The layoffs keep going and going, e.g. today’s updates [1, 2]; there’s no end in sight
Summary: Microsoft’s supposedly strategic/future areas — gaming (trying to debt-load or offload debt to other companies), so-called ‘security’, “clown computing” (Azure), and “Hey Hi” (chaffbots etc.) — have all had layoffs this year; it’s clear that the company is having a serious existential crisis in spite of Trump’s and Biden’s bailouts (a wave of layoffs every month this year) and is just bluffing/stuffing the media with chaffbots cruft (puff pieces/misinformation) to keep shareholders distracted, asking them for patience and faking demand for the chaffbots (whilst laying off Bing staff, too)
Linux is free and open-source, this has emanated from the low total cost of ownership of a Linux system, compared to other operating systems.
Although Linux operating systems (distributions) are not entirely doing well on desktop computers, they are commanding the stats when it comes to powering servers, mainframe computers as well as supercomputers in data centers around the world.
Torc has acquired Codealike to provide cloud-native application developers in its network with data that improves their skillsets. Torc CEO Mike Morris says Codealike complements other tools that Torc provides, including access to a community of more than 10,000 cloud-native application developers that take on assignments listed…
Linux is great and it’s great that we have all the documentation we have however there’s a trend over on the BSD side which I really wish caught on more on Linux
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we will be discussing building an automated home, the open source way. Then we discuss an alternative to ChatGPT that is currently in the works and it’s open source. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks.
Although Converseen has been available as a Flatpak package for a few months now, it finally now has a series of updates that bring it up to par with the corresponding AppImage and Snap packages in terms of features.
Pitivi 2023.03 has been in development for the past nine months, superseding the Pitivi 2022.06 release, but it doesn’t look like it’s a big update as it only adds a couple of new features and smaller improvements.
For example, Pitivi 2023.03 makes audio waveforms more precise when you look at them and implements automatic seeking to the start of the timeline when starting playback while the playhead is at the end to save you a click.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to get the latest stable version of GNOME Web on Linux. What is GNOME Web? According to the project’s website, Web is the web browser for the GNOME desktop and for elementary OS, based on the popular WebKit engine.
One of the things that various open source Git repositories are doing is changing their main branch from being called ‘master’ to being called ‘main’. As a consumer of their repository, this is generally an easy switch for me to deal with; some day, I will do a ‘git pull’, get a report that there’s a new ‘main’ branch but there’s no upstream ‘master’, and then I’ll do ‘git checkout main’ and I’m all good. However, with some repositories I have my own local changes, which I handle through Git rebasing. Recently I had to go through a ‘master’ to ‘main’ switch on such a repository, so I’m writing down what I did for later use.
MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database management systems used by developers worldwide. However, with its popularity comes a significant risk of security threats such as SQL injection attacks.
It’s not advisable to install an older version of a package on your computer, but what can we do when the latest build removes the feature that we want?
If you intend to restore only one or a few schemas from a PostgreSQL backup file, you can use the pg_restore command, which is used for restoring a particular PostgreSQL database from an archive created by pg_dump in non-plain-text formats.
In this guide, we will show how to restore a particular schema from a PostgreSQL database backup file using the pg_restore command-line tool.
Android Debug Bridge (adb) is the most used command-line tool that enables communication between a personal computer and a connected Android-powered device or emulator instance over a USB cable or TCP/IP (wirelessly).
It supports various device actions such as networking, scripting, installing and debugging apps, and file transfer. It also provides access to a Unix shell that can be used to run a variety of Linux commands on a device.
In our previous tutorial, we discussed how to install XCP-ng server. Before deploying our first VM, let us get familiar with XCP-ng configuration menu. Allow me to give you a screenshot tour to get started with XCP-ng Management Console.
One of the quite common errors while installing packages on Ubuntu is the “Held broken packages” error, which can be solved very easily with this guide..
Ever wondered how far we have come in terms of Steam Deck support for the Top 100 Most played games on Steam? Well, look no further, we have the answer. It’s going to be split in two parts.
Ah hell, going to say goodbye to any free time I had for the next month. Halls of Torment has sucked me right in being a blend of retro Diablo and Vampire Survivors.
The internet is currently buzzing about mentions of Left 4 Dead 3 appearing in files for the upcoming Counter-Strike 2. So apparently Valve can count to 3 — not the 3 the majority of their fans will want I imagine but still, why is it there at all in a huge upgrade for CS:GO?
Hellgineers takes the idea of Bridge Constructor and gives it a devilish spin, available now with Native Linux support. The interesting bit about this one is that it was made with the versatile PICO-8 fantasy console.
There we go, we fixed the little annoyance. I really don’t understand why the good ole menu is such a nuisance on the classic, conventional desktop. Now, we also need to remember that the Plasma desktop is highly consistent and extremely customizable. So you can easily change anything you like. But the defaults should be more desktopy, even if they are somewhat less visually pleasing so to speak. Minimalism only works for glass displays and people without a real task at hand.
Have you ever run a Windows update, only to have it fail and render your desktop unusable? Many have, which is one of the reasons why some Linux distributions take great pains to ensure it never occurs on the open source operating system.
Some developers take this to the next level by using atomic updates, which means every time you go to update the operating system, it is guaranteed to succeed. Should an update fail, the system will automatically roll back the upgrade so everything continues working.
In this article, we will demonstrate how to deploy a complex Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform application using the datasources feature pack to deploy the required drivers and configuration to connect to a PostgreSQL database. The datasources feature pack for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) and JBoss EAP XP makes it easy to configure JBoss EAP with JDBC drivers and data sources for various databases such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 27 March at 1300 UTC. The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over: [...]
Vanilla OS is a new Linux distribution with a single version behind it, released late last year. However, the non-traditional approach in its development has drawn much attention from the Linux community. So here’s a quick rundown of what it is all about.
The distro is an immutable operating system, which means that core parts of the system are locked down to prevent unwanted changes and corruption from third-party applications or faulty updates. Strongly oriented towards the GNOME desktop environment, as you can already guess from its name, Vanilla OS aims to offer the best vanilla GNOME experience.
System hardening means locking down a system and reducing its attack surface: removing unnecessary software packages, securing default values to the tightest possible settings and configuring the system to only run what you explicitly require.
Let’s take an example from daily life. A jewellery store and a grocery shop are located next to each other, but of course, you would expect that the jewellery store has much beefier bars and stronger locks that are shut when the shop is closed for the night as the contents are more valuable. In this case, the jewellery shop building has been hardened to protect precious products and deter thieves.
We can take a very similar approach to computer systems too. When software such as an operating system is published, anyone can download it and use it for playing games, running an online bank, and everything in between. But for running the bank, we need to take some additional precautions to harden the system above and beyond the default configuration.
Hardening a system aims to decrease its exposure in order to make it more difficult to hack, and to lessen the potential collateral damage in the event of a compromise.
…very surprised with how fast it was, but noted that a gen2
caddy will probably be even faster.
The terms “usb3.0″, “usb3.1″ and “usb3.2″ just muddy the waters.
All that we need to know, is the USB interface “gen1″, “gen2″ or
“gen2x2″, as these latter specify the speed; 500MB/sec,
1,000MB/sec or 2,000MB/sec.
Although gen1 seems an ok match for the SATA SSD, I thought that
throughput might be improved with a gen2 caddy, so bought one of
these, Simplecom SE229: [...]
congatec will provide a Linux BSP for the Arm Cortex-A72 cores, as well as support for Wind River VxWorks, RTOS, and QNX for the Cortex-R5 real-time cores. The TDA4VM processor also happens to be found in the Beaglebone AI-64 SBC so besides support from congatec directly, there should be public resources to help with development too. Congatec also offers two SMARC carrier boards for evaluation and early-stage software development: conga-SMC1/SMARC-ARM and conga-SEVAL.
It’s pretty hard to find differences between TDA4VM and DRA829J since the processors are virtually identical except for a few small differences as noted on TI forums…
The world of mechanical engineering is full of interesting and ingenious mechanisms. The Geneva drive, for example, translates rotary motion into intermittent ticking — perfect for a wristwatch or clock. With a clever mechanism, one can reduce the need for complicated control electronics.
It’s FOSS ☛ Open-Source Model ‘Dolly’ Claims to be a Cheaper Alternative to ChatGPT [Ed: Chatbots are not news. Pointless, worthless hype intended to help Microsoft distract from mass layoffs. Why does the corporate media celebrate Microsoft wasting a lot of electricity for something people don't want or use? How much has Microsoft paid so far for all those mindless puff pieces?]
An affordable alternative to ChatGPT? And, open-source? Looks like we’re joining the open-source race against ChatGPT.
HackerBox is a monthly subscription that combines and delivers various dev kits aimed at hobbyists and students. This month’s HackerBox is based on the wardriver.uk platform and it features two ESP32-WROOM-32U modules, one GSM modem, a MicroSD card, an OLED display and many other components.
A: Start small and work your way up to bigger and more complex things. Test and calibration prints are a great way to get to know your printer’s capabilities and limitations, but if you find that uninteresting and want to be designing and printing your own things, then try tackling one difficult thing at a time, instead of trying to throw it into a single design. I also recommend reading up on the basics/theory of 3D printing before diving in too far, particularly since there are some amazing, very easy-to-digest primers out there. I highly recommend Billie Ruben’s guides.
I’ve used hardware-backed OpenPGP keys since 2006 when I imported newly generated rsa1024 subkeys to a FSFE Fellowship card. This worked well for several years, and I recall buying more ZeitControl cards for multi-machine usage and backup purposes. As a side note, I recall being unsatisfied with the weak 1024-bit RSA subkeys at the time – my primary key was a somewhat stronger 1280-bit RSA key created back in 2002 — but OpenPGP cards at the time didn’t support more than 1024 bit RSA, and were (and still often are) also limited to power-of-two RSA key sizes which I dislike.
[...]
In December 2022 I bought a new laptop and setup a FST-01SZ with my Ed25519 key, and while I have taken a vacation from Debian, I continue to extend the expiration period on the old RSA3744-key in case I will ever have to use it again, so the overall OpenPGP setup was still sub-optimal. Having two valid OpenPGP keys at the same time causes people to use both for email encryption (leading me to have to use both devices), and the WKD Key Discovery protocol doesn’t like two valid keys either. At FOSDEM’23 I ran into Andre Heinecke at GnuPG and I couldn’t help complain about how complex and unsatisfying all OpenPGP-related matters were, and he mildly ignored my rant and asked why I didn’t put the master key on another smartcard. The comment sunk in when I came home, and recently I connected all the dots and this post is a summary of what I did to move my offline OpenPGP master key to a Nitrokey Start.
GnuCash is a powerful and flexible accounting tool that can be used for small business invoicing and accounting. It has a number of features that make it particularly well-suited for this purpose, including the ability to track expenses and income, generate reports, and manage invoices. Additionally, GnuCash is free and open source, which makes it accessible to small businesses with limited resources. In this article, I discuss the features of GnuCash that make it easy for you to get started using it in your own small business.
I began using GnuCash a number of years ago for my personal finances but found it could also function as a useful tool for my small business too. I’d been using a proprietary solution for much of the life of my business. I grew tired of being forced to upgrade periodically to get access to my invoices and statements for my small business. Moving to GnuCash gave me the ability to integrate my small business accounting with my personal finances without sacrificing any features.
Twitter Inc. is attempting to identify the person who leaked parts of its proprietary source code after it was discovered to have been shared on GitHub for at least three months.
Parts of a Twitter code used to run the social network were leaked online, the company said in a court filing first reported by the New York Times on Sunday.
Driving the news: Twitter said in a Friday filing with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California against GitHub, a Microsoft-owned software collaboration platform, that the leak included the “[p]roprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools.”
Benchmarking is the process of measuring and comparing the performance of different programs, tools, or configurations in order to identify which one is the most efficient for a specific task. It is a critical step in software development that can help developers identify performance bottlenecks and improve the overall performance of their applications.
In this post I create a square matrix and then convert it to a data.frame (2,000 rows by 2,000 columns) and then saved it as a gz compressed csv file. The benchmark compares different R packages and functions, including base R, data.table, vroom, and readr, and measures their relative speeds based on the time it takes to read in the .csv.gz file.
Well, nREPL was never meant to be a “real REPL”. It was meant to be a REPL server that makes it easy for people to build development tools (e.g. Clojure editor plugins) upon. And framing requests and responses makes a huge difference there. Sure, it might look appealing to be relying only on eval for everything, but you still need to be able to process whatever you got from eval. It’s also pretty handy to be able to match requests and responses that originated from them.
Python is a versatile and powerful programming language, known for its readability and ease of use. As a programmer, learning new coding techniques and best practices is essential for growth and skill development.
ChatOps is a collaboration model that connects people, processes, tools, and automation into a transparent workflow. Mattermost is an open source, self-hosted messaging platform that enables organizations to communicate securely, effectively, and efficiently. It’s a great open source alternative to Slack, Discord, and other proprietary messaging platforms. This article outlines the steps to create a ChatOps bot on Mattermost, including the necessary code examples and explanations.
Prerequisites
Before starting, ensure that you have access to a Mattermost server, have Python installed, and have installed the Mattermost Python driver using pip.
Two government leaders delayed the time change so Muslims would not have to break their daytime fast an hour later during Ramadan. But after a firestorm ensued, they backtracked.
On Monday, March 27, in Ogre, a man has been run over by a train at the Jaunogre railway station, the State Police representative Līna Bagdone told Latvian Radio.
Ukraine, with far more pressing needs, plans to rebuild the colossal Mriya cargo plane, a symbol of pride that was destroyed last year in a battle for its airfield.
Investigators looking for the cause of a deadly explosion that leveled part of a Pennsylvania chocolate factory are facing an even more difficult task as they comb through wreckage that was picked apart and moved around during the weekend search for victims and survivors. Seven people were killed and several others wounded in the powerful blast at the R.M Palmer Co. plant in West Reading (REHD’-ing). With the recovery effort now over, attention turned to identifying the cause. Authorities say that task is even more complicated because heavy equipment was used to pick apart the wreckage.
With talk of quiet quitters and pressure on employers to create a space where we can bring our whole selves to work, work is still work. Some of it’s great. Much of it can feel meaningless.
Failure to meet water and toilet needs and lack of disinfection amid insect density increase the risk of an outbreak in the region, according to the Turkish Medical Association.
Traditionally, an org chart is represented as a tree. You start at the top with the root of the tree, probably the CEO. And then everything comes down from there hierarchically.
It doesn’t have to be that way, though! We can imagine other topologies for companies which would work differently. Let’s challenge assumptions one by one and see where we end up.
Lines will be getting longer for free breakfast and lunch at New Mexico public schools. Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Monday signed legislation to provide free school meals to all students regardless of family income. The bill cleared the Legislature during the recent 60-day session. New Mexico and several other states are looking to fill the gap as federal pandemic-era benefit programs lapse and as food prices strain family budgets. Lawmakers set aside more than $22 million in the state budget to help pay for the program. Some say more money will be needed to bankroll the effort over time.
The squabble had been brewing for weeks in the K-12 charter school in Leon County, Fla., after students in a sixth-grade art history class were taught about the Renaissance. Alongside the Michelangelo sculpture, the lesson included images of the paintings “The Creation of Adam” and “Birth of Venus.”
In a tweet, Florence Mayor Dario Nardella said he would “personally invite” the American educator to the city, home of the statue, to “give her recognition on behalf of the city,” adding that “art is civilization and whoever teaches it deserves respect.” Confusing art with pornography is “ridiculous,” Nardella wrote.
The board of the Tallahassee Classical School pressured Principal Hope Carrasquilla to resign last week after an image of the David was shown to a sixth-grade art class. The school has a policy requiring parents to be notified in advance about “controversial” topics being taught.
The incredulous Italian response highlighted how the U.S. culture wars are often perceived in Europe, where despite a rise in right-wing sentiment and governance, the Renaissance and its masterpieces, even its naked ones, are generally free of controversy. Sunday’s front page of the Italian daily publication Corriere della Sera featured a cartoon by its leading satirist depicting David with his genitals covered by an image of Uncle Sam and the word “Shame.”
She was recently going through her stack of important reminders when she found a note she had written at least a year ago. Ms. Smith said she remembered thinking at the time that she should rewrite the note so it would be discernible but never got around to it.
Struggling to decipher it, she posted a photo of the note in a Reddit community where thousands have sought help to decode messy handwriting.
“Teaching cursive in our schools not only has a historical significance but it also promotes discipline, and patience as students learn to form each individual letter and then connect them in words,” said Grand Rapids Catholic Schools Assistant Superintendent Sarah Grey, over email. “It forces students to slow down and be intentional about what they are writing, and encourages them to do it beautifully.”
Cursive handwriting is a foundational skill for students, Grey added, and teaching it allows students to improve their reading and writing skills.
I ruffled through my legacy parts box, and found this amazing (and dusty!) ISA Acer MIO-400 KF Multi-IO card. Rather than needing separate cards for printer ports, serial, game ports, floppy drives, and IDE controllers, this integrated them all into one card, with jumpers on the board to tune their settings and enable/disable specific functions: [...]
Today, I shipped the physical rewards for the Devotion and Corrosion Kickstarter. These books arrived at my house a couple days after I opened sponsorships on the mail book. Unfortunately, in those intervening days I caught covid. (Zero stars, recommend catching distemper or cercospora leaf rot instead.)
The number of calls to drug-related emergencies has increased significantly in Latvia. New synthetic opioids, which are more dangerous to users, are rapidly spreading to the Latvian market, and overdose is often fatal, Latvian Radio reported March 27.
The state’s Democratic governor signed a bill expanding the health insurance program for low-income people days after the measure cleared the Republican-controlled legislature.
A Canadian Pacific train derailed in rural North Dakota Sunday night and spilled hazardous materials. But local authorities and the railroad said there is no threat to public safety. There were no injuries or fire associated with the derailment, which occurred in a rural area outside Wyndmere. Several hundred people live in that town about 60 miles southwest of Fargo. Canadian Pacific spokesperson Andy Cummings said 31 of the 70 cars on the train left the tracks around 11:15 p.m. Sunday. Four cars carrying liquid asphalt and two filled with ethylene glycol spilled part of their loads. But there are no waterways near where the derailment happened and the chemicals were contained at the site. Cummings said the railroad believes a broken rail caused the derailment.
North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has signed a Medicaid expansion law that was a decade in the making. Cooper celebrated on Monday the passage of expansion legislation from the Republican-controlled General Assembly with the bill-signing ceremony at the Executive Mansion. Cooper has wanted expansion for years, but Republicans came around to the idea recently. North Carolina has been among 11 states who haven’t accepted expansion. Cooper isn’t thrilled with a provision in the bill that requiring the legislature to pass a separate state budget law first for expansion to be implemented. The governor said the law will be the “working families bill of the decade” once implemented.
The standoff between the U.S. government and TikTok underscores a growing problem for policymakers: Chinese apps are booming in America, but most U.S. apps aren’t able to operate in China.
Why it matters: Mobile apps are one of the most powerful vectors for expanding trade and exporting soft power, given how widely accessible they are, how much time is spent on them, and how little regulatory oversight there is online.
Social media companies are increasingly being blamed for historically high rates of depression, suicidality and other mental health issues in youths. And now, states and local governments are increasingly pursuing legislation and legal action.
The Biden administration’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, weighed in last month, telling CNN that age 13 is “too early” for kids to join social media.
“Multiple juries are in. They’re all reaching the same conclusion,” Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business told the Financial Times. “When social media or high-speed internet came in, [studies] all find the same story which is mental health plummets, especially for girls.”
A December report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate which focused on TikTok found the platform began recommending eating disorder and self-harm content to new teen accounts within eight minutes of use.
Research published by the American Psychological Association last month found teens and young adults who cut social media use by 50% for a few weeks saw significant improvement in how they felt about both their weight and their overall appearance compared with their peers.
The big picture: There are nearly 150 product liability lawsuits filed in the U.S. against the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, per the Financial Times.
I have set myself a challenge to use greyscale mode on my phone for a week. My goal is to reduce usage of my phone and stop procrastinating to the degree that I have been over the last few days. If the experience proves valuable, I shall leave greyscale mode enabled. I will report back in a week to share my progress.
The conflict between providers’ obligations to provide the best care and private equity investors’ insatiable appetites for maximized [returns] provides is clear. “You can’t serve two masters,” a doctor who previously worked for private equity-owned U.S. Dermatology Partners toldBloomberg. “You can’t serve patients and investors.”
Microsoft Israel is set to lay off dozens of employees as part of the global cutbacks in the company, Calcalist has learned. Microsoft announced in January that it is laying off 10,000 workers, but this will be the first time that cyber team members in Israel will also be fired.
The local R&D center is headed by Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Corporation, General Manager of Israel R&D Center and CTO of Microsoft Security. The center employs around 2,700 people, with around half of them working in cybersecurity.
Using the information gathered through testing — both by myself and with others asking questions — I refined my information architecture, changed the prompts sent to accompany queries, and made other changes to help improve the quality of answers. The architecture of how this bot is built is outside of the scope of this post. Rather, I would like to focus on some interesting results both I and the people who tested the bot have observed. I list the common themes in bullet point form below.
We’ve all seen the non-stop stream of news from OpenAI. First we see GPT-4, where you have the announcement on Tuesday morning and you basically have thousands of companies launched by sundown.
And then we see chatgpt plugins drop, which are basically ways of implementing entire businesses as plugins! This is what I said when Brockman dropped the web search plugin.
Whilst Microsoft is fixing the embedded files feature in OneNote I decided to abuse a whole other feature. Embedded URLs. Turns out this is something they may also have to fix.
[...]
In my previous blogpost I described how OneNote is being abused in order to deliver a malicious URL. In response to this attack, helpnetsecurity recently reported that Microsoft is planning to release a fix for the issue in April this year. Currently, it’s still unknown what this fix will look like, but from helpnetsecurity’s post, it seems like Microsoft’s fix will focus on the OneNote embedded file feature.
During my testing, I discovered that there is another way to abuse OneNote to deliver malware: Using URLs. The idea is similar to how Threat Actors are already abusing URLs in HTML pages or PDFs. Where the user is presented with a fake warning or image to click on which would open the URL in their browser and loads a phishing page.
I watch what Dima (dimkr in the forum) is doing on woof-CE with
great interest. In particular, the steps that he has implemented
to enhance security for applications running as user ‘spot’.
Security Week ☛ Microsoft: No-Interaction Outlook Zero Day Exploited Since Last April [iophk: Windows TCO; Ed: Lies, decoys, and distraction. Microsoft is trying to offload blame to those who exploit the holes while Microsoft sits on its hands, making bug doors in everything it makes]
Microsoft says it has evidence that Russian APT actors were exploiting a nasty Outlook zero-day as far back as April 2022, upping the stakes on organizations to start hunting for signs of compromise.
[...]
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-23397, was flagged in the ‘already exploited’ category when Redmond shipped a fix earlier this month and Microsoft’s incident responders have pinned the attacks on Russian government-level hackers targeting organizations in Europe.
BEC attacks, an attack method that involves fraud enabled by social engineering, are not new. A report in September found that one-third of all cyberattacks now involve BEC, but typically, such attacks aim to steal money. The FBI warning details that those behind the attacks are now also targeting tangible goods.
According to a March 24 announcement by the FBI, criminal actors are impersonating the email domains of legitimate companies to initiate the bulk purchase of goods from vendors across the U.S. The email messages sent to vendors appear to come from known sources of business, which vendors assume are legitimate business transactions, so they fulfill the purchase orders for distribution.
To date, the United States has identified devices associated with 50 U.S. personnel in ten countries across several continents that are confirmed or suspected of being targeted with spyware, a senior administration official told CyberScoop during a press call Monday. The official did not rule out additional instances and said that investigations are ongoing.
In examining the issue, the White House found that “commercial spyware vendors were aggressively marketing, seeking to make inroads across the U.S.’s many law enforcement and intelligence components, sometimes obfuscating their business ties and practices,” according to a senior administration official.
A review of the websites of more than 3,500 companies, organizations and government entities by the Toronto-based company Feroot Security found that so-called tracking pixels from the TikTok parent company were present in 30 U.S. state-government websites across 27 states, including some where the app has been banned from state networks and devices. Feroot collected the data in January and February of this year.
The presence of that code means that U.S. state governments around the country are inadvertently [sic] participating in a data-collection effort for a foreign-owned company, one that senior Biden administration officials and lawmakers of both parties have said could be harmful to U.S. national security and the privacy of Americans.
Canadian cybersecurity company Feroot Security found at least 27 state government websites have web-tracking code placed by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., which runs TikTok, according to an exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal.
The report — which surveyed more than 3,500 companies, organizations and government entities in January and February — is the latest to reveal how the US unknowingly shares data with subsidiaries of the Chinese Communist Party.
While tracking pixels – or web beacons – are typically used for collecting data to better target audiences with relevant ads, concerns have been raised about the information collected and how it may be used by the Chinese company and other entities in the country.
According to a new report from a cybersecurity company, more than two dozen state governments have placed web-tracking code made by TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. on official websites.
The newly-launched Protect My Face campaign gives residents of the Brussels region of Belgium the opportunity to oppose mass facial recognition. EDRi applauds this initiative which demands that the Brussels Parliament ban these intrusive and discriminatory practices.
The president signed an executive order seeking to limit deployment of a tool that has been abused by autocracies — and some democracies — to spy on dissidents, human rights activists and journalists.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order today banning government agencies from using commercial spyware deemed to present a national security risk to the United States.
The United States on Tuesday opens its second Summit for Democracy with its eyes firmly on the rest of the world, seeking a united front against authoritarianism as Russia attacks Ukraine and as China launches a diplomatic offensive.
The Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, plus Poland and Ukraine have released a statement clearly laying down their opposition to allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to participate in Olympic competition.
From Monday, March 27, in Liepāja, on the promenade at the end of Celtnieku street, the destroyed T-72B tank of the Russian occupation forces in Ukraine is on view to the general public.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has topicalized refugee issues in Latvia once again. In the past, many Latvians were also forced to flee their homes due to hostilities. The exhibition “Refugee Paths” opened in March displays items Latvians had taken with them when fleeing and tells the stories of Latvian refugees from 1944 onward, Latvian Radio reported on March 25.
Putin badly miscalculated, the US often claims, and his invasion of Ukraine has made NATO stronger and more united than ever. “He thought NATO would fracture and divide. Instead, NATO is more united and more unified than ever – than ever before,” Biden said on February 21.
Originally posted at TomDispatch. Just in case you were wondering where your tax dollars went in this century, consider the American war, now 20 years old, in Iraq (and after 2014 in Syria as well).
Danger: President Joe Biden’s sophomores running U.S. foreign policy today live in a dream world on the verge of becoming a nightmare. The nightmare – military confrontation with both Russia and China – now looms. It is scary enough that Biden seems to be out of it.
The government and the Greens have both declared victory after long negotiations about key climate policy. What really changed? And what is a safeguard mechanism anyway?
Sany has set out its ambitions to create a comprehensive hydrogen industry chain covering green production, storage, transportation and refuelling equipment.
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission today sued Binance and its founding Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao, as well as former Chief Compliance Officer Samuel Lim. The CFTC is the agency responsible for regulating the derivatives market.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) is suing Binance, alleging that the popular crypto exchange illegally sold crypto derivatives—for currencies including bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin, tether, and binance USD— to retail investors.
In Latvia, the price of band 95 gasoline has decreased to the level seen before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, according to LETA’s information March 27.
California lawmakers have approved the nation’s first penalty for price gouging at the pump. The state Assembly passed a bill on Monday that would empower state regulators to punish oil companies for profiting from price spikes. The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has said he will sign it into law. The bill is in response to a price spike last year that saw the average price for a gallon of gasoline hit $6.44 in California. The oil industry says the bill will decrease supply and cause prices to increase. The bill also requires oil companies to disclose more data on their pricing.
In 2021, there was a substantial increase in the number of electric passenger vehicles in the EU compared with 2020 (+76%), and Latvia’s growth rate in that regard was close to the EU average (+75%), according to Eurostat data published March 24.
“We have situational awareness – cameras on the side, front and stern of the ship,” the captain explains. “It can decide whether to change its path because something is in the way.”
The captain’s job will move onto dry-land, to a remote operation centre more than 80km (50 miles) away, where several ships could potentially be monitored at the same time. If necessary, humans will be able to intervene by sending commands to alter the speed and course.
Both in academia and the maritime industry as a whole, cybersecurity is a hot concern. Recently, a collaborative team taught a brand-new cyber security course at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Lesund. A new course titled “Maritime digital security” has just been added to NTNU in Lesund’s maritime industry program.
Participants in the workshop have studied digital risks for the past two months. They have conducted a realistic practice run of a cyber attack on a ship in motion and evaluated the risk of current digital threats. The main emphasis is on resilience development and risk management of cyberattacks.
With dimensions of 1160*560*860MM, an 800MM wheelbase, a 590MM seat height, and a curb weight of 81.5 pounds (37 kg), the M One that was unveiled is described as a casual mini moped. The vehicle is powered by a 48V20Ah lithium battery pack and has a hub motor with a 400W rated power and a 1KW maximum output power. The battery has a 1-kilowatt-hour capacity, and the vehicle’s top cruising distance is 60 miles (100 kilometers).
When Covid-19 arrived three years ago, most transit passengers stopped riding, shrinking transportation agencies’ fare revenues. Today, ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Unless they can quickly find new sources of funding, big transit systems will be forced to drastically curtail service, which would drive away still more passengers and place those systems in an even deeper financial hole.
While live bees can be used as a deterrent to keep elephants away from farms, a new technology fills in for cases where a buzz without the sting is preferable.
The arrests come amid ongoing friction between the governor and legislative leaders over taxes as Hochul over a progressive push to raise income taxes on the wealthy.
One of the largest public transportation walkouts in decades was intended to give unions leverage as they seek raises to keep pace with rising inflation.
Over the last couple of weeks, cash crowded into U.S. money market funds at the fastest clip since the COVID crisis hit.
Why it matters: The flow of dollars to money market funds for safekeeping highlights the anxiety that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank introduced into the financial system.
Silicon Valley Bank was a “textbook case of mismanagement,” the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator will tell lawmakers this week — one key reason for the bank’s failure.
Why it matters: The Fed official is among the regulators set to appear before Congress for the first hearing related to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which sparked panic about the financial system’s health.
As JPMorgan’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are being scrutinized in court, Whitney Webb reveals how the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.
Despite the best efforts of financial authorities following the most recent banking crisis, selloffs of bank shares and capital contingent bonds have persisted. After the sale of Credit Suisse, the most poignant example of investor concerns is the market pressure on Deutsche Bank (DB).
The movie’s based on a book published in 1902 that people have adapted into more than a dozen movies. And we’d never read it or seen any of the films before, but I presume that a big part of the appeal is that you also get to fantasize: how would you solve this puzzle?
As Leonard pointed out: the first thing to do, perhaps, ought to be to hire professional assistance: experts who could research and advise you on how to do this. But then of course the problem reduces to: what ought those experts suggest?
The FDIC has approved the sale of Silicon Valley Bank to First Citizens Bank & Trust Co. Bank stocks have been largely on the rise since the announcement of the acquisition, “but uncertainty is high,” said IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva.
First Citizens Bank, a major financial institution with more than $100 billion in assets under management, has agreed to acquire Silicon Valley Bridge Bank. The transaction was announced this morning. Silicon Valley Bridge Bank is the entity to which regulators moved the assets of Silicon Valley Bank following the latter company’s collapse this month.
Latvijas Banka (LB), the central bank of Latvia, has released its first “sustainability disclosures report”, outlining its efforts to promote sustainable development and addressing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues.
Data published on March 27 by the Central Statistical Bureau show that in February 2023, compared to February 2022, the level of construction costs in Latvia increased by 14.3 %.
First Citizens BancShares of Raleigh, N.C. has agreed to buy the commercial banking business of Silicon Valley Bank, which recently collapsed and was seized by the U.S. government.
Why it matters: This is a step toward stabilizing America’s regional banking sector, after a month of tumult.
A survey from Specops Software showed that 41 per cent of businesses are still not providing adequate cybersecurity training and new research from Hornetsecurity stated 33 per cent of businesses not are not offering cybersecurity awareness training to remote staff.
Trest insisted the lack of security hygiene measures is “one of the most common reasons why cybercriminals gain access to business-critical systems in the first place.” He added that with humans fronting company defences, “the key to reducing cyber threats and mitigating human risk is by prioritising and investing in the right security awareness training.”
The leak saw excerpts of Twitter’s source code — the programming that powers the Twitter platform and its internal tools — posted to the online software repository GitHub, according to a court filing Friday by a Twitter attorney. The files were posted by a pseudonymous GitHub user, identified only by the handle FreeSpeechEnthusiast. The account was created on Jan. 3 and does not appear to have posted any other material besides the Twitter code.
Some U.S. lawmakers are calling on the government to ban the app, alleging it could be used for sweeping data collection, content censorship and harm to children’s mental health.
According to the ministry, Wang told Cook that China unwaveringly supports high-level opening-up of rules, regulations, management, standards, and other systems.
He Lifeng’s long career in government has spanned the extremes of China’s approach, from the early embrace of small business in the 1980s to today’s tighter state control.
China has made significant efforts to curry favor with Utah lawmakers, The Associated Press reports. As a result, state officials have delayed legislation and nixed resolutions that would have conveyed displeasure with the Chinese government.
Though his visit is not official, it is nonetheless significant and may offer clues to political calculations on both sides of the increasingly tense Taiwan Strait.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he would delay plans to overhaul the judiciary after mass protests and work stoppages thrust Israel into widespread civil unrest.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government contends the Supreme Court has unchecked power, but critics of the proposal say it goes too far.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said he was delaying his coalition’s judicial overhaul legislation after mass protests and a general strike that affected much of the country.
“Lifting of the articles that ban the use of Kurdish, and making legislation in favor of Kurdish will be what I will work for,” says Zana Farqînî who applied to Green Left Party to be a candidate for MP in the May 14 elections.
Sometimes it seems like billionaires can dominate our lives—or at least the news. A mystery in US tax data, however, suggests at least one super-wealthy individual flew under the radar until the very end.
The Saeima should not rush the amendments to the Law on Public Electronic Media, which provides for the merger of Latvian Radio and Latvian Television as of January 1, 2024, Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš (New Unity) wrote on Twitter Monday, February 27. LSM is also a part of the public media framework.
The grand jury investigating a hush-money case against the former president met again on Monday, but the timing of any potential indictment remained unclear.
The ambassador of France in Ankara was summoned to the Foreign Ministry where he was told that Ankara strongly denounces the Senate of France to host YPG members and to award them medals of honor.
In a weeklong trip to Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, the vice president will face a balancing act as she tries to foster a collaborative U.S. relationship.
A foundation laid during the groundbreaking ceremony of a new state hospital in the quake-hit province of Hatay was removed a day later. The cement poured during a live television broadcast was not intended for construction.
For now, the creditors committee is simply requesting more information on Mountain Way from Free Speech Systems and Jones; in the future, though, the scheme could lead to serious headaches for Jones and the company.
The Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones, who faces more than $1.4 billion in legal damages for defaming the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, has devised a new way to taunt them: wriggling out of paying them the money they are owed.
Automattic (WordPress.com) refuses to say what led to the ban, but it’s quite obvious through my history of posts about Apple’s censorship, proprietary software, the Microsoft Stabber, etc. that there are probably outfits that would rather that I just go away and not come back.
Automattic says that there’s no robot going around killing blogs without human review, but beyond this, I have no idea and I’ll never be able to prove anything.
Yle TV1 will host a series of minority language election discussions this week, beginning on Monday at 3pm with a show in Easy Finnish. The English language discussion will be broadcast on Thursday at 3pm.
A group of people attempted to attack those who gathered outside of the home of the theologian who had been attacked. The police detained the journalist filming the incident.
Police arrested Singh after a first information report was filed earlier that day by the Ratia Sadar police station in the state’s Fatehabad district, which opened an investigation into Singh and an unnamed journalist based on a complaint by the son of a local official, according to those sources and a copy of the report reviewed by CPJ.
The police arrested Fatehabad-based TV journalist Jaspal Singh after booking him under Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, Sections 384 (extortion) and 500 (defamation) of the IPC and various sections of the SC/ST Act on the complaint of BJP MLA from Ratia Lakshman Napa’s son Sumit Kumar on Saturday.
Anthony J. Broadwater spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted in the assault in Syracuse, N.Y., which Ms. Sebold, a well-known novelist, described in her memoir “Lucky.”
Thanks to legislation signed by President Carter in 1980, a Christian group rooted in faith and compassion has hosted thousands of refugees in rural Georgia.
At rallies across the country, community members have been chanting“Sí, se puede!” to demand that the U.S. fulfill its moral obligation to undocumented immigrants by expanding their access to life-saving medical care, job-loss benefits, driver’s licenses, and much more. However, this political advocacy — critical to our democracy’s debate about our immigration policies — could constitute a crime under federal law.
This issue brief describes cross-cutting themes, a proposed theory of change, and recommendations that emerged from the Atlantic Council and US Department of State expert convening, “Future of Women and Work in South Asia” on how to foster cross-sectoral collaboration and catalyze knowledge sharing to support women’s economic empowerment in South Asia.
The influence of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a rising far-right lawmaker, was underscored when he said he would agree to a delay of the divisive judicial overhaul.
Israel’s prime minister, who has long thrived by pitting one force against another, is caught between his far-right coalition and public anger over the government’s plan to weaken the judiciary.
In 2021, a 17-year-old boy in the Netherlands was arrested for inciting of riots. The boy had called for people to come to Utrecht with fireworks as a protest against the corona policy and the fireworks ban. The boy received a so-called “online area ban” from the municipality, even though the mayor does not have a legal basis for such an order. He was no longer allowed to make statements online that could lead to disorder in the city. Local rules do not provide majors the authority to curtail the freedom of expression as prevention, online or otherwise.
It was claimed that Yılmaz Ekinci committed suicide by hanging himself on an iron part of the door in the cell which is 1 meter and 20 cm high from the floor. Ekinci’s then-prison mate is now a witness in the case over Ekinci’s death.
Workers of Mata Automotive, a firm manufacturing parts for high-end car brands such as Bentley and Jaguar, demand improved working conditions and a 25 percent additional pay rise.
Artificial light emitted from buildings, streetlights, and reflected from satellite constellations are making the night sky brighter for earth-bound skywatchers. The Milky Way was visible to pretty much everyone less than 100 years ago, but is now drowned out by human-made light to most, according to the International Dark Sky Association.
Light pollution is actively destroying our ability to see the stars. Many Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems around the world are based on the stars, and the peoples’ ability to observe and interpret stellar positions and properties is of critical importance for daily life and cultural continuity. The erasure of the night sky acts to erase Indigenous connection to the stars, acting as a form of ongoing cultural and ecological genocide. Efforts to reduce, minimise, or eliminate light pollution are being achieved with varying degrees of success, but urban expansion, poor lighting design, and the increased use of blue-light emitting LEDs as a cost-effective solution is worsening problems related to human health, wildlife, and astronomical heritage for the benefit of capitalistic economic growth. We provide a brief overview of the issue, illustrating some of the important connections that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia maintain with the stars, as well as the impact growing light pollution has on this ancient knowledge. We propose a transdisciplinary approach to solving these issues, using a foundation based on Indigenous philosophies and decolonising methodologies.
Now, a group of scientists and other space stakeholders is working to preserve these stories. The Satellite Communications (SATCON) workshop, which is organized by the National Science Foundation and the American Astronomical Society, aims to mitigate satellites’ effects on our sky-viewing experiences.
Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist at the University of San Francisco, served as a co-chair at the 2021 event. While she and her colleagues sought to consult Indigenous scientists on sustainable space practices, they acknowledged that it wasn’t an all-encompassing discussion. “Everyone who spoke at the meeting was very clear that they were not speaking for their whole tribe, or for all sovereign tribes and nations or just the U.S. alone,” says Venkatesan.
She sees space as an ancestral global commons, as described in her 2020 article published in Nature Astronomy. But the task of regulating space is a complicated one. Astronomers and entrepreneurs should be careful not to appropriate Indigenous perspectives to serve their bottom line, she adds.
Each of these companies is taking to the skies to increase internet access across the globe. But even if they deliver on this, sky gazers — and especially Indigenous peoples — are left to wonder: at what cost?
The manufacturers, who tended to carry out their transactions in the same carpark, signalled their presence to business partners, including the Dutch duo, by placing a bottle of Cocio on the roof of their car.
The NSK were able to find out about this by cracking encrypted messages sent and received by the drug-importing Dutchmen and their colleagues.
The 220-million worth procurement for food supply for the Latvian National Armed Forces (NBS), which is under suspicion of unfair practices, has not undergone the safety checks needed, Latvian Television’s De Facto reported on March 27.
Bill C-18, the online news bill whose foundation is mandated payments for links, has unsurprisingly sparked reaction from Google and Facebook that raises the possibility of stopping linking to Canadian news. In an act of obvious retribution, the government responded to the companies response with a motion from Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage Chris Bittle that demanded a wide range of internal and external documents dating back years and even looped in the private correspondence of companies, NGOs, journalists and potentially of thousands of Canadians.
The non-profit claims its book scanning and distribution qualifies as fair use because its digital lending scheme is “transformative” – which conveys a different meaning than the original – and non-commercial. These are among the factors considered when assessing whether the fair use defense can be applied.
It also asserts that the goals of the “first sale doctrine” – which allows the purchaser of a copyrighted work to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy without seeking permission from the copyright holder – support its controlled lending of digitized purchased books.
I’m a little bit late with my update this month. It’s been a pretty crazy month to be quite honest, so this is a slightly longer entry than usual.
I’ll start with the good news. First off, I’ve got a new job (yay!). It’s at a nearby prominent heritage site, which is a really big deal for me and has pretty much been my main goal since graduating from Uni in 2021. I’m so beyond excited and can’t wait to start next month. Plus, I’m finally leaving my current job which is uh…worse than ever, to be quite honest. I won’t go into it too much but let’s just say that place is a sinking ship and I can’t be out of there soon enough. They’re not even planning on hiring a replacement for me. They’re just expecting everyone else to work harder and pick up the slack – like what?
This book was written over 50 years ago by Gary Allen, and while it was written from a US centric point of view I still found it an interesting take on what happens in the world.
When reading books (or, listening in this case) I try to have an open mind and find what might be applicable or relevant to my world and life.
Just once in life I would like to get involved in a super heated “duck season”, “‘wabbit season” style argument with someone where I manage to pull it off and get my way by, in the heat of the moment, reversing position to trick the other person into also reversing their position.
It comes as no surprise that the Windows OS and the Microsoft environment are some of the most common infrastructures to be found within a business. For the most part, people go for Windows simply due to the overall convenience and the fact that many other industries have Windows as their go-to OS.
That said, did you know that there are advantages to utilizing another operating system for your company? An OS such as Linux can prove to be a fantastic addition, but you’ll have to take the time to figure out the ins and outs of the system. Here’s how you can develop a reliable startup utilizing the Linux OS.
Bodhi Linux has always held a soft spot in my heart. Not only is it a beautiful, user-friendly operating system, it reminds me of my earlier days with Linux. That is mostly because the default “Moshka” desktop is based on one of my all-time favorites, the Enlightenment window manager.
Kubuntu has released the second generation of its flagship laptop, the Kubuntu Focus XE. With its sleek design, high-end hardware, and pre-installed Kubuntu 22.04 LTS GNU/Linux distribution, the Kubuntu Focus XE Gen 2 is aimed at power users and developers who demand top-notch performance and stability.
In essence, Machine Learning is the practice of using algorithms to parse data, learn insights from that data, and then make a determination or prediction. The machine is ‘trained’ using huge amounts of data.
In other words, Machine Learning is about building programs with tunable parameters (typically an array of floating point values) that are adjusted automatically so as to improve their behavior by adapting to previously seen data.
Machine learning architectures have arisen in recent years that include JPEG-style artifact mitigation as part of AI-driven upscaling/restoring routines.
LibrePCB is a free/open source electronic design automation (EDA) software. Its purpose is to help electronic engineering people draw circuits and make printed circuit board designs with drag-and-drop approaches and many more. Its latest version is 0.1.7 which has been released 3 October 2022. We write an overview and introduction of LibrePCB in this article.
Coming a year after Porteus Kiosk 5.4, the Porteus Kiosk 5.5 release is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series to support new hardware and features and includes upgraded userland packages from Gentoo Linux portage snapshot 20230318.
New features in Porteus Kiosk 5.5 include support for exFAT formatted storage devices, MD5 authentication support in 802.1x wired networks, support for monitoring the battery capacity of connected clients, as well as the ability to enable the watchdog timer to automatically restart the computer when something fails.
Debian 12 has been under development for a few months and slowly moving towards a final release. As of publishing this, it is currently under the hard freeze. That means no major package changes or enhancements are expected.
This release comes with several new features and improvements, making it an exciting release for Debian enthusiasts. In this article, we will discuss the best new features of Debian 12 Bookworm and how they can benefit users.
The community of developers who have been keeping the dream of Ubuntu phones and tablets alive since Canonical abandoned the project have announced that the first stable build of Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS “Focal Fossa” is here.
To everyone’s surprise and while we were waiting for the Ubuntu Touch OTA-25 update, UBports pushed today a new stable update based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, entitled Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal. This is the culmination of more than a year of hard work porting Ubuntu Touch from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The Focal Fossa Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 update is currently only available for Fairphone 4, Google Pixel 3a, Vollaphone 22, Vollaphone X, and Vollaphone devices. UBports also mentioned the fact that this release supports Android phones running Android 9 or later.
It’s only been three months since 2023 began and Ubuntu has already released its short-term release, Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster”. Even though it comes with only nine months of support (until January 2024), it’s excited people with its slew of upcoming features.
If you are an avid Ubuntu fan and don’t want to wait to get your hands on the final release, you can take a sneak peek into the beta version and get going with the latest features on display.
Here’s what you can expect with April’s release of Ubuntu Lunar Lobster 23.04.
ITTIA™ has announced the immediate availability of ITTIA DB software for the industry-leading VxWorks RTOS and Wind River Linux operating system. ITTIA DB is an embeddable, high-performance database that integrates time series with real-time data processing, where low-footprint transactional and analytical queries are both performed locally on embedded devices. Together, ITTIA DB and Wind River software offers a great edge computing platform for developers of embedded system applications.
How does the OS know when a headset is plugged in? This is a physical jack, so there must be a physical change that is detectable.
Some jacks have normally-closed sense pins that open when you insert a plug. These might be readable as a simple digital I/O – high or low. If you’ve ever wired gadgets onto the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi, it’s something like that.
The Librem 14, though, has a normally open sense pin. The plug tip shorts two pins together. The jack’s datasheet has a diagram worth a thousand words…
In a pretty long article published on March 24th at “TheNextWeb”, /e/OS was lucky enough to be highlighted as a proof of “why a a European mobile operating system can’t challenge Android and iOS”.
So “two OS is enough”. But why not “one OS is enough” in that case?
For apps developers, having to deal with both iOS+Android is real pain. They would really prefer one OS.
But there is a solution for this: use the technologies of the web to build mobile apps. That’s called “PWA”, “miniApps”… Standard technologies, not owned by X or Y. When you reach that point, then you can have 1,2,3… 5, 100 different OS. You don’t care: all apps will work. That would be possible, and we think it’s what’s going to happen.
Highlights of the GnuCash 5.0 release include a new Stock Transaction Assistant that can be accessed from the Actions menu. This feature will guide you through entering most investment transactions for bonds, mutual funds, and stocks.
This release also introduces an Investment Lots report that displays a graph of capital gains and losses in a period by investment lot. This feature works only when you use the View Lots dialog to manage capital gains and losses and can be accessed from the Reports > Assets & Liabilities menu.
Version 5.0 of the GnuCash accounting tool is out. Changes include a number of investment-tracking improvements, better completion in the register window, a reworked report-generation system, and more.
In every C/C++ source code file, we use header files to put declarations of functions, data types, class, macro and other relevant things inside it. These files have the extension of .h (for C) and .hxx (for C++).
We have different header types: internal and global includes. Some of the header files are used in many places. For example, in LibreOffice we have several modules, and some modules are used in many places. Here, we focus on the VCL module. For the global includes, they are placed inside include/ folder, and for internal headers of VCL module, the include files are put inside include/vcl/.
The Linux Foundation (LF), one of the primary driving forces behind the continuing growth of open-source technology, is turning its attention to developing a better metaverse and creating a living digital record of the physical world.
In December, LF announced the Open Metaverse Foundation (OMF) with a mission to provide a collaboration space for diverse industries to work on developing open-source software and standards for an inclusive, global, vendor-neutral, and scalable metaverse.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice and xen), Fedora (chromium, curl, and xen), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), Slackware (tar), SUSE (apache2, ceph, curl, dpdk, helm, libgit2, and php7), and Ubuntu (firefox and thunderbird).
Crown Resorts said on Monday a ransomware group had contacted the company, claiming that they had gained access to some files related to Australia’s biggest casino operator following a data breach at a file transfer service GoAnywhere.
“We were recently contacted by a ransomware group who claimed they have illegally obtained a limited number of Crown files,” a spokesperson of the formerly listed firm said in a statement.
In response to the growing public attention given to ChatGPT, the Europol Innovation Lab organised a number of workshops with subject matter experts from across Europol to explore how criminals can abuse large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, as well as how it may assist investigators in their daily work.
In a March 11 post about non-U.S. hospitals that had been victims of cyberattacks, DataBreaches had noted a report about CHU-BREST. Valéry Rieß-Marchive of LeMagIT has an update and more details on the incident.
On March 15, DataBreaches was contacted by a researcher who had found a “bunch of medical docs.” The files included patient intake evaluations, laboratory results, medical records requests, insurance information forms, treatment or consultation notes, and other files you would expect to see in a patient’s records. The patients all appeared to be in Texas, and there were almost 683,000 files.
When the researcher couldn’t determine who owned the data, they requested DataBreaches’ help. The researcher’s confusion was understandable. There appeared to be scanned documents from numerous doctors and medical groups, although certain names cropped up more than others. Most of the files were scanned pdf files and many were more than a decade old. The most recent files appeared to be dated in 2018 or so.
According to the filing, the law firm’s server was vulnerable to attack in November 2021 because they had not patched a vulnerability reported by Microsoft months earlier in April and May. A patch had been made available by Microsoft at around the the time as the vulnerability report.
We started playing Yahtzee as a way of playing games and passing the time with my in-laws over Zoom, back in the early days of the pandemic. It became a weekly thing: every Sunday, two games of Yahtzee, rolling the dice for around 45 minutes total, circling the wins on our scorecards.
The last year in general, and the last couple of months generally, have been bad from a mental health perspective. I’ve taken some real, tangible steps to healing from what went on when I was younger. I’m seeing a therapist; I need to schedule our next appointment. But it’s been helping.
It feels somewhat pointless to just create things knowing there will never be an audience to see it.
[...]
Similarly, I’ve tried writing on my own a number of times before I found Gemini. I’d find an old notebook for school and start writing about my day or whats on my mind, but very quickly would burn out. I tried having a digital journal for 2014 as well as later in 2022, but each one never got more than a couple entries before I lost interest. It wasn’t until I found Gemini, where I could post my writings, that I was able to stick to it for more than a week. The year anniversary for me starting this is coming around the corner and It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. Writing for my glog has been a great escape for me, much more rewarding than any video game ever was. Sure I’ll still occasionally write something, knowing full well I won’t publish it, just to get it off my chest, but still the desire to have an audience still fuels part of this passion. Even if it’s someone just skimming through it and not finding much interest, the very fact I’ve created something that can be viewed by another being just brings me a sort of closure. It scratches that creative itch.
Hi Gemini! A short text to talk about what is happening in the streets of Paris and elsewhere, as I’m spending most of my time and energy out there. If you saw trash on fire, I’m going to talk mostly about that. I won’t talk about what the reform is about; essentially, people’s anger is focused on the change of the legal age for retirement, pushed from 62 to 64 years, which a good two thirds of the population rejects, including a significant part demanding the legal age to be 60 again.
After my first encounter with systemd (which I honestly cannot remember the details of) I started reading about it, found myself quite convinced by the arguments against it, and kind of joined the “systemd is evil” camp and eventually moved to a systemd-free distro.
I am confronted with office work that I don’t want to do but needs to
get done. I had to trick myself into doing it by getting out of the
house with my office work with the reward of coffee and pastry. I
had to put that down just to bring me to the here and now.
I have created a random URL script to jump to any url in the gemini space, since I way playing around with PHP on my gemini server I thought what would be interesting small projects, so I did this.
This week we got a lot of cool stuff, starting with the release of the GNOME 44 desktop environment and continuing with a new Linux laptop from Kubuntu Focus, a new major NVIDIA graphics driver release, and new security updates for Ubuntu users.
Several new distro releases were also out this week including Tails 5.11, Trisquel GNU/Linux 11.0 LTS, and OpenMandriva Lx 23.03. Check out the hottest news of this week and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for March 26th, 2023, below.
Roughly a year ago I redid my entire home network and could then officially call it a homelab. Unfortunately the insane delays in acquiring Raspberry Pi’s has put quite the delay in finishing this setup. So while I continue to sit and wait on available pieces – I want to recap all the software I’ve come to love and run on this network.
Interactive widgets powered with only CSS are relatively common as people are playing with all the ways CSS can respond to, or create, interactions. CodePen contests are a great venue to see these experiments (which hopefully are never moved to a live human-facing project).
The problem with many of these examples is they need to convey their state (such as expanded or not), properties (think of relationships), or values, and (sometimes) dynamic names. While CSS is ideal to show these visually, they need to be passed to accessibility APIs so they can be conveyed to users of assistive technologies.
Emphasis is what you use italics for most of the time. When you need cite, you can type <cite> and when you need a more generic italic, for example for foreign language words or Linnaean names, you can type <i>. But on user-writable forums that disable fallthrough HTML, i is the better default. It’s never “wrong”, per se (em is just more specific) and it matches how many people sometimes use * and _ on these forums, when they think “I want to make this look cursive” rather than “I need to semantically emphasize this”.
New business models are another source of growth. Gaming’s latest boom was propelled by free-to-play games, which suck users in before monetising them with ads and in-game purchases. A new phase of expansion is coming from game-library subscriptions, which already show signs of increasing consumption and accelerating discovery, much as the cable bundle did in television. These new distribution mechanisms and business models promise more choice for consumers—which is why regulators should allow Microsoft’s $69bn acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a big gamemaker whose titles Microsoft would make available for streaming and subscription.
All this holds lessons for other industries—chiefly that, if you are in media, you need to be in gaming. Apple and Netflix are scrambling to complement their streaming offerings with games. Others are already there. In August Sony Pictures will release “Gran Turismo”, a film based on a Sony game which features songs by artists from Sony Music. Media firms that ignore gaming risk being like those that decided in the 1950s to sit out the tv craze.
At Embedded World 2023, Ferrous Systems had a joint booth with AdaCore, to talk about our new joint-venture: Ferrocene. Ferrocene is a qualified toolchain for building safety-critical systems in Rust.
Florian noted that our booth was next to the Blackberry/QNX booth, and that “we should do a demo using QNX Neutrino”, the POSIX-compatible real-time operating system that’s popular with our target audience in the automotive sector. That’s pretty much all we had to go on
We recently reported that Theo de Raadt (derradt@) was scheduled to present at CanSecWest. That’s now happened, and slides of Theo’s presentation, Synthetic Memory Protections, can be found in the usual place. Video is available on the bird site.
Rockchip RK3588M is an automotive-grade variant of the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC that supports at least 6 Full HD displays and 16 camera inputs and can simultaneously run the car dashboard, in-vehicle infotainment, a digital rearview mirror, headrest monitors, ADAS system, and more.
The company offers support for Android 12.0, Ubuntu Desktop and Server, Debian 11, and buildroot RTLinux for the board//system-on-module. Firefly also mentions Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Docker container support, as it will be necessary to support critical (e.g. dashboard) and non-critical (e.g. infotainment) parts of the software with isolated and likely different operating systems. Technical documentation can be found in the Wiki to get started with Android, Linux, and RTLinux.
You can expect many more blog posts with development updates, but, in summary, I am taking the existing WiFi-focused core of nzyme and am extending it to support Ethernet data. Along with this huge addition, I am adding critical features like multi-node support and a proper authentication model.
In a court filing, Twitter also asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, reports The New York Times.
It is unclear when the code was posted online or whether its leak exposes Twitter to security vulnerabilities or hackers. Twitter’s takedown request to GitHub described it as “proprietary source code for Twitter’s platform and internal tools,” while the legal filing called it: “various excerpts of Twitter source code.”
Musk said earlier this month that Twitter would “open source” all of the software code it uses to recommend tweets on March 31.
According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.
According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.
Writing markdown documents outside RStudio (using the usual set of packages) has benefits and struggles. Huge struggle is transforming dataframe results into markdown table, using hypens and pipes. Ugghhh…
This useless functions takes R dataframe as input and prints out dataframe wrapped in markdown table.
The argument that the stack should be small often seems to be that, if it’s not, people will write programs which run away. That’s spurious: if such a program is, in fact, iterative, then good compilers will eliminate the tail calls and it will not use stack: a small limit on the stack will not help. If it’s really recursive then why should it run out of storage before its conversion to a program which manages the stack explicitly does? Of course that’s exactly what compilers which do CPS conversion already do: programs written using compilers which do that won’t have these weird stack limits in the first place. But it should not be necessary to rely on a CPS-converting compiler, or to write in continuation-passing style manually to avoid stack usage: it should be used for other reasons, because the stack is not, in fact, expensive.
In a previous article my friend Zyni wrote some variations on a list-flattening function, some of which were ‘recursive’ and some of which ‘iterative’, managing the stack explicitly. We thought it would be interesting to see what the performance differences were, both for this function and a more useful variant which searches a tree rather than flattening it.
A self-hosted AI image generator takes, very roughly, a few hundred GB of disk space, plus a large amount of RAM, and some fairly hefty compute. But, once that’s done, you could “compress” images by specifying an AI engine and weighted prompts like this: [...]
Recently I’ve been in a few discussions about adding support for multi-file analysis in several single-file linters. I believe that to be an amazing feature and that it is done quite well in elm-review, so I wanted to write down how it works to help other tools do the same. Hopefully it will be interesting for non-tooling authors as well!
If you’ve worked with circuit simulation, you may have run into IBIS models. The acronym is input/output buffer information, and while you can do a lot without having to deal with IBIS, knowing about it can help you have a successful simulation.
You know how it is. You have an older computer, and you can’t run the latest software on it. Time to upgrade, right? Well, if you have been in this situation a very long time, [ryomuk] may have an answer for you. The emu8080on4004 project (Google Translate) offers a way to run 8080 code on a 4004 CPU. Finally!
Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a soft robot that moves in a distinctly caterpillar-like manner. As detailed in the research paper in Science Advances by [Shuang Wu] and colleagues, the robot they developed consists of a layer of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCE) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with embedded silver nanowire that acts as a heater.
Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded NM Electronics, the company that would later go on to become Intel Corporation and give the world the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. The four-bit microprocessor would be joined a few years later by the 8008 and 8080, chips that paved the way for the PC revolution to come. Surprisingly, Moore was not an electrical engineer but a chemist, earning his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954 before his postdoctoral research at the prestigious Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. He briefly worked alongside Nobel laureate and transistor co-inventor William Shockley before jumping ship with Noyce and others to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is where he made the observation that integrated circuit component density doubled roughly every two years. This calculation would go on to be known as “Moore’s Law.”
Why scour the internet for a rare-as-hen’s-teeth new in box ZX Spectrum computer when you can instead order up some parts, assemble a basically all new ZX Spectrum along with the box, instruction manuals and more?
Back when commercial quadcopters started appearing in the news on the regular, public safety was a talking point. How, for example, do we keep them away from airports? Well, large drone companies didn’t want the negative PR, so some voluntarily added geofencing and tracking mechanisms to their own drones.
The average person spends 2.45 hours a day perusing social media — mostly watching videos — on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and Snapchat, to name just a few. The older, TV-based media services are battling for our time and attention with these newer phone and PC-based media services, and YouTube and TikTok are winning.
While the social media companies perfect user experiences that leverage the amazing capabilities of 10+ billion phones and PCs, pre-social media businesses spend roughly $100 billion per year on content but almost nothing on user experience (UX). As phones go 5G and social media reaches 5 billion users, older media is held back by a stagnant UX, frozen to the same plastic buttons TV remotes have had for decades.
The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat, and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).
• Rather, the objective evidence indicates that many OEMs and third party entities provide high quality, safe, and effective servicing of medical devices;
• A majority of comments, complaints, and adverse event reports alleging that inadequate “servicing” caused or contributed to clinical adverse events and deaths actually pertain to “remanufacturing” and not “servicing”; and
• The continued availability of third party entities to service and repair medical devices is critical to the functioning of the U.S. healthcare system.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last couple of decades, it’s that there is one characteristic of a quack treatment that is almost immutable, that always, always comes to apply to it—and usually rather quickly after it is introduced as a “miracle cure” for something. Basically, sooner or later, that quack treatment will be—shall we say?—repurposed for other conditions, usually many other conditions (e.g., cancer). A corollary to this principle is that, sooner or later, the quack treatment will likely be applied to autism, especially if it’s ever been claimed as a “treatment” for “vaccine injury.” A further corollary (a sub-corollary, if you will) is that, if this treatment, whatever it is, causes significant side effects in the autistic children being subjected to it, instead of stopping the treatment the parents will “persevere” and continue to abuse their child with it. I was reminded of this and thought it worth discussing when I came across a story on VICE by David Gilbert, Inside the Private Group Where Parents Give Ivermectin to Kids With Autism. It gave me serious flashbacks to Miracle Mineral Solution (a.k.a. MMS), and it was that similarity that I wanted to explore.
If, however, a person ingests a high concentration of uranium, it can cause cancer, affecting bones or the liver. And if a person inhales a large concentration of uranium, the alpha particles are likely to cause lung cancer.
Uranium is also a toxic chemical, so any form of consumption will damage a person’s organs severely, particularly the kidneys.
Demands by the president for TikTok to sell to an American firm cemented Democrats’ about-face on alleged national security threats posed by TikTok, with momentum against the platform escalating. The government and more than 30 states have blocked the app on government-issued devices. And, in a precursor to Biden’s ultimatum, the White House on March 7 supported a bipartisan measure to take action against TikTok and other companies subject to influence from foreign adversaries by establishing a new unified framework for reviewing and addressing foreign technology.
The effort came after Republicans on a House committee rammed through a separate bill that effectively would ban TikTok on mobile devices in the U.S on the heels of the company acknowledging that its Beijing-based parent firm, ByteDance, used data collected from the app to monitor journalists’ physical location using their IP addresses.
Russia’s Interior Ministry has put Denis Kapustin, the head of the right-wing militant group the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), on the federal wanted list.
A Ukrainian Tu-141 Strizh drone packed with explosives exploded in the city of Kireyevsk, in the Tula region, reports TASS. RIA Novosti reports that the drone was carrying ammunition.
Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin says more than 5,000 former prisoners are now free since they received pardons after fulfilling contracts with Wagner Group.
Donald Trump is not being targeted for the misdemeanors and serious felonies he appears to have committed but for discrediting and undermining the entrenched power of the ruling duopoly.
A Sukhoi Superjet 100 passenger aircraft en route from Nizhny Novgorod to Moscow sent out an alarm 10 minutes after takeoff, reports TASS, citing aviation services.
A voice recording is circulating on Ukrainian traditional media and Telegram channels. It’s allegedly a recorded telephone conversation between Russian music producer Iosif Prigozhin (no relation to Wagner Group founder Evgeny Prigozhin) and billionaire and former politician Farkhad Akhmedov. Ukraine’s Channel 5 television network was among the first outlets to call attention to the recording, which was first posted on March 7. Its authenticity has not been confirmed.
Decades into the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine, massive crowds flooded Israel’s streets on Sunday for another round of demonstrations to “save a democracy that never existed,” as one journalist recently put it.
The Chinese communists employed deception and subterfuge—to compensate for inferiority in training and equipment—during their war with the Imperial Japanese and the Chinese Nationalist forces from 1 August 1927 until 7 December 1949. The West is not adept at using deception beyond the military arena, whereas the CCP has practiced employing deception in every dimension of the struggle.
Michael Pillsbury realized late in his long government career the vast extent of the CCP’s strategic deception. In The Hundred Year Marathon (2016), Pillsbury identified the following elements of deception in the Chinese strategy to defeat the US: [...]
[...]
Pillsbury’s description of the principal elements of Chinese strategy to defeat the US are unlike those used in Western states. The CCP’s focus on deception is key to their goal of defeating the US.
The White House later condemned the alleged Iranian actions and warned of “further action” for an “unprecedented” cyberattack on a NATO ally.
“The United States will take further action to hold Iran accountable for actions that threaten the security of a U.S. ally and set a troubling precedent for cyberspace,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
The Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) deployed a team of two dozen personnel on a “hunt forward” operation following the second hack, which took place in September, and returned before the end of 2022. A CNMF spokesperson declined to comment on the specific number, or kinds of networks, that were examined.
The three-month mission was part of a now-years-long effort by the CNMF, a unit of U.S. Cyber Command, to work with foreign governments that want help shoring up their systems. Since 2018, teams have deployed 44 times to 22 countries and conducted operations on nearly 70 networks around the globe, most notably in Ukraine months before Russia’s invasion.
The so-called hunt-forward operation, a defensive measure taken at the invitation of foreign officials, was the first conducted in Albania, a smaller NATO ally. U.S. Cyber Command revealed the operation, handled by its Cyber National Mission Force, or CNMF, on March 23.
Army Maj. Gen. William Hartman, the commander of the mission force, in a statement said the operation brought CYBERCOM personnel “closer to adversary activity” while promoting international relationships.
While every day is technically a day to be kind to the planet, April 22 is Earth Day—a time to show appreciation and get into new habits if needed. There’s a lot of history when it comes to why fighting the climate crisis is at the core of all Earth Day celebrations.
From France to Uruguay, not by chance, neoliberal governments have proposed a pension reform that adds years to the retirement age (two in France; up to five in Uruguay). The narrative that justifies raising the retirement age is twofold: (1) People live longer and, therefore, have to work more; (2) If these “necessary and painful reforms” are not carried out, the system will be defunded and the country will lose competitiveness in the world since other countries have applied these same measures, necessary for the financial class and painful for the productive classes. The same discourse, plus a third threat, has been repeated for decades in the United States: (3) Social Security (invented by “the communist president” Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression) is not sustainable, so we must raise the retirement age and, as far as possible, privatize it. It does not matter that it is and always has been self-sustaining. Social security is just that: insurance, not risky investments.
On CNN March 14, Roger Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, said that American banks were on the verge of being nationalized:
Congressman Ro Khanna announced on CNN Sunday that he will not run for U.S. Senate and is endorsing fellow California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee in the closely watched 2024 race for retiring Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.
Now that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have concluded their summit in Moscow– an unusually long series of meetings over three days–are those purporting to lead the United States prepared to drop their wishful thinking, their miscalculations, and their illusions as to the significance…
Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to. So we are troubled by growing demands in the United States […]
Amid a national debate over whether Congress should ban TikTok, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday posted her first video on the social media platform to make the case for shifting the focus to broad privacy protections for Americans.
On a Saturday when dark clouds and even killer tornadoes were wending their way over huge swathes of the United States, the sun rose brightly over Waco. On a dusty patch of land in a central Texas town tagged by historic infamy, Donald Trump’s army of supporters came early and in surprisingly large numbers on the first weekend of an uneasy American spring.
Whether the hearing will advance Congress’ goal of ultimately banning TikTok in the U.S. remains to be seen. But if there were winners that emerged from the hearing, they were TikTok’s rivals — specifically Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
For years, Zuckerberg has attempted to draw attention and shift scrutiny onto TikTok, whose parent company is Chinese tech giant Bytedance. That’s because Zuckerberg and Meta have a lot to gain if TikTok were to get banned in the U.S.
Her post comes after lawmakers from both sides of the aisle grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Thursday on ways his company plans to address recent security concerns raised about the social media app.
Google was already a billion-dollar giant in 2006. YouTube’s fit was difficult. From the beginning, its complex, contradictory and wrong decisions have made the platform what it is today. Indeed, YouTube has surpassed the audiovisual competition that ridiculed it in 2006. Few imagined that the combination of Internet videos and unleashing the creativity of millions of people with only a camera could change entertainment forever: “It’s a sea change in how we think about entertainment. It’s undeniably true that it has given careers to people that don’t have careers in traditional media and never would,” says Bergen.
The channel, called February Morning (a reference to when the invasion began), also runs dozens of Telegram channels – the news messaging app where most Russians get their information about the war.
I don’t think I’d want to see this film if it was the only one being shown on a 19-hour flight, and all I had to read was the air sickness bag. But China-watchers speculate the film isn’t being suppressed over matters of taste; it’s political censorship.
Three months later — with the bullet still lodged in her arm — she continues to wait for answers. Latasha Smith.
The Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Capitol Police, has offered little information about what led an officer to open fire at Commonwealth Village apartments. The state has not given a timeline for releasing more details, including video from the body camera the officer was wearing.
Protesters marched through the city’s western Pol-e Sokhta neighborhood before being forcefully dispersed by Taliban security forces.
Around 25 women and girls attended the demonstration, carrying placards and chanting slogans “freedom, work, education,” “wise mother strong nation,” and “education is our right,” organizers said.
On Friday, Michigan repealed an 11-year-old law that weakened unions’ power in the workplace. Known as a “right-to-work” law, this type of legislation has been around since at least 1943, and Michigan is now one of only a handful of states to ever repeal it.
When Michigan’s law passed in 2012, the state was firmly in Republican hands. The party held control of the governorship, state Senate and House, after riding the Tea Party wave to power. Conversely, this repeal comes a few short months after the Democratic Party — which has long allied with unions — scored their own trifecta for the first time in roughly four decades. Meanwhile, in 2022, unions reached their highest popularity since 1965. In the repeal of right-to-work, though, partisanship could play just as much of a role as love of unions does.
What’s new, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer, is that Apple is now using badge records to monitor attendance — and has begun to enforce an escalating system of warnings against those who don’t make it in on those three days. It suggests some staff are being warned that failure to comply could cost them their job, though this policy doesn’t seem to be compan-wide.
This followed reports that the company has begun cracking down on workers, including insistence on presenteeism and the cessation of additional sick time for staff who catch COVID – even though the virus continues to infect people.
Josh and Kurt talk to Fiona Krakenbürger about the Sovereign Tech Fund. This is a fund created by Germany to fund important open source projects. Fiona has amazing insight into how this fund was created, what it’s doing today to help fund open source. She discusses where we go from here and what the future will look like. The Sovereign Tech Fund is a forward thinking program to fund open source across the world. This episode is a window into the future.
Things are looking pretty normal for this time of the release process.
All the stats look very regular, and the diffstat mostly does too.
I say "mostly", just because we had a bunch of xfs fixes last week,
which makes the diffstat skew that way more than usual. But even that
is mainly for a self-test addition. The actual code changes are much
smaller.
So instead of the usual 50+% drivers, the rc4 diffstat is about "one
third drivers, one third filesystems, one third rest". Not all of the
filesystem stuff is xfs, of course - we have cifs, btrfs and ksmbd
fixes too.
On the driver side, it's a mix, but networking and gpu shows up as
usual. With USB and thunderbolt fixes showing up, and the rest being
fairly random.
And "the rest" is all the normal stuff. Self-tests, core networking,
architecture updates, nothing odd there.
Let's hope things stay normal. And, as normal, testing and reporting
issues is appreciated,
Linus
libinput 1.23 is available!
Thanks to Yinon Burgansky, this version has a new pointer acceleration
profile: the "custom" profile.
This profile allows users to tweak the exact response of their device
based on their input speed.
On X11, the code required to configure a custom acceleration profile
was already merged [1].
In the Wayland world, now that libinput 1.23 has been released,
compositors are able to expose this feature to their users.
Peter Hutterer already covered how this feature works on his blog in
detail, so make sure to have a look at his article [2].
In addition to the new acceleration profile, this release includes a
set of new quirks for different hardware. The work done for Razer
hardware is especially noticeable.
Finally, various bugs has been fixed and the CI has been improved.
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-input-libinput/-/merge_requests/39
[2] http://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/01/libinput-and-custom-pointer.html
Thanks to everyone involved for making this new version possible:
Aksel Stokseth (1):
add quirks for Logitech MX Master 3B
Benjamin Tissoires (1):
CI: bump b2c and kernel
Bill A (1):
quirks: add generic quirk for Dell 2-in-1 models for side volume buttons
Cyril LEVIS (1):
fix: add apple m2 keyboard quirks
Diep Pham (1):
quirk: Lenovo P14s Gen 1 AMD Trackpoint
José Expósito (13):
test: remove unused variable
tablet-pad-leds: fix compiler warning when -Dlibwacom=false
tablet: fix compiler warning when -Dlibwacom=false
test: fix compiler warning when -Dlibwacom=false
test: fix uninitialized variables
sparse: make some variables static
quirks: add quirks for Positivo-Vaio touchpad
tools/record: fix quirk error message
quirks: touchpad: add ModelPressurePad
doc/user: fix trackpoint quirks path
quirks: fix DWT on Legion 5i
quirks: add a note to not quirk the Bolt Receiver
libinput 1.23.0
Lucas Zampieri (1):
Allow rotation on all mice and for any angle
Marge Yang (1):
quirks: Dell Mayabay (Pressure Pad).
Peter Hutterer (36):
doc/user: explicitly specify language as en
test: print the usage from the symbols-leak-test
Remove trailing whitespaces in the tree
Remove a few empty lines with nothing but a lonely tab
Remove duplicate empty lines in our source
tools: fix a tab after space whitespace issue
gitlab CI: add a job to check for whitespace issues
quirks: allow overriding of AttrEventCode and AttrInputProp
evdev: only read the trackpoint multiplier on trackpoints
tools: add a libinput list-kernel-devices tool
tools: add a --hid toggle to libinput-list-kernel-devices
doc/user: document the new list-kernel-devices tool
meson.build: fix a deprecation warning
CI: give the meson-build.sh script a proper license tag
CI: make the meson-build.sh script even more generic
CI: use meson compile over ninja directly in meson-build.sh
filter: add helper functions to create/destroy a delta smoothener
doc/api: set HAVE_DOT to YES
doc/user: fix sphinx warning
tools: add --replay-after and --once to libinput replay
CI: bump to use Fedora 37
gitlab CI: drop comment about weekly rebuild of images
gitlab CI: remove a leftover use of a fedora image
gitlab CI: explicitly run the test in the systemd service
CI: update to latest ci-templates
CI: add new workflow rules
test: give the generic MT touchscreen realistic ranges
quirks: fix duplicate section names
quirks: change all 3-digit matches to zero-prefixed 4-digit matches
tools: honor FDO_CI_CONCURRENT in the tools option parser
test: drop the explicit -n auto to the tool options test
CI: make the ci-fairy commit check verbose
test: comment two tap tests
test: add a quicks file validation test
test: add a test to make sure we don't accidentally add Logitech receivers
quirks: add a bunch more Razer internal keyboards
Richard Stefun (1):
Improve X280 support
Tobias Bengfort (3):
filter: simplify speed_factor()
doc/user: fix tap in palm exclusion zone
touchpad: rm dead tp_palm_tap_is_palm
Yinon Burgansky (3):
Introduce custom acceleration profile
filter: validate custom acceleration function's points size
filter: add scroll movement type to the custom acceleration profile
Zhangyuan Nie (1):
quicks: invert horizontal scrolling for Logitech MX Master 3S
gogogoghost (1):
quirk: Google Chromebook Atlas (Pixelbook go)
hrdl (2):
evdev-tablet: clip touch arbitration rectangle
evdev: apply calibration for touch arbitration
Hi list,
I know this email is going out a little late, but better late than
never. Which may also be the name of the 23.0.1 release. I must
apologize, I was running behind to start with, and then the troubles
with the CI pushed me even further behind. As such, there are still a
great number of patches nominated that are not in the release. I
basically got what I could in by the end of day Friday, and cut that as
the release, and I'll continue to pull in patches over the next week and
half to have a normally scheduled release on April 5th.
There's a lot here, covering a wide swath of the mesa codebase,
especially Intel, AMD, and Zink.
Cheers,
Dylan
As a Linux system administrator, having access to real-time performance insights is crucial for managing and optimizing your system. While there are several command-line tools available, Gtop offers an interactive, visually appealing dashboard that presents a wealth of system information at a glance.
When starting out in Python, setting up a coding environment can be challenging. IDLE (Integrated Development Learning Environment) is a Python IDE that simplifies the process for the same. You can start coding immediately after you install it.
IDLE is an easy-to-use IDE with features that make it easier for you to write and run Python code. It comes pre-installed with some operating systems, but on Linux, you need to install it. Learn how to install IDLE on Ubuntu and how to use its interactive shell.
MySQL is a widely used open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that allows you to store, organize, and retrieve data efficiently. User account management plays a crucial role in maintaining the security and integrity of your database.
When it comes to video editing, Kdenlive stands out as a versatile and user-friendly solution for Linux users. Developed on the KDE platform, this open-source video editor has gained widespread popularity among multimedia enthusiasts and professionals alike.
KTorrent is an efficient and feature-rich BitTorrent client designed for the KDE Plasma desktop environment on Linux systems. Built with user-friendliness and flexibility, KTorrent offers advanced features catering to beginners and experienced users.
MyPaint is a highly versatile and user-friendly open-source digital painting application designed to cater to artists of all levels. With its powerful, dynamic brush engine and sleek, intuitive interface, MyPaint has become a go-to tool for creatives looking for a seamless digital painting experience.
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) that is widely used for web applications and content management systems. Knowing the MySQL version you are running can be essential for compatibility, security, and performance reasons.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MyPaint on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MyPaint is a free, open-source graphics application designed specifically for digital painting and drawing.
By default, EFI firmwares boot a specific file under /efi/boot/. The name of
such file depends on the architecture: for example, on 64 bit x86 systems it is bootx64.efi, while on ARM it is bootaa64.efi.
Copy /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi/monolithic/grubx64.efi from package grub-efi-amd64-bin to /efi/boot/bootx64.efi on the boot image, and that
should be enough to start GRUB.
In this article, we will explore valuable tips and tricks for using Tmux plugins and extensions, including how to install them, configure them, and use them to streamline your workflow. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced user, this guide will provide you with the knowledge you need to take your Tmux experience to the next level.
In this guide, we will provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to install and use Gnome Boxes on Ubuntu. We will cover the steps involved in installing Gnome Boxes, creating and managing virtual machines, and configuring virtual machine settings. We will also explore some popular use cases for Gnome Boxes.
In this guide, we will provide an introduction to the Pop!_OS desktop environment. We will cover its features, customization options, and differences from other popular desktop environments. We will also explore some popular tools and applications for working with Pop!_OS.
It looks that way — apparently on the Steam Deck official website the current short trailer of games showcased on the Steam Deck (that are usually Verified) includes a short sequence from the Last of Us Part 1…
As you probably have heard by now the lastest development versions of Plasma and KDE Frameworks require Qt6. This transition has been in the works for a few years by now, but it was only somewhat recently that we took the plunge and started relying on Qt6 exclusively for Plasma. Plasma 5.27 is the last Plasma 5 release and continues in bugfix-only mode.
For people who want to hack on Plasma features this raises the obvious question: How do I build Plasma 6 to hack on it?
Before diving into this, a word of warning: Current Plasma master is in no way “ready for production”. There are known-broken things and things may temporarily regress at any time. That said, the only way to get towards a stable thing is to dig in and fix things. So let’s see how to do that.
For this explanation I’m assuming you have build KDE software with kdesrc-build before. If not we have some extensive documentation for that. First you need at least Qt 6.4 installed. The usually best way to get that is from your distribution. If your distribution does not have Qt6 packaged yet please complain^Wtalk to them. CMake should complain about any missing Qt6 modules/development files, but make sure you have the qtpaths tool installed beforehand. It should be named something like qtpaths6 or qtpaths-qt6.
I’ve complained in the past about Solus (Linux distro) when they could not be bothered to fix their Steam Linux client packaging after Proton 5.13 was long out (they eventually did)…
I like Debian and run it on almost every computer I own, so siduction felt very familiar to me. In some ways it was a preview of Debian 12, and in other ways, it was an interesting look at some advanced features that go beyond the conservativeness of vanilla Debian. The three major features covered in its release notes — chroot helper, Nala, and snapper — are all great features. I just wish the chroot helper worked with my eMMC drive, but siduction would not be the first distribution that had issues when the only storage available is eMMC storage.
If Debian-based distributions are your preferred Linux distributions, I highly recommend giving siduction a try. It offers many interesting things while remaining familiar. There are certainly plenty of Debian-based distributions out there, but siduction provides a lot of features that make it different from other distributions. Sure, it lacks the conservativeness of Debian Stable, but aside from the issue with the siduction-btrfs package on an ext4 install, I ran into no major issues when working on this review. Though, I am somewhat amused by absurdity of the root password issue, but that was 99% on me for doing something I knew would likely end up ending in the situation that it did.
OpenMandriva Lx 23.03 is here almost three months after the introduction of OpenMandriva Lx 23.01 ROME as OpenMandriva’s first-ever rolling-release edition where you install once and receive updates forever.
This release bumps the kernel to the latest Linux 6.2, ships with the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment series, which is accompanied by the KDE Frameworks 5.104 and KDE Gear 22.12.3 software suites, and features out-of-the-box support for the Flatpak universal and sandboxed binary format.
The Opera Browser has been updated to 97.0.4719.28 and available through our software repository. No need to go hunting all over the internet to find your favorite web browser when they are in the PCLinuxOS software repository!
Brave Browser has been updated to 1.49.128 and has been shipped to the software repository. Brave Browser is one of the best Chromium based browsers on the market.
Cytron CM4 Maker Board is a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM4 Lite system-on-module with plenty of I/Os, support for one M.2 NVMe SSD, and RTC backup battery, a buzzer, and various LEDs for GPIO status that makes the board especially well suited for the education market and prototyping.
The board is designed to run the Raspberry Pi OS operating system provided by Raspberry Pi Trading.
Arduino have launched an upgrade to their 8-bit Arduino UNO R3 board with the Arduino UNO R4 featuring a 48 MHz Renesas RA4M1 Arm Cortex-M4F 32-bit microcontroller, and an optional ESP32-S3 module for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity.
Week highlights: new releases of topologicpy and LSP plugins, new features and
improvements in GIMP, Inkscape, FreeCAD, Olive, automatic generation of
subtitles from audio is coming to Kdenlive.
Achievement unlocked: we found with the Pepper&Carrot community Fa BD Comic, the publisher of the worst derivations of Pepper&Carrot made so far.
Unfortunately, the product’s are published under my name and also in the name of artists who sent fan-arts of Pepper&Carrot… That’s why I write this article to describe a bit this scam and desktop publishing carnage happening right now on Amazon and inform the audience of Pepper&Carrot to not buy them.
Brace yourself, cause we are going in the territory of the zero absolute of quality, graphic designs horrors, colorimetry nightmares and bad layout.
From a pricing perspective, the platform scales with your audience size. Importantly, Ghost does not take a cut of your membership subscription revenue. For this reason, the pricing incentives mean your Ghost site is more cost-effective when you have 100% paid members and 0% free members. I’m sure that ratio is a pipe dream for most publications, but that’s how the business model works. Pricing is currently $9/mo for any site with 500 or fewer subscribers, including web hosting.
We have released version 7.0.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format.
This is a minor bug-fix release containing minimal changes from the
previous release (7.0.2).
This package contains tools to produce documentation in various
formats, including HTML and PDF, from source files in the Texinfo
format. Texinfo is a text-based format with commands for marking text,
document structuring and indexing.
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/texinfo/texinfo-7.0.3.tar.xz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/texinfo/texinfo-7.0.3.tar.gz
If automatic redirection fails, the list of mirrors is at:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html
Failing that, you can use the main server:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.0.3.tar.xz
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.0.3.tar.gz
Please email any comments to bug-texinfo@gnu.org.
The Texinfo web page: https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/
Support free software ~ https://www.fsf.org/ ~ https://www.gnu.org/
News:
* texi2any
. fix performance regression when Perl binary extension (XS) modules
are not being used (e.g. with TEXINFO_XS=omit)
* info
. further fix of recoding of UTF-8 files to ASCII to avoid text
disappearing from nodes
. avoid possible freeze at start of a file with `-v nodeline=pointers'
GNU a2ps is an Any to PostScript filter. Of course it processes plain
text files, but also pretty prints quite a few popular languages.
For more information, see https://www.gnu.org/software/a2ps/
This release is a minor bug-fix release; no pressing need to update unless
you’re affected by a bug it fixes (see the end of this message for details).
Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz
https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig
b2ae4016b789a198c50a2f1dc0fefc11bda18ebe a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz
0A6B4OtNy/LUlj2J4d8rtm9x5m1ztBUsQ8+YOOaq98c a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz
The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.
gpg --verify a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig
pub rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC]
2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44 9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230
uid Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
uid keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>
gpg --locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org
gpg --recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230
wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1' | gpg --import -
gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig
Gnulib v0.1-5892-g83006fa8c9
* Noteworthy changes in release 4.15.3 (2023-03-26) [stable]
* Bug fixes:
- Fix fixps to use GhostScript’s ps2write device instead of defunct
pswrite.
* Build:
- Fix a problem building PDF version of manual.
Writing markdown documents outside RStudio (using the usual set of packages) has benefits and struggles. Huge struggle is transforming dataframe results into markdown table, using hypens and pipes.
Sometimes data arrives as a series of individual files each of which is organized in the same way—which is to say, each of which has the same variables, features, or columns.
The nineteenth release of littler as a CRAN package
landed this morning, following in the now seventeen year history (!!) as
a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined
by me a few weeks later.
littler
is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang
scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more
consistently and still starts
faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only began to do in recent years.
lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to
yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive
filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on
Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for
an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ
vignette on how to add it to your PATH. A few examples
are highlighted at the Github repo, as well
as in the examples
vignette.
Exporter::Almighty sets up your exporting automatically (but using Exporter::Tiny instead of Exporter), and calls use strict and use warnings on your behalf.
Exporter::Almighty creates your constants for you, so you don’t need to duplicate your list of constants anywhere.
This is an update to python-per-line.py, my tool to execute a Python expression one each line of a text file. New options are regex join split. And there are new string reversal functions: Reverse and ReverseFind. More details in the man page. python-per-line_V0_0_10.zip (http)MD5: 54BFA2E593A024E3FBAA76757D63847ESHA256: D12E5FE10F71011C480EA332E0E183AE904024CEBC22128775197481152B9C1E
The static keyword is often overused in Java and this can lead to several risks, including: To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to use the static keyword sparingly and only when necessary.
In Java, a predicate is a functional interface from the java.util.function package that represents a function that takes in one argument and returns a boolean value.
Polymorphism in Java is a concept that allows objects of different classes to be treated as if they were of the same type. It allows you to write code that can work with objects of multiple classes, without knowing the specific type of each object at compile time.
The removeIf() method is a default method introduced in Java 8 for the Collection interface. It is used to remove all elements from the collection that satisfy a given condition.
The AutoCloseable interface is a functional interface introduced in Java 7 that defines a single method called close(). This interface is used to ensure that resources are closed automatically when they are no longer needed, without the need for manual intervention.
In Java, a resource leak occurs when a program fails to properly release system resources after they are no longer needed. This can lead to a range of problems, such as reduced system performance, increased memory usage, and potential security vulnerabilities.
Lebanon woke up in two time zones on Sunday amid an escalating dispute between political and religious authorities over a decision to delay the clock change by a month.
Lebanon woke up in two time zones on Sunday amid an escalating dispute between political and religious authorities over a decision to extend winter time for a month.
At least 29 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa died when their two boats sank off the coast of Tunisia as they tried to cross the Mediterranean to Italy, the Tunisian coast guard said on Sunday.
Organisers of a biomedical innovations event consisting of an exclusively male 22-speaker line-up has defended the gender disparity. The event was held last week at the Science Park in Shatin and was supported by the University of Hong Kong, InvestHK, the Hong Kong Startup Council, and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.
At least 20 Afghan women marched in the capital, Kabul, on March 26 to demand the right to education for women and girls before being rounded up by a Taliban patrol.
Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, the man credited with creating “Moore’s Law,” which served as a measuring stick and spark for the entire semiconductor industry for decades, passed away Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94 years old.
Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, who the breakneck pace of progress in the digital age with a simple 1965 prediction of how quickly engineers would boost the capacity of computer chips, has died. He was 94.
The Patient Insurance Center in Finland has reported a significant increase in patient injury claims in 2022, with over 9,000 claims filed during the year. Nearly one-quarter of the claims resulted in compensation payments, with the majority relating to surgical and anaesthetic procedures. Claims for compensation due to delays in diagnosis and treatment have also increased in recent years.
A federal court in Guam Friday denied a request to reinstate a total abortion ban on the island of Guam. The Attorney General of Guam Douglas Moylan filed the motion to reinstate the ban.
This is what GPT “knows” about me. More precisely, this is the sequence of words GPT generates when asked with that specific prompt.
First paragraph is 100% correct.
Second is kind of 50% (in)correct and outdated.
Third paragraph he completely confused me with one of my relatives that have same last name but different first name.
Also, I think GPT would have a different perspective about me if blog posts in social media, such as Facebook, would be part of its training dataset. But it can’t because Meta won’t allow open access to their platform even if I post openly there.
Hackers have attacked the Wisconsin court system’s computer network, court officials said Thursday. A cyberattack began early this week, according to a statement from court officials. Network users may have experienced intermittent service or slower than usual response times from online services, court officials said. Asked when specifically the attack began and if it’s still ongoing, courts spokesman Tom Sheehan said in an email that he had no further information.
The data breach affects driver licence numbers of 7.9 million Australian and New Zealand customers of retailers including Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, The Good Guys and Apple.
In an update to the ASX on Monday, the company said out of this number, 3.2 million had been provided during the last decade.
“In addition, approximately 53,000 passport numbers were stolen. We have also identified less than 100 customers who had a monthly financial statement stolen,” the statement said.
Major Australian retailers Harvey Norman, JB Hi-Fi, David Jones and The Good Guys offer buy-now-pay-later services in association with Latitude.
Protests broke out shortly after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired the defense minister, who had called for a halt to efforts to weaken the judiciary.
North Korea fired at least one unidentified ballistic missile Monday, South Korea’s military said, the latest in its flurry of weapons tests in recent weeks.
Thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Sunday in protest after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed his defense minister who had urged the government to halt a highly contested plan to overhaul the judicial system.
South Korea’s military says it detected North Korea firing at least one ballistic missile toward the sea off its eastern coast, adding to a recent flurry in weapons tests.
Tens of thousands of Israelis have poured into the streets across the country in a spontaneous outburst of anger after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu abruptly fired his defense minister for challenging the Israeli leader’s judicial overhaul plan. Protesters in Tel Aviv blocked a main highway and lit large bonfires Sunday, while police scuffled with protesters outside Netanyahu’s private home in Jerusalem. The unrest deepened a monthslong crisis over Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary. Mass protests and unrest in the military prompted Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Saturday to speak out against the changes. In a brief statement Sunday, Netanyahu’s office said the prime minister had dismissed Gallant.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister on Sunday, a day after Yoav Gallant called for suspending the government’s judicial overhaul plan and warned opposition, including within the military, to the legislation was undermining Israel’s national security.
The decision by Honduras is also a setback in Washington’s efforts to use its influence in Central America to help prevent China from isolating Taiwan.
Honduras announced on Saturday that it had broken off diplomatic relations with Taiwan, a move that drew an immediate rebuke from Taipei as Tegucigalpa switches allegiances to China.
China and Honduras began formal diplomatic relations on Sunday, with Taiwan accusing Beijing of using “coercion and intimidation” to lure away its few remaining allies.
The proposal from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, talked of since last year, would be provocative without changing the West’s battlefield calculus in Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has announced plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus. Putin said the move was a response to Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium. Speaking in an interview broadcast Saturday on Russian state television, Putin said Russia would maintain control over the tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Belarus. He said storage facilities would be completed by July 1 but didn’t say how many weapons they would hold. He argued that Russia was following the lead of the United States, which has tactical nuclear weapons based in Europe. Such weapons are intended for battlefield use, unlike more powerful, longer-range strategic nuclear weapons.
Ukraine is calling for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to place tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus.
As thousands of ex-prisoners fight and die in Ukraine, honoring their memory is becoming a patriotic imperative in Russia. But some committed crimes their old neighbors cannot forget.
In 1885, with tensions high between England and Russia, and a Russian fleet spotted off the coast of South Africa, just 19 days steam from Australia, the Victorian government prepared for war.
After decades of gradual military build-up by China, territorial disputes with China and Russia, and increasing concern about North Korea’s missile-strike capability, Japan is once again reinventing itself and rapidly moving from the pacifist stance [...]
The General Staff of North Macedonia has backed the transfer to Ukraine of 12 Mi-24 military helicopters that it purchased from Kyiv two decades ago, Macedonian Defense Minister Slavjanka Petrovska said.
International condemnation has intensified over Moscow’s plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, even as fighting raged in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, with the ruined city of Bakhmut continuing to be the focal point of Russia’s struggling war effort.
Ukrainian National Bank Governor Andriy Pishniy says the bank has settled its “open conflict” with the government and will avoid the “very dangerous” practice of printing new money to fund the war effort.
Ukraine will no longer resort to “dangerous” monetary financing to fund the war against Russia, its central bank governor, Andriy Pyshnyi, has told the Financial Times.
Tehran has condemned U.S. air strikes on Iran-linked forces in Syria that reportedly killed 19 people, which Washington said it carried out following a deadly drone attack on U.S. forces.
The British Defense Ministry said on March 26 that Russia had “likely launched” at least 71 Iranian Shahed kamikaze drones against Ukraine after a two-week letup in late February.
The U.S. Department of Defense said that there were no indications that Russia is preparing to use nuclear weapons after Moscow’s announcement to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Rescuers combed through rubble on Saturday after a powerful storm tore across Mississippi overnight, killing at least 25 people there and another in Alabama, leveling dozens of buildings and spawning at least one devastating tornado. The White House announced on Sunday that Joe Biden had ordered federal aid be provided to support local recovery efforts.
With residents of Mississippi and portions of Alabama reeling from the damage sustained during Friday night’s deadly tornado outbreak, more severe weather is occurring Sunday.
Threat level: The Storm Prediction Center forecast the likelihood of “several tornadoes” that could include “a few strong tornadoes” of EF-2 intensity or greater in southern Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia into Sunday night.
The Storm Prediction Center (SPC) placed the region from northeastern Louisiana to southern Alabama at a “moderate risk” for severe thunderstorms Sunday. This is a level 4 out of 5 on the storm threat scale.
The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for portions of far eastern Louisiana and all of central Mississippi around 4 pm local time. The watch is scheduled to expire at 11 pm local time on Sunday night.
With at least 25 people dead in Mississippi, tornadoes that ravaged parts of the Deep South overnight were the deadliest in the state in more than a decade. That is according to National Weather Service records that say 31 people died in Mississippi in April 2011 during tornadoes that tore through several states. Alabama was hit hardest during that so-called “super outbreak” of twisters that killed more than 320 people. A sheriff in Alabama on Saturday reported one storm-related death. Records show that 12 people died in Mississippi during Easter storms in April 2020, and 10 died in the state during a tornado event in April 2014.
The big picture: More tornados are expected to hit Mississippi, Alabama and other Southern states Sunday, Axios’ Andrew Freedman reports.
Zoom in: In Mississippi, the rural towns of Silver City and Rolling Fork in the southwest and Amory in the northeast all sustained significant tornado damage Friday.
The NWS preliminary damage survey found the tornadoes that struck Rolling Fork and Silver City were about 3/4 a mile wide and lasted for over an hour. It was given a rating of EF-4 — the second highest.
Residents of rural Mississippi have recounted harrowing tales of survival after a deadly tornado tore through the state Friday night. In the tiny town of Silver City in the western part of the state, homes were ripped right off their foundations, leaving scattered piles of debris in their wake. About 30 miles away, the small town of Rolling Fork was also flattened. Residents described seeking refuge in bathtubs and hallways and covering loved ones with their bodies as the twister surged around them. Officials say the tornado killed at least 25 people in Mississippi and one person in Alabama as it surged nearly 170 miles across the Deep South.
Help began pouring into one of the poorest regions of the U.S. after a deadly tornado tore a path of destruction in the Mississippi Delta. President Joe Biden has issued an emergency declaration for the state.
Help began pouring into one of the poorest regions of the U.S. after a deadly tornado tore a path of destruction in Mississippi even as furious new storms struck Georgia
Major oil and gas companies are calling for access to international carbon offsets, which analysts say could reduce the price and make it easier to produce fossil fuels.
Rescuers raced Saturday to search for survivors and help hundreds of people left homeless after a powerful tornado cut a devastating path through Mississippi, killing at least 25 people and injuring dozens. The tornado flattened entire blocks and obliterated houses in at least one Mississippi Delta town as it carved a path of destruction for more than an hour. Another person was killed in Alabama. The tornado flattened entire blocks of the small town of Rolling Fork, reducing homes to piles of rubble, flipping cars on their sides and toppling the town’s water tower. Residents hunkered down in bath tubs as the tornado struck and later broke into a John Deere store that they converted into a triage center for the wounded.
A protester with trauma to the head was fighting for his life on Sunday after clashes with police during a demonstration over water storage facilities in France, a prosecutor said.
Swiss financial regulator Finma is probing how to hold bosses at Credit Suisse to account following its emergency takeover by rival UBS, a media report said on Sunday.
Ellen Brown, frequent Corbett Report guest and author of The Web of Debt and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age, joins James to discuss her latest articles on the bank runs that are leading us toward the event horizon of the quadrillion-dollar derivative black hole.
“Popular discontent with the pension reform does not mean we will withdraw the approval of other unpopular reforms, which are highly necessary,” Veran said.
They ride in pairs, are armed with handguns, expandable batons and tear gas grenades, and have been specially trained to prevent protests from spiralling out of control. But since France’s pension protests began, officers belonging to France’s special Brav-M motorbike unit have increasingly been accused of taking the law into their own hands, intimidating and threatening people, and in some cases, resorting to the use of excessive force.
Tensions are rising in France after President Emmanuel Macron in a televised interview Wednesday refused to compromise on the government’s controversial pension reform bill. As peaceful demonstrations turn to social unrest, police forces are picking up their batons and using them on protesters.
Rapid interest rate rises have spurred a refinancing boom but many borrowers are still paying the price for their complacency. Almost a quarter of all borrowers are paying 6.5 per cent or more on their variable rate loans, based on Canstar modelling, which is 1.81 per cent higher than the cheapest loan rate.
A defiant and incendiary Donald Trump, facing a potential indictment, held the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign Saturday in Waco, Texas, a city made famous by deadly resistance against law enforcement.
Donald Trump staged his first presidential campaign rally in Texas Saturday, brushing off his potential indictment as he railed against multiple criminal probes threatening his bid for the White House.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s probe of former President Trump should instead be handled by the Department of Justice, House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
Former President Trump’s prediction last weekend that he would be arrested on Tuesday wasn’t made up, his lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.
Driving the news: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has beeninvestigating a hush money payment allegedly made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, and reports continue to circulate that an indictment in the case could be imminent.
Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has withdrawn his nomination amid Republican opposition.
Driving the news: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg called Washington an “excellent nominee” and condemned the “undeserved” partisan attacks against him in a tweet confirming the news Saturday night.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ biggest political asset is that he’s viewed favorably by nearly all of the Republican Party’s voters — across the ideological spectrum.
Yes, but: His biggest challenge is that those sky-high approval numbers are likely to falter now that he’ssparring with former President Trump — and as he makes tough decisions on where he stands on hot-button national issues.
The leak adds to the challenges facing the Elon Musk-owned company, which is trying to identify the person responsible and any other people who downloaded the code.
A veteran Finnish politician was slightly injured in a suspected anti-Semitic assault on Saturday. A decision on whether to remand the suspect will be made within the next two days.
From Italy’s Matteo Salvini to Britain’s Nigel Farage, self-proclaimed defenders of tradition say there’s a plan afoot to make the public dine on crickets, locusts and grasshoppers.
Kazakh journalist Duman Mukhammedkarim has launched a hunger strike as he serves a 25-day jail term over his plan to hold a rally to protest the official results of this month’s parliamentary and local elections.
Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova said the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin has given her “some sort of hope” that resistance might be sparked within the country’s elite.
Edward curtin It is comical how easily one can be ignored for pointing out that new technology is dangerous and fetishistic. So-called “smart” cell phones are a prime example. For years I have been pointing out their dangers on many levels. To say most people are devoted to them is an understatement.
Kenya’s police chief Sunday announced a ban on opposition protests scheduled for Monday. The ban comes in the wake of last week’s protests, which devolved into riots.
Indian law students are reporting for JURIST on law-related developments in and affecting India. This dispatch is from Samar Veer, a third-year law student at National Law University, Delhi.
The first protest since the introduction of the 2020 National Security Law in Hong Kong was held Sunday in Tseung Kwan O, an eastern area of Hong Kong. Protestors marched against the implementation of a new land reclamation plan but did so in compliance with certain restrictions imposed by authorities.
The conference is organized in the spirit of an inclusive and efficient digital transformation based on the needs of the citizens, which leaves no space for the undermining of human rights and dignity, nor digital exclusion of any community.
This is my appearance on The Soul of Enterprise, Episode 432, with hosts Ed Kless and Greg Tirico. Recorded Friday, March 24, 2023. Their shownotes are below.
Ron and Ed recently welcomed patent attorney and advocate for abolishing intellectual property, Stephan Kinsella to the show. We explored what is (and is not) intellectual property and then had a conversation about why Stephan thinks these forms of property should not exist and why the world would be better if they did not.
A federal judge has sided with four publishers who sued an online archive over its unauthorized scanning of millions of copyrighted works and offering them for free to the public. Judge John G. Koeltl of U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the Internet Archive was producing ”derivative” works that required permission of the copyright holder.
Anyone who has been exposed to Bollywood culture could argue that contemporary mainstream Indian artists produce the same type of music with little experimentation — either catchy feel-good pop tunes or cliche love songs.
I felt bad that my wife is not usually able to come along on these sunset chasing adventures, since one of us has to stay with the kids, so I decided to bring the whole family along this evening. I could only think of a few decent parking spots with the right view for this, so I settled on Hot Springs Gas, a gas station a little east of Fairbanks, which has a decent view to the west, and also a bathroom and snacks for children. It almost goes without saying that trying to watch the sunset while trapped in a vehicle with three young children for 50 minutes is far from a tranquil experience.
It rained most of Wednesday and Thursday, and all day yesterday and today. I’m
wondering if it’s going to wash away all the cherry blossoms. The trees are out
in full bloom now.
Not the operating system, but the display concept. Do I actually need them?
I’ve been thinking a bit about my computing setup, primarily, how I plan to reconfigure my desktop machine to move off of Manjaro. It has been “fine”, but I’ve found delays and fuck ups from their end, and some “choices” they’ve made to just not align with my personal computing preferences.
// FWIW, I’m the type of gal that expects my computer to work the same every time I boot it. If you, computer, decide to update something that I didn’t explicitly authorize in the updater? See Ya!! And Ubuntu, and now Manjaro have broken that rule. Which is often why I stick to mainline distros like Debian, or Arch + a DE and not get “out of the box” type stuff, since that’s someone/group controlling the direction, and I’m perfectly capable of doing nothing thanks
It was a really nice 22c/71f today; it was nice and sunny and HOT. I had to run
to the store around lunch time and I was hot wearing a thin jacket. Kids on the
street were in T-shirts and shorts. Too bad it’s going to rain the rest of the
week :/
Also at lunch was the news that Japan won the WBC (World Baseball Classic.) It
was, of course, all over the TV on most of the channels. I checked the news
back home but the only bit there was this story way down the page. It took a
while to find it cnn.com, too.
After some time of trying I have decided that TWTXT is not for me. In its current form it shares many negatives of other social networks while almost nothing to offer (for me). Unlike the Gopher, it’s useless on older computers (SSL is required for most people’s files).
I don’t say I will not try it once more in future but at the moment I have no use for it.
Ah, systemd. More or less this was Linux under new management, same as the old management. For example, systemd on RedHat Enterprise 7 (2014) had a charming feature where, sometimes, it would fail to shutdown a host, and one would eventually stride to the server room and apply the Paperclip of +3 System Slaying. Such already unbent paperclips had been hung on the racks for exactly this purpose. RedHat 7 (2000) also had this feature. Folks with money might have remote management, or maybe a data centre tech would be wandering about Europe at 2 AM as one kept the Sev-1 line informed of their progress. Regardless, there was a manual reset because of a wedge at shutdown. Different clowns, same act.
[..]
That systemd generated more than 20 log lines by default for each and every mailman cron job on RHEL7 was charming. What was the point of all that log spam? I forget how I squelched it; RedHat Linux is fairly maintenance heavy.
[...]
The past tense means I haven’t really touched Linux in a while; there is an Alpine Linux virt under vmd(8) somewhere, gently unused. And a big-endian Debian MIPS qemu thing used even less to test that code does not assume little-endian. OpenBSD gets the complexity and maintenance needs just about right.
I like that it gives you a choice between _ and *, that they mean the same thing, and that you can mix and match them, and that double means stronger. That was a good design decision that was a lot easier to remember than the other markup formats I was using before. So solutions where “_ is cite and * is em” are no good, especially when they don’t fix things like Linnaean names.
I suggest that Markdown installations that do allow fallthrough HTML should stick with em and strong as the default, since those are the most common cases and fallthrough HTML can handle the special cases, but Markdown installations on online forums that disable fallthrough HTML (i.e. where Markdown is used in lieu of bbcode or Wiki syntax), it should generate i and b instead of em and strong. It’s less wrong.
I just uploaded first release of “run-many” tool that is standalone implementation of colored interleaved output like “docker-compose up” or “devenv up”.
I was just looking at an old photo of my great grandfather. He was in the 99th aero squad in WWI, which I think I’ve written about previously. Maybe not.
In any case, I noticed that in this photo, he had handwritten the names and ranks of the people around him, who were all officers. But, none of them had sleeve insignia, except him. He didn’t bother writing his own name or rank, of course. Saving the memories for himself, I think.
I was recently reading a detailed account of Apple UNIX, a Macintosh-compatible UNIX operating system published by Apple for Macintosh computers with m68k CPUs. The account appeared to have been written in 2001, based on one screenshot of the author’s PC desktop. The account concludes by recommending that operators of m68k-based Macintosh computers who wish to run UNIX on their machines find an alternative to Apple UNIX for a number of reasons. They recommend NetBSD.
As of release 37, Fedora has deprecated legacy BIOS installs [0] -
you can still boot and presumably upgrade an existing OS install
over the network, but you can no longer install it fresh.
I think the biggest issue with this decision for me is the lack of
awareness around e-waste and re-purposing of old hardware that may
have many years of useful life left. I know I am not alone in that
I mostly buy refurbished or older computers. I keep them for years
and maintain them or replace parts in them as needed, and only junk
them when they are truly dead.
I needed to replace my aging desktop, which is my daily driver for
work, so last week I purchased a refurbished “business desktop” with
four CPU cores, a large SSD and plenty of RAM (32GB), which is more
computing power than I have ever had. My old desktop has half that
amount of RAM with a SATA HDD, and was beginning to groan under the
weight of all the web-based and other apps I’m forced to use while
at work. Things like Google apps and Slack were noticeably sluggish.
I am quite sure that Gemini server on tilde.pink user to serve directory index automatically, now I have to regenerate “index.gmi” manually. I understand that it makes server simpler which is good, but that broke by dist/ directory, which is bad. Did I miss an announcement?
I had a feeling looking at my capsule that there should be a last time stamp for every section. Because without that reader must check every link if there was any change. So I implemented a script for that…
Gophersphere was crowded at the beginning of the 90s. And it was empty
at the end of the same decade. We are aware that most of that content
was lost. The only archive which is available is from 2007 and we are
naming it The Wayback Machine. The same as that from Internet
Archive. But Internet Archive which is operating The Wayback Machine
for WWW has 802 billion web pages, not some small amount of final
stage content of Gophersphere. Probably there isn’t any other backup
of Gophersphere from the earlier years. And we can only weep for that.
ABOUT four months ago I left my job at Sirius ‘Open Source’ (one of the first FSF sponsors) after nearly 12 years at the company. I will be publishing a lot more about how this company robbed its own staff, probably posting an update just once or twice per week. The company is under investigation at the moment; it’s also losing some very big clients.
“My plan is to devote a lot more time/energy to these Internet issues; they’re about as important as Software Freedom and are arguably a prerequisite.”I left my job when I was 40 and since then I’ve focused on many other things. I didn’t lack projects to work on and I finally had a lot more time in my hands. As noted here last night, one aspiration of ours is to curate what’s left of the World Wide Web algorithmically, seeing that a lot of today’s Web is spam or sponsored propaganda. Gemini does not have this issue (yet).
Another issue is censorship; Ryan just wrote about that, based on his own experience. My plan is to devote a lot more time/energy to these Internet issues; they’re about as important as Software Freedom and are arguably a prerequisite. The photo at the top is me by the way, I stumbled upon it last night when searching old photos because my sister gets married later today. She’s a Debian user and programmer, leading a small team despite being in her mid 20s. She is also my closest sibling. █
Video download link | md5sum 388650e7d4e9f734a4572fd0265c3c95 Free Speech Online, Banking Digitally, and More
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: A “society of sheeple” (a term used by Richard Stallman last week in his speech) is being “herded” online and offline; the video covers examples both online and offline, the latter being absence of ATMs or lack of properly-functioning ATMs (a growing problem lately, at least where I live)
THE video above is an outline of topics we’ve been covering, dealing with, barely coping with (like struggling to get cash out of ATMs where I live), and may cover some time soon. One recurring theme will be “online” banking or banking with “apps”.
The video starts by discussing online censorship. Days ago a longtime contributor, Ryan Farmer, had his blog suspended for no sane reason! None at all! If one tries to access anything on his blog it says “baronhk.wordpress.com is no longer available. The authors have deleted this site.”
This deletion was actually a protest after he had been unjustly suspended, having published this article (OMG! Someone call the cops! The headline had the string “porn” in it!).
There will be a lot more details in IRC scrollbacks, including today’s (to be publish shortly). As an associate noted on the day of the suspension, “hugo or jekyll or pelican would be a better choice than wordpress.com” (where the ban/suspension happened; we’re in discussion with them about restoring the blog).
“The video starts by discussing online censorship.”Free speech online is threatened. Self-hosting is one way to curb this trend. We’ve spoken strongly in favour of self-hosting for several years already, cautioning about the inflation of censorship in the COVID-19 era. Yes, it predates COVID-19, but it has been getting a lot worse in recent years.
After discussing Ryan’s situation I pivot to a completely different topic, namely ATMs (or “cash machines” as we call them here). Our ATM journeys are over for now because machines that dispense cash have become less dependable. We’ve surveyed quite a few machines over the past fortnight. Got cash? One nearby shop let an ATM run out of it (it already had a chance to restock when it cautioned it had run low) and there are a lot fewer bank branches/offices in the city, so contingencies are very limited and overcrowded, maybe by intention. They try to herd all the “clients” into their “apps” and “sites”. The video above speaks of some recent experiences of mine. It focuses on NatWest, but I tried in 3 different banks. They’re all acting similarly. They used to offer actual services, but they are “consolidating” though (fewer staff, fewer services, fewer places you can go). In the case of NatWest, they have just 2 branches left in the centre of town. There used to be a lot more.
In some places it’s even worse; some banks “have only a single office with highly restricted visiting hours,” somebody recently told me. Speaking of this from a surveillance/tracking perspective, there’s much to be said about the “war on cash” and what happens when clients cannot withdraw physical money. More people need to protest this “war on cash”; one person mentioning the problem is better than zero people naming the problem, e.g. cashless ATMs (literally no cash in them, one can just do an account’s balance check!).
“A society that cannot pay anonymously is a society that’s easier to censor, surveil, and abuse in all sorts of other ways.”These things won’t be improving. We’re heading down a dark path.
“Once people accept that there is no cash in the ATMs they will get removed because few will complain at that point,” one person told me. “That’s an other problem which Microsoft has provided: getting people to accept abuse without complaining and a general learned helplessness about the situation. Worse, many people have become Microsoft sympathisers due to disinformation and just plain “magical thinking” about the situation. [...] there is a lot of disinformation out there combined with wishful, unrealistic thinking and denial of empirical facts. Then there is the learned helplessness which is even more harmful. Microsoft [leads to] incompetence. Their sales pitch is that it is so simple that trained monkeys can run it, but then when it inevitably fails to work as advertised, whine that it is too hard and that they lack the knowledge and skill to make it work. In truth those products only have to look good enough to make the sale to the manager with purchasing authority. After that, it is the fault of the “IT” dept for not making it work, even though it doesn’t have the possibility to work. Managers love Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange because the latter loses mail left right and center, giving them plausible deniability for their claims that the mail was lost when they neglect a task. [...] hey love Microsoft Exchange because then people have to give them the benefit of the doubt about the mail having been lost whenever they use that excuse.”
Either way, back to ATMs, we need to encourage people to still use them and still pay with cash. Otherwise, we’re going to lose them. A society that cannot pay anonymously is a society that’s easier to censor, surveil, and abuse in all sorts of other ways. █
Summary: In order to separate the wheat from the chaff we’ve been working on simple, modular tools that process news and help curate the Web, basically removing the noise to squeeze out the signal
THE concept behind Free Software emanates from many programmers’ desire to not only produce useful software but also to share this usefulness with many other people, either in exchange for recognition or further improvements to that software.
Lately we’ve developed a number of programs (Free Software of course, GPLV3-licensed) that help produce/curate Daily Links. Some time later this month or next month we’ll properly explain what they are and how they work. Other people too deserve access to the toolsets. █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Roy is a Software Engineer, interdisciplinary researcher, and an advocate of fair competition. He holds a doctoral degree in Medical Biophysics. Contact us (encrypted/PGP)
Content is available under CC-BY-SA