At the NDS2 Lab at Northeastern University, we study Internet protocols using a variety of techniques for this very purpose. For example, in a prior blog post, I wrote about how we synthesized attacks against protocols given only their prose specifications. Today, I’ll zoom in on two critical components that are used in many Internet protocols — Karn’s Algorithm and the RTO calculation — and explain our recent efforts to formally verify them.
That was my mental model of URLs until I indexed my blog’s links and realized there’s more to “domain” than initially meets the eye.
So often you'll see folks (me included) use "jq" to take an unformatted JSON mess and turn it into a readable output. For instance, last thursday we used the Shodan API to dump about 650k of host info like this: [...]
Samsung provide official apps for managing Galaxy Buds on Android, iOS, and Windows. Linux users have to fill the silence with unofficial apps, such as the opens-source Galaxy Buds Client this spotlight post is about.
The first change was the move to our Linux fileservers, with 10G networking and SSD storage. With SSDs, we had both greatly increased read bandwidth and greatly increased IOs per second (which matters for scanning filesystems and figuring out what to back up for incremental backups). This unambiguously moved the limit on our backup speeds to the write speed of our Amanda 'holding disks', which were a striped set of HDDs. With some hand-waving the striped filesystem could do around 200 Mbytes/sec (starting out higher and then dropping over time), which was under what the fileservers could now deliver.
This week it was brought to my attention that bpfilter might be delaying our kernel boot sequence. The initial thought was that bpfilter’s usermode upcalls were stalling for some reason and caused boot time stalls.
While it is true that module initialization for built-in modules (ie. CONFIG_FOO=y) is serialized and that in theory it is possible for the boot to be stalled if a module was slow, it turned out not to be the case for bpfilter, as we had CONFIG_BPFILTER_UMH=m which actually causes bpfilter.ko to be built and loaded separately.
So end of story, at least for the important side of the investigation.
This tutorial will help you setup DoT (short for DNS over TLS) security into your Debian 12 Bookworm. With this, we hope you will have a very secure internet access so nobody can forcefully block or redirect your browsing activities in the middle especially for your dns line. This article complements our both Debian 12 Install Guide and After Install Recommendation. We choose here a secure public dns service that serves DoT --Quad9 from Swiss-- to replace our internet service provider's one which does not support it. We hope this will be helpful for you.
In the vast world of Linux, having a reliable way to identify your public IP address is crucial for various networking tasks. Whether you’re troubleshooting connectivity issues, configuring a server, or setting up remote access, knowing your public IP address can be a lifesaver.
The latest game to ride the boomer shooter craze, Warhammer 40K: Boltgun, has finally attained Steam Deck Verification as of today according to it's own Steam Page.
Originally created for the Atari 2600 back in 2021 (yes, really), Mr. Run and Jump has been recreated properly for modern systems from Atari and Graphite Lab. Seems it caught Atari's eye if they wanted to team up to remake it in full. Like a lot of recent games published by Atari, it also has Native Linux support.
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is an upcoming squad tactics heist RPG, from Trese Brothers who created Star Traders: Frontiers and Templar Battleforce.
Need more free games? You can currently get free Steam keys for both SEGA Bass Fishing and Dungeon of the ENDLESS!
Superior: Vengeance is an Early Access hyper-stylized superhero third-person co-op shooter, and the good news for Steam Deck players is the developer is ensuring it works great.
Making it easier than ever to grab all your games, the Heroic Games Launcher version 2.9.0 is out now and this brings with it Amazon Games support.
GUADEC 2023 is a hybrid conference where attendees can join in person if they are in Riga, Latvia, as well as online from the comfort of their PCs. This is the first since the COVID-19 pandemic that the GUADEC conference will take place in Europe.
GUADEC has opened its doors until July 31st to both GNOME users and developers from all over the world, where they can share knowledge and discuss the new features and changes of the next major GNOME desktop release, GNOME 45 “Riga”, due out on September 20th, 2023.
As gnome-shell’s CSS grew more complex, designers needed something more expressive, so they started compiling the stylesheet from SASS. The sources were moved to a subproject, so they could be shared between the regular stylesheet and the GNOME Classic stylesheet.
Fast-forward to the present day, gnome-shell now includes a light variant to support the global color-scheme option.
So, Alpine does not make the news. There are no commercial entities which are trying to monetize it, at least no more than the loosely organized coalition of commercial entities like SourceHut that depend on Alpine and do their part to keep it in good working order, alongside various users who have no commercial purpose for the system. The community is largely in unanimous agreement about the fundamental purpose of Alpine and the work of the community is focused on maintaining the project such that this purpose is upheld.
While Debian did have some support for RISC-V before this as a Debian port, which was not officially part of Debian. However, the official support will begin with the release of Debian 13, which is currently in the testing phase and hasn’t seen a stable release yet. To that end, the current state of this official version is extremely limited, being described as “almost empty” but with planned support for an initial 90 packages in the coming days. Most users working on a RISC-V platform will most likely to continue to use their Debian ports version.
Some of you have been following on IRC, some of you have noticed the ACCEPTED mails from dak on the mailing list, some of you may have noticed the recent closure of bug #1033658. For all the others, I am happy to share the good news:
riscv64 is now an official Debian architecture
That’s great on Debian’s part - huge leap forward for freedom!
Earlier this year in February, Canonical announced the general availability of the real-time Ubuntu kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) users with an Ubuntu Pro subscription. This real-time kernel provides enterprises with end-to-end security and reliability for their time-bound workloads.
Now, Canonical has optimized its Ubuntu RT kernel for Intel silicon, enabling enterprises to harness the power of Linux for a wide range of use cases, including Telco workloads, automation systems for the factory floor, and life-saving medical equipment.
SparkFun is 20 years old this year! We're lucky enough to have a bunch of employees that have been around for over 10 of those years, and we wanted to share their reflections on their time here with you. Today you'll be hearing from Kristen Moorefield.
Before attempting to confirm or refute the remaining hypotheses, I wanted to be able to better quantify the problem. In that vein, I made some tools and scripts which would attempt to render what noise was present as a function of reported ADC counts. The idea was to sweep each phase of the motor through a range of fixed voltages, and capture a time domain signal at a variety of steady state points. Then, we would plot the magnitude of the noise, and what the the frequency components looked like throughout the range.
The Vindriktning air quality sensor is sort of fascinating. Opening it up is pretty easy; all you’ll need is a PH0 screwdriver. Once open, you’ll see a Cubic PM1006 particulate sensor connected via flying leads to a PCB which hosts an Eastsoft ES7P001FGSA microcontroller, which talks to the PM1006 sensor and drives the LED on the front of the Vindriktning based on the readings.
The artwork features slides of laser cut acrylic, each of which is illuminated by LEDs. As a sheet is illuminated, the image which has been etched on the acrylic is illuminated. By using multiple slides, and multiple light sources an animation effect akin to Neon signage is produced. The Pico is responsible for alternating between these sheets and controlling what colors appear from the LEDs. Sprixels has managed to daisy chain seven signs together using just one Pico as a controller.
3D printers need to set their hot ends to a very specific temperatures suited to the filament material and keep them at those temperatures throughout the printing process. Most use PID (proportional-integral-derivative) control for that purpose, which modulates power according to an algorithm that prioritizes stability and prevents feedback oscillations. But what if you want to control a hot end that isn’t connected to a 3D printer? In that case, Michael Klements has a guide on how to build a dedicated hot end controller.
During the proliferation of the internet in the 1990s, the internet was decentralized enabling free trade and commerce on an equal basis where content creators were free to publish anything at will.
Although the internet today is still theoretically decentralized, we cannot discount the fact that the internet, artificial intelligence (AI), and connected technology have been centralized by a handful of multinational corporations that include Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
Google, Apple, and Microsoft control access to internet trade and commerce by way of their operating systems that support intrusive apps while controlling app distribution.
Open source software is a popular choice for libraries. The ability to customise the software for a library’s particular needs, the potential for interoperation with other software, and the lack of license restrictions makes open source software attractive.
Modern libraries need robust, scalable and flexible software to make their collections and services attractive, especially as digital libraries are radically transforming how information is disseminated. This article focuses on selecting the best open source Linux software which enables a library to catalogue, track circulation and inventory their assets using an integrated system.
Nowadays, the first day of school lands somewhere between August and September, so it’s no surprise we’re seeing back-to-school sales early. As you start your back-to-school shopping, one thing you’ll want to be on the lookout for are fake reviews and unreliable third-party sellers persuading you to buy poor-quality products. To save you time and money, meet Fakespot, a free browser extension and website that provides an easy way to identify fake and unreliable reviews. Fakespot recently joined Mozilla, a company with a 25-year history of building products and services that puts people’s needs first when they go online. Today, Fakespot announced its product categories with the most reliable and unreliable reviews, just in time for the back-to-school shopping season.
We’re closing on on 400 books in the collection!
A new Economics chapter has been added and some of the books previously in Finance have been moved here.
This post rounds up 7 of the newest additions. Thanks to Lluís Revilla, Mario De Toma and Gary for their submissions: [...]
My motivations for working on GNU Emacs are practical and ideological.
In terms of practicality, GNU Emacs provides the missing layer of interactivity on top of Unix-y tools. We have a uniform, text-centric interface to the computer, which we can configure and/or extend in a consistent way with the GNU Emacs Lisp programming language. My GNU Emacs setup gives me the best integrated computing environment I have ever had, because I can draw linkages between individual interfaces while reusing code/patterns already established for the rest of GNU Emacs. For instance, a function to indent the selected text in Vim does not automatically become available for text controlled by Tmux. Whereas in GNU Emacs editing and viewing text inside windows are part of a continuum. The consistency of the gestalt form provided by GNU Emacs is not available to the user when they piece together a system out of disparate Unix-y tools.
Dorota Rizik of the R Ladies New York recently talked to the R Consortium about the diverse R community in New York. She also discussed how her current job at a non-profit organization involves training her colleagues to use R. She shared details of some of the packages they have developed for internal use.
A simple and basically universal approach for getting an answer from such a tree is what I call the 'Eval' pattern. In this pattern, you give each node in the tree an 'Eval()' method (often it takes some sort of context object as its argument), and then to get the answer you call Eval() on the top level node. Terminal nodes return their value in their Eval() (these may be strings and numbers or more complex things); higher level nodes call Eval() on their children (as necessary) and know how to combine the answers into their own answer, adding and subtracting and anding and oring and so on as required.
WARNING for nRF52 boards only: If your board has an nRF52 UF2 bootloader whose version is before 0.6.1, you will not be able to load CircuitPython 8.2.0 and later. The 8.2.0 firmware is larger than what the bootloader can handle. See these instructions for updating your bootloader. [...]
Directed by acclaimed Irish filmmaker, Alan Gilsenan, The Seven Ages of Noël Browne draws on previously unseen and newly discovered footage from four interviews recorded in 1997. In 1997, shortly before his death, Dr Noël Browne gave a passionate and wide-ranging interview to producer and screen writer James Black.
The other day I looked and realized I created this site 14 years ago today (July 25th 2009). Inspired by Eli Bendersky, I’m taking a walk through memory lane (in other words, looking back at the website and going to today).
Cops were called yesterday to the San Francisco headquarters of the social media company formerly known as Twitter — and now seemingly called X — because crews were trying to remove the Twitter sign but apparently didn't have required permits.
All told, it's an episode that's both amusing and painfully symbolic of the much-derided rollout of the new company name, not to mention the general tenure of CEO Elon Musk's mercurial and at times shambolic management style.
Working with Professor Gábor Timár, head of the Department of Geophysics and Space Sciences, Cziráki calculated the parameters used in the Earth's GPS system for the moon using the method of mathematician Fibonacci, who lived 800 years ago. Their findings have been published in the journal Acta Geodaetica et Geophysica.
The trick is to think of all your projects as a series of games. Whether you win or tie a few early ones matters far less than building your capacity to crush them consistently later. Giving everyone on your team the chance to be their absolute best as quickly as possible is how build that crushing capacity.
Many early home video game consoles were developed by American and Japanese companies: think Nintendo, Commodore, and Atari. But on the other side of the Iron Curtain, which was still very much in place in the 1980s, an entirely separate industry was built on names like Tesla and Elektronika. As a resident of the republic of Georgia, [Thomas] over at Workshop Nation has built up a sizeable collection of such Soviet-era hardware. A while back, he stumbled upon an Elektronika Video Sport 3, a 1990-vintage Pong-like video game console made in the USSR, and made a delightful video that shows him bringing it back to life.
It turns out that with precise scheduling, you can cause some processors to recover from a mispredicted vzeroupper incorrectly!
This technique is CVE-2023-20593 and it works on all Zen 2 class processors, which includes at least the following products: [...]
Both Democratic and Republican senators expressed alarm on Tuesday about the potential for a malevolent use of artificial intelligence, focusing on the possibility of AI being used to create a biological attack.
In a hearing before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dario Amodei, chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could help otherwise unskilled malevolent actors develop biological weapons.
One of the AI topics that I’ve been talking about for the last few months is Context. The basic argument is that everything we’re about to do with AI will sit on top of a deep, nuanced understanding of the principal—which could be an individual, a business, or whatever.
India's top four IT outsourcers saw a quarter where clients were hesitant about everything except their desire to discuss AI, according to earnings reports from TCS, HCL, Infosys and Wipro.
Here’s an overview of the changes: [...]
According to Microsoft, Windows OEM revenue decreased by 12% while Devices, which refers to Surface products, was down 20% or $339 million.
Reports of Microsoft 365 outages spiked at around 8:00 pm BST yesterday (via Downdetector) amid complaints that some users were unable to access Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft services.
According to the outage monitoring website, seven in 10 (71%) complaints about Microsoft outages relate to Outlook.
These claims were tested at MISI’s DreamPort facility in Columbia, MD. MISI is a non-profit organization purposed with driving discovery, education, collaboration, and innovation in cybersecurity. The DreamPort facility was created in partnership with US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) but is neither owned nor operated by the government. One of the key pillars of MISI’s operation is to provide independent validation of product claims for government.
...Azure’s growth decelerating in each quarter since Q3 2022....
Apple patched another zero-day flaw used in the 'Operation Triangulation' exploit chain. iOS and macOS-powered devices are affected.
"Apple has also issued fixes for CVE-2023-37450, a separate zero-day vulnerability that was first patched as part of Apple's Rapid Security Response update process.
US-based endpoint software management firm Ivanti initially blocked access to a security advisory about an exploitable zero-day in its Endpoint Manager Mobile software, formerly known as MobileIron Core.
The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs).
Researchers this month uncovered a two-year-old Linux-based remote access trojan dubbed AVrecon that enslaves Internet routers into botnet that bilks online advertisers and performs password-spraying attacks. Now new findings reveal that AVrecon is the malware engine behind a 12-year-old service called SocksEscort, which rents hacked residential and small business devices to cybercriminals looking to hide their true location online.
Scammers are creating ads for fake travel cards to steal your personal and financial information. If you see the below ad on Facebook, don’t click on the link.
It appears to be a desktop videophone! The interlacing looked artificial to me - but I've noted before that people think degraded images are somehow more authentic.
But something was niggling me. Were there really videophones of that ilk when that song was released in 1998? Well, yes and no.
The European Union’s top court has issued a ruling that could lead to major changes in the way Meta Platforms Inc. operates its ad business. The Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union, or CJEU, released a summary of the ruling today.
In many states, Americans can now ditch their physical wallet and verify their identity simply by tapping their device on a scanner. And just as digital wallets from Apple and Google have made commerce more convenient, digital ID systems could potentially make government interactions faster and more efficient. But they also raise the ominous specter of government surveillance. Can we have the efficiency of a digital ID without letting government track our every move?
Yes, but that's not the path we're on.
If we spent just one-tenth of the effort we spend prosecuting the poor on prosecuting the rich, it would be a very different world.
Russia has denied repeated Moldovan accusations of meddling in its affairs, particularly over the breakaway region of Transdniestria, where Moscow has a contingent of peacekeepers.
Founded by Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, the Worldcoin project says it aims to create a new "identity and financial network" and that its digital ID will allow users to, among other things, prove online that they are human, not a bot.
Reflecting rising concerns that Big Tech’s infatuation with artificial intelligence threatens privacy and economic competition, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has begun investigating Google’s efforts to swoop up medical information derived from biopsy specimens of millions of military service members.
Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and the chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, wrote on Tuesday to Google and the Department of Defense, seeking information and records related to the company’s pursuit of a vast trove of medical data overseen by the military’s Joint Pathology Center. The archive represents a largely untapped gold mine for AI and health care companies, because computers can use the data to develop algorithms that detect patterns, like telltale signs of tumors, faster and often better than humans can.
What is “plain view?” Cops claim it’s anything anyone could see if they happened to be in the same place at the same time, including those moments when citizens deploy their own air force. Force your way into the house under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment? Anything out in the open is yours to deem criminal evidence. Peek through the windows of cars you’ve pulled over for pretextual reasons? Anything readily visible can provide after-the-fact reasonable suspicion to perform a full-blown search.
Oppenheimer has emerged into a world newly concerned with the possibility of a nuclear weapon being used again, and at a time when Silicon Valley is developing a technology that its inventors claim is just as dangerous as the atom bomb: AI. So far, their reactions to the film reveal a viewpoint that isn’t nearly as critical or self-reflective as one might hope for people developing a tool that supposedly poses an “existential risk” to humanity to have.
Chinese short video platform TikTok announced yesterday it will offer text-based content – a feature that mimics capabilities of various other social media sites, including what is formerly known as Twitter, Meta's Threads and even Instagram.
The Russian State Duma passed the second and third readings of legislation on Tuesday that, once approved by senators and signed by the president, will raise the upper age limit for conscription from 27 to 30.
Regarding the Wagner paramilitary group's presence in Africa, Kuleba noted that Ukraine had "a valuable amount of information" that could help African countries beef up their security.
The feature allows users to post without the background visuals, such as videos and photos, for which TikTok is known. There did not appear to be a separate name for the text post feature.
Before the new format was introduced, users could type text over video and image posts as well as in captions and comments. Some people would create their own text-only posts by sharing screenshots of text-focused content from outside of TikTok, including from other social media apps and text message conversations.
As Twitter tries to become the everything app, TikTok becomes Twitter, while Meta-owned Instagram also becomes Twitter through its fairly new Threads app. Threads has reportedly seen a huge drop in user numbers just recently after a promising start to its existence. It’s not the only company struggling to outdo Twitter in a battle that has become rather political. But it’s quite uncertain many of these companies will succeed in becoming everything apps.
The reported move comes at a time when TikTok is facing heightened scrutiny from U.S. officials over concerns about data security. The company is fighting to prevent a ban in the country after lawmakers introduced a bill that would grant the Biden administration authority to ban apps that pose security risks.
Touray said the military staff recommendations were made before Mali’s military junta demanded that the more than 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in the country leave, which was followed by the Security Council's unanimous vote on June 30 to immediately end the mission. Mali has brought in mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner Group to help fight an Islamic insurgency.
The Iranian Air Force has launched a major exercise after the United States sent additional warships and forces to the Persian Gulf region. More than 90 aircraft and combat drones have been deployed in the Gulf and other parts of Iran as part of the maneuvers, Iranian state media reported.
Erdoßan's tour of the Gulf opens a new chapter in Turkey's political and economic relations with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
Last March, in a stylish gallery on Mosfilmovskaya Street in Moscow, I listened as 56-year-old Viktor Bout, his bushy mustache tinged with gray, discussed art and composition. Dressed in black, with a silver cross of St. George military decoration pinned to his left breast, the former Russian arms dealer had recently been released from an American prison. Hanging from the studio’s beige walls were dozens of his paintings, including portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. They ranged from cats and parrots to children and Soviet-era movie stars, as well as a number of self-portraits from behind bars. While confined in the federal maximum security penitentiary in Marion, Ill., Bout, fluent in English, had managed to turn his tiny cell into a makeshift art studio.
More than 60% of respondents said that Finland should not allow the transport of Nato nuclear weapons through the country.
Lawyer Elena Ponomareva was attacked while waiting for public transportation in Moscow on July 6. Ponomareva was doused with greenish substance and beaten by an unknown assailant.
The judicial board for military personnel cases of the Russian Supreme Court has ruled that “due to changes in the situation,” it considered it possible to exempt Russian contract serviceman Vladislav Ustinov from legal punishment. Ustinov was found guilty in a fatal traffic accident. The ruling was handed down on June 28, reports Kommersant.
Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, announced that the editor-in-chief of Russian propaganda project Sputnik Lithuania, Marat Kasem, has left Latvia, where he was under recognizance not to leave.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has arrived in North Korea, according to the Russian ministry.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office has declared the independent media outlet TV Rain’s branches in Latvia and the Netherlands “undesirable,” criminalizing their work in Russia.
The Second Western District Military Court has sentenced Vyborg resident Eldar Voskresensky to 13 years in prison for an attempted terrorist act (part 3, article 30 and paragraph A of part 2, article 205 of the Criminal Code). He was accused of the “attempted arson of a military enlistment office.”
The company revealed in the report, published on Monday, that its data centers and offices consumed a combined 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022, typically to cool facilities. That’s an amount equivalent to irrigating an average of 37 golf courses according to a 2012 estimate from the U.S. Golf Association, which Google cites. As Insider notes, that’s a 20% increase from the 4.3 billion gallons of water that Google says it consumed in 2021. Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California Riverside, told the outlet that a 20% increase is approximately on par with an increase in Google’s computing power—which has been driven by a push toward AI.
In 2018, two separate investigations came to the same conclusion: the planet’s circulatory system was weakening. The main set of ocean currents that carry immense amounts of water from tropical to northern seas would be slowing down due to the impact of climate change. The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, published this year, reached the same conclusion. But now, a new paper goes further, arguing that the so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will collapse in the coming decades if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced now. The article even puts the date at around 2057. But other scientists argue that there is not enough data to expect a collapse.
The new research reveals a far grimmer view of the North Atlantic’s future than the most recent predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and underscores the urgency of transitioning away from the consumption of fossil fuels to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving warming global temperatures.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is a large system of ocean currents that regulates the transfer of ocean heat from the tropics to the northern hemisphere.
As such, it impacts much of Earth's climate. It is considered one of the most important tipping elements in Earth's climate system, and has been slowing down since the mid-1900s.
If it stalls completely, monsoon seasons will likely be disrupted in the tropics, and Europe and North America will experience dangerously harsher winters. The knock-on effects will severely impact entire ecosystems and our food security.
Since the Manatee Bay buoy is near land, the water temperature could have been heated up by floating plants and other debris, he said. Without photos documenting clear water there Monday, “it will be difficult to verify the 101.1 degree record as valid.”
Given the gauge's location near land and the Kuwait measurement in open water, Masters said the two really shouldn't be compared.
Typical hot tub temperatures should range between 100 and 102 degrees, according to the hot tub maker Jacuzzi.
Record-breaking, deadly heat in the U.S. and Europe would have been "virtually impossible" in a world without human-driven climate change, according to new data published early Tuesday.
Why it matters: The findings show society is more vulnerable than previously thought to relatively low levels of warming.
After record-breaking drought weather and unusually low levels of rainfall, heavy precipitation comes as a relief for many across Mexico.
Tallgrass Energy, working through a new subsidiary called GreenView, wants to build the hydrogen pipeline because the Navajo Nation is “blessed with a wealth of natural resources” and “We believe they have the right and responsibility to develop and manage these resources, including projects like hydrogen,” says Tallgrass Vice President of Government Affairs Steven Davidson. He says that his company has been talking with the leaders of the Nation for the past two years, well before the local meetings began.
Among the legislation the House Financial Services Committee is scheduled to consider are a bill that would define when a cryptocurrency is a security or a commodity and another that would establish a regime to oversee stablecoins - digital tokens typically backed by traditional assets like the US dollar.
The markups - where legislation is debated and brought to a vote, paving the way for a full vote by the House of Representatives - are the first time [cryptocurrency] regulatory bills will be put to a vote in Congress, a victory for [cryptocurrency] lobbyists that have pushed lawmakers to provide regulatory clarity for the industry.
Rain will also be able to open a bank account in the UAE, and allow clients in the country to fund their own accounts when using the local payment network, cofounder Yehia Badawy said on Tuesday.
NS is in the process of placing 1,450 new public transport bicycles at stations to meet the increasing demand for the bikes, the rail company said on Tuesday. “It is expected that all these hundreds of bicycles will be available to travelers by the end of September.”
The rail company has already placed the first 650 new bikes at stations in Tilburg, Amsterdam, and Leiden, among others. The remaining 800 will be placed in the Amsterdam region at the end of September.
New York officials have primarily pitched congestion tolls as an easy cash grab for the city's subway system. New Jersey drivers and politicians aren't happy about that.
The government is considering a new round of cloud seeding in an attempt to create rainfall in parts of Mexico affected by drought.
FRANCE 24 brings you a special debate€ about€ the rush for cobalt, a strategic mineral essential to making electric car batteries. Electric vehicles will help reduce the pollution caused by the internal combustion engine, the current standard for most motorised transport. But as€ our€ special€ full-length€ Reporters programme shows, the mining€ of the cobalt€ necessary for the€ batteries is already a source of human misery and damage to the environment, particularly in DR Congo. We delve into the issue with our guests, including the co-director of "The Battle for Cobalt", our documentary about the dark side of the cobalt rush.
Buses remain the only form of public transport between Lithuania and Belarus.
The Texas power grid has come through weeks of record 100-degree days like a champ, thanks in part to ramped-up clean energy and battery storage.
Kununurra-born Lawford Benning says Aboriginal clean energy is about celebrating beautiful country without hurting it.
He is a key voice in a $3 billion proposal to produce hydrogen and ammonia in Western Australia’s majestic East Kimberley from abundant sunshine and an existing reservoir of fresh water.
Low birth rates are often regarded as problematic by major media, which overlook the perils of population increase. Here we show that unsustainable long-term population growth prevails in developing countries, despite historical family planning and gradually sinking birth rates. One lesson is that further reduced rates are urgently needed in high-fertility countries, in Africa and elsewhere.
As President Donald Trump and the Republican Party unveiled their “cruel joke” of a tax plan that would provide an enormous boon for the rich disguised as a “middle class miracle,” an analysis by the People’s Policy Project (3P) published Wednesday [...]
A national survey found that the construction sector grew 18.2% over last May, a boost that may be linked to Mexico's nearshoring phenomenon.
With the growth of sports betting, what responsibility do governments – and society – have in addressing regulation and addiction?
Mango Technologies Inc., a well-funded productivity software startup that does business as ClickUp, has let go 10% of its workforce or about 90 employees. The move was reported earlier today by TechCrunch. ClickUp confirmed the workforce reduction, saying it will be carried out over the next few months.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the country's biggest lender, could cut up to 200 jobs, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday, but did not divulge further information the layoffs.
The layoffs could end up being a "couple of hundred" and the CBA's ongoing consultations could mean some employees would be redeployed into some other roles, the source said, requesting to be unnamed as they were discussing confidential information.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend. Today, the company that built The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077 has issued a public statement that outlines its reasoning for cutting 9% of its workforce.
Kicià âski also explained that the studio is trying to be more agile and effective, and so they have to streamline the company to reach this objective. In other words, the cycle of tech layoffs that was spearheaded this year by Microsoft is still ongoing, and finally caught up to CD Projekt RED.
Like Microsoft, CD Projekt RED won’t be laying off these employees immediately. Layoffs will extend to as long as Q1 of 2024.
It’s not great news, but both Microsoft and CD Projekt RED did do the responsible thing by notifying their employees early. As they have both put it, this move gives these employees sufficient time to prepare, and hopefully, transition to finding new jo
Despite a booming job market overall, 2023 kicked off with the biggest tech companies laying off thousands of employees. Cuts at Microsoft hit Halo Infinite devs at 343 Industries and other game teams across the company, including at Bethesda. Months later, layoffs are continuing across other pockets of the video game industry, impacting major companies and smaller indies alike. Every week a new studio announces it’s shedding staff, and it’s not clear when the bleeding will stop.
CD Projekt Red have announced another batch of layoffs, this time affecting “around 100” employees, or roughly 9% of the company’s total headcount. The redundancies won’t take place immediately, according to CDPR, as some employees won’t lose their jobs until early next year at the latest.
Last month, after kicking off 2023 by trimming about six percent of its global workforce, Spotify announced approximately 200 podcasting layoffs. Now, CFO Paul Vogel has indicated that his company expects “headcount year over year to actually be down in Q3,” and some are speculating that additional personnel cutbacks could be on the way.
Vogel made the remark during Spotify’s Q2 2023 earnings call this morning. For background, 2023’s initial seven months have seen the Stockholm-headquartered business axe a number of evidently unprofitable divisions, original podcasts, and different offerings amid a broader push for profitability.
Notwithstanding these efforts and the adjacent layoffs, ValueAct Capital-backed Spotify posted heightened operating expenses (€1.013 billion, up 13 percent year over year) as well as a €247 million operating loss for the second quarter. In explaining the increases, the platform pointed in part to €91 million in once-off expenditures, including €25 million worth of severance packages (along with “related costs”) and a “real estate optimization plan.”
Prominent Utah tech company Pluralsight cut more employees Tuesday, with less transparency than its layoff of 400 people in December.
On her first day in office last December, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass declared a state of emergency over housing and homelessness, promising to provide shelter for people living on the streets and make it easier for developers to build affordable housing.
Articles from The Athletic will begin appearing in the print NYT for the first time.
What’s the winning formula? €· Well, I guess I’m now a minor expert in fighting my way into sam.gov, and I think I know what happened. Every time the registration process went off the rails, I created an “Incident” with the GSA Federal help-desk. In most cases, the response was the equivalent of “Did you try turning it off and on again? Ticket closed. Kthksby.” But on two occasionsââ¬â°—ââ¬â°once for the conflict with the pre-existing registration, once for the Trade Register Numberââ¬â°—ââ¬â°there was an eventual response like “Fixed it, re-submit.” And indeed they had fixed it.
So I think the winning technique is simply to flood their input queue with issues and eventually one will find a chink in the armour and reach an intelligent human being who Just Fixes It.
Better decisions are made by diverse groups and it's essential to lend all relevant voices to the development of future Internet standards. Dan Sexton from IWF shares his experience of coming to the IETF to discuss civil society issues regarding the safety of the Internet for children.
Now, the technology industry is pulling back hard, clouding the city’s economic future.
Facing many business challenges, large technology companies have laid off more than 386,000 workers nationwide since early 2022, according to layoffs.fyi, which tracks the tech industry. And they have pulled out of millions of square feet of office space because of those job cuts and the shift to working from home.
In 2021, Leo was the beneficiary of the largest-known dark money donation in US history, putting him in control of an unprecedented $1.6 billion political advocacy fund to influence the courts, politics, and policy, as wereported with ProPublica. Leo has appeared in some of the Supreme Court’s recent ethics scandals: He reportedly organized Justice Samuel Alito’s undisclosed trip on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet and allegedly steered consulting payments to Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife.
Some of Leo’s neighbors are distraught about his influence on the American political and judicial systems — and they want the rest of the town to know exactly who he is.
Speaking at the Economic Club of New York yesterday, Khan said that, while it's true the US regulator failed to halt a couple of major mergers this year (Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard, and Meta's acquisition of VR firm Within), those are just two among 13 to 20 challenges her monopoly cops have successfully brought against takeovers in her time at the helm, depending on how you count.
The ultimate objective is to double the EU's global market share in semiconductors from the current 10% to 'at least' 20% by 2030. In addition, the initiative also aims to strengthen the domestic semiconductor supply chain and prevent chip shortages in critical sectors such as the automobile industry, something which happened in 2020 – 2021.
As of Wednesday morning, any reference to the 57-year-old had been removed from the website of China’s foreign ministry.
A search for his name yielded no results and previous articles about his diplomatic appearances showed a message saying the page “does not exist or has been deleted”.
This question, with its exclamatory urgency, has never been more relevant to Twitter than in the past 48 hours, when Musk decided to nuke 17 years’ worth of brand awareness and rename the thing. The artist formerly known as Twitter is now X. What is happening?! indeed.
I have three answers to that question, beyond the simple “Nothing much.” (Even with its new name, the site is pretty much the same as ever; the blue bird logo in the left-hand corner of the website is now a black X, and … that’s about it.) This X boondoggle may simply be the flailing of a man who doesn’t want to own his social network and was pressured via lawsuit to buy it, but Musk and the Twitter (X?) CEO, Linda Yaccarino, would like you to believe that much bigger things are coming.
We speak with two Israeli journalists in Tel Aviv after lawmakers in Israel passed a highly contested bill Monday weakening the power of the Supreme Court by preventing it from blocking government decisions it deems unreasonable. The bill is part of a broader set of judicial reforms pushed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that has sparked months of unprecedented protests, which continued last night. Journalist Haggai Matar says that while the Supreme Court “is not an ally to Palestinians,” its rare rulings in favor of Palestinians are a driving factor in the right wing’s overhaul, as well as decisions meant to curb public corruption. Palestinian leaders have criticized both Netanyahu’s government for pushing the judicial reform, as well as the massive protest movement for not speaking up for Palestinian rights as Israel continues its deadly crackdown in the West Bank. It’s time for the U.S. to show Israel there are consequences for apartheid and anti-democratic legislation, says Gideon Levy, columnist for Haaretz. “What kind of democracy can exist in an apartheid state?” he asks.
Kurdish peace activist Kani Xulam is in New York City after his solo 300-mile, 24-day walk from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to the United Nations headquarters. His arrival Monday coincided with the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which partitioned Kurdistan into four parts — British Iraq, French Syria, Turkey and Iran — which left the Kurdish people without a recognized sovereign state. “We have been struggling ever since to have a say,” declares Xulam. Kurds have experienced decades of conflict, cultural genocide and a protracted struggle for independence.
The Act's backers stressed that the law (unlike the English common law of seditious libel) was limited to "false" and "malicious" statements; and they noted the importance of restricting those statements. Here is Justice Chase's instruction to the jury in U.S. v. Cooper, about the Sedition Act specifically: [...]
Things our essayist regrets saying: “Anything I said to a girl in high school, for example, or whatever I was trying to say in German.”
Stark also points out that Aldean filmed portions of his video at a courthouse in Tennessee, which was the site of the lynching of a black 18-year-old in 1927 and a race riot in 1946. Stark’s video and a follow-up have both accumulated over 1.5 million views each on the platform, but Stark now says that she’s been the subject of death threats, doxxing, and other negative speech.
“I’m receiving thousands of comments that quite honestly, I can’t possibly keep up with. The context of those comments go far beyond what is considered ‘reasonably harsh criticism,’ and into the dark realm of death threats, death wishes, threats of violence, and just the most degrading, vile comments I’ve ever seen, quite frankly,” Stark told Gizmodo in an email. “I would encourage everyone who is so angry about my commentary to spend some time reflecting on why it is that they are so angry about what I have to say.”
Li Jiexin, a 69-year-old retiree, in May pleaded not guilty to four counts of playing a musical instrument without a permit and three counts of collecting money in a public place without permission.
Prosecutors said Yuen made seditious statements on Facebook and Instagram including posts about the death of marine police officer Lam Yuen-yee in an anti-smuggling operation in September 2021, the Witness reported.
The detentions came after Mezopotamya Ajansñ (MA) reporter, Fñrat Can Arslan, tweeted about his news report regarding a married judge and prosecutor presiding over the same trial. The other four journalists were detained for retweeting that tweet.
The investigation against them was triggered by Arslan's report, which brought attention to the marriage between one of the judges overseeing the Diyarbakñr-based case against 18 Kurdish media workers and the prosecutor who prepared the indictment.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement on Monday calling on Ethiopian authorities to immediately release seven “arbitrarily detained” opposition figures. The seven detained individuals belong to the formerly banned Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). HRW claims their detainment is politically motivated.
The background to the case is reports of a political trial against 18 colleagues in Amed. 15 of the accused journalists, who work for Kurdish media, were held in pre-trial detention for over a year on vague "terror charges" in what was obviously a contrived trial without charges and were released on the first day of the trial a fortnight ago. The long detention was based on the false testimony of an anonymous witness.
The investigation against the journalists detained on Tuesday was triggered by Arslan's report, which brought attention to the marriage between one of the judges overseeing the Diyarbakñr-based case against 18 Kurdish media workers and the prosecutor who prepared the indictment.
Perhaps the most infamous leak was the “Collateral Murder” video, which showed footage of American helicopter pilots casually carrying out a massacre of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007, two of whom were Reuters-employed journalists.
The Guardian is creating seven new journalist jobs to improve its coverage of “underrepresented regions and communities” in the UK and the US, as well as the Caribbean, South America and Africa.
The publisher’s decision comes after carrying out research that linked the founders of the Manchester Guardian, which later became The Guardian, with the transatlantic slave trade.
During a new police political operation launched by the Diyarbakñr Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, the police raided the house of Mesopotamia Agency (MA) reporter Delal Akyüz in ðzmir. Although it is mandatory to wear shoe covers during house searches, some police officers did not wear them. There was tension between Akyüz and some police as they kept provoking her.
The investigation against them was triggered by Arslan's report, which brought attention to the marriage between one of the judges overseeing the Diyarbakñr-based case against 18 Kurdish media workers and the prosecutor who prepared the indictment.
Three journalists were taken into custody during police raids at their homes in the early hours of the morning as part of an investigation conducted by the Diyarbakñr Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.
Marzieh Mahmoodi, a journalist and the editor of Tejaratnews, says she has been fined 24 million tomans (about $500) and sentenced to a year in exile in the northeastern district of Torbat-e Jam for republishing on social media critical statements about former lawmaker Hamid Rasaei, who had disparaged protesters demonstrating against the suppression of rights and freedoms following the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody for an alleged hijab offense. [...]
The association also spoke against the unlawful treatment of journalist Sherwan Sherwani, who was sentenced by a criminal court in Hewlêr (Erbil) to four years in prison last week for an alleged forgery of documents. The reason for the charge was an application for the conditional release of several journalists and activists from prison. Sherwani is also alleged to have signed the document on behalf of his colleague Guhdar Zebari because the latter was in solitary confinement and could not sign it himself. Although Zebari repeatedly stated during the trial that he had explicitly given Sherwani the authority to sign on his behalf, his testimony was ignored by the court.
The investigation against the journalists detained on Tuesday was triggered by Arslan's report, which brought attention to the marriage between one of the judges overseeing the Diyarbakñr-based case against 18 Kurdish media workers and the prosecutor who prepared the indictment.
Erol Ãânderoßlu, the Turkey representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), expressed concern over the "criminalizing" approach towards journalists for reporting news. He also emphasized that handcuffing Kepenek with plastic handcuffs was "unacceptable."
"One news article, and especially one of this nature, shouldn't lead to such criminal treatment of journalists," said Ãânderoßlu. "Turkey needs to stop being a country where journalists are systematically detained."
Another unavoidable topic driving the popular discourse is artificial intelligence. Language-based machine learning software like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Bard has exploded in popularity among students, employees, entrepreneurs and [Internet] creators. Not only is it fascinating to see what a machine can put together, it can be a relief to offload some of the creative work for a job or a class. However, many employees aren’t thrilled about the possibility of their role being digitally outsourced, and film and television workers are at the forefront of the debate.
AI seems to offer a great deal for studios who might decide soon that they don’t want to shell out for expensive human employees. Performers want to ensure their likenesses — their physical appearances, voices and unique performances — can’t simply be scanned and repurposed with AI tools by studios without due credit or compensation. Screenwriters also see the potential for advanced language models to expropriate work from writers’ rooms. Even so, the WGA appreciates some aspects of AI technology and has proposed a compromise that would keep the human artists on the credits list when software is involved.
When they perform on film sets, their image and voice are digitally recorded at extremely high resolution, providing producers with huge amounts of data. Actors are concerned the data can be reused with AI. New processes such as machine learning – AI systems that improve with time – could turn an actor’s performance in one movie into a new character for another production, or for a video game.
TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns.
All women’s beauty salons in Afghanistan were set to close on Tuesday, officials said, as part of a Taliban administration announcement early this month that the women-only spaces were forbidden under Shariah law and caused economic hardship for grooms’ families during wedding celebrations.
Like these, other Iranian women who have dispensed with the hijab — obligatory from the age of nine — are being sentenced to prison or other, unusual punishments often accompanied by an order to undergo psychological therapy for an alleged “antisocial personality disorder” whose only “symptom” is not covering their hair. Last week, the Iranian website Vaklapress published another ruling by a third criminal court in Tehran defining not wearing the veil as “a contagious mental illness that causes sexual promiscuity.” The defendant was sentenced to two months in prison and ordered to pay for six months of psychological treatment.
The ignorance of cops is almost always their saving grace. If they can’t “reasonably” know the intricacies of the laws they uphold or the rights they’re supposed to respect, they’re too stupid to be punished for their wrongdoing. That’s how qualified immunity works. And that’s why it behooves police departments to keep officers in the dark about legal developments.
There have been plenty of laws passed to keep prisoners from profiting from depictions of their crimes, encompassing not only their own recountings, but those put together by others. These so-called “Son of Sam” laws got their name from serial killer David Berkowitz, who authorities speculated was going to sell off the rights to his life story for an immense amount of money. This deal never materialized, but the New York State Legislature passed the first “Son of Sam” legislation anyway.
Yuen's daughter-in-law Eunice Yung says she 'fulfilled her civic responsibilities' by telling police what she knew.
Some 160,000 actors in the United States, from major stars to background players, are refusing to work after talks failed between their union, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).
Hongkongers’ right to perform music in public is protected by a UN treaty enshrined in the city’s mini-constitution, an elderly man accused of playing a popular protest song in public without a permit has argued in court. Li Jiexin appeared before Magistrate Amy Chan at Shatin Magistrates’ Courts on Monday, representing himself in court.
Organising an unofficial legislative primary poll was not a “waste of time,” despite knowing pro-democracy candidates may not win majority control as they wished, Hong Kong journalist-turned activist Gwyneth Ho has said during her testimony at a national security case against 47 democrats.
Netflix is not exactly a stranger to artificial intelligence and machine learning, but this appears to be one of the first times that Netflix has put hundreds of thousands of dollars in someone’s pockets to wrangle it. In the past, Netflix has deployed an algorithm that would change the thumbnails of its programs between users based on those users viewing habits. At the same time, Netflix employs a rudimentary AI to recommend content, much the same way a platform like Spotify might. It’s not clear whether this Product Manager would be working with an AI on the backend, or in an application closer to production. Netflix did not immediately return our request for clarification.
The U.K.’s antitrust regulator has determined that Adobe Inc.’s planned acquisition of Figma Inc. could reduce competition in the local market for graphic design software. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, released its findings today. Adobe has five business days to address the regulator’s concerns. >
This process applies more broadly than just to platforms, except the part about dying. Below the fold I discuss a recent development that provides an opportunity for you to take action to push back against it.
Meta Platforms offered to curb the use of competitors' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace online classified service in an attempt to settle an EU antitrust investigation but it was not accepted by regulators, people familiar with the matter said.
France's antitrust watchdog said on Tuesday it had issued a statement of objections against Apple, citing concerns the U.S. company could have used "discriminatory and non-transparent conditions" for using user data for advertising purposes on iOS devices.
The latest issue of Allen's Trademark Digest includes a compilation of my capsule summaries of the precedential "Decisions of the Federal Circuit and the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on Registrability Issues - July 2022 to June 2023." [download pdf here].
Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piquet opposed applications to register MOSSY OAK and MOSSY OAK & Design for watches and jewelry on the grounds of likely confusion with and likely dilution of the registered mark ROYAL OAK, in standard character and stylized form, for watches. The Board dismissed the dilution claim because Piquet failed to show the requisite fame among the general consuming public. But what about likelihood of confusion? How do you think this came out? Audemars Piquet Holding S.A. v. Haas Outdoors, Inc., Consolidated Oppositions Nos. 91242213 and 91242238. July 14, 2023 [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Thomas W. Wellington).
A cursory search through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database reveals some of these logo patents were filed as recently as last week, just a few days before Musk started mentioning his intent to rebrand Twitter. Some trademark logos are as simple as a big “X” in a square box. Others from firms like Brand X Co. include a more stylized X that could compare to Musk’s current choice of logo. That’s despite the design bearing a strong resemblance to the Monotype brand font and the Unicode character (U+1D54F).
"There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," said trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who said he counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations that already cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
Mr. Musk had long said he might make the name change, but he hastened the process in a tweet early Sunday when he declared that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” He has said he hopes to turn Twitter into an “everything app” called X, which would encompass not only social networking but also banking and shopping.
In the coming academic year she’ll be teaching a course on AI and the legal profession and she joins me on the Law Bytes podcast to talk about the latest on AI technology for law and the legal, regulatory and ethical challenges it brings.
Following another setback in its legal dispute with Sony Music, Quad9 has decided to block pirate site Canna worldwide. The court-ordered block was initially restricted to Germany but the music label complained that VPNs and a mobile network still allowed Germans to access the pirate site. Quad9, meanwhile, has appealed the underlying court judgment.
An ISP industry group fears that adhering to the rapid blocking requirements of Italy's new IPTV piracy law will massively increase costs and may even "wipe out" 2,000 small to medium-sized businesses. Meanwhile, streaming service DAZN has just hiked its prices, sparking outrage on social media, a significant spike in searches for pirate set-top boxes, and vows not to pay and pirate instead.