about Ukraine in the Russian language. It didn't take long for Russia to catch on and restrict access to their website, Mukka said.
"Without any tricks, you can't access our website there in Russia. It's closed by the authorities," he said. "But we found that online games … are still available and no one has banned them. So why don't we try that channel? And it seems to work. At least we hope so."
Back in 2001, Edward Said had noted that the acrimonious debate surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was never really about its literary attributes but about the literary treatment of a topic that exacerbated religious passions. Said’s observations remained valid as Rushdie suffered a near fatal attack at the hands of a young bigot in August 2022. Given Rushdie’s narrow escape, his triumphant return with Victory City has rightly renewed the debate over censorship and literary freedom.
The 40-year-old said the torture only stopped when he agreed to record a video pledging to stop criticizing the powerful Pakistani military and the pro-government militants that are allegedly on its payroll.
Wazir blamed the state-backed militants, locally known as the “good Taliban,” for his April 19 abduction. These militants are mostly former members of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) extremist group, which have been dubbed the “bad Taliban” by the authorities. The TTP has waged a deadly insurgency against Islamabad for years.
As president of the Missouri Library Association, she's currently in a bit of a panic over strict new rules that go into effect May 30 and could deny state funding to libraries over books deemed inappropriate for young readers. Missouri is one of a growing number of places where government funding is being deployed as the newest weapon in the fight over books.
Anyone raising kids in Denmark will likely be familiar with Onkel Reje, the bearded, heavy rock-loving pirate who dazzles children and adults alike.
But, barring reruns, the cheeky red-cheeked favourite won’t feature on the national broadcaster’s kids channel DR Ramasjang anytime in the near future.
The actor behind the character, Mads Geertsen, has gone on sick leave after enduring a spate of venomous abuse and threats on social media.
A Turkish court ruled on Wednesday handed pop singer Gulsen a 10-month suspended sentence after convicting her of "inciting hatred and enmity" over a joke about Turkey's religious schools.
Gulsen, whose full name is Gulsen Colakoglu, was jailed in August last year and later placed under house arrest when she quipped that the "perversion" of one of her musicians came from attending a religious school.
Gulsen made the comment on stage months earlier, but action was only taken when a video of it was republished by a pro-government daily in August, causing an uproar within in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP).
China has been rigorously barring Tibetan writers, Buddhist monks and other influential people from spreading religious content online without prior approval, sources told Radio Free Asia.
The clampdown, based on a March 2022 regulation, gives authorities additional power to restrict online content that the ruling Communist Party considers damaging and is yet another example of how China has ramped up restrictions on expression, religion and culture in the western Tibet Autonomous Region.
Moscow’s Simonovsky District Court fined the Main Radio Frequency Center (MRFC), an agency overseen by Russia’s federal censorship authority Roskomnadzor, for an employee data leak, Interfax reports. The agency was fined 30,000 rubles (about $383).
The St. Petersburg authorities have arrested two teenagers suspected of murdering a 13-year-old girl. On May 3, the Investigative Committee reported having taken them into custody. According to the news media, the suspects are a 16-year-old named Ilya T. and his 15-year-old friend Anfisa R.
Russia’s Investigative Committee has launched a criminal case in connection with a theatrical production of Svetlana Petriychuk’s prize-winning play “Finist the Bright Falcon.” The production was directed by Zhenya Berkovich, a member of the Seventh Studio, a theater project founded by Kirill Serebrennikov.
"If this is a sign of things to come on Twitter, we might soon see even more of a rapid retreat by media organizations and other brands that don't think it's worth the risk," said Emily Bell, a professor at Columbia Journalism School who studies social media. "It's really an extraordinary threat to make."
Civil liberties defenders on Wednesday decried yet another bill passed by Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature attacking academic freedom, while calling on Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to take the unlikely step of vetoing the measure.
The prosecutor-general, Ivan Geshev, however, went on the offensive on March 16, accusing journalists of conspiring with criminals, business owners, and politicians to plot against him and high-ranking officials at the Interior Ministry. On May 1, Geshev escaped what media described as a car bombing, although many in Bulgaria, including Tchobanov, questioned details of the incident and its timing.
For the United States government, World Press Freedom Day is an opportunity to further project an image of the U.S. as a supposed champion of journalism and human rights. But that projection is muddied greatly by the prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The following article was made possible by paid subscribers of Shadowproof’s Dissenter Newsletter. Support independent journalism on whistleblowers and press freedom and become a subscriber with this€ limited offer for World Press Freedom Week.On World Press Freedom Day, the United States State Department abandoned its policy of not commenting on the case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and essentially backed the prosecution against him.Matthew Lee of the Associated Press€ asked€ State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel “whether or not the State Department regards Julian Assange as a journalist who would be covered by the ideas embodied in World Press Freedom Day.”“I’m not asking for the [U.S. Justice Department point of view. I’m asking for what the State Department thinks,” Lee said.It was not the first time Lee had posed this question. In 2021, on World Press Freedom Day, Lee€ asked€ if President Joe Biden’s administration was looking into the Assange case, “his detention, his extradition, the request for extradition here, the charges against him?”“I realize you can’t speak for DOJ, but from the State Department’s perspective, is the current position still – does that still hold? Do you believe that Mr. Assange is a journalist?” Lee added. “And given the importance you place on accurate and factual information being disseminated, do you believe that the information that was published based on the U.S. government documents that he obtained and put out was either unfactual or inaccurate?”Jalina Porter, who was a spokesperson for the State Department, avoided the question. “So to your specific on Julian Assange, we’ll have to get back to you on that.”
But now, with Biden going around repeatedly declaring that “journalism is not a crime,” Patel read a prepared response.“The State Department thinks that Mr. Assange has been charged with serious criminal conduct in the United States, in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in our nation’s history,” Patel declared. “His actions risked serious harm to U.S. national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”Patel continued, “It put named human sources to grave and imminent risk and risk of serious physical harm and arbitrary detention. So it does not matter how we categorize any person, but we view this as something, he’s been charged with serious criminal conduct.”
Some sense a profound change in what this means for the news industry. AI “is going to change journalism more in the next three years than journalism has changed in the last 30 years”, predicts David Caswell of BBC News. By remixing information from across the [Internet], generative models are “messing with the fundamental unit of journalism”: the article. Instead of a single first draft of history, Mr Caswell says, the news may become “a sort of ‘soup’ of language that is experienced differently by different people”.
It was almost time for school pickup when Paul’s mom saw the text on the classroom messaging app: Paul — her 7-year-old — “ended up running out of class today and it escalated rather quickly.” Someone at the school had called 911. Paul’s parents could contact the main office for more information, the message read.
Paul’s mom remembers the physical feeling of dread, like ice under her skin. Paul — that’s his middle name — has a neurological disorder. He loves to cuddle with his mom and help take care of his baby sister, and he’s wild about Greek mythology. Like a lot of kids with developmental disabilities, he also has very big tantrums, hitting, spitting and throwing things when he gets upset. Since the end of first grade, he’s been in a special public school classroom in Brooklyn that integrates disabled and nondisabled kids.
Some know the late Harry Belafonte for his genre-jumping music and silky baritone voice, epitomized in his classic 1956 album Calypso. Others swoon over his performances in films like the 1954 musical Carmen Jones.
According to Ukraine’s National Information Bureau, as of the start of May 2023, more than 19,000 Ukrainian children have been deported from occupied territories since the start of the full-scale war. So far, only 364 of these minors have been returned to their parents. In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged complicity in the illegal deportations of children, which the court has recognized as a war crime. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) also says the documented evidence of the deportations “matches with the international definition of genocide.” The Russian authorities, meanwhile, have claimed that they’re not deporting Ukrainian children but “evacuating” them from the conflict zone for their own safety. In a new article, the Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda laid out in detail how these deportations work and how the Russian government attempts to indoctrinate deported children into hating Ukraine. In English, Meduza summarizes the report’s main points.
If cops screw up enough, they may get blacklisted by prosecutors. These lists — known as “Brady” or “Giglio” lists (depending on jurisdiction) — inform prosecutors that they may not want to ask these officers to testify due to their long histories of misconduct.
Actual data about life and death in jails is not enough to move New York’s governor, but the sensationalism about crime is enough.
The conditions that caused this strike (the first by the WGA since the 2007–08 walkout) have been percolating for years. While overall production budgets have risen sharply, writer pay has declined by 4 percent over the past decade—23 percent when adjusted for inflation. The shift of film and television to streaming has meant lower residuals (the money writers get paid when their shows are re-aired) and shorter seasons. The proliferation of so-called “mini-rooms”—where small writing staffs often work on a show before it is green-lighted—has many writers taking short-term jobs for less than their established rate. Nearly 50 percent of writers are working for the minimum salary, compared to 33 percent 10 years ago. To paraphrase Chris Rock, the studios would love to pay us even less, but they’re not legally allowed to. And people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQIA community are impacted the most.
What makes this so frustrating is that the money for what we’re asking is readily available. Implementing the WGA proposals would net total yearly gains of $429 million for 20,000 writers. Netflix, Paramount, Comcast, Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros reported a total of $28–30 billion in operating profit each year from 2017–21. In 2022 alone, eight Hollywood CEOs pocketed $773 million between them.
VIP+ has conducted an analysis of the leading U.S. TV and streaming entertainment companies to assess how reliant they are on scripted content, which is most vulnerable to being disrupted by a strike. We examined the volume of scripted comedy and drama the companies program versus more secure unscripted genres, including documentaries, true crime, reality, pop culture and lifestyle.
We speak with Jumana Abo Oxa, project manager at the Greek refugee project, Elpida Home, who is in Washington, D.C., where she is meeting with Biden administration officials and lawmakers in an effort to seek help for 82 families, including many women parliamentarians, who evacuated from Afghanistan but have been stuck in Greece for over a year and a half.
One year after New York’s HALT Solitary Confinement Act took effect, incarcerated people and advocates have filed suit against the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) for failing to comply with the law. This story was published with Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group that investigates, documents, and disseminates information on the use of solitary confinement in US prisons and jails.
It seems like every day this week a new bill has been introduced in Congress with the grandstanding politicians behind the bill insisting that it’s necessary to protect the children online. It seems like no elected official wants to be left behind on this particular moral panic train. The latest, from Senators Ed Markey and Bill Cassidy is being called COPPA 2.0 in that it updates the original Children’s Online Privacy Protect Act, which was passed in 1998.
In the first instalment of this series, I mentioned that there were three dramatic moments of change in Canadian history before the cataclysmic event of prolonged European contact. The first was the development of culturally sophisticated hierarchical societies on the west coast. Next came a series of migrations in the Canadian arctic, which (by the 13th century) resolved itself with the Inuit holding sway in the far north.
The final development that we’ll focus on this time is perhaps the most important—both because it sparked truly revolutionary economic and social change, and because it established a geopolitical balance of power that would guide the next two centuries of Canadian history. The arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries will, of course, feature prominently in our story. But until the English and French came in greater numbers, the course of events was determined by the powers we’ll encounter today.
U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying€ shitty, protectionist laws€ in around twenty states that either banned or heavily hamstrung towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly failed to upgrade or expand their broadband networks.
The cable and broadband industry spent the better part of a decade pretending that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional television in favor for streaming or antenna-based alternatives) either didn’t actually exist or was a fad that would end when Millennials started procreating.
A port of the free software TianoCore UEFI firmware can be used instead of the proprietary boot blob to boot the Raspberry Pi. This allows to install Debian on the RPi with the standard Debian Installer, and it also makes it possible to use UEFI Secure Boot. Note that Secure Boot had been broken on arm64 for a while, but it’s now working in Bookworm!.
Microsoft Edge is a good browser but for some reason Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone’s throat and make it more difficult to use rivals like Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft has now started notifying IT admins that it will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead.
Alphabet's Google LLC won a jury trial on Tuesday in a long-running patent lawsuit in Delaware federal court over features in Google's smartphones and apps.
The jury decided that Luxembourg-based patent owner Arendi SARL's patent was invalid and that Google did not infringe it, according to the verdict made public on Wednesday.
Norwegian inventor Atle Hedloy's Arendi sued Google in 2013 over the patent, which relates to retrieving information like names and addresses from a database and entering it into word processors and spreadsheets.
Arendi alleged that Google's mobile devices and apps including Gmail, Chrome, Docs, and Messages infringed. It asked the court for $45.5 million (roughly Rs. 37 crore) in damages, according to a spokesperson for Google's law firm Paul Hastings.
The jury determined that Google did not infringe Arendi's patent and agreed with Google's argument that the patent was invalid based on earlier publications that disclosed the same invention.
The jury decided that Luxembourg-based patent owner Arendi SARL's patent was invalid and that Google did not infringe it, according to the verdict made public on Wednesday.
The European Commission has officially unveiled its recommendation for combating live sports piracy in the European Union. Rightsowners and broadcasters were left disappointed last year when the EC ruled out new legislation and regulation. So is there anything in today's publication with the potential to tip the balance of power away from cheap all-you-can-eat pirate IPTV subscriptions?
Back in March, we discussed a fairly silly request, made by several film producers who are suing RCN for not being their copyright police, that the court subpoena Reddit to unmask 9 users of that site. There were several aspects of the request that made it all very dumb: half the Reddit users never mentioned RCN, most referenced Comcast being their ISP, most of the remaining users never mentioned anything about piracy, and the one user who did mention RCN and piracy in context together had done so nearly a decade prior to the lawsuit. Given the First Amendment implications and hurdles involved in a request like this, the desire for the subpoena seemed doomed to fail.
Popular mixtape platform Spinrilla has signed a confidential settlement agreement with several RIAA-backed music companies. Spinrilla submitted a judgment that requires it to pay $50 million in piracy damages and other fees. The mixtape platform will also shut down its site and apps, which have a massive audience.
In recent months, controversies around generative AI have erupted in nearly all areas of intellectual property law, from copyright and patents to trademarks and publicity rights.
In November 2022, a handful of unnamed coders sued claiming GitHub's CoPilot, which charges users $100 per year, violates the open-source licensing by not crediting the authors of the source code the AI has learned from. The complaint puts forward a number of causes of action, including breach of contract for the open-source license violations, fraud, unjust enrichment and unfair competition.
"CoPilot ignores, violates, and removes the licenses offered by thousands — possibly millions — of software developers, thereby accomplishing software piracy on an unprecedented scale," the plaintiffs say in the complaint. "CoPilot’s goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall. It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub’s pledge never to do so."
Ed Sheeran is ‘not guilty’ in a high-stakes copyright infringement battle involving his Grammy-winning track “Thinking Out Loud,” according to decision details shared with Digital Music News this morning. The courtroom battle focused on whether Sheeran and his collaborators pilfered the Marvin Gaye classic, “Let’s Get It On.”
After roughly three hours of closed-door deliberations, a jury in the Manhattan federal court trial ruled that Sheeran was not liable for willful copyright infringement. Those jury instructions will now be passed to the presiding judge, who is expected to certify the results and close the case.
While not defining a firm legal precedent, the case could shift the contours of future copyright infringement cases involving similar musical works.
A musicologist for Sheeran's defence told the court that the four-chord sequence in question was used in several songs before Gaye's hit came out in 1973.
The jury reached a unanimous verdict, a requirement in the case, after just under three hours of deliberations.
The plaintiffs had alleged similarities between the chord progression, harmonic rhythm, and certain melodies in the two songs. Sheeran’s legal team had argued that the melodies are different and the elements used in both songs are common in pop music.
During her closing argument, Farkas said the case never should have been brought and that Sheeran was "unjustly accused" of copying from "Let's Get It On."
"We all benefit from artists being free to create and to build on what came before them," Farkas said, warning the jury that a verdict against Sheeran would mean "creativity will be stifled for fear of being sued."
“We have spent the last eight years talking about two songs with dramatically different lyrics, melodies and four chords which are also different and used by songwriters every day, all over the world,” Mr. Sheeran continued. “These chords are common building blocks which were used to create music long before ‘Let’s Get It On’ was written and will be used to make music long after we are all gone.”
“I am just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy,” he added. “I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake.”
It’s intriguing to me that middle school students are seemingly held to a higher standard of “cite your sources” than today’s interfaces to large language models. What happened to the idea of authorship?
The individual website is deemphasized in order to emphasize the faceless, nameless crowd. We get “word smoothies” powered by LLMs that obscure attribution resulting in, as Lanier puts it in his book You are not a Gadget, “a digital flatting of expression into a global mush”.
On social media, TikTokers are rewarded with massive views for tailoring content to an algorithm that is meticulously designed to trigger dopamine release. In Hollywood, producers are rewarded with lucrative film deals for developing projects that feed the black box AI at studios and streaming platforms, which keep valuable viewership data insights to themselves. That viewership data is built via feedback loops created by recommendation engines reinforced by the very viewer behaviors they shape in the first place. It is value creation increasingly usurped by machines, and between TikTok and streaming platforms, the precious space that allows for human-first innovation is closing. TikTokification is metastasizing.