02.08.23
Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 7:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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Power up your devices and revive your old phones with open source Android and even a full-fat Linux desktop! We guide you through using LineageOS – the best Android spin – to revive and protect older phones and tablets alongside full-fat Linux options.
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Server
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IBM has built out a cloud-native AI supercomputer from affordable, commodity hardware for foundation model–training R&D initiatives.
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Anybody who can read a financial report knows they are paying too much for compute, storage, networking, and software at Amazon Web Services.
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Applications
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After being in development for more than a year and coming more than two and a half years after Transmission 3.0, the Transmission 4.0 release is here to introduce support for BitTorrent v2 and hybrid torrents, support for IPv6 blocklists, as well as a revamped Web client with mobile support.
Other new features include an option to omit potentially-identifying information like User-Agent and date created when creating new torrents, the ability to set “default” trackers that can be used to announce all public torrents, and the ability to specify the piece size when creating new torrents.
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After a long wait, Transmission 4.0 was finally released today! It is the latest version of the popular torrent client and promises to be a major leap forward in terms of usability, security, and performance.
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Anew major release, Transmission 4.0.0, is out now after more than a year of development. This release brings dozens of new features, hundreds of bug fixes and much-needed code cleanups. Thanks to many contributors and developers, the “go-to” torrent client has become much more stable and advanced.
Here’s what’s new.
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Cryptpad is an open-source office suite program that you can self host on your server. It is similar to Office 365 that allows you to access an office suite right from the browser. The main difference is that Cryptpad focuses on user privacy and allows you to create and share documents without the risk of leaking any personal information.
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Want to hear your sound in microphone? Here’s a stupid simple tool to the job in Linux. It’s Whisper, a new free and open-source GTK4 application, allowing listen to microphone through your speaker.
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Instructionals/Technical
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FirewallD is a highly regarded firewall solution utilized by many Rocky Linux users. It provides robust control over the firewall’s accessibility to ports, services, and protocols. Despite the simplicity of its command line interface, some individuals may prefer a graphical user interface for firewall management.
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Chamilo is an open-source learning management system (LMS) used for delivering online courses and training programs.
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Just like domain name registrations, SSL certificates need to be renewed regularly. Let’s look at ways to monitor SSL expiry, from using a hosted service like https://prettygoodping to doing it ourselves in curl, Go and Perl.
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MongoDB is a widely used NoSQL database that can function well in containers if you know how to set it up. Learn how to connect the Compass GUI here.
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ImageMagick is a powerful, open-source software used to create, edit, and manipulate images. This versatile software is widely used by graphic designers, photographers, and web developers to perform various image-related tasks, from resizing images to adding special effects.
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Lightzone is a free and open-source photo editing software that provides users with a comprehensive set of tools to enhance their images. It is available for various operating systems, including Ubuntu, and is well-suited for amateur and professional photographers.
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Generating files of a specific size can be useful for testing purposes. There are several different commands in Linux that can create files of certain sizes. Check out the commands and examples below to learn how.
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The /etc/mtab file is an important component in the Linux operating system. It contains a record of the currently mounted file systems, including the device name, mount point, and file system type.
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perf record --branch-filter any,save_type,u true
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The other thing you’ll run into using IAM users in AWS CLI is that a lot of things don’t support SSO sessions anyway.
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PostgreSQL, also widely known as Postgres, is a powerful but open-source relational database management system. It is widely used for web applications, data warehousing, and analytics due to its scalability and robust features.
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This is the sixth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about syslog-ng source definitions and how to check the syslog-ng version. Today, we learn about syslog-ng destinations and the log path. At the end of the session, we will also perform a quick syntax check.
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PHP is a popular scripting language that is used to develop dynamic web applications. It is an open-source programming language that can be easily installed on a variety of operating systems, including CentOS 9.
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MySQL is an open-source relational database management system that is widely used for storing and organizing data. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS Stream are two popular Linux distributions used by many developers and system administrators.
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Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install PDF Mod on Ubuntu and thus edit PDF files on the system. According to the tool’s website: PDF Mod is a simple application for modifying PDF documents.
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WINE or Emulation
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The Wine development release 8.1 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
- Windows version set to Windows 10 for new prefixes.
- Many code cleanups that were deferred during code freeze.
- Various bug fixes.
The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.
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I’m a professional computer programmer, but I don’t often do all that much computer programming. Instead I spend much of my time futzing around with config files, other people’s frameworks, and other people. This makes it easy to forget how much fun it is to write a long program that truly interests you and watch it do something a little bit astonishing.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Over the past few months, the Endless OS Foundation has been putting focus on improving GNOME Software’s reliability and performance. Endless OS is an OSTree-based immutable OS, and applications are entirely distributed as Flatpaks. GNOME Software is the frontend to that, and since our target userbase is definitely not going to use a terminal, we need to make sure GNOME Software delivers a good experience.
This focus has been materializing with Philip’s long effort to switch GNOME Software to a different threading model, more suitable to what Software does these days; and more recently, I’ve been tasked to look at GNOME Software’s performance from a profiling perspective.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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The Kickstarter for my new collection, Devotion and Corrosion, is live.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Betterbird is a fork of the Mozilla Thunderbird client and has been updated to 102.7.1 in the software repository.
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youtube-music-for-desktop has been updated to version 0.10.9.
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Telegram is an Open Source instant messaging platform for mobile and desktop focused on privacy.
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Kernels 6.1.10 and LTS 5.15.92 are now available in the software repository.
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The xorg-server has been updated to 21.1.7 for PCLinuxOS and shipped to go to the software repository.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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This article describes how to generate SUSE Linux Enterprise Server image descriptions from keg-recipes and how to use those to build binary images for use in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, either using KIWI directly, the Open Build Service, or SUSE Manager.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Fedora 38 is bringing in unfiltered access to the Flathub applications. Learn more about it here.
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More factors play a profound role in defense and military strategies today, and technology is one of them. Lockheed Martin Corp. and the United States Department of Defense have leaned on Red Hat Inc. and its artificial intelligence chops to keep as many soldiers as possible alive on the battlefield.
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When it comes to the accelerated advancement of technology implementation like Kubernetes containers, cloud adoption and app modernization – security conversations are at an all-time high as enterprises address complex security issues that mean changing the way its been done in the past.
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Devices/Embedded
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ESP32 MPY-Jama is a cross-platform MicroPython IDE specifically designed for ESP32 boards with a file manager, a REPL terminal, real-time dashboards, and various ESP32-specific features. The IDE is an open-source Python program using pyWebView and pySerial plus some JavaScript for the user interface, and the developer of the program, Jean-Christophe Bos, provides binaries for Windows 64-bit and macOS 64-bit Arm or x86.
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The use of Bluetooth-enabled devices remains popular. New products (such as mobile phones, laptops and fitness trackers) still support this protocol and have even launched with more recent versions (e.g. Samsung S23 family of phones, iPhone 14 and 14 Pro, Apple Watch Series 8/SE/Ultra all shipped with Bluetooth 5.3).
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Microcontrollers are small electronic systems that are designed to control electronic devices and machines. These tiny devices have the ability to interact with the environment
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Nix environment management startup FloxDev Inc. said today it has raised $16.5 million in new funding and has launched its new open-source flox platform to expand on Nix’s unique approach to package management and system configuration. Nix is a cross-platform package manager that employs a functional deployment model where software is installed in unique directories.
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To accelerate the application modernization journey, enterprises are taking the multicloud route and Kubernetes is a key facilitator. Since multicloud enterprises running Kubernetes need object storage, high-performance object storage company MinIO Inc.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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I just figured out how to get my Android phone recognised byAndroid Debug Bridge (adb
)on my MacBook, which finally allowed me to remote debug websites on Firefox Android. Just so I don’t forget what I did, this is a short documentation of the steps needed to get everything to work. Hopefully it will stay relevant for a good while.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Lome, Togo – February 04, 2023
pgFormatter 5.5 released
Version 5.5 of pgFormatter, a free and reliable tool used to format
SQL and PL/pgSQL code, has been officially released and is publicly
available for download. A demonstration site is available online at
http://sqlformat.darold.net/
pgFormatter is the most advanced SQL and PL/pgSQL code formatter and
beautifier dedicated to PostgreSQL. It is provided as a CLI or a CGI
program.
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Zurich, Switzerland – February 4th, 2023
pg_dumpbinary
pg_dumpbinary
is a program used to dump a PostgreSQL database with
data dumped in binary format. The resulting dump must be restored
usingpg_restorebinary
that is provided with this tool.
pg_dumpbinary 2.9 was released today, this is a maintenance release
of version 2.8 published some days before. This releases add some
new features to pg_restorebinary and fix some issues reported by users.
- Force pg_restorebinary to stop on pg_restore or psql system command
error, print the failing command and exit with code 1.
- Add option -f, –outfile to generate a restore file usable with psql.
The purpose of this option is to be able to debug pg_dumprestore by
looking at the generated DDL and \copy commands.
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Programming/Development
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Programming is a highly sought-after skill in today’s digital world. Whether you’re looking to start a new career or simply expand your existing skillset, learning to code is an excellent way to open up new opportunities. One of the simplest, yet most impactful, programs you can write as a beginner is ‘Hello World’.
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Leftovers
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The daughter of a South Florida Lyft driver who went missing more than a week ago has confirmed that the man has died
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A Mexican Air Force (FAM) plane bound for Turkey took off Tuesday morning with a delegation (human and canine) to support rescue efforts.
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With Myanmar being the 6th country to recognize the independent Bangladesh on 13th January 1972, it has been more than 50 years that Myanmar and Bangladesh has officially began their bilateral relation.
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In response to the earthquake Monday in Türkiye and Syria, the following statement is attributable to Houssam al-Nahhas, MD, MPH, Middle East & North Africa researcher at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who worked in the region until 2019 and now conducts research on human rights and public health in Syria [...]
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency across 10 provinces as rescuers in Turkey and Syria struggled to find survivors on Tuesday with the death toll from both countries surpassing 7,800. Follow the latest developments on our live blog below. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).
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Medical personnel and rescue workers have been stretched to their limits after a devastating earthquake hit southern Turkey and northwestern Syria in the early morning of February 6. Opposition-controlled northern Syria has been particularly affected, and doctors report a shortage of medical facilities to treat the injured.
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Science
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Possibly changing the way we live just as profoundly as the internet did.
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Our brains exist in a state somewhere between stability and chaos as they help us make sense of the world, according to recordings of brain activity taken from volunteers over the course of a week.
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Hardware
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From April, revised traffic laws will allow self-driving delivery robots to navigate streets across Japan.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The human heart beats 100 000 times a day, every beat circulating blood, oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body. Heart failure happens when the fist-sized organ is unable to perform this vital function properly. Most people with the condition are forced to seek long-term mechanical support for blood circulation.
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More than four months after President Joe Biden declared the pandemic to be over, the White House is fighting efforts to lift lingering and nonsensical COVID rules.
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The Cochrane Library’s review of masking trials should sound the death knell for mask mandates everywhere.
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Hong Kong’s Democratic Party has urged the government to hand out HK$15,000 to each resident to help them meet day-to-day needs amid rising inflation.
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For decades, scientists have debated the causes of cognitive decline. Is an effective treatment finally around the corner?
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Prices of some vegetables are said to have increased by “between 40% and more than 100%”.
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New Zealand authorities said on Wednesday they had recovered 3.2 tonnes of cocaine worth more than $300 million…
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada’s health care system isn’t living up to its promise, and he plans to add billions more in funding
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Proprietary
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Now that Microsoft has launched its Teams Premium service, it’s shaking up the free offering for work — and not everyone will be happy. The company is retiring the existing Teams Free version for small business in favor of the similarly-titled Teams (free) on April 12th, and legacy data won’t carry over. Your office will have to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month) to preserve chats, meetings, channels and other key info.
As Windows Central explains, the new Teams (free) tier will require a new account. Data in the old app, now rebadged as Teams Free (classic), will be deleted. Anything you haven’t saved by then will be gone, including shared files you haven’t downloaded.
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Zoom to the long list of major tech companies that have laid off employees in recent times. It’s letting go around 1,300 employees, which equates to 15 percent of the workforce.
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Discover how to spot and report scam emails
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My son Cole, pictured here as a goofy kid many years ago, is now six feet six inches tall and in college. Cole needed a letter of recommendation recently so he turned to an old family friend who, in turn, used ChatGPT to generate the letter, which he thought was remarkably good. As a guy who pretends to write for a living, I read it differently. ChatGPT’s letter was facile but empty, the type of letter you would write for someone you’d never met. It said almost nothing about Cole other than that he’s a good kid. Artificial Intelligence is good for certain things, but blind letters of reference aren’t among them. The key problem here has to do with Machine Learning.
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Security
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Hacker praises carmaker’s prompt response to the (mercifully) good-faith pwnage
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Surprise! During the end-of-year rush to pass the federal spending bill, a piece of legislation with more than 4,000 pages apportioning out $1.7 trillion of spending, legislators included a section that helps make connected medical devices more secure.
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CISA has released a recovery script for organizations that have fallen victim to ESXiArgs ransomware. The ESXiArgs ransomware encrypts configuration files on vulnerable ESXi servers, potentially rendering virtual machines (VMs) unusable.
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CISA released one Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisory on February 7, 2023. This advisory provides timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.
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As international law enforcement agencies turn up the heat on ransomware gangs, LockBit’s high-profile cyberattacks make it a prime target.
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A Russian man extradited to the U.S. last year pleads guilty to attempting to conceal ransom payments that resulted from attacks on Americans.
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Many former customers of Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) health plans woke up on Friday to discover they had been notified of insurance claims despite not being covered by the provider for some time, causing concerns that a security breach could have leaked customer information.
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By early December 2022, Hive ransomware gang had not only claimed responsibility for an attack on Knox College…
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News has learned a suspected ransomware attack has hit Ross Memorial Hospital disabling some important diagnostic systems and access to medical files.
Patients in the Emergency Department notified Kawartha 411 this morning calling the situation “crazy”. Patients say staff aren’t able to access the systems needed for treatment and they say even the parking machines aren’t working properly.
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A leading electrical engineering company in Russia, Elevel, has exposed its customers’ personally identifiable information (PII,) including full names and addresses.
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Saolta has confirmed that Letterkenny University Hospital is managing a data breach incident arising from the removal of one list of patients from the hospital premises.
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The LockBit ransomware operation has claimed the cyberattack on UK’s leading mail delivery service Royal Mail that forced the company to halt its international shipping services due to “severe service disruption.”
This comes after LockBitSupport, the ransomware gang public-facing representative, previously told BleepingComputer that the LockBit cybercrime group did not attack Royal Mail.
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Hong Kong police have cracked the local operation of an international phishing syndicate that used 563 bogus mobile applications to spy on phones globally and steal information.
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A 20-year-old man has evaded a potentially decade-long jail sentence after trying to scam $2000 from Optus customers affected by its September data breach.
Dennis Su, 19 at the time, pleaded guilty in November to texting 92 Optus customers and demanding they transfer $2000 to a CBA bank account “or face their personal information being used for financial crimes”.
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“The AFP-led Joint Policing Cybercrime Centre continues to work around the clock to protect customers affected by recent data breaches who are at risk from identity fraud.”
Optus announced the breach on 22 September last year, and there were fears that the data of as many as 9.8 million Australians could have been exposed.
Eleven days after this announcement, Optus finally made it clear that 2.1 million of its customers had some form of ID exposed.
The attacker initially exposed the data of some 200 customers, presumably as some kind of lure.
Later, he/she said that the data of 10,000 people would be made public for five days, and released the first lot.
But soon after that, the attacker appeared to develop cold feet and deleted all the data, issuing an apology as well.
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A major household router was patched after Which? testing revealed it could be
exploited – here’s what to do if you own one
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Which? reveals the most secure homes for your money, whether you bank online or via an app
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Criminals using Google search ads to deliver malware…
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Some odd things have happened on airplanes recently. The voice on the PA system on an American Airlines flight was one of these.
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Julius Kivimäki is suspected of crimes including aggravated computer breach, aggravated attempted extortion, aggravated dissemination of information violating personal privacy, extortion, among others.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The age verification proposal is a disaster for both children and adults.
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President Biden will call for stronger privacy protections and increased algorithmic transparency from tech companies in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, repeating his message from last year’s address about the need to strengthen privacy rights.
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So far, authorities have arrested 48 people in connection with Exclu, discovered two drug labs and a cocaine-processing facility, and confiscated $4.3 million, several kilograms of drugs, and luxury items.
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Defence/Aggression
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New York City has accepted over 44,700 migrants from the southern border since the spring with over 28,800 housed in 88 city-run shelters and emergency hotels – the majority are overseen by Jenkins’ agency.
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A big part of Trump’s appeal in 2016 was his forthright opposition to military interventionism. His record in office didn’t match the rhetoric.
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Finland proceeding without Sweden should be a last resort because of all the strategic and logistical difficulties it would create.
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A weekend attempt to shoot down a South African military transport helicopter in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a further example of what the senior United Nations (UN) representative in the country called “a dramatic deterioration” in security.
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Almost 70% of Africa’s population lives in a country where the security and rule of law environment is worse in 2021 than in 2012, mostly driven by a worsening security situation, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation has said in its latest report.
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Germany’s new defence minister, Boris Pistorius, made an unscheduled visit to Kyiv on Tuesday, two weeks after Berlin agreed to provide Leopard tanks to help Ukraine counter Russian forces, according to the Ukrainian government.
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Berlin will deliver 14 Leopard 2 battle tanks to Kiev by the end of March, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced during his visit to the Ukrainian capital.
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Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo changed her stance on Russian competitors at the 2024 Olympics on Tuesday saying they should be banned “while the war continues” in Ukraine, her office said.
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Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo is opposed to Russian competitors at the 2024 Olympics “while the war continues” in Ukraine, her office said on February 7.
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People should have enough supplies in stock to last at least 72 hours in case of an emergency such as a natural disaster or a military attack.
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Beijing rejected a request for a secure call between Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin and his counterpart on the day an American warplane shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon, a US Department of Defense spokesman said Tuesday.
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A UN peacekeeper Sunday was killed and another injured after their helicopter came under fire in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
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A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report Sunday criticized Australia’s inaction since the military junta took over Myanmar in a military coup two years ago. According to the report, Australia has yet to impose sanctions on the junta in response to their human rights violations.
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The Lithuanian military has trained Ukrainian troops to use a Swedish L70 anti-aircraft gun and carry out military police operations.
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Israeli Ambassador Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein has called for an apology from a Lithuanian conservative politician for making inappropriate Jewish comments.
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The U.S. State Department has approved the potential sale of long-range missiles and rockets to Poland in a deal valued at up to $10 billion, the Pentagon said on February 7.
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Russia has asked Roger Waters, co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, to speak to the UN Security Council on February 8 at a meeting to discuss the delivery of weapons to Ukraine.
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A fire broke out on February 7 at a drone factory in Latvia that has built drones for Ukraine’s military and NATO allies.
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Russian invading forces continue to launch attacks along the front lines in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv’s military reported on February 7, as Ukrainian officials continued to warn that Moscow was preparing for a fresh offensive in the region.
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The UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said that nearly 8 million people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion almost a year ago.
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The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterressaid on Monday he fears the world was heading for a “wider war” as the potential for escalation of the Ukraine war continues.
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Russia is intent on taking the strategically unimportant town of Bakhmut and it has been under fire for weeks. But some residents are still there, and the funeral home continues to operate. Why haven’t they left?
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Rebels set fire to a small plane carrying six people after it landed in Papua province.
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un lauded the “limitless strength” of his nuclear-armed military as he visited troops with his daughter to mark the 75th founding anniversary of his army
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Environment
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People venturing on icy lakes should be careful around clear and slushy ice cover, a Syke hydrologist tells Yle.
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Energy/Transportation
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The molten salt battery design has the potential to charge and discharge faster than other conventional high-temperature sodium batteries.
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The Henry Hub natural gas spot price will average 3.40 U.S. dollars per million British thermal units (MMBtu) in 2023, down almost 50 percent from last year, the report forecast.
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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried will be in a New York courtroom Thursday for a bail-related hearing despite his lawyers claims that they’ve settled their differences with prosecutors
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Wildlife/Nature
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Some 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants across the USA are at risk of extinction, a new report has warned, with whole ecosystems at risk of collapsing due to a combination of factors including habitat loss, pollution and climate change.
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Overpopulation
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Human population growth has exploded during the last century, decimating wildlife and devastating ecosystems. Without honest conversations about overpopulation, continued growth will likely condemn most wild animals to extinction and leave us with a much poorer planet By Brad Meiklejohn “Fewer people, more wild animals.
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Finance
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According to the World Bank, multilateral financial institutions and commercial creditors hold nearly three-quarters of Africa’s total external debt.
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The prez wants a new “billionaires tax,” forcing high earners to pay a minimum in taxes to ensure they “pay their fair share.”
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The 2nd Circuit reasoned that the government hasn’t necessarily taken a landlord’s property when it forces him or her to operate at a loss while renting to a tenant he or she never agreed to host.
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Zoom Video Communications Inc. today announced plans to lay off 1,300 employees, or about 15% of its workforce. All the company’s core business units are affected. The organizational structure of some units will be updated to streamline business operations.
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If the National Assembly approves his bill, a worker will need 43 years of social security contributions to receive a full pension.
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Trade unions launched a third wave of nationwide strikes on Tuesday against President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to make the French work longer before retirement, a day after parliament began debate on the bill. Read our live blog below to see how all the day’s events unfolded.
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CEO Eric Yuan says the cuts are due to economic uncertainty.
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A judge for the United States District Court for the Central District of California Monday gave preliminary approval to a settlement between United Airlines and a class of former flight attendants in a case brought by the flight attendants alleging that the airline issued insufficiently detailed wage statements.
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The UN Development Programme Tuesday reported that unemployment plays a key role in pushing people to join extremist groups in the Southern Sahara. The report indicates a 92 percent increase in the number of volunteer recruits pushed to such groups due to lack of jobs since the last such study conducted in 2017.
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The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Monday affirmed two consolidated cases upholding New York rent stabilization laws.
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Workers in the normally cushy public sector are demanding salary increases
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Customs has published preliminary data on the international trade in goods in 2022. According to preliminary data on international trade on goods available to Finnish Customs, the value of Finnish exports of goods increased by 18.2 per cent in 2022. The volume of exports decreased by 5.2 per cent and the prices of exports rose by 24.2 per cent. The value of exports amounted to 81.5 billion euros. The value of imports increased by 26.5 per cent in comparison with 2021.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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With Richard Woolcott, you always had to take the smooth with the smooth. No rough edges for this wattle-proud Australian who was one of our greatest diplomats.
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It’s been just over a month and a half since Fiji’s new coalition government, headed by former coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka, was sworn in to parliament. The December election was a tight race, as many …
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It’s too soon to declare an end to China’s economic war against Australia, but the signs are all pointing in that direction…
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Find the best Twitter analysis by Atlantic Council experts of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as he takes on Russia, China, and more.
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To have a sustained and enduring peace in the region after the signing of the Abraham Accords, women must also be equally included and reflected in policy-making, decision-making, and programming.
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Belarus has played a key supporting role in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but the democratic Belarusian opposition recognizes that defeating Putin can lead to the downfall of their own dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
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Elon Musk may have to think of a lot more ways to make Twitter Blue appealing to potential subscribers if he wants the subscription service to be a major source of revenue.
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Ofcom currently has two investigations open into claims made on Steyn’s GB News show.
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Arron Banks is appealing a libel judgment in Carole Cadwalladr’s favour from June 2022.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Helsinki Times ☛ Women can fix Europe’s tech talent challenge [Ed: Loaded headline, insinuating the is a shortage of talent in technology (the opposite is true; it's abundant). Feminism hijacked and coopted by greedy corporations.]
A new study by McKinsey Digital reveals that Europe could solve its talent gap if more women chose to work in tech. By doubling the share of women in tech would also mean a large GDP increase.
By 2027, European companies risk a gap of nearly four million employees with tech skills. The growing demand cannot be met with the current recruitment base, which has a predominance of men. European leaders thus need to recruit and retain women for tech roles to stay competitive.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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“Defendant White would go on to accuse Ms. Erlick of sexually abusing and—most importantly, including by Defendant White’s own reckoning—causing the death of the person (Danie) who made the accusation.”
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From Sharpe v. Winterville Police Dep’t, decided today by Judge Julius Richardson, joined by District Judge Michael Nachmanoff: This case asks whether a town’s alleged policy that bans video livestreaming certain interactions with law enforcement violates the First Amendment…. Defendants have thus far failed to establish that the alleged livestreaming policy is sufficiently grounded in,…
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Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder argue that we should not kid ourselves about the threat university DEI bureaucracies pose to academic freedom, but is there a better way?
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From the WIPO Arbitration & Mediation Center Administrative Panel Decision in Polanski v. Uziel (Arbitrators Brian J. Winterfeldt, Warwick A. Rothnie & Marie-Emmanuelle Haas), decided two weeks ago but just posted on Westlaw: In 1977, the Complainant [film director] was arrested in the United States and charged with unlawful sex with a minor. The Complainant…
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Authorities in Iraq must immediately reinstate full internet access — including social media — across the nation.
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Internet shutdowns negatively impact ordinary people’s lives. These stories from Central Asia show just how damaging cutting off the internet can be.
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Elon Musk, the social network’s owner, says Twitter is tweaking a policy against showing blood in profile pictures.
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Greg Abbott announces a plan to ban TikTok on Texas government devices after an initial ban on the app from Texas government employees’ devices late last year.
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Malaysia’s former foreign minister speaks to RFA about the crisis in Myanmar
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Ji Feng is ordered to delete comments critical of a police claim that high-schooler Hu Xinyu took his own life.
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A former Hong Kong bookstore manager says the democratic island is well-placed to resist Beijing’s growing power.
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China’s preferred negotiating partner, Taiwan’s Kuomintang party, has a shot at winning the vote.
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The Moscow City Court has upheld the decision of a lower court to withdraw the licenses of the Novaya gazeta newspaper and its Novaya rasskaz-gazeta magazine, two of the last independent media outlets in the country, amid a crackdown on the free press during the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.
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Protesters in several Iranian cities, including the capital, Tehran, have set fire to government banners commemorating the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution as rights group Amnesty International chided the country’s leaders for “decades of mass killings and cover-ups.”
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Some quipped that the balloon was a misunderstood attempt at wishing Americans a happy Lantern Festival.
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Wikipedia was accessible in Pakistan on February 7, days after the country’s media regulator had blocked the free online encyclopedia.
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A prosecutor has asked a court in the Siberian city of Barnaul to convict and sentence journalist Maria Ponomarenko to nine years in prison on a charge of discrediting Russia’s armed forces with “fake” social media posts about the war in Ukraine.
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Geshe Phende Gyaltsen served as mediator in conflicts and was active in renovating a monastery
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Sienos Grupė (Border Group) is organising a rally near Vilnius Airport to protest deportation of seven asylum seekers to Nigeria, the group said in a press release on Tuesday.
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More than 170 pastors and other faith leaders have urged Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to authorize an independent review of death penalty procedures, as other states have done following problems with executions
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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This month, Section 230 is going before the Supreme Court for the first time in Gonzalez v. Google
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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It was promised and as the months rolled by we forgot it was coming. We have been rudely reminded that it’s coming and that it’s almost here. Our days of sharing Netflix passwords are numbered.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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The UK High Court has found that London-based company Supponor infringes a patent owned by competitor AIM Sport, with the court also upholding the patent as valid (case ID: HP-2020-000050).
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Earthquake in Türkiye and Syria [Ed: EPO criminals exploit natural disaster to come across as sympathetic to human beings (they're the exact opposite)]
EPO staff and management express their sympathy for the victims.
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Trademarks
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Rarely does the Board grant a motion for judgment on the pleadings (FRCP 12(c)), but that’s what happened in this opposition proceeding. Opposer Jackson Family Farms claimed that the word-and-design mark shown below, for “wines made from grapes from Côtes de Provence in accordance with adapted standards” is likely to cause confusion with its common law markVERITÉfor wine and with its registered markVERITÉfor “alcoholic beverages except beers.”
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Copyrights
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A exposition on camouflage that believes all animal coloration is an attempt to blend in.
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MediaMuv fraudster Jose Teran, who was in 2021 accused of stealing $23 million worth of royalties by falsely claiming ownership of more than 50,000 songs, has accepted a plea deal.
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Getty Images Monday filed a complaint against Stability AI, an open artificial intelligence platform, for allegedly misusing the stock photo company’s images without its permission.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Technical
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As I’m working through one project, I’m frequently planning the next. I noticed that a number of my future ideas, fantasies as you will, all have one thing in common: packages. It doesn’t if it is a game idea or working on programming calendars[1] or Author Intrusion[2], they all need some form of package management.
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i recently had occasion to mention my experience of someone assuming that any command ending in ‘-d’ is a systemd thing[a]. It made me wonder when Unix first started using that suffix for daemons: 6th Edition Unix introduced ‘cron’ rather than ‘crond’. i asked on the TUHS (Unix Heritage Society)[b] mailing list, and it turns out that 2nd Edition had ‘dpd’, ‘data-phone daemon’.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Send this to a friend
02.07.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux is an interesting choice for your operating system instead of Windows or macOS.
You might have heard many good things, so you decided to try them. However, new Linux users make some mistakes that end up giving you an unpleasant user experience or making them think that using Linux is tough.
And I do not blame you. When I started, I made some of those mistakes too, and it is simply inevitable for most users.
But, if you get to know what you are doing wrong, problem solved, right?
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Applications
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Many organizations and individuals need to encrypt sensitive files but do not have the funds to buy disk encryption software. Fortunately, there is a good selection of open source software available to download at no charge that offers good functionality. There are many different tools that allow for disk encryption.
To provide an insight into the open source software that is available, we have compiled a list of 9 notable disk encryption tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants easy-to-use data encryption and security.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Introduction MySQL is one of the most popular open-source relational database management systems used for managing and organizing data. To test and practice the features and functionality of the database, sample data can be loaded into the MySQL database. In this article, we will discuss how to load sample data into a MySQL database.
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MySQL is one of the most widely used relational database management systems in the world. It is an open-source database management system, which means that it is free to use and modify. It is widely used by website developers, data analysts, and other professionals who need to manage and analyze large amounts of data.
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The margin-trim property allows a container element to trim the margins of its children where they adjoin the container’s edges.
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Just like any other operating system, Linux also supports a rich Graphical User interface (GUI). In fact, it supports multiple graphical desktop environments such as – GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, and the list goes on.
However, most Linux administrators and power users prefer to use the command line interface, because it allows us to automate repetitive tasks using the scripts.
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This has all changed with the availability of free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. There is now a much wider adoption of SSL encryption across the Internet. It is becoming less and less common to find web sites which don’t offer https. Wider adoption of SSL is a very good thing, but with this added layer of security there comes an added layer of complexity. Just like domain name registrations, SSL certificates need to be renewed regularly, otherwise they expire. This means you now have one more thing to monitor. 1
In this post we’ll look at a three different ways to automate getting SSL certificate expiration dates. 2 Before we get to that, is an easier way?
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As a result, once the RegEx becomes more than trivially complex they’re hard for most humans to understand. That makes them difficult to debug. It also makes it difficult to add or remove functionality.
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In this post, we will show you how to setup local yum/dnf repository using ISO file on RHEL 9.
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This is the sixth part of my syslog-ng tutorial. Last time, we learned about syslog-ng source definitions and how to check the syslog-ng version. Today, we learn about syslog-ng destinations and the log path. At the end of the session, we will also perform a quick syntax check.
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Games
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If you’re not familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you’ve missed out on a legendary story about a labor of love. The game, a minimalist experience in which you are managing a colony of dwarves as they live their lives and conduct their dwarf-y business, was created by two brothers sixteen years ago. It’s an incredibly deep and detailed simulation and narrative builder… and it was released for free. This was during a time when lots of content producers were running around screaming about how “free” as a content concept could never work for anything.
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The Force Engine is a free and open source game engine reimplementation for Star Wars Dark Forces, with upcoming support of Outlaws. The latest release version 1.08 adds Linux support!
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EVERSPACE 2 from ROCKFISH Games is ready to properly blast off on April 6th and it’s looking mighty fine. I’ve been quite excited about seeing this one completed and I’ll be taking a good look around the release or shortly after.
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Running until February 13th, you’ve again got a while to cram in trying out as many demos as possible in Steam Next Fest – February 2023 edition. Not only is there plenty to play but this also kicks off a full week of developer livestreams and chat, which you can see on the event page.
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Valve put out another small Beta update for Steam Desktop and Steam Deck that fixes some more annoying bugs. Changelog again the same across both, since it’s mainly about New Big Picture Mode that Desktop and Steam Deck now share.
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The Sim-ple Life Bundle from Humble Bundle is another that has a few good looking indie gems you might want to relax with. As usual, I’ll go over what to expect on Linux desktop and Steam Deck for compatibility. Noting if something is Native Linux or ProtonDB ratings (which goes: Platinum – Gold – Silver – Bronze – Broken) to save you some clicking around.
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We have a thing for DOOM, and we admit it. The source was released, and clever hackers have ported the engine to every system imaginable. It’s a right of passage, when hacking a machine, to run DOOM on it — be it a VoIP phone, or tractor. But the original 1993 release does have a few notable tricks, and there’s something to be said for recreating that experience on period hardware. And that’s what we’re covering today: [Tech Tangents] discovered DOOM’s multi-monitor support, and built a 4-computer cluster to show it off.
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Daedalic Entertainment have now teamed up with Spitfire Interactive to help their work on the superhero strategy game Capes. It’s a turn-based strategy game where you assemble a team of unique heroes who are fighting to take back their city, which is now controlled by evildoers.
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Seems like a future update of VKD3D-Proton that translates Direct3D 12 to Vulkan for Proton, for Windows games on Linux desktop and Steam Deck, will make use of a newer extension available in the new NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 525.47.07 release.
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Easily one of the best puzzle games to release back in 2021 and frankly it’s criminally overlooked (only 140 use reviews on Steam?!), is set to get a whole lot bigger with the Lost Memories 3-part DLC. The gorgeous blocky-voxel world with great lighting and bite-sized puzzles won me over easily.
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All your base are belong to us. Toaplan are having some absolute classics revived including Zero Wing, Out Zone, Twin Cobra and Truxton with a PC release and enhancements. Oh, and Native Linux support to ensure they’re great on Steam Deck too.
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French comedy point and click adventure Superfluous Returnz is all about a useless superhero and it’s releasing on May 15th. Coming with Native Linux support, I must admit one particular scene in the trailer made me laugh a bit, probably more than it should have.
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Want a way to emulate old Apple iOS apps and games? Well, touchHLE just had its first release to prevent some more things being lost to time.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”, Endless OS 5.0 is finally here with its refreshed desktop interface built on top of the GNOME 41 desktop environment and running on top of the next-generation Wayland display protocol for improved privacy, security, and a performance boost over X11.
Since Endless OS is an app-centric operating system, the new release comes with an all-new App Center that no longer features hard-coded lists of apps and promises to make it easier than ever to find, download, and install all the apps you need for your daily computing needs.
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BSD
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To expand your OpenZFS storage infrastructure to meet constantly evolving infrastructure demands, you must understand where the limits of your current system lie. Only then can you plan to expand to provide the capacity, durability, and performance that modern applications demand.
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I kinda omitted this topic (printing) for quite a lot of time – when I was using FreeBSD in the corporate environment I still printed from Windows VM on a network printers. Then they forced me to use Windows anyway. At home my wife always had a printer configured (as she uses it more) and the other printer also had USB port – so you could just copy the PDF or JPG file to a USB pendrive – attach it the printer and hit print button for the selected files. No configuration needed.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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As I reported earlier this year, the upcoming Fedora Linux 38 release will get two new official spins featuring the modern and lightweight Budgie desktop environment, as well as the Sway tiling window manager and Wayland compositor.
Of course, these will be available to the general public later this Spring and as a beta preview version later in March 2023. As usual, I wanted you to be the first to take an early look at these two new Fedora Linux 38 spins, just in case you have plans to switch to Budgie or Sway with the Fedora Linux 38 release because they look hot.
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Fedora users can rejoice – the proposal to include unfiltered access to Flathub as a third-party repository in Fedora 38 has been approved.
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Debian Family
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SparkyLinux is a unique Debian-based distribution which features both Debian stable and Testing flavours. In addition, it has several use-case specific flavours, such as the SparkyLinux gaming edition and system rescue edition.
A new release of SparkyLinux 6.6 is here, bringing the latest package and Kernel updates.
Here’s what’s new.
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Devices/Embedded
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Variscite provides support for Linux (Yocto, Debian, Boot2Qt), Android, and FreeRTOS for the module, as well as evaluation kits with the Symphony carrier board and an optional LVDS display with a touch panel. The wiki is up with currently under construction with limited information. The VAR-SOM-AM62 AM625x system-on-module is compatible with the VAR-SOM Pin2Pin family that already includes modules powered by NXP i.MX6UL/6ULL, NXP i.MX 8M NANO/MINI/PLUS and i.MX 93, up to the higher-end i.MX 8X and 8QuadMax SoCs.
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The IcyBlue Feather by Oak Dev Tech is a tiny development board based on the Lattice ICE5LP4K low-power FPGA. This development board provides flexible peripherals such as up to 22x GPIOs, LiPo battery support and it can be programmed using the open-source Project IceStorm.
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If you are running video around your home theater, you probably use HDMI. If you are running it in a professional studio, however, you are probably using SDI, Serial Digital Interface. [Chris Brown] looks at SDI and shows a cheap SDI signal generator for an Arduino.
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Having an enclosure around an FDM 3D printer is generally a good idea, even when printing only with PLA, as it keeps the noise in, and the heat (and smell, with ABS) inside. With all the available options for enclosures out there, however, [David McDaid] figured that it should be possible to make an enclosure that does not look like a grow tent and is not overly expensive. He also shared the design files on GitHub.
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In theory, using MicroPython on the ESP32 is easy — just flash an image and connect using a serial port. But that leaves a lot of things you still have to do. You need to move files between the two platforms. You’ll want to manage network configurations. You might want better editing and assistance, too. So there are a number of IDEs made to help you and one we recently noticed was MPY-Jama.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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AI-generated art is all the rage right now, thanks to widespread sharing on social media. The appeal is obvious: anyone can utilize an online service to create a unique (and often hilarious) piece of art based on a simple prompt. To display that art, one can utilize a high-quality printer or a digital photo frame.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Printing text messages from Android is completely possible, even though Google doesn’t provide an obvious way to do it. As helpful as a big print button in the Messages app would be, that’s not how this works. You can print one, a few, or all your texts directly from your phone or through your computer.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Cucumber is an open source framework that enables the creation of automated software tests using an easy-to-write and common language. It’s based on the concept of behavior-driven development (BDD), which dictates that creating software should define how a user wants an application to behave when specific conditions are true.
The Cucumber framework isn’t “technology” in the modern sense. It’s not a collection of bits and bytes. Instead, it’s a way of writing in natural language (English, in the case of this article, but so far Gherkin has been translated to over 70 languages). When using the Cucumber framework, you aren’t expected to know how to read or write code. You only need to be able to write down ideas you have about how you work. You should also document how you want technology to work for you, using a set of specific terms and guidelines.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Forum member Caramel installed the ‘firefox-skel-ask’ PET, which
has a menu entry “Internet -> Download latest Firefox”.
I have already posted how this has been properly
internationalized:
https://bkhome.org/news/202302/ff-download-improved.html
However, Caramel then added an SFS onto the layers on the main
desktop, and after rebooting, Firefox was deleted.
There are different ways that Firefox can be installed; via
easy.sfs, via the ‘firefox-skel-ask’ PET, via a FF package in
PKGget (PPM), or via a FF SFS. This may cause a conflict if two
FFs are installed via these different ways. To fix this, there is
a script in the initrd, /sbin/fixlayers, that tries to detect
conflicts.
I found the problem in /sbin/fixlayers script and applied a fix:
https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/e6b1eb44a499fa6cdc8fc552b2c22d3d22e33536
I probably should put in similar code for Chromium. The
Kirkstone-series has Chromium in easy.sfs, but there are also
Chromium SFSs
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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In early 2009, OpenOffice.org was the main competitor to Microsoft Office in the individual office productivity suites market. The popular open source office suite’s community looked forward to a November conference in Orvieto, Italy. Things were going well, and the future looked bright.
And then, in April of that year, Oracle announced its plans to acquire Sun Microsystems.
Personally, I knew it was bad news for OpenOffice.Org. Oracle had no interest in the open source suite, and I felt confident it would abandon the project. Of course, I hoped to be proved wrong at the upcoming conference. Instead, a single representative from Oracle, with no budget to speak of, arrived in Orvieto and talked vaguely about monetization and re-branding. I felt that my worst fears were confirmed, and my fellow community members agreed.
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FSF
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is hosting a talk by Richard
M. Stallman on March 17, 2023 at 15:00 EDT (19:00 UTC).
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Licensing / Legal
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This is concerning, since Praat is licensed under the GPLv3 and libgcrypt is licensed under the LGPLv2.1. These licenses are not included with the software at all; in fact, Voice.ai’s Terms of Service1 has sections which explicitly violate these licenses: [...]
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Many people don’t know about the difference between open-source and proprietary shareware. I’ve seen many cases where people use GitHub releases to distribute proprietary binaries of their programs. Some don’t even bother to license their software, they just dump it on GitHub, so even though you can see the source code you’re not legally allowed to modify / re-use it for your own project.
Your projects don’t have to be explicitly licensed under a FOSS license. There are plenty of web-based git forges. GitLab, Codeberg, Sourcehut to name a few. Isn’t it ironic that GitHub itself isn’t “oPen sOuRce”? Git is meant to be used over email, decentralized
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Programming/Development
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I mean. Think about it.
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So… how do diffusion models generate images? Why are these images as good as they are, and not better (or worse)? And… if we’re talking about conjuring new images from nothingness, what does “better” even mean?
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Friends, you might have noted, but over the last year or so I really caught the GC bug. Today’s post sums up that year, in the form of a talk I gave yesterday at FOSDEM. It’s long! If you prefer video, you can have a look instead to the at the FOSDEM event page.
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A few days ago I published a short post about two bugs I wrote while developing the C++ external scanner for my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. Reactions were mixed! Many people were supportive, but there were of course the usual drive-by claims by developers that the bugs were trivial, they would’ve found & fixed them inside of 20 minutes, and I was laughably incompetent for having written them in the first place.
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There I was, minding my own business, when I readan opinion from David Bissetthat ended with</$0.02>
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I spent the past few weeks thinking about complexity and poking dead birds and stuff, but now that theMarch TLA+ workshop is available(useC0MPUT3RTHINGS
for 15% off!), I’m back in teacher mode and making workshop improvements.TLA+ is intended for finding flaws in software designs. But what else can we do with it?
Creative Misuseis the use of a tool in an unintended way. For example, if you use a screwdriver to pry something open, or a book as a monitor stand. Creative misuse in software includes making games in Excel spreadsheets and usingyes
totest for broken hardware. Creative misuse is 1) very fun, and 2) expands the space of how useful the tool is. I love finding creative misuses for tools. Here’s a few of them for TLA+.
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Introduction
In R, lists are a fundamental data structure that allows us to store multiple objects of different data types under a single name.
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Leftovers
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To be clear, the “secret” here was a joke and these buttons are in fact well
documented. The buttons I was talking about were the AUTOVON call precedence
buttons, used for a five-level prioritization scheme within the AUTOVON
military telephone network. The labels on these buttons, FO, F, I, P, for Flash
Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority, directly reflected the nuclear C2
scheme at the time. The AUTOVON telephone network is long retired, but military
telephone systems continue to provide a call precedence scheme today,
admittedly usually without dedicated buttons.
Well, the idea of call precedence without the priority buttons leads naturally
to a followup that I promised: government and defense call prioritization
schemes on the general, civilian telephone network. It has long been recognized
that in the event of a national emergency, many people involved in the response
would not have access to a dedicated government telephone network. This is
particularly true when you view civil defense as a wider remit, beyond just
military reprisal. Recovery from a disaster of any type will involve federal,
state, and local government leaders, as well as staff of response organizations
like critical utilities, hospitals, and disaster relief organizations. Not all
of these people can realistically be furnished with a phone on a dedicated
network. The only way to practically ensure prioritized communications in a
disaster is to provide that capability as a feature of the public switched
telephone network.
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“At 15 it’s all tomorrows. At 73 it’s a lot of goodbyes. That’s why you have to make the most of right now. ”—Bruce Springsteen, opening night of the 2023 E Street Band tour, Tampa, Fla.1
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Neeson last week called McGregor a “little leprechaun” who “gives Ireland a bad name.”
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Finland re-took the world ice carousel record from the United States on Monday, when Janne Käpylehto’s latest creation in southwestern Finland’s Lappajärvi was recognised as the biggest ever rotating ice circle.
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With the exception of the Second World War, every military conflict in which the United States has taken part has generated an anti-war movement. During the American Revolution, numerous Loyalists preferred British rule to a war for independence. New Englanders opposed the War of 1812; most Whigs denounced the Mexican-American War launched by the Democratic president James K. Polk; and both the Union and the Confederacy were internally divided during the Civil War. More recently, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan split the country. At the same time, wars often create an atmosphere of hyper-patriotism, leading to the equation of dissent with treason and to the severe treatment of critics. During the struggle for independence, many Loyalists were driven into exile. Both sides in the Civil War arrested critics and suppressed anti-war newspapers. But by far the most extreme wartime violations of civil liberties (with the major exception of Japanese American internment during the Second World War) took place during World War I. This is the subject of Adam Hochschild’s latest book, American Midnight.
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US sanctions are specifically designed to prevent Syria’s reconstruction.
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Thousands of collapsed buildings, widespread destruction, and deep anguish were reported alongside over 2,300 dead and thousands more injured after a pair of earthquakes—an initial 7.8 tremor on the Richter scale in the early morning and another that measured 7.5—devastated Syria and Turkey on Monday.
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CNN’s Becky Anderson reports from Gaziantep, Turkey after a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked the region killing thousands and injuring thousands more.
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In August of 1989, Huu Can Tran obtained full ownership of the house he previously shared with another roommate. It was a modest two-bedroom on a narrow street in sunny San Gabriel, Calif., about 10 miles east of Los Angeles. An immigrant from China, Tran, then in his late 30s, had grasped a little piece of the American dream: homeownership.
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Thousands killed in Turkey and Syria, while many more left without homes following a powerful 7.8 magnitude quake
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An important sideline to the artist’s daily journey to what is presently a large black and pearlised soft pink and silver ink painting on the wall of her studio is mentoring. Some of her previous mentees are so pleased to have had her as mentor, they not only keep in touch, they continue to seek advice as well. This she gives freely, because she is that type of person. However, it does bring home the fact that there are many creative people out here in the UK perilously close to some kind of artistic dystrophy. Some are being brave about it, some are in pieces, while others just give up. Being an artist is like living on the edge anyway and artists often unfairly have to defend themselves from accusations of having it all too easy. This must be so infuriating for them. For many creative people, creative work is an utter necessity. Some cannot perceive of their life without it. It is existential, therefore, to use a word these days released again from what was the long grip of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. For a true artist, it is a condition of existence.
Traditionally, the arts in this country have been well supported. This has always been one of the reasons for the rich vibrancy and bounce to our habits and mores. Now that much of this support is dwindling, or disappearing altogether, some of it now even replaced in advance by a greater demand in schools for more science and less art, I fear that genuinely gifted people are falling by the wayside — people already gnawed to the bone by their lack of self-esteem and general sense of self-worth. I noted one teacher last week say that he was joining the latest teacher strikes after what he called ‘the last straw’ of his primary school losing their art teacher. It is not just in schools, either. The government now wants universities to decrease arts and humanities funding in order to teach what they deem commercially more advantageous courses. What is most frustrating is that this is a provenly counter-productive act and one which goes well against the grain of what people know. The arts are widely known to develop emotional intelligence. They stretch people. Steve Jobs would always hire an artist or musician who was into technology rather than a computer freak. The arts develop the whole being — mind, body and soul. Some folk who struggle with more mainstream subjects, as well as true high achievers interestingly enough, have said they don’t know what they would have done without an arts education. The present government also now want mathematics to be taught until 18. The artist of this piece has no qualifications in this subject whatsoever. She never understood it and couldn’t get to grips with it on any level, no matter how hard she tried. What kind of hell would her years to the age of 18 have been? Even the financial sector admits creative people make good financiers. Entrepreneurship, after all, is a creative mindset. At the end of the day, art is not a soft option.
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Education
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That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.
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Hardware
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MIT recently announced its research on toroidal propellers to create quieter drones. That got [Major Hardware] thinking about noisy PC fans. The obvious solution was to adapt the toroidal shape for a PC fan. He was familiar with the idea from similar screws on boats that are commercially available. You can see his tests in the video below.
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In the old days, scanners would listen to a bunch of channels in a round-robin fashion. If a signal breaks the squelch, the scanner stops and scanning continues scanning after a few seconds of inactivity. But with modern SDRs, you don’t have to listen to one channel at a time. You can listen to all of them. [Tech Minds] shows RTL SDR Scanner on Linux to record up to 20 MHz of the band simultaneously. It records all the channels in the band of interest. The actual project is on GitHub.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Condemning the United Kingdom’s Conservative-controlled government for putting “patients at risk” by refusing to pay nurses fairly and forcing healthcare providers out of the profession, tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance workers joined forces on Monday to stage the largest work stoppage in the history of the venerated National Health Service.
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Sandwiched between the high-profile leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson draft and the official overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Austin City Council passed a resolution to provide free menstrual products in public-facing city buildings. Pritika Paramasivam, a student at University of Texas at Austin and organizer with Texas Menstrual Equity Coalition, spoke at a press conference about the policy. Paramasivam urged council members to take proactive action to decrease reproductive health inequities by providing free products to the public. “In light of the recent news we have heard about the leaked draft and the threat placed upon the fundamental reproductive rights, such as abortion, Plan B, and sex-ed, I think it’s very important to understand that people across the United States have fear not only about their lack of access to reproductive health but also…menstrual equity,” said Paramasivam.
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Climate change and antimicrobial resistance are two of the greatest threats to global health, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme.
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When the COVID-19 pandemic closed businesses down in 2020, over 70 films pushed their release dates. This caused MovieScoop Kent Plaza Cinemas, a movie theater in University Plaza in Kent, to adapt how the business operated.
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Vineyard Kikushima grows Merlot, Pinot Noir, and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on steep slopes in Katsunuma, the heart of of Yamanashi’s wine region. It’s scenic and full of wine — double tick — but humid conditions attract lots of insects prone to attacking grapevines. And while these insects can be managed using pesticides, that approach risks tarnishing the flavour of the wine as well as being undesirable from an ecological perspective, so Raspberry Pi has been harnessed to keep chemical use to a minimum.
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Besides supply chain breakdowns, heat waves and rising sea levels, scientists cannot fully anticipate how the Earth’s ever-rising temperature will impact every aspect of the environment. Agriculture is a science of balances — just the right kinds of minerals in the soil, the ideal amount of sunshine and precipitation — and global warming throws so many new variables into the mix that the most predictable thing about it is its unpredictability.
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Proprietary
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Microsoft on Tuesday said it was investigating issues with collaboration suite Teams and email service Outlook as users across the globe struggled to access their emails. This marks the second such disruption in less than two weeks for Microsoft online services.
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Security
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What’s in a name? A lot. It’s the first piece of information that identifies a person — from their first name given at birth to their last name which connects them to their family lineage. Even a fictional name like Clark Kent says a lot. Not surprisingly a lot of people use the name of their favorite superhero as passwords, which made us wonder: Do people still use their names or the names of their nearest and dearest as passwords? The unfortunate answer: Yes, they do. This year, in recognition of Safer Internet Day, we explore how common this is and why it is not a good idea.
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Plan to create boundary between JavaScript objects and their blueprints gathers momentum
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It’s not just regulators and lawmakers struggling to make sense of cybersecurity concerns about TikTok — even your Codebook author can’t figure out which are overhyped and which are valid.
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On February 7, Latvian energy and transport companies have been attacked by cybercriminals, national cyber defense agency CERT.lv confirmed Tuesday.
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Germany appointed Claudia Plattner to lead its cybersecurity agency, months after her predecessor was removed following reports of possible problematic ties to Russia.
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The most serious of the vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to read memory contents or launch denial-of-service exploits.
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Security researcher finds severe vulnerability providing system admin access to Toyota’s global supplier management network.
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A patch has been released for the GoAnywhere MFT zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in attacks.
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Security Week ☛ Linux Variant of Cl0p Ransomware Emerges [Ed: But how do these machines get compromised in the first place? Surely something else, likely unrelated to Linux]
A Cl0p ransomware variant targeting Linux systems emerged recently, but a flaw in the encryption algorithm has already allowed for the creation of a free decryptor.
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ESXiArgs ransomware attacks continue, with thousands of unpatched ESXi servers compromised within a few days via CVE-2021-21974.
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KrebsOnSecurity will likely have a decent amount of screen time in an upcoming Hulu documentary series about the 2015 megabreach at marital infidelity site Ashley Madison. While I can’t predict what the producers will do with the video interviews we shot, it’s fair to say the series will explore tantalizing new clues as to who may have been responsible for the attack.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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In December 2022, the Council and the European Parliament agreed on a final compromise text on the so-called ‘e-Evidence’ proposals. With major concessions given to the Member States’ position, the results of these trilogues negotiations are of bad omen for people’s rights and freedoms.
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With the search of the free radio station, authorities obtained large amounts of unencrypted data. The public prosecutor’s office also demanded that the web host hand over the IP addresses of all visitors.
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US Customs and Border and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed new rules to expand its Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) to require all international airlines serving the US to provide additional information about all passengers, prior to flight departures.
CBP’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), published last Thursday in the Federal Register, falsely claims that the proposed rules would not affect individuals, only airlines. But the mandate for airlines to provide additional information about each would-be passenger makes it a de facto requirement, as a condition of air travel, for travelers to provide this information to airlines and the government.
This would constitute a significant expansion of an ongoing unconstitutional surveillance and profiling program in which all international air travelers are required to respond to suspicionless, warrantless, interrogatories administered through airlines as intermediaries and outsourced government surveillance agents and interrogators.
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Geofence warrants are just part of day-to-day cop business these days. Rather than moving forward with a list of suspects, law enforcement agencies just ask for data on everyone in a certain area at a certain time and move backwards to probable cause to investigate and arrest.
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Defence/Aggression
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Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, the commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command, better known as NORAD, and U.S. Northern Command, was asked at a briefing whether his command had been involved in tracking previous balloons and whether he could identify differences between the most recent case and other balloons dating to the Trump administration.
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Presumably, we’re meant to believe his elaborate combover and spray tan would have created a manliness force field that repelled all floating objects. But, of course, it’s a lie, as Jonathan Karl of ABC News reminded Sen. Marco “Once Pretended To Like Rap” Rubio, R-Fla., when he echoed Trump’s lie on-air. In reality, U.S. officials claim the Chinese sent three balloons into U.S. airspace during Trump’s presidency, none of which were shot down.
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Subscribe to the Unauthorized Disclosure podcast with this free trial offer.Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK co-founder and co-author of War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, and Ann Wright, a CODEPINK member, retired Army colonel, and former State Department diplomat, join “Unauthorized Disclosure” hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola to discuss the high stakes of a protracted conflict in Ukraine.Initially, President Joe Biden said the United States would not ship tank to Ukraine. That line was crossed, and now Ukraine would like fighter jets. Both Medea and Ann address the issue of escalating with more and more weapons and military equipment and crossing red lines that are drawn by officials.
Medea draws from her experience in antiwar organizing to share how difficult it has been to advocate for a diplomatic settlement and mobilize Americans to oppose fueling this war. Later in the conversation, Ann, who lives in Hawaii, responds to the prevalent idea that the conflict in Ukraine against Russia has been a test run for a war over Taiwan against China. Hawaii is a US military launchpad for Asia-Pacific exercises and actions intended to curtail China’s influence in the region.The Chinese “spy balloon” incident shows just how rapidly a scenario could develop that resulted in a devastating conflict.
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As the war in Ukraine nears the one-year mark, we speak with veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody about a growing movement to hold Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest allies criminally responsible for the invasion. The Ukrainian government has called for a special tribunal to prosecute Russian leaders, modeled on the Nuremberg trials of Nazi officials after World War II. On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the formation of an international center in The Hague for the prosecution of the crime of aggression in Ukraine. “Aggression is the worst international crime,” says Brody, who notes that there is currently no venue to prosecute crimes of aggression largely due to opposition from the United States and other victorious powers after World War II. “Let’s change the rules forever, so that aggression — not only by Russia against Ukraine but any cases of aggression — could be prosecuted.” Brody has been involved in several major war crimes cases, including against Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré.
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China has accused the United States of overreacting after President Joe Biden ordered a suspected spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday. China maintains the balloon, first spotted over U.S. airspace last week, was a civilian aircraft blown off course. The U.S. and China have been conducting surveillance on each other for years using spy satellites, hacking and other means. The Pentagon has revealed Chinese balloons also entered the continental United States at least three times during the Trump administration, as well as once before under Biden. The balloon saga led to the abrupt cancellation of a planned trip by Secretary of State Tony Blinken to Beijing and threatens to further derail the relationship between the two countries. “The two countries need to speak to each other,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a visiting fellow at Yale’s Paul Tsai China Center and formerly the Asia-Pacific director for Amnesty International, in a wide-ranging interview about evolving U.S-China relations and potential for tensions to escalate further.
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A former New York stockbroker-turned-Islamic State group militant has been convicted of becoming a sniper and trainer for the extremist group during its brutal reign in Syria and Iraq. A Brooklyn federal court jury reached a verdict Tuesday in the trial of Ruslan Maratovich Asainov, a Kazakh-born U.S. citizen. Prosecutors say he fought in numerous battles and built a notable profile in the Islamic State group by becoming a sniper and later an instructor of nearly 100 other long-range shooters. Defense lawyers argued that his accounts of his role were boasts that had no firsthand corroboration and didn’t prove anyone died because of his conduct.
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to Palestine offered a paltry aid package to Palestinians and a gift to Israel’s far-right in the form of the removal of the Jewish Defense League from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.
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Earlier this month, Ukrainian media started foreshadowing the likely resignation of Ukraine’s Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov. Amid rumors and speculation about Reznikov’s next appointment and who might take his seat as defense minister, military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov emerged as Reznikov’s most likely (though perhaps less than enthusiastic) successor. Here’s what we currently know about upcoming staffing changes in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.
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The Russian Defense Ministry has drafted a bill that would make more Russian soldiers eligible to voluntarily participate in peacekeeping missions, including by allowing draftees to serve as peacekeepers, according to RBC.
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A group of soldiers mobilized in Tuva, a region in Russia’s southern Siberia, have published a video documenting abuses by the militia of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” where the draftees were deployed after mobilization.
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Russia’s Prosecutor General is seeking to designate the Freedom of Russia Legion as a terrorist organization to be outlawed in Russia.
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The brutal murder of Tyre Nichols by five Black Memphis police officers should be enough to implode the fantasy that identity politics and diversity will solve the social, economic and political decay that besets the United States. Not only are the former officers Black, but the city’s police department is headed by Cerelyn Davis, a Black woman. None of this helped Nichols, another victim of a modern-day police lynching.
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CNN — Seven additional Memphis police officers are facing discipline in the wake of Tyre Nichols’ death, City Attorney Jessica Sink told CNN’s Nick Valencia on Tuesday.
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In the wake of Tyre Nichols and too many others, heart-stopping video shows a neighborhood confront “thugs with a badge and gun” after Seattle cops respond to a false call about gunfire and quickly target the first black man they see – holding a cell phone. Police depart the volatile encounter – “We’re here with rifles to protect and serve and make sure someone gets shot” – after bystanders shield, film, vouch for the distraught guy and beseech cops, “Calm the fuck down.”
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The revelation came in Memphis police documents related to the firing of five officers who have been charged with murder in Mr. Nichols’s death.
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The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2022, as reported by […]
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A month before the Feb. 24, 2022 Russian invasion, CN wrote that the U.S. was laying a trap to lure Russia into an economic, information and proxy war. All three have failed for the U.S.
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A court ruling held that South Korean troops were responsible for a civilian massacre that killed more than 70 villagers in Vietnam during the war.
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It only took one balloon to drive the Washington political elite into a frothing rage. On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that a Chinese surveillance balloon had been detected hovering over Montana. The Chinese government acknowledged ownership of the slow-moving aircraft and claimed it was a weather balloon that had been forced off course by accident or “force majeure.” This claim was rejected by the United States government, which claimed that the balloon was an instrument of espionage. President Joe Biden had ordered the balloon to be shot down as soon as it was safe to do so, which turned out to be on Saturday when the flying object was no longer over land but rather off the coast of South Carolina.
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The shooting down of a Chinese balloon near Charleston (New York Times, 2/5/23) and an Air Force general’s prediction of a war with China (NBC, 1/27/23) have ignited media talk of the possibility of confrontation between the two nuclear powers. It’s scary stuff, indeed, but the media hype is dangerously overblown.
For Fox News, the balloon incident meant that the US has stepped closer to war with China, because China “is preparing its citizens for war” (2/4/23) and collecting information for a future confrontation (2/4/23), while the Biden administration’s failure to down the balloon while it hovered over Montana demonstrated to China that the US was weak (2/4/23). NBC (2/4/23) also called it a propaganda win for China, who along with the Wall Street Journal (2/4/23) said the event elevated tension between the US and China (NBC, 2/5/23). The Washington Examiner (2/4/23) called it a wake up call “to the communist country’s larger threat of war.” The New York Times (2/5/23) said that while spying between powers is common, “for pure gall, there was something different this time.”
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Ukraine’s parliament has appointed Vasyl Malyuk as the head of the country’s Security Service, according to UNIAN. Malyuk had been serving as the agency’s acting head since July.
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Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo—In the sweltering heat of the garden of the Palais de la Nation, President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi welcomed Pope Francis to Central Africa.
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Close to 100 Leopard 1A5 tanks formerly part of the Danish Defence will be dusted off and sent back into commission with the Ukrainians
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With the IOC wavering in making a decision, the Danes are adament that Paris 2024 should be without athletes from Russia and Belarus
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A senior American military officer notified lawmakers in January that China has more land-based fixed and mobile intercontinental ballistic missile launchers than the US, according to a letter sent to Congress.
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Russia’s ability to endure sanctions relies on the reluctance of countries like India to join the West’s economic embargo. The trade channels being formed could have lasting geopolitical effects.
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The daughter of an eccentric Swiss collector has asked an independent panel to review whether items in his massive collection were stolen from Jews during World War II.
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ADF STAFF Three years after Burkina Faso recruited civilian volunteers to join the fight against terrorists in its northern regions, those groups are being blamed for crimes.
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Residents of Mārupe and the vicinity are asked to close windows and doors and shut off ventilation due to a fire that has broken out at a drone production plant, said the State Fire and Rescue Service (VUGD) Tuesday, February 7, afternoon.
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Environment
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The rules about the minimum and maximum sizes of lobsters that can be trapped off New England could soon become stricter, potentially bringing big changes to one of the most valuable seafood industries in the country.
Fishers are required to measure lobsters from eyes to tail and must throw back the crustaceans if they’re too large or too small. The rules, which can vary slightly based on fishing grounds, are intended to maintain a breeding population of the lobsters in key areas such as the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank.
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It was January 1983 and raining in San Francisco.
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Undeterred by a court order threatening heavy fines or even two years behind bars, a pair of Greenpeace activists on Monday joined four other protesters aboard a shipcarrying a Shell oil platform into the North Sea in order to demand the company stop expanding fossil fuel production around the world.
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Klemtu, Canada—On British Columbia’s Central Coast, a rare robust stock of Pacific herring can still be found in Kitasu Bay. Every March, herring inject their milky white roe into quiet bays, and wolves, bears, seals, and humpback whales descend to feast.
“Everything comes here to eat, including us,” said Ernest Vincent Mason, a hereditary chief of the Kitasoo Xai’xais First Nations and former fisherman.
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Family members of climate activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán are demanding answers regarding the January 18 police killing of their 26-year-old relative, commonly known as “Tortuguita.”
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There’s no time to lose.
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Energy/Transportation
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Power grid outages following an ice storm in Austin, Texas, have left thousands of people without electricity for nearly a week and counting. Infrastructure repairs have been sluggish, prompting criticism of local government and an unreliable grid.
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When it comes to portable power, lithium-ion batteries are where it’s at. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of work being done to better understand how to maximize battery life and usable capacity.
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Ex Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has joined the UK’s main climate denial group saying: “we need more science”.
Abbott announced he was “pleased” to join the board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which had “consistently injected a note of realism into the climate debate”.
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BP, a London-based oil giant that has attempted to style itself as a leader of the renewable energy transition, announced Tuesday that it is slashing its emission-reduction goals and planning more fossil fuel output than previously expected after reporting a record $28 billion in profits for 2022—more than double what it made the year before.
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A leading climate action group on Monday published a report revealing that the 94 clean energy projects announced since U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law last August are set to create more than 100,000 green jobs.
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Authorities ordered Ohio and Pennsylvania residents in the vicinity of a derailed train to evacuate immediately or risk death prior to a planned release of toxic chemicals on Monday afternoon.
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres made clear Monday that securing a livable planet depends on stopping the “bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.”
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Restrictions on Russia’s oil trade are raising the stakes in a protracted economic standoff that is reshaping the global energy market.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Kohda’s previous research showed that bluestreak cleaner wrasses can pass the mirror test, a controversial cognitive assessment that purportedly reveals self-awareness, or the ability to be the object of one’s own thoughts. The test involves exposing an animal to a mirror and then surreptitiously putting a mark on the animal’s face or body to see if they will notice it on their reflection and try to touch it on their body. Previously only a handful of large-brained species, including chimpanzees and other great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies, have passed the test.
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Underscoring the need for humanity to overhaul its relationship with nature, 34% of plants species and 40% of animal species across the United States are at risk of extinction while 41% of U.S. ecosystems could collapse, according to an analysis published Monday by the nonprofit NatureServe.
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A North Atlantic right whale was left in a dire situation after it became entangled in commercial fishing rope and lobster pots.
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The young British explorer Henry Watkins pursued impossible expeditions, leading men “Into the Great Emptiness” of Greenland’s ice cap. His leadership got them all home – eventually.
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Finance
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Boeing says the total workforce was 156,000 employees as of Dec. 31, 2022.
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President Emmanuel Macron is forging ahead with plans to raise the legal age of retirement to 64, from 62, despite a third day of strikes, wide public opposition and a fierce parliamentary battle.
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Customers withdrew a total of $26 billion from Russia’s majority state-owned VTB Bank between February 24 and March 10 last year, resulting in a net loss for the bank in 2022, its chairman, Andrey Kostin, said in an interview on Tuesday.
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Vsenauka, an organization that provides free popular science books to Russian students, is closing as a result of political and financial challenges that have arisen in the last year, its creators announced on Tuesday.
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We speak with renowned legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw about right-wing efforts to curtail the teaching of African American history, queer studies and other subjects that focus on marginalized communities. The College Board, the nonprofit group that designs AP courses for high school seniors, recently revised a curriculum for a course in African American studies after criticism from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others who maligned it as “woke indoctrination.” The new curriculum removes Black Lives Matter, slavery reparations and queer theory as required topics, and drops many major writers, including Crenshaw, from the reading list. “Anybody who’s concerned about our democracy, anyone who’s concerned about authoritarianism has to wake up and pay attention to this, because this is how it happens,” she says. Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to study the overlapping or intersecting social identities and systems of oppression, domination or discrimination people experience.
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A Kamchatka court has overturned the convictions of four Kronotsky Nature Reserve employees who were previously convicted of embezzling federal funds, according to Russian state media.
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If Congress doesn’t raise the ceiling, one of the political parties threatens to bring our economy to a halt. That is not a sensible way to run a government. That’s why only the US and Denmark have a debt ceiling set at an absolute amount rather than as a percentage of GDP like other developed countries.
Once the federal budget is not balanced and runs a deficit, the government must borrow more money, go deeper into debt to pay its bills, and not default on paying its loans. Although the U.S. has run a deficit in 77 out of the past 90 years, it has never defaulted on its debt payments because Congress raised the debt limit. However, that threshold may be crossed this year under pressure from the House Freedom Caucus, which demands a cut to the 2023 budget that Congress already approved.
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When his debut novel caused a sensation in France, Édouard Louis was just 21. The End of Eddy (originally published in 2014 as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule) was an unflinching account of Louis’s difficult childhood as a gay boy in Hallencourt, a postindustrial village in northern France. In this world, the men were monstrous alcoholics, the women were trapped in miserable marriages, and the children were too many. Louis chronicled a community ravaged by addiction and violence and abandoned by the state. He described the working class at its worst: These men and women weren’t just tired and hungry; they were resentful, callous, and racist. To make life even tougher for luckless little Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s birth name), they also proved to be viciously homophobic.
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Sometimes a little socialism is a very good thing. But don’t tell Mike Pence or the billionaires who bankroll him and his GOP colleagues.
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ADF STAFF Despite much speculation that Chinese lenders were constructing a so-called “debt trap” as a way to claim key national assets from their African borrowers, an analysis by the think tank Chatham House suggests that China might have actually trapped itself.
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ADF STAFF Many rural West African communities rely on donkeys as a source of labor, transport and income. Traditional Chinese medicine values donkeys for their skins. In recent years, China has been unable to meet its high demand for ejiao, a gelatin created from boiling donkey skins.
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When the economy gets worse, companies cut their advertising budgets. This truism has played out throughout the last year as economists have nagged about a potential US recession.
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An associate of a Russian billionaire has been charged with violating U.S. sanctions and money laundering. An indictment unsealed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court charged Vladimir Voronchenko with joining a scheme to make over $4 million in payments to maintain four U.S. properties belonging to sanctioned oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. The indictment says Voronchenko is also charged with contempt of court for fleeing the U.S. after receiving a grand jury subpoena requiring his testimony. It isn’t clear if Voronchenko has a lawyer who can comment on his behalf.
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The Internal Revenue Service is recommending that taxpayers hold off on filing their tax returns for 2022 if they received a special tax refund or payment from their state last year. Last year, 19 states offered diverse programs that offered inflation relief payments or refunds for taxpayers. The IRS issued the guidance Friday due to the agency’s uncertainty about the taxability of the payments. For residents from states such as California and Illinois, the agency is recommending that they hold off on filing their tax returns until they receive further instruction from the IRS.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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BBC News has issued a groveling apology after using a photo of Viola Davis in a story about Beyoncé.
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Martin Hanson While still at the height of her popularity, “Jacinda Ardern: Leading with Empathy”, a biography of the New Zealand Prime Minister was published. It was described by the publisher as “a major biography of one of the most important and inspirational leaders of the twenty-first century”. 20 months later came her shock resignation. …
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On a ranked choice ballot, voters can rank every candidate in a given race. Over time, that could lead more voters to consider candidates outside the two parties.
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In CJR’s 23,000 word narrative criticizing reporting on the Russian investigation, Jeff Gerth committed the first of many errors at word 18.
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The economy has helped drag down the president’s numbers, with a low point coming amid record high gas prices.
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Republicans are resorting to their age-old tactic of manufactured moral outrage to distract from the fact that they have no economic agenda other than to enrich the already wealthy. It would be laughable if their culture wars didn’t have a deadly impact on people’s lives. From attacks on the right to an abortion, to the right to be transgender, to the right to study accurate history, conservative attacks on vulnerable populations have reached a fever pitch. And it’s destroying the nation.
As if overturning Roe v. Wade at the Supreme Court in 2022 wasn’t enough, 20 GOP state attorneys general are now targeting pharmacy chains Walgreens and CVS for fulfilling mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency, in January expanded availability of the drug across the country. The abortion pill was relatively unknown some years ago but is now used in more than half of all abortions nationwide, likely in response to the rapidly disappearing access to surgical abortions. Now, as they go after mail-order abortion pills, Republicans are showing just how hell-bent they are on ensuring that the bodies of women (and transgender men) remain glorified baby incubators.
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President Joe Biden will deliver his third State of the Union address tonight, and it will in all likelihood go according to plan. The presentation will be steady and competent. Not too much drama. After 36 years in the US Senate—eight years as vice president and more than two years as president—Biden knows how to SOTU. He’ll deliver a recitation of recent economic good news, outline policy goals, take a few subtle swipes at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and a Republican majority that is functional only in its ability to stall the president’s agenda, and finish with a temperate call to action that reinforces the assumption that he’ll be bidding for a second term in 2024.
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Ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address scheduled for Tuesday evening, four national youth-led advocacy groups on Monday warned the president that a continued failure to deliver on his promises to young voters could jeopardize his chances of a second term in the White House.
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The fundamental right to vote has been a core value of Black politics since the colonial era—and so has the effort to suppress that vote right up to the present moment. In fact, the history of the suppression of Black voters is a first-rate horror story that as yet shows no sign of ending.
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Campaigners from two national justice advocacy groups on Monday released recommendations for the Biden administration to act on in order to fulfill the president’s longtime promise to “stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration.”
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President Biden’s State of the Union address on February 7 will frame the last two years of his administration—and perhaps his legacy. With House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy handing the keys to the asylum to his party’s lunatic fringe, it will take heavy lifting just to keep the government open and the country’s debts honored. But the cascading mega-crises the country faces—contagion, climate, conflict, corruption, corrosive inequality, and impending recession—demand aggressive action. Biden should call on Congress to act; he should also lay down the gauntlet, promising that if Congress fails to act, he will use his executive powers to address the challenges we face.
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In Arabic, the term sumud means roughly steadfastness or steadfast perseverance. It is a term that has become a cultural rallying point and a liberatory social practice for a people locked in a daily fight for survival on their own land. For this people, right now facing a deadly onslaught from an increasingly dangerous right-wing government, sumud is solidarity, mutual aid, and determined resistance to an apartheid system. The Western story about what we are witnessing in Palestine has omitted the accounts of Palestinians themselves. It has left out their story of sumud, which takes shape through a shared fight for freedom and equality. Sumud is a practice that “creates a continuous world” in which Palestinians can “live in resistance and refusal together,” and as a struggle in recognition of the material reality that is Palestine as a people, place, and culture.
Last March, the UN Special Rapporteur charged with assessing the situation in Palestinian issued a disturbing report detailing “a deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system” and calling the international community to action. Less than two months before the UN report, Amnesty International had issued a report detailing the crimes of Israel’s apartheid regime and calling it a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity,” founded upon key components of “territorial fragmentation; segregation and control; dispossession of land and property; and denial of economic and social rights.” Not long after the release of these reports, the Israeli government launched a campaign of terror called Operation Breakwater (or “Break the Wave”), a focused torrent of violence that made 2022 one of the deadliest years on record in the West Bank. According to a report from the nonprofit Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, more than 200 Palestinians were killed in 2022, about 1 in 5 of whom were children. Most of these lost lives belonged to “civilians killed by Israel’s army in unjustified operations and contexts where they presented no imminent threat or danger to the lives of Israeli soldiers or settlers.”The new year is still young, but already it has seen levels of violence and death that, if sustained, will make 2023 even bloodier than 2022. January alone witnessed 35 Palestinian deaths, 8 of which belonged to children. The Palestinian people are in a desperate fight.
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As the 90-day trial of 16 pro-democracy figures began Monday in Hong Kong, the global human rights group Amnesty International blasted what it called the “politically motivated” charges against the defendants, while urging authorities to drop the case.
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Digital and LGBTQ+ rights groups are condemning homophobic attacks against U.S. President Joe Biden’s Federal Communications Commission nominee Gigi Sohn, whose Senate confirmation has been stalled for over a year largely due to opposition from the powerful telecom industry.
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As the new Conago president, Jara said that governors would “work together” amid a “new stage” in the country’s political life.
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The Russian Foreign Ministry is preparing for the second Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, July 2023.
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A recent survey of Iranian public opinion suggests that the lack of confidence in a Middle Eastern regime is starkest in Iran, although crisis-wracked Lebanon, Egypt, or Syria may compete.
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One of the critical aspects for India is to identify the strategic landscape which might be comprising of terrestrial, marine, space, cyber, and psychological aspects. Furthermore, the developments in artificial intelligence, biotech, machine learning, and data mining needs comprehensive plan of action which can help India in meeting future challenges.
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NATO sources tell ‘Haaretz’ some of the intel is on the Iranian drones in Ukraine, writes Yossi Melman at Israeli newspaper. Israel has stepped up its intelligence assistance to Ukraine in recent weeks via NATO, sources in Brussels told ‘Haaretz’, with Jerusalem remaining keen to keep its aid to the embattled country indirect.
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“We developed evidence convincing us that Donald Trump had committed serious crimes. As we put the facts together, many of us came to believe that we had enough evidence to convict him, and we could present a solid case in court that would lead to a guilty verdict.”
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After the reduction, the headcount for Round Rock, Texas-based Dell will be its lowest in at least six years — about 39,000 fewer employees than in January 2020. Dell in November 2021 spun out its stake in VMware, which had about 37,500 workers after the spinoff, according to a filing.
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By Art27 Mr. Fish recently did a podcast with Art27, which can be listened to here. We start 2023 off with a long anticipated guest, the political cartoonist and artist Dwayne Booth, better known as Mr Fish. Fish’s incendiary political artwork and relentless truth-seeking has been a recurring topic around the art27 office, and we […]
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Well-meaning left-wing people seem to recall, at some point somewhere in Bill Maher’s 30-year talk-show career, a golden age of Maher. A time when they believed absolutely that he was their guy. It’s why every time Maher has made headlines over the years—for calling Islam “the only religion that acts like the mafia that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing,” or arguing that #MeToo is the new McCarthyism, or devoting a lengthy segment of self-examination to why he casually used a racist slur while talking to a US senator—someone always says, “What happened to that guy?”
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The Republican resolution decrying “the horrors of socialism,” which the US House approved by an overwhelming bipartisan majority last week, formally asserted that “Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America.”
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Have you ever spoken with a parent of black boys about the struggle and fear of keeping them safe? There are several familiar concerns, but a number that are unique. “He is 12 now and I think I need to tell him he is not allowed to wear hoodies anymore,” is such an example.
A great deal of research shows that white people and black people have different experiences with law enforcement. A friend explained: “when you get pulled over for speeding on your way to work you might call in and let them know you’ll be late. I call my wife and tell her that I love her.”
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It’s been clear since the takeover, that Elon’s running Twitter entirely based on his fleeting and oft-changing whims. The weird decision last week to suddenly, with one week’s notice, remove the free tier for Twitter’s basic API, has create a bit of an uproar, as tons of tools, services, and useful bots made use of it. Many have been posting farewell messages on Twitter, leading Musk (as he seems to do all too often) to announce a policy change in a reply tweet. He did this when he rolled back his bizarrely stupid policy that you were no longer allowed to link to other social media (a policy so obviously stupid, that only Musk’s mother would defend it). Musk rolled that one back in a reply tweet — meaning a tweet that very few people would see, because they don’t show up nearly as much.
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So, Donald Trump is back on social media. What a perfect moment to grapple with our nation’s crisis of trust.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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For the first time, A.I.-generated personas, often used for corporate trainings, were detected in a state-aligned information campaign — opening a new chapter in online manipulation.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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A court in the Siberian city of Chita has fined local resident Ivan Losev 35,000 rubles (almost $500) on two counts of “discrediting” the Russian army for two interviews he gave about an earlier fine he received, he told the independent outlet Mediazona. The earlier fine was punishment for a social media post in which he described a dream he had about Volodymyr Zelensky.
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In 1989, Rushdie defied advice to lie low after Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put a virtual contract on his life in response to his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which many Muslims found blasphemous or at least outrageously irreverent.
Rushdie has also expressed little desire to embrace a recluse’s life after the midsummer violence at a public, outdoor discussion in Chautauqua, New York.
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The instructor says: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labour camps where children make smartphones.”
It is understood Disney removed the episode to comply with China’s sweeping national security laws, which were introduced to Hong Kong in 2020.
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Disney has removed an episode of The Simpsons referring to Chinese labour camps from its streaming service in Hong Kong.
The absence of the One Angry Lisa episode in its latest season was flagged in media reports this week. It is unclear when it was removed.
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U.S. entertainment giant Disney has removed an episode of the animated situation comedy The Simpsons from its streaming service in Hong Kong because of a reference to forced labor camps in China.
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Gould was in the minority, and the case was decided in Google’s favor. But even the majority cautioned that the drafters of Section 230—people whose conception of the World Wide Web might have been limited to the likes of email and the Yahoo homepage—never imagined “the level of sophistication algorithms have achieved.” The majority wrote that Section 230’s “sweeping immunity” was “likely premised on an antiquated understanding” of platform moderation, and that Congress should reconsider it. The case then headed to the Supreme Court.
This month, the country’s highest court will consider Section 230 for the first time as it weighs a pair of cases—Gonzalez v. Google, and another against Twitter—that invoke the Anti-terrorism Act. The justices will seek to determine whether online platforms should be held accountable when their recommendation systems, operating in ways that users can’t see or understand, aid terrorists by promoting their content and connecting them to a broader audience. They’ll consider the question of whether algorithms, as creations of a platform like YouTube, are something distinct from any other aspect of what makes a website a platform that can host and present third-party content. And, depending on how they answer that question, they could transform the internet as we currently know it, and as some people have known it for their entire lives.
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An agency spokesman had said Saturday that Wikipedia would “remain blocked until they remove all the objectionable material”, without specifying what content was at issue.
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Under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws, anyone found guilty of insulting Islam or its figures can be sentenced to death, although the country has yet to carry out capital punishment for blasphemy.
But even allegations of the offense are often enough to provoke mob violence and even deadly attacks. International and domestic rights groups say that accusations of blasphemy have often been used to intimidate religious minorities and settle personal scores.
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Russia’s Justice Ministry has added “The Last Bell,” a hip-hop track released in 2009 by the Russian artist Oxxxymiron, to its list of extremist content. The song portrays a high school shooting reminiscent of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre in Colorado.
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A Moscow court has dismissed the journalist Alexey Venediktov’s appeal in the libel lawsuit filed by Evgeny Prigozhin after Venediktov described him as the “owner” of a private military company.
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For all the misleading claims about “free speech under attack” in place where it is definitively not under attack (i.e., on social media sites, or via “cancel culture”), there are many areas in which free speech absolutely is under attack, and there may be no bigger one than the (relatively new!) movement to overturn the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case from 1964 that basically set the standards for defamation of a public figure. Basically, in an effort to make defamation law compatible with the 1st Amendment, the Supreme Court realized that it had to have a very high bar to bringing a successful defamation case. Otherwise, the Court (accurately) surmised, the rich and powerful would bring such cases against critics for just minor inaccuracies.
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The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the College Art Association (CAA) expressed their deep concern with Arkansas Tech University’s handling of its on-campus exhibition, Artifacts, by artist Dominique Simmons.
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New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie delivered the 32nd annual Davis, Markert, and Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual Freedom with a talk titled “Revisiting Du Bois and ‘The Propaganda of History.’”
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On February 3, the State Security Service (VDD) completed an investigation against a pro-Kremlin blogger and brought a criminal case against him on the justification and glorification of crimes committed by the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, as well as efforts to create hatred and alienation between people of different nationalities, VDD said February 7.
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February 7 is World Safer Internet Day. In connection with this, the Child and Adolescent Hotline of the State Children’s Rights Protection Inspectorate (VBTAI) 116111 is organizing a campaign called “I choose to speak”, reports LSM’s parents’ and children’s service.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship. Read more about this reporting project and make a contribution to fund our fellowship budget.
Joseph Wilson, who is incarcerated in a maximum security state prison, believes COVID-19 worsened the existing crisis of incarceration in the United States and amplified the urgency for mutual aid practices in prison.
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Roughly one million Tibetan minority children in China have been separated from their families and placed into Government-run boarding schools, forcing their assimilation into the dominant culture, three independent UN human rights experts said on Monday.
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Around a million children of the Tibetan minority were being affected by Chinese government policies aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically through a residential school system, UN experts* warned today.
“We are very disturbed that in recent years the residential school system for Tibetan children appears to act as a mandatory large-scale programme intended to assimilate Tibetans into majority Han culture, contrary to international human rights standards,” the experts said.
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This was perfectly summed up by Edward Lucas, who coined the term “Tibet test.” “If you think you live in a free country, ask if your politicians feel free to meet the Dalai Lama. If the answer is no, then you are part of the Chinese empire—you just haven’t realised it yet.”
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Catherine Bracy, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland-based TechEquity Collaborative, has spent her career exploring ways to build a more equitable tech-driven economy. She believes that because the technology sector became a major economic driver at the same time deregulation became politically fashionable, tech companies often didn’t catch the “civic bug” – a sense of responsibility to the communities in which they’re based – in the way that industries of the past might have.
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Last month, Washington state Rep. Lillian Ortiz-Self, a Democrat, introduced a first-of-its-kind bill aimed at providing attorneys for parents who are facing hidden foster care, the subject of a ProPublica-New York Times Magazine investigation in December 2021. The story documented how, across the country, caseworkers who have not petitioned a court persuade parents to send their children to live in another home, often by threatening a foster placement if they refuse. The Washington bill unanimously passed out of the House Committee on Human Services, Youth and Early Learning on Friday.
The ProPublica-New York Times Magazine story exposed a shadow foster care system in which parents and their children have little or no legal protections. Caseworkers investigating allegations of mistreatment sometimes coerce parents to place their children with a relative, friend or family. Child welfare departments then often skirt their responsibility to keep families together or to monitor the informal arrangements, saving money in the process; the hidden system strips parents of access to free lawyers, judicial oversight and court-mandated services to attempt to reunite families.
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A Tbilisi court has dismissed Mikheil Saakashvili’s petition to be released from prison in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia’s former third president has been in custody in his country since the fall of 2021. Saakashvili’s legal team had submitted the pleading in December 2022.
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NYPD detective Joseph Franco developed a late career habit of letting perps walk. Very late career. He was fired. But not before wreaking enough havoc, prosecutors were forced to toss nearly 100 convictions.
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In 2018, Laredo (TX) police officers arrested independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal after she published the name of a Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide. The alleged crime was “misuse of official information.” But all Villarreal had done was perform an act of journalism: she had asked Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to verify information she’d obtained elsewhere.
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My old friend Robert Hoyt — singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, organizer, nurse, father, lover of the wild — died on the morning of February 1st, 2023, at the age of 68, only weeks after being diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. He hadn’t wanted to make his illness public, and only a very few of his friends and relatives were aware of it. I’ve been getting beautiful personal messages from many people I haven’t seen much or at all since the 1990’s with updates.
Just to say from the outset, I will not be writing the definitive remembrance of Robert, and I’m not sure if anyone else could do that if they wanted to try to, either. It may be a stretch to say that Robert led many lives, but he certainly embraced a number of different identities over his lifetime, certainly on a musical level at least. I suspect any thorough effort to pay homage to the man would have to involve at least four or five different people, who knew him during different stages of his life.
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Judges cannot take the Supreme Court’s silence as a ground to subvert Supreme Court precedent.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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The latest pivot at Spotify is partly a recession-era sign of the times and partly growing pains for a company that has made massive expansions in recent years but has yet to become profitable. Though Spotify remains cash-flow positive, the company has spent more than $1 billion on its podcast expansion alone since 2019, making expensive tech and studio acquisitions and striking flashy talent deals for sums previously unheard of in podcasting for such talent as Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Dax Shepard. Since 2019, when the company’s podcast expansion began in earnest, Spotify has seen these costs as a necessary evil to help the company grow beyond music, boost advertising, draw in new users and, ultimately, compete with rivals as it seeks the perch as the “world’s No. 1 audio platform,” as Ek once told THR in late 2019. \
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The trouble started with a label for a package. My printer was unresponsive. Then I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP’s website, I learned why: The credit card I had used to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink cartridge-refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response.
For those not trapped in this devil’s bargain, Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one’s printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself but for the number of pages printed. (The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages). Like others, I signed up in haste during the printer-setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I need it sounded convenient enough to me, a man so thoroughly coddled by one-click e-commerce that the frontal lobes of my brain likely resemble cottage cheese. The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some liminal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you’re enrolled in the program.
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This month, Nicole Hannah-Jones, with the help of Oprah, took the Right’s favorite target of historical censorship, the New York Times’ “1619 Project” to Hulu as a six-part mini-series. Phillip W. Magness, an early historical critic of the 1619 Project, immediately jumped on the first episode proclaiming in Reason magazine that Hannah-Jones and her consulting expert, historian Woody Holton, “peddles false history.” But a closer look at Magness’ criticisms reveals that lacking actual historical evidence, the MAGA attempt to malign historians who document that slavery was an integral factor in the American Revolution is just a furious blur of misdirection, omission, and half-truths.
Phillip W. Magness was one of the first to pen a book condemning the 1619 Project. His instant book, The1619 Project: A Critique, was published in 2020 by the rightwing think-tank that signs his paychecks, the American Institute for Economic Research, whose mission is to promote “the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government, and sound money.” Ever since Magness has been flogging away at Hannah-Jones and any historians who defend the proposition that the American Revolution had anything to do with slavery.
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Netflix’s password sharing crackdown hasn’t even launched yet in the States, but is already a public relations mess.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Bayer and its subsidiary Monsanto have filed a new set of patent infringement lawsuits against farmers who saved seeds and replanted them in violation of Monsanto Roundup Ready patents and license agreements. Monsanto’s original patents on genetically modified plants have all expired. But, the company now primarily sells Roundup Ready 2 – Xtend seeds for soybeans and cotton. And those new lines are covered by new patents. Here, the company has asserted United States Patent Nos 9,944,945 and 7,838,729.
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Kluwer Patent Blog ☛ A new European patent landscape (2): scope of the Unitary Patent system [Ed: Yet more UPC propaganda. Team UPC pretends UPC is already here even through it has not been ratified, it is illegal, and it would violate constitutions. This is fake news, classic!]
In June 2023 the European patent landscape will see one of the most dramatic changes in decades with the introduction of the Unitary Patent (UP) and the opening of Unified Patent Court (UPC).
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Copyrights
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AI is an area that Creative Commons has long focused on, including most recently in a webinar series we held last fall. We are going to expand on our views in future posts, including exploring why we think the legal arguments in the US court case against StabilityAI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt are ill-founded. (Getty Images also subsequently filed a similar suit against StabilityAI in the US, as well as apparently commencing litigation in the UK, but we have yet to see that complaint.)
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Last year, a U.S. federal court handed a 40-month prison sentence to Gary Bowser for this role in the infamous Team-Xecuter group. The Canadian pleaded guilty to being part of the Nintendo hacking group and is now hoping for an early release. However, in a phone call with Nick Moses, Bowser reveals that his looming freedom will present its own challenges.
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The UK Intellectual Property Office has published the latest edition of its Online Copyright Infringement Tracker. Live sports piracy remains stubbornly high and with a 36% overall infringement rate, the situation is worse than it was in 2019. Relentless anti-piracy campaigns failed to stop 3.9 million people from accessing illegal sports streams in 2022.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I have a longer post or two on the stove, but nothing quite ready yet. But as I try to get a tad better about actually posting (both here and to my main blog), I’m hoping to do more frequent smaller posts here. We’ll see how much difference this actually ends up making.
Despite having been away for so long, I’m certainly glad to see that The Midnight is still jumping. Finding any sense of community seems to get harder and harder by the day, and even though I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a “regular” or whatever, it’s comforting simply to see activity continue. I was also gratified to see that my blog[1] is still on Writer’s Lane; than you for that, m15o!
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I posted this on Mastodon and got into a short exchange with @Yora@dice.camp. The following is my elaboration on what I found to be interesting about it all.
I think Patrick’s point is that a game of expeditions into the unknown is about going from civilisation into the wilderness. My contention is that the civilisation part of the adventure consists of buying stuff and gathering information in town before leaving; there is no implication that this generates engaging situations. The part that you are leaving (civilisation) is not emphasised.
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It’s been entirely too long since I posted anything to this gemlog, and in fact my online presence has been almost non-existent for a while now across all platforms. When I think about the reasons it’s not just that my current projects aren’t really Gemini related, or that there’s a lot of unfinished work sitting around. Those are factors, yes. It’s got more to do with the feeling up until last week that it was something like January the fucking 75th, my job sucks, the hope of getting betterr employment is on hold while the tech sector reboots a bit, and my truck is suicidal. Even my dog seems to be less than chipper these days, although he might just be picking up on our moods.
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i’m an adventurous type. always looking for the new and the exciting. used to be i bought the new phones the day they came out, preordered the new games, got excited about all the new tech.
these days things have changed, slowed down as it were. i still get excited, but in my experience the new new new is 90% just the old wrapped in new plastic at this point. either i’m getting old or the world is getting dull.
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Politics
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As I’ve watched the climate change, almost imperceptibly at first, and recently like a roller-coaster car having just come over the highest peak on its track, I’ve wondered what I’ll say to my grandchildren and great-grandchildren when they ask about it.
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It’s sickening how the GOP has made climate a partisan issue. It’s weird and disorienting. Science and the eve of destruction isn’t really a matter of opinion.
The democrats have a similar skeleton in their own closet. Nowhere near in terms of magnitude (the destruction of planet Earth is pretty hard to beat which is why you have senators like Manchin thinking “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”) but a pretty fundamental issue:
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Technical
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Last year (2022) might have been one of the most significant years of my life thus far. I had some success that year and some notable failures. Something that I suppose counts as a “success” is that I finally have some clue as to who I am, and who I could (or should) be.
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Internet/Gemini
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It is just too easy to extend, simple to remember and very easy to read even unformatted.
However, I was worried that long lines become a problem to some readers of my ATOM feed or when people read my mails since it depends on how the client handle them.
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While certainly not the target audience of some of the questions posed in this gemlog, this struck a chord recently with me. As I have been really struggling to figure out what to write over the last month or so.
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I ran across an article on the tilde NNTP server in the tilde.text newsgroup and found myself amused by the inferences made by someone looking at the modern BBS landscape having clearly never used a BBS in its natural time.
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Programming
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I stumbled upon some musing[1] about different form simple shell scripts can take and had some thoughts. Now my first rule of programming is to follow the style of the team you’re working with. If you think something should be different, you must convince the team instead of doing your own thing in the corner. It’s more important that the team be able to survive without you than it is to be “right”. If you are working alone then as a team of 1, you just need to convince yourself. Once you have satisfied the above, the next rule is to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible. To paraphrase something I heard many years ago, you have to be smarter than the author to debug a thing so try not to be your cleverest when you are writing something else you may not be qualified to maintain it. For some final context before I begin my more specific thoughts I’m used to working in mixed environments so my goal with shell scripts specifically is maximal portability. I prefer POSIX shell to the point that I’d rather inline Python or Perl than resort to bash-isms. My targets are typically MacOS/bash, Linux/bash, Linux/dash, and BSD/pdksh.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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This could be the perfect solution: a distro designed to help new users migrate from Windows or MacOS to Linux.
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Back in 2006, Michael Dell told me that Dell was going to be the first major PC vendor to release and support desktop Linux. Six years after that, Dell went further. The Austin, Texas-based company released a laptop specifically for Linux and open-source developers: The Project Sputnik Dell XPS13. A decade later, Dell is still producing this popular programmers-first laptop.
From the start, this powerhouse laptop family’s path forward has been shepherded by Barton George, Dell Technologies’ Developer Community manager. I’ve also been using and reviewing the Dell XPS13 Developer Edition since day one. They were great machines then. They’re great machines now.
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Server
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Anybody who can read a financial report knows they are paying too much for compute, storage, networking, and software at Amazon Web Services.…
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The adoption of AI/ML in financial services is increasing as companies seek to drive more robust, data-driven decision processes as part of their digital transformation journey. For global banking, McKinsey estimates that AI technologies could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value each year. But productionising machine learning at scale is challenging.
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Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that can be used to deploy and manage machine learning models. By using Kubernetes, you can easily scale your models, ensure high availability, and automate the deployment process. Additionally, Kubernetes can be used to manage the
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Applications
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Designers, makers, engineers, and hobbyists now have a new tool they can use to tackle 2D computer-aided design (CAD) projects on Linux.
Design is a 2D CAD app for Linux created by developer Daniel Wood. The app has a noble aim: provide a first-class, native CAD software experience on Linux as free, open source software. It already has a small but functional feature set that makes a promising first impression.
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If you want something pretty to look at when listening to your favorite music check out Cavalier, a (relatively) new audio visualizer for Linux desktops.
A beautifully simple app, Cavalier is made using Python and LibAdwaita. It offers 4 drawing modes, configurable color schemes (including gradients), plus lots of options to tweak the included animation spacing, padding, roundness, smoothness, noise reduction, etc.
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If you need quick access your favorite apps in GNOME Shell you can pin ’em to the Dash — or put them in a folder and pin that to the Dash.
You can’t do this out of the box, but with new Pin App Folders to Dash GNOME extension installed, you can. It lets you add any app folder in GNOME Shell’s Applications screen to the Dash.
For those confused, the Dash is the name of the dock/favorites bar you see in GNOME Shell when you enter the Activities overview. A number of Linux distributions (including Ubuntu) replace the Dash with an alternative launcher. This extension does not work with them.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Gatus is a health dashboard that gives you the ability to monitor your services using HTTP, ICMP, TCP, and even DNS queries as well as evaluate the result of said queries by using a list of conditions on values like the status code, the response time, the certificate expiration, the body and many others.
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Every command, such as cp, mv, rm, tar, rsync, grep, and so on, produces the error “command: argument list too long.” Why does this happen, and how do I fix it?
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Hello, friends. You will learn in this post how to generate SHA-256 Hash on Linux using the terminal. This although simple [sic] allows you to compress and sign files for later verification. SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA)…
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Iptables is a powerful firewall tool for Linux systems that allows you to control incoming and outgoing traffic. It’s essential to configure Iptables rules to secure your server against malicious attacks. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the steps to set up Iptables rules for common services like SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a better understanding of how to configure Iptables firewall rules to secure your Linux system.
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Creating a bootable Pen drive sometimes becomes problematic when you don’t have appropriate software in Linux.
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Exaile Music Player is a free and open-source music player for Ubuntu that provides a feature-rich and user-friendly experience for music lovers. With its intuitive interface and support for a wide range of audio formats, Exaile is a powerful tool for organizing and playing your music collection.
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Kodi is a versatile and powerful media center software that provides users with a seamless and engaging entertainment experience. With Kodi installed on your Ubuntu system, you can enjoy all your favorite movies, TV shows, music, and other digital media in one centralized location.
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Sometimes, you might want to retrieve the geographical location of a Linux server due to a wide range of reasons. These include conducting cybercrime
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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With its classic yet modern design, Xfce delivers users with a friendly and efficient experience that has stood the test of time. The design with an icon-based menu and desktop icons is easy to use and makes you productive without needing to “learn” the interface.
A few weeks back, Xfce 4.18 is released after almost two years of the development cycle. Yes, considering the leading desktops and distro, it’s a slow cycle, but sometimes it brings solid stability to your workflow.
Let’s find out how the desktop performed.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Screen recording functionality is coming to Spectacle, KDE Plasma’s built-in screenshot tool.
Developer Nate Graham reports that the upcoming Spectacle 23.04 release will boast expanded functionality when used in a KDE Plasma Wayland session.
Now, a slew of Linux screen recording tools are available to KDE users but a user has to go out of their way to install them. With Spectacle they won’t need to as they’ll be able to record their entire workspace, screen, or individual app out-of-the-box on all Linux distros that ship it.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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A new version of elementary OS, a popular Ubuntu-based Linux distro, is available to download.
The elementary OS 7 release is built on top of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This affords the distro a solid and stable foundation on which to build-out its bespoke elements, like the Gala window manager, Pantheon desktop environment, and various GTK-based first-party applications.
In a blog post to introduce the update, elementary founder Danielle Foré says elementary OS 7 makes it easier for users to get the apps they want (like those distributed through ‘alternative’ app stores like Flathub), and ’empower’ them by adding new features and settings.
The Pantheon desktop environment boasts few changes, but the user experience in elementary OS 7 is buffed through the addition of new config options. These include a much-requested way to disable “single click” folder opening in the Files file manager app.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Fedora Linux 38 branches from Rawhide today. While there’s still a lot of work before the Fedora Linux 38 release in April, this marks the beginning of the Fedora Linux 39 development cycle. The work you do in Rawhide will be in the Fedora Linux 39 release in October.
With that in mind, here are some important milestones:
- Wed 2022-06-21: Proposal submission deadline (Changes requiring infrastructure changes)
- Tue 2022-06-27: Proposal submission deadline (Changes requiring mass rebuild & System-Wide Changes)
- Tue 2023-07-18: Proposal submission deadline (Self Contained Changes)
- Tue 2023-08-08:
- Change Checkpoint: Completion deadline (testable)
- Branch Fedora Linux 39 from Rawhide
- Tue 2023-08-22:
- Change Checkpoint: 100% Code Complete Deadline
- Beta Freeze begins
- Tue 2023-09-12: Beta release (early target date)
- Tue 2023-09-19: Beta release (target date #1)
- Tue 2023-10-03: Final Freeze begins
- Tue 2023-10-17: Final release (early target date)
- Tue 2023-10-24: Final release (target date #1)
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If you make frequent use of Flatpak apps and want a user-friendly front-end for managing app permissions, check out Flatseal.
Flatseal is a GTK-based tool for Linux desktops that (I think) makes it easier to tweak general permissions and security settings for all the Flatpak apps you have installed.
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The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (aka the folx in charge of approving changes to the RedHat-backed Linux distro) have OK’d the proposal to provide users with access to “Unfiltered Flathub” in the next release.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The latest version of ONLYOFFICE Docs 7.3 has been released and it comes with several new features and improvements that will be beneficial to users.
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Programming/Development
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The algebraicMesh function of my package
cgalMeshes
takes as inputs a trivariate polynomial
\(P(x,y,z)\), a number
\(\ell\) and some other parameters, and
it returns a mesh of the isosurfa…
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The Fediverse is wired together by protocols like ActivityPub and WebFinger which, as yet, I know very little about. That’s because the Steampipe plugin, which supports the dashboards I’ve been building and describing in this series, doesn’t require me to understand or use those protocols.
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curl is actually something which is critical, especially to our data management system. It is being used very widely across NASA. Dr Steve Crawford 2020 Back in 2020 I started getting emails from NASA asking for details and specifics about curl’s origins and in particular about where contributors to the project works…
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Leftovers
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I’m all about the federal government in this week’s newsletter. To start with, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a risk management framework for artificial intelligence (AI).
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A woman was rescued from rubble 22 hours after a magnitude-7.8 quake struck early Monday. Rescuers are digging overnight through flattened buildings and fighting near-freezing temperatures.
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Many governments have rushed to dispatch aid, personnel and equipment to help the rescue efforts in quake-stricken areas of Turkey and Syria. The European Union has mobilized search and rescue teams to help Turkey, and at least 13 member countries have offered assistance.
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The Associated Press (AP) — A magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook Turkey and Syria on Monday, killing more than 3,400 people in the two countries. The death toll is expected to rise as rescuers search through…
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Entire neighbourhoods and villages in northwestern Syria were destroyed after a violent earthquake the morning of February 6 hit Turkey near the border. In between internet outages, several of our Observers in opposition-controlled areas of Syria told us of the heartbreaking scenes as rescue workers struggle to keep up.
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Prisoners mutinied in a northwestern Syria prison Monday following a deadly earthquake, with at least 20 escaping the jail holding mostly Islamic State group members, a source at the facility told AFP.
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“Speed is of the essence because so many people are still trapped under the rubble,” said Janez Lenarcic, EU Commissioner for Crisis Management. “The rescue teams will continue to work for as long as necessary.”
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One of the hardest hit areas was northwestern Syria, where nearly three million people displaced by the country’s decade-long civil war were already living in precarious conditions.
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Most needed materials are heaters, sanitary pads, blankets, bedlinen, and hygiene kits. The Red Cresent calls for people to donate blood.
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More than one million migrants from Syria live in the ten cities most affected by the deadly earthquake that hit the south of Türkiye this morning.
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Constant rains are frequent in February in Peru and often cause deadly landslides.
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Science
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Less than 15% of the 92 million tons of clothing and other textiles discarded annually are recycled. Woven-in labels made with inexpensive photonic fibers, developed by a team led by U-M, could change that.
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Despite growing up in landlocked Colorado, Ann Evans Watson always felt drawn to the water and takes part in long-distance saltwater swims.
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Jupiter already reigns as king of the planets — it’s the largest one in our solar system. And now, the gas giant has the most known moons, too.
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Without a glimpse of sunlight.
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A previously unknown layer of partially-molten rock extends below much of the planet’s surface, and could illuminate mysteries in plate tectonics.
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But what is it?
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This is nuts.
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The scale of the tragedy is still unfolding.
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Hardware
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Global shipments of tablets and Chromebooks both fell last year, with the former dropping 3.3% year-on-year while the latter fell a much bigger 48%, according to information technology analyst firm IDC.
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Spending on semiconductors by the world’s top 10 OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) fell by 7.6% year-on-year in 2022…
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Dell’s latest round of job cuts will result in its lowest global employee footprint over the past six years.
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Boeing says it plans to cut about 2,000 jobs from the aerospace company’s finance and human resources departments in 2023
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Spanish villages were promised that pork production would revitalize Spain’s rural communities, but it hasn’t turned out that way for some areas like Balsa de Ves. Spain’s rural population continues to decline, and now the growing number of pigs is linked to water contamination in some areas.
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New York City is ending its COVID-19 vaccination mandate for municipal employees including police officers, firefighters and teachers. Mayor Eric Adams says the vaccine mandate will end Friday. Adams said Monday that with more than 96% of city employees and more than 80% of city residents having received their initial vaccine shots, this is the right moment for this decision.
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State officials in northern Mexico on Monday reported another death caused by a mysterious meningitis outbreak.
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For the first time in three decades, Lithuania’s population grew in 2022. There are around 203,000 more women than men in Lithuania. Despite all efforts, male mortality remains extremely high, while women are facing poorer and lonelier life in their old age.
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Dr. Li is regarded as symbol of freedom of speech in China
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The Danish Medicines Agency, Lægemiddelstyrelsen, said on Monday that persons using the antibiotic medicine Dicillin, produced by Sandoz, should return it to pharmacies to be replaced.
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A fire broke out yesterday in the toppled containers at the İskenderun International Port following the earthquake.
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80 buildings collapsed in Cindires and 30 in Afrin.
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Customers and investors alike are sticking a fork in fake meat.
Why it matters:Eating plant-based meats is one of the easiest ways for Americans to reduce their overall carbon footprint. But after years of hype, the tide is turning against the first generation of plant-based protein makers.
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Proprietary
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CNN ☛ Microsoft Outlook email experiences outage [Ed: E-mail is a brand new, cutting-edge technology; it's understandable that in 2023 Microsoft cannot assure decent uptime for E-mail, right? And has a constant stream of zero-days in Exchange, which means data breaches galore.]
Microsoft Outlook experienced an outage late Monday night and into Tuesday morning.
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Security
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A 25-YEAR-OLDFinnish man suspected of hacking into the client database of Psychotherapy Centre Vastaamo was arrested in France on Friday, according to the National Bureau of Investigation (KRP).
KRP on Friday stated that the arrest was made by local police on grounds of an international arrest warrant, adding that it would initiate the extradition process without delay in co-operation with authorities in France.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Police deployed on Monday after an iPhone automatically dialled 999, wrongly believing its owner had been in a crash. In fact, the iPhone 14 had flown off the windscreen on Route Twisk on Monday morning and detected a sudden impact, causing it to alert the authorities.
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Defence/Aggression
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The great tragedy of Ukraine is that so many opportunities to avoid or end the war have been missed.
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by Sebastian Smith President Joe Biden on Monday defended the decision to wait until a Chinese balloon crossed the United States before shooting it down, and the White House said valuable intelligence was being culled from the device.
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The UNFPA and UNICEF made the call in line with the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, which is annually commemorated on Feb. 6.
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Traditional Ukrainian tapestries, family photos and pastoral scenes on cheap posters cover the walls of her cottage warmed by a wood-burning stove. The only record of her tragic past are her birth certificate and her memories.
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The Monroe Doctrine was first discussed under that name as justification for the U.S. war on Mexico that moved the western US border south, swallowing up the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.
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At the request of Ukraine, the campaign “Knit for Ukrainian Support” is resumed, during which, until March 17, knitwear can be donated at all Latvian Post departments, Latvian Television reported on February 6.
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A giant transport ship, the Arc Defender, delivered armored vehicles and equipment belonging to the United States Army’s 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Calvary Division and the 4th Infantry Division’s headquarters element in late January at the port in Riga, according to the U.S. Army’s official website.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, together with his ally Belarus, is supported by only 4 percent of the population of Latvia, and their number has halved since March, according to a publicly available survey commissioned by the State Chancellery, reported the LETA newswire February 4.
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Shortly before 5 p.m. Monday, there was a large explosion at the site of the train derailment in East Palestine. It happened just over an hour after crews began the process of releasing chemicals from the tanker cars. TV2’s Jacob Brooks has the latest.
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The American military had a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental United States undetected under the Trump administration, the Pentagon general responsible for providing air and missile defense over North America said on Monday.
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For all the talk about the World entering a new global era, the past year bears a striking resemblance to 2008. That year, Russia invaded its neighbor, Georgia, and tensions with Iran and North Korea were consistently high
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President Biden plans to visit Poland later this month to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to a report. The 80-year-old president is expected to make the trip to the Nato ally near the end of February, according to NBC News.
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I have lived in flyover states my whole life. People tend to overlook the transformational change and creative organizing that happens in the Midwest. But I have known our capacity to show up for justice and equality for years.
I went to law school in Kansas, and I stayed here because of the powerful community I found: organizers and activists who are “Midwest nice,” working tirelessly to make Kansas a more welcoming place for people like me — Black people, LGBTQIA people, and people with disabilities. It was in Kansas that I was able to reclaim my power and become an advocate for racial justice. Today in Wichita, I’m using that power with my colleagues at the ACLU of Kansas and the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project to bring a constitutional challenge to the state’s death penalty on behalf of our client, Kyle Young.
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It’s too soon to declare an end to China’s economic war against Australia, but the signs are all pointing in that direction…
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Is globalisation coming back to life? That was the big question at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, where WEF founder Klaus Schwab asked whether it is possible to have cooperation…
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France invented the attack helicopter in 1956. Sixty-seven years later, Japan has decided that the idea has had its day.
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NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s visit to Japan and South Korea trip was striking both for its timing and for its messaging shift on China.
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Ukrainian military medic Yulia Paievska has a simple message for anyone who still believes in the possibility of a compromise peace with Putin’s Russia. “They will not stop until they are stopped,” she says.
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Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Mali early Tuesday for talks with its junta leaders seeking Moscow’s help in battling an Islamist insurgency that remains entrenched despite years of fighting.
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Interviews with five former Taliban fighters reveal the crushing ennui of office life in the big city.
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National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology is taking the lead in the development push.
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Pilots are “lucky to be alive” following a “miraculous” escape from their Boeing 737 firebomber crashing in Western Australia’s south on Monday.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Eleven environmental concern groups have refused to attend a closed-door meeting hosted by the Hong Kong government to introduce its proposed artificial islands project off Lantau Island, saying the conference was “absolutely not an open and honest consultation.”
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Environment
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Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire is known to have some of the wildest weather on the planet, and without a doubt, it takes the cake for the United States.
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February 6 sees the start of ‘biomass trading’ in Latvia, reports Labs of Latvia.
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Energy/Transportation
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BP’s annual profit more than doubled last year to nearly $28 billion, extending a record run of earnings for the world’s oil majors that is adding to calls for higher taxes on the windfall gains.
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Myths And Real Facts About Cryptocurrency Just ten years ago, no one suspected that the investment market would undergo such revolutionary changes. Furthermore, after the announcement of Bitcoin’s development, most people were skeptical.
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Interconnection is currently a “painful” process that speakers said will require organizational reform as well as innovative technology.
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Micronesia’s president denounced Japan’s plan at the United Nations in September.
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Forget diplomatic language—it’s a moment for some home truths.
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When you’re on the toilet (obviously). Also when you’re proposing marriage.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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Congress is once again bickering about raising the debt ceiling, the amount of money the US government can borrow to pay its bills on time. And that means that Corporate America has to be ready for the worst.
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Food prices are still on the increase in Sweden, at an even higher rate than at the end of 2022. Here’s why.
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FINNISH GAME STUDIO Rovio Entertainment on Monday said it will commence a strategic review and non-binding discussions regarding a potential tender offer for its shares.
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As the railroad merges with Canadian Pacific, its Mexico subsidiary is investing in making rail a competitive shipping alternative, says its president.
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Tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance workers joined Britain’s largest-ever health sector strike on Monday – the latest walkout to cause disruption at the National Health Service. Public support for striking staff remains high, but negotiations with the government over pay increases have reached a stalemate.
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Asian stock markets are mixed after Wall Street sank under pressure from worries about higher interest rates and Japan reported stronger wage gains than expected
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Russian citizen Denis Dubnikov pleaded guilty on February 6 to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the U.S. District Court of Oregon.
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to discuss Washington’s future support for Ukraine when she travels to a major security conference in Germany next week.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has been invited to take part in a summit of European Union leaders, the EU said on February 6.
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Ukraine and Russia are among the countries that immediately pledged to send rescuers and other aid after a powerful earthquake struck Turkey and Syria in the early hours of February 6.
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Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic publicly apologized on February 6 for the appearance on the official government website of the phrase “Republic of Kosovo,” saying it was the result of an “unforgivable” translation error.
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Kazakh Foreign Ministry officials have rejected a Russian court’s summoning of editors of the Arbat.media news website over an article it published about Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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President Emmanuel Macron and his government on Tuesday braced for a third wave of nationwide strikes and protests…
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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From Rench v. City of Moscow, decided last week by Judge Morrison England (D. Idaho): Plaintiffs Gabriel Rench, Sean Bohnet, and Rachel Bohnet … initiated this action against Defendants City of Moscow …, a political subdivision of the State of Idaho [and Moscow officials] … for constitutional injuries purportedly sustained when Plaintiffs participated in a September…
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Child sexual abuse imagery spreads on Twitter even after the company is notified: One video drew 120,000 views. “Sewer rats,” as one regulator described bad actors, remain.
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Ever heard of TikTok’s “Focused View”? Learn how TikTok claims to tracks your emotions and invades your privacy for profit.
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Ecuadorians Sunday voted in local elections and a referendum containing a number of measures aimed at reforming Ecuador’s constitution. As of Monday night, all eight referendum measures have been defeated. President Guillermo Lasso proposed the referendum in September 2022.
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The national security trial of the 47 pro-democracy activists Monday commenced in the Hong Kong High Court, two years since their arrest in 2021. Amongst them, 16 defendants denied the charges.
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Access Now is demanding TikTok clarifies how it applies EU laws and human rights safeguards when using its new feature, “Focused View.”
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In an open letter, Access Now is demanding TikTok clarifies how it applies human rights law when using its new feature, “Focused View.”
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Geshe Phende Gyaltsen served as mediator in conflicts and was active in renovating a monastery
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But propaganda tool is expensive, and apparently not banned under UN sanctions on luxury goods
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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For the first time, A.I.-generated personas, often used for corporate trainings, were detected in a state-aligned information campaign — opening a new chapter in online manipulation.
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Twitter, Google’s YouTube, Meta Platform’s Facebook, Microsoft’s LinkedIn and TikTok are not doing enough…
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Salman Rushdie’s new book is ready for release.
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People in Pakistan can once again use
Wikipedia, three days after the country
blocked the websiteover content that regulators deemed “sacrilegious.”
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A generation after a law that made online commentary possible, long-standing rules of the road online have become a political football.
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Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founder of the feminist art collective, displays the Russian President’s “ashes” at a gallery show, in front of L.A. luminaries such as Kesha.
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Blasphemy is a sensitive issue in Muslim-majority Pakistan.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A group of Kai Tak residents rallied outside Hong Kong’s Central Government Offices to oppose a proposed short-term public housing project in their district, saying the plan would negatively impact the area’s outlined transformation into the city’s second central business district (CBD).
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Five people, including two minors, have been arrested after they allegedly behaved in a disorderly manner at a Hong Kong retail chain store, whose owner is set to testify against his co-defendants in the city’s largest national security trial.
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From a rally in New York to a strike in Texas, full-time employees and contractors are voicing their displeasure.
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“The Court permanently enjoins the District … from … prohibit[ing] … speakers … from reading or quoting verbatim from the text of any book or written works available in any FCS library or classroom, while addressing the school board during the public-comment period at school board meetings.”
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Now a judge has cleared him of wrongdoing and struck down the rule used to justify the arrest.
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The last of the reelection campaign’s defamation lawsuits against media outlets looks like it is headed for defeat, like all the others.
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Renowned Turkish-American author Elif Batuman Ph.D. ’07 spoke to the Stanford community about her discovery of her sexuality and how she mirrored her journey through fiction-writing.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Heavily tinted or blacked out windows made up the highest number of offences.
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A spate of right-to-repair bills is sweeping through state legislatures, demanding that even in a digital age, the people who buy something own it.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Software Patents
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In two decisions rendered on January 11, 2023, the French Supreme Court (“Cour de cassation”) ruled for the third time in almost 50 years on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.
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Copyrights
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Runway, the generative AI startup that co-created last year’s breakout text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, has released an AI model, called Gen-1, that can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. In a demo reel posted on its website, Runway shows how its software can…
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I’ve recently taken up brewing mead as a hobby. It’s been a bit of an investment but I’ve been enjoying it so far. It keeps my attention and gives me something to look forward to.
Around the middle of last month I was especially bored and decided to search the local craigslist listings. I found a listing by a man who was selling a few gallons of honey for a steal. I think it was in the ballpark of $20/gal, or roughly $1.60/lb. On an impulse I reached out and was able to arrange to purchase the stuff. It turns out the person selling the honey owns some local timber land. A beekeeper that he’d worked with in the past had some of his hives destroyed by a bear, and offered the landowner several gallons of raw honey if he’d let him store his hives on the man’s property. I lucked out, as the man already had a lot of honey and so decided to try and sell some of it.
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Technical
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I just finished the third project for my security class. This project has been simultaneously the most difficult and most easy lab that I have done. I wanted to describe my experience of the lab here.
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Internet/Gemini
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As of last Saturday, I’ve been blogging consistently for two years.
When I started out I was writing about everything from how my week was going to new tech I found to music or games I was getting into and making that writing available exclusively over the gemini protocol. Not much has changed in the topics I like to write about, but last year I started making my writing available over the web in addition to gemini. At first I was using Neocities, but recently I migrated to my own Hugo static site in an effort to streamline my publishing process.
Here’s some of the things I’ve learned and come to enjoy in my two years of writing.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.06.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Making Home Assistant easier to configure, scoring music with FOSS, protecting yourself against phishing, 3 very different distro releases, traffic shaping and QoS, and more.
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Kernel Space
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I'm announcing the release of the 6.1.10 kernel.
All users of the 6.1 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 6.1.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-6.1.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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Applications
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Comprehensive guide on some of the best Ethereum wallets that you can use on your Linux and its distros such as Ubuntu that works best for you.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Archives are a common way of storing and transferring multiple files in Linux. However, extensive archives can be difficult to manage and transfer, especially if they exceed a certain size limit. One solution to this problem is to split the large archives into multiple smaller files, each with a specified size limit.
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Java is a popular object-oriented programming language that has been widely used for developing a variety of applications, from desktop to mobile and web. One of the most basic concepts in Java programming is printing to the console. This is where the System.out.println() method comes into play.
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The split command in Linux is a useful tool for splitting large files into smaller parts. This is useful when dealing with large files that are too big to be transferred or managed easily.
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balenaEtcher is a user-friendly and efficient tool widely used for creating bootable USB drives and SD cards and works well on Linux Mint-based distributions. Its popularity stems from its ease of use, reliability, and robust features that simplify creating bootable media.
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Brave is a free, open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. that offers a faster, more secure, and private browsing experience compared to traditional browsers like Firefox. Whether you are browsing the web for work or leisure, Brave Browser provides the tools you need to stay protected online.
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Ubuntu Kylin is a popular Chinese-specific edition of the Ubuntu operating system that features the Kylin Desktop Environment. This unique desktop environment has been specifically designed for the needs of the Chinese community, offering a smooth and seamless computing experience.
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All the major Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, etc use the systemd init system today for managing and controlling various services while the system is running. In this guide, we explain the systemd commands you can use to manage systemd services using systemctl.
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The Documentation Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide and Calc Guide release 7.5, narrowing the time gap between the software release date and the Guides’ release date.
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Linux kernel has an integrated firewall named netfilter, but you manipulate it through command lines such as the good old iptables, or nftables which will eventually superseed iptables.
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The text color works in Bootstrap by using several classes, such as “text-primary”, “text-info”, “text-light”, “text-dark”, “text-danger”, and more.
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This is on the zombie process and also the causes and the procedure to kill these processes also the ways to identify them using simple commands
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DPKG, also known as Debian Package Manager, is a package management system used in Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and others. The package manager is responsible for managing the installation, removal, and upgrade of software packages.
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Introduction If you’re using a Linux-based operating system, you’ve probably heard of the DPKG package manager. DPKG is a powerful tool that helps you install, update, and manage packages (or software) on your system.
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If you’re familiar with the Linux operating system, you’ve probably heard of Yum. Yum is a package manager that makes it easy to install and manage software on your Linux machine. It’s a powerful tool that can help you automate software installations, keep your system up to date, and even resolve dependencies between packages.
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Introduction dpkg is a package manager that is used in Debian-based Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, to manage software packages. A package manager is a tool that helps you to install, remove, and manage the packages or software installed on your system.
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Introduction When it comes to managing packages in a Linux system, there are multiple package managers available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. One of the most widely used package managers is apt, which is used by many popular Linux distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE’s Plasma desktop environment, once considered something of a resource hog, has more features than ever and is Linux’s most configurable desktop, yet it’s as easy on resources as relatively lightweight desktops such as Xfce.
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No surprise, given that I recently wrote that it was a “slow month” for my Free Software activities, that I skipped FOSDEM too. My recurring memory of the event is cold, sleet, snow, miserable weather and a cold draft across the KDE booth – and returning from the event with a hangover and recharged, nonetheless, by seeing how the whole Free Software world hangs together.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Older versions of the utility give you with a simple toolbar icon that you click on to enable Caffeine (to prevent your system from sleeping, or a screensaver from kicking in), and click on again to disable.
But the latest version integrates with the Quick Settings menu introduced in GNOME 43. It adds a “Caffeine” pod option that, like other Quick Settings pods, you can click on to enable/disable instantly.
There’s also a new sub-menu with one-click timers for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 30 mins, plus ‘infinite’ (which is default option)
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Esuealas Linux is a distribution aimed at the education sector, from preschool to high school, and includes a collection of educational software. This distribution can be installed on either 32-bit or 64-bit hardware and is based on Bohdi Linux.
The list of pre-installed educational software is impressive, with the likes of TuxPaint, GCompris, TuxMath, Scratch, WxMaxima, Geogebra, Kalzium, and many more. Along with the educational software, you’ll also find standard packages such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and more.
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New Releases
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The last release of Legacy OS was in 2014 and was based on Puppy Linux. It was intended to be a general-purpose lightweight distribution based on Puppy Linux with a complete set of applications, packages, media codecs, etc.
The aim was to provide a complete operating system for older computers. However, the distro stopped releasing after 2014. Until now.
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BSD
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KDE e.V. supports the KDE community, and has a staff of people to make that happen. Your contributions make that possible. I’ve been saying that for ages. But did you know that the FreeBSD Foundation supports theFreeBSDcommunity, and works on the same basis?
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Every few months, someone asks me not how to install a FreeBSD or NetBSD desktop, but whether it’s worth doing. Michał Sapka emailed with this most recent comment:
Third: could I ask for some “FreeBSD as daily driver” article? You, a co-worker and Vermaden made me very bsd-curious but there’s a lot people in the webs saying that bsd on desktop is a bad idea. That it’s a server-only use case.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company, has recognized Rachel Cassidy, SUSE’s SVP Global Channel & Alliances on its 2023 Channel Chiefs list.
Every year, CRN honors the IT channel executives who work tirelessly to advance the channel agenda and deliver successful channel partner programs and strategies through the Channel Chiefs list. The 2023 Channel Chiefs have helped their solution provider partners and customers navigate an increasingly complex landscape of interconnected challenges and shifting industry dynamics. With the innovative strategies, programs, and partnerships of these Channel Chiefs in place, the solution provider community has continued to thrive.
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Back in 2012, I received a box of eight hundred openSUSE 12.1 promo DVDs, which I then set out to distribute to local Linux users’ groups, tech conferences, other SUSE crew in Australia, and so forth. I didn’t manage to shift all 800 DVDs at the time, and I recently rediscovered the remaining three hundred and eighty four while installing some new shelves. As openSUSE 12.1 went end of life in May 2013, it seemed likely the DVDs were now useless, but I couldn’t bring myself to toss them in landfill. Instead, given last week was Hack Week, I decided to use them foran art project.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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“Even the most junior SRE on call starts having director authority.[..] There is a power in that relationship that SRE does have when they think something is in danger. And it’s a power we have to be careful not to misuse. But it’s important, because that’s our job.”
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This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.
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A few days ago I posted about Fedora 38’s frame pointer change. I stated there that perf using only DWARF information produced inaccurate stack traces. But this isn’t true at all. After working on trying to reproduce those results (with the binutils developers who offered to help) I realised that I made a mistake on the DWARF (Fedora 37, pre-frame-pointer change) results, using:
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Streamline creating container instances with Red Hat OpenShift and Git
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It’s no longer enough to declare security is important for your organization. If that’s true, you’re also automating as much of your posture as possible – otherwise, you’re losing ground to cybercriminals and other threats.
“If security is a priority for you – it is, isn’t it? – automating that security had better be a priority as well,” says Gordon Haff, technology advocate, Red Hat.
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Technology has been growing exponentially for years,doubling by various measuresevery two years. Industry experts predict digital transformation activities to exceed 3,700B by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6 percent. Given this growth rate, business leaders must continuously improve leadership talent, strategic partnerships, and organizational capabilities.
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Debian Family
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Synced with the software repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 11.6 “Bullseye” release as of February 4th, 2023, the SparkyLinux 6.6 release is powered by Linux kernel 5.10.166 LTS, but it also offers support for the latest and greatest Linux 6.1 kernel series, which can be installed alongside Linux kernel 5.10 LTS from SparkyLinux’s unstable repos. On the other hand, the ARM images ship with Linux kernel 5.15.84.
This release updates the SparkyLinux in-house built tool for creating live USB disks (sparky-live-usb-creator) with support for persistent storage. The devs note the fact that with this feature you’ll be able to use a SparkyLinux live system directly from a USB disk and save your work or installed packages on the bootable media.
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Prologue
For over a year now, Fre(i)e Software GmbH (my company) is involved in Ubuntu Touch developmt. The development effort currently is handle by a mix of paid and voluntary developers/contributors under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation. We are approaching the official first release of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with rapid pace.
And, if you are a non-Englisch native speaker, we’d like to ask you for help… Read below.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, today named Regis Paquette, VP Global Alliances and Channels, to its 2023 Channel Chiefs list. This is Regis’ third time appearing on the list. This list identifies top IT channel vendor executives who have helped their solution provider partners and customers navigate an increasingly complex landscape of interconnected challenges and shifting industry dynamics with innovative strategies, programs, and partnerships.
“I am honored to once again be included among CRN’s list of leading Channel Chiefs. Our partnerships are everything,” said Regis Paquette, Vice President Global Alliances and Channels at Canonical. “We have built out an amazing global team to address endless opportunities with distributors and VARs around the world. I look forward to continued channel and reseller program growth, and supporting our partners with additional tools for success, including new enablement resources.”
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 773 for the week of January 29 – February 4, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.
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The publisher of Ubuntu makes a move to collaborate within the media and entertainment industry.
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Canonical has joined the Academy Software Foundation to help promote and advocate for the use of open source software in the media and film industries.
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Devices/Embedded
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InuoMicro G4305L8-S2 is a relatively inexpensive fanless industrial PC box powered by an Intel Celeron 4305U Whiskey Lake processor that offers eight 2.5GbE ports making the system suitable for firewall and other networking applications.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Similarly to all electronic computers, the Raspberry PI computer boards need a stable power supply in order to work correctly.
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The breakout board for the Librem 5 is a great way for hardware hackers to add functionality to your phone. When attached, you’ll have nicely exposed programmable pins.
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The vast majority of automated, CNC-controlled machine tools utilize a kinematic motion system that is (not coincidentally) the easiest for people to wrap their heads around. This is your standard Cartesian layout, in which the tool head rides on linear rails along two or three axes.
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After the successful launch of the new Project Hub at the end of last year, we are ready for a new challenge and the opportunity for you to be rewarded for your awesome work.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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I’m going to be having some fun on the Fediverse over the next few days/weeks. If you’re comfortable doing so, please join in, as the more people who take part, the better.
What is FediPoll?
Well, I have a fair number of followers onMastodon, around 20,000 last time I checked. So I thought it would be fun to pose some questions to the fediverse, as polls. Then I could compile the results and see what kind of wonderful folk we have on the fedi.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Mozilla
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Forum member Caramel suggested some improvements for the
‘firefox-skel-ask’ PET. This is in the menu at “Internet -> Download latest Firefox”. I have improved the script to be truly multi-language.
The PET has been uploaded, as well as others that I was tardy in updating online:
deleting pet_packages-noarch/pupradio-1.0.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/puppy-podcast-grabber-1.3.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/pfind-6.3-1.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/pburn3-3.7.18.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/firefox-skel-ask-20220107.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/desk_icon_theme_wary7orange-1.0.pet
deleting pet_packages-noarch/PupControl-3.4.0.3.pet
pet_packages-noarch/PupControl-3.4.0.4.pet
pet_packages-noarch/desk_background_kirkstone-orange-20230124.pet
pet_packages-noarch/desk_icon_theme_wary7orange-20230124.pet
pet_packages-noarch/firefox-skel-ask-20230206.pet
pet_packages-noarch/firmware_linux_all_k5p15p85-20230201.pet
pet_packages-noarch/libreoffice-icons-colibre-v7.4.2-20221202.pet
pet_packages-noarch/pburn3-3.7.18-1.pet
pet_packages-noarch/pfind-6.3-2.pet
pet_packages-noarch/puppy-podcast-grabber-1.3-1.pet
pet_packages-noarch/pupradio-1.1.pet
Back from holiday in Brisbane, gradually catching up with the
backlog.
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Programming/Development
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Last weekend, at FOSDEM 2023, I watched a Lightning Talk by Frank Vanbever titled “Lua for the Lazy C developer”. I had recently suggested at work that we should be using Lua to script the behavior of some systems which are written in Go, so the talk strongly resonated with me.
Lua is an ideal scripting language for embedding into other programs because it is small and provides excellent bindings in both directions – Lua code can call native code, and vice versa.
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Looking like this: Lots of people walked around the conference this year with sarcastic or otherwise amusing messages scrolling or blinking on them.
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Protocol Buffersare a popular choice forserializing structured datadue to their compact size, fast processing speed, language independence, and compatibility.
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Partly to celebrate moteus controllers being back in stock and partly because a lot of important work has backed up, we’ve just released a new firmware version for moteus (2023-02-01) that has a little bit of something for everyone.
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Perl / Raku
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The past week it became known to the Raku Community that Ben Davies (Kaiepi / @Mrofnet) passed away suddenly at home in the early hours of January 14, 2023 with his father Eric. Ben has worked on MoarVM, NQP and Rakudo since 2017.
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Python
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Tutorial on how to perform the bubble sorting in Python using a logic that works by repeating the adjacent elements if they are not in the correct order.
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Practical tutorial on matrix multiplication with the help of NumPy library to perform the multiplication operations on a matrix in a Python application.
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In this article, we discovered that we can easily generate random numbers from the uniform distribution using the NumPy library’s random module.
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Standards/Consortia
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Stanford student co-founds wearable augmented reality device startup that transcribes live captions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people.
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Leftovers
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Residents near the site of a train derailment that sparked a massive fire in East Palestine, Ohio, were urged to evacuate immediately Sunday night due to the risk of an explosion, authorities said.
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How can the international community help? What will the impact be for a region already reeling from a decade-long war and refugee crisis?
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A 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit Turkey and Syria early on Monday, killing more than 2,300 people as they slept, leveling buildings and sending tremors that were felt as far away as Greenland. Hours later, a second earthquake of magnitude 7.6 struck the same region. Follow FRANCE 24′s liveblog for the latest developments.
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The Latin Catholic Church in İskenderun, and the 17th century Yeni Cami mosque in Malatya are among those damaged.
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At least 1.762 people lost their lives, 12.068 were injured, and 5.606 buildings collapsed.
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Minister of Education announced school closures for the whole country until February 13.
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1517 Fund posted an interesting question on their Twitter account…
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A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked wide swaths of Turkey and neighboring Syria on Monday, killing more than 2,300 people and injuring thousands more as it toppled hundreds of buildings and trapped residents under mounds of rubble or pancaked floors.
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CNN’s Scott McLean shows harrowing video on the ground in Syria after a powerful magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria, leaving thousands of people killed or injured.
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More than 1,300 people are dead after an earthquake hit southern Turkey. CNN meteorologist Karen Maginnis explains why the region is susceptible to earthquakes and why this one is so consequential.
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A steady stream of injured were flowing into an overwhelmed hospital in the town of Darkush, in rebel-held northwestern Syria on Monday, after a deadly earthquake struck the region.
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February 07, 2023 12:22 AM
The propellers of both engines went into “feather in the base leg of descending”.
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Around 2.5 million more people visited Finland’s museums last year than in 2021. The five most popular museums were all in Helsinki.
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In 2022, nearly 1,000 nurses requested authorities to withdraw their licenses as they left the profession.
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Science
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Less than 15% of the 92 million tons of clothing and other textiles discarded annually are recycled. Woven-in labels made with inexpensive photonic fibers, developed by a team led by U-M, could change that.
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Hardware
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YouTube videos and blogs don’t ever prepare me with a sense of scale. Wandering around an Osaka computer store with Clara made us realise just how gargantuan so many modern computer cases are, even ones billed as being smaller.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Britain faces its largest ever strike by health workers on Monday as tens of thousands of nurses and ambulance workers walk out in an escalating pay dispute which the health minister said would place further strain on the National Health Service (NHS).
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Employees are constantly reminded of an impending recession, inflation, and continued public health concerns, which can impact employee mental health.
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The whole gang’s here.
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A mysterious twist.
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Security
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It may be helpful to detect these requests. Many use unique host names. This will make detecting the request in DNS logs easy even if TLS is not intercepted.
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A critical vulnerability affecting wireless communications base stations from Baicells can be exploited to cause disruption or take complete control of data and voice traffic.
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Did you know: “Disable JavaScript” as a browser feature was born out of an exasperation with plugging security holes?
I didn’t. But then I watched “A Hipster History of CORS”and the speaker, Devdatta Akhawe, references the history of the feature as outlined in the bookJavaScript: The Definitive Guide.
Security in JavaScript in those early days was WDD: whack-a-mole driven development.
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Hackers are targeting a two-year-old VMware server software vulnerability in a ransomware campaign aimed at extorting thousands of companies around the world, Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency warned on Saturday (Feb. 4).
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VMware Inc. and government agencies in Europe are warning users of VMware’s ESXi hypervisors today to ensure their software is up to date following the emergence of a widespread ransomware campaign targeting unpatched installs.
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After two full days of keynote presentations and track sessions, CloudNativeSecurityCon is officially in the books.
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Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare was forced to cancel procedures and divert patients after taking systems offline following a Thursday night cyberattack.
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Unpatched and unprotected VMware ESXi servers worldwide have been targeted in a ransomware attack exploiting a vulnerability patched in 2021.
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Episode 441 of the Cyberlaw Podcast
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Privacy/Surveillance
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After reading supposedly secure messages for five months, authorities then arrested the alleged owners and some users of Exclu.
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More than 450 cybersecurity-related mergers and acquisitions were announced in 2022, according to an analysis conducted by SecurityWeek
The postSecurityWeek Analysis: Over 450 Cybersecurity M&A Deals Announced in 2022appeared first onSecurityWeek.
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Instant Checkmate and TruthFinder have disclosed data breaches affecting a total of more than 20 million users.
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Defence/Aggression
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In recent years, the international security environment has evolved in a way that lays greater emphasis on information gathering and analysis. This is largely due to the proliferation of digital technologies and the internet, which have made it easier for individuals, organisations, and governments to access, share, and disseminate information.
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As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the one-year mark, an overwhelming majority of Ukrainians have faith in their country’s victory and reject the idea of a compromise peace with the Kremlin, writes Mariia Zolkina.
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United Nations (UN) Secretary General Antonio Guterres added his condolences to those of senior South African defence ministry and national defence force personnel on the death of a SA Air Force (SAAF) flight engineer when the Oryx he was crew on came under fire in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Sunday (5 February).
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The United States has reported over 3,500 deaths from gun violence since the start of this year with more than 50 mass shootings recorded, according to Gun Violence Archive.
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How much of Shell’s record US $40 billion profit was due to the Ukraine war and freezing Russia out of the market? If you apply the “excess deaths” methodology we became familiar with during covid, comparing profit against a running average of the previous five years, we get a figure of about $25 billion “excess…
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The reshuffle plans come in the midst of a corruption scandal around the Ministry of Defense.
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The Chinese balloon that floated over US airspace last week before being shot down by a US military jet Saturday has raised questions of international law on both the US and Chinese sides.
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Lithuanians donated over one million euros in one hour for radars for Ukraine. An IT company then matched the sum. Over 6 million euros were raised during the first week of the Radarom! campaign.
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Su Mon Htet was treating wounded pro-democracy guerillas when she was hit.
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The leader of Russia’s Republic of Tyva in Siberia, Vladislav Khovalyg, has sent his representatives to parts of Ukraine’s Russia-occupied Donetsk region after a group of Tyvan men mobilized to fight with the Russian armed forces invading Ukraine complained of ill treatment.
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A noted sociologist in Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan, Iskander Yasaveyev, has been sentenced to three days in jail on a charge of inciting hatred because of an analysis he wrote about Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
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The war is intensifying in a string of villages on the eastern front, where doctors struggle to handle an influx of gruesome injuries and soldiers fret about a Russian army sending waves of new conscripts.
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Russia is deploying hundreds of thousands of newly mobilized soldiers, in small groups, to probe for vulnerabilities in Ukrainian defensive lines.
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On February 6, Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, Edgars Rinkēvičs, took part in the meeting of the General Affairs Council of the European Union in Brussels, which examined the priorities of the Swedish Presidency and made preparations for the special European Council on 9-10 February.
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The Citizenship and Migration Affairs Office (PMLP) has decided to withdraw ‘National Bolshevik’ Beness Aijo’s Latvian citizenship, LETA reported on February 6. In a separate case, the legitimacy of Russian billionaire Pyotr Aven’s Latvian citizenship is also being examined by one of Latvia’s security services.
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Hybrid warfare refers to the use of a mixture of conventional and unconventional military tactics and techniques in order to achieve strategic objectives. This type of warfare has become increasingly prevalent in recent years and has been utilized by numerous actors, including state and non-state actors.
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The visit of Anthony Blinken US Secretary of State to China comes after the official Chinese announcement of the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to Russia within the framework of the US administration’s continuation during the current year of its strategy to confront Chinese military and economic influence in the Indo-Pacific region…
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After $67 billion and more than 20 years, the F-22 finally won a dogfight against an unarmed, nearly immobile opponent.
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Plus: The French face “le wokisme,” a Tennessee “eyelash specialist license” would require 300 hours education, and more…
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Tunisia’s Mobile ID program is opaque and risks undermining users’ data protection and privacy. The government must share details of the program to foster trust and transparency.
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Environment
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The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently started a campaigning platform highlighting what it calls the “costs of net zero”.
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Energy/Transportation
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The project includes a 5 MW power purchase agreement with SaskPower.
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Insurance, finance and other services for Russian oil shipments will be banned if oil sells for more than US$60 a barrel.
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The new management of FTX is pressuring hundreds of politicians and political organizations to return millions of dollars donated by the crypto platform or its founders before it went bankrupt last year.
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A year ago, crypto successfully scraped and scrapped to get a foot in the door in Washington. But in the wake of crypto’s winter, and FTX’s spectacular collapse, that door has now slammed shut.
Why it matters:Gaining legitimacy in Washington has been an essential part of the industry’s push into the mainstream. But a series of recent announcements from the Biden administration suggest there’s a crackdown ahead.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Officials say a polar bear that killed a young mother and her baby Jan. 17 in western Alaska was likely an older animal in poor physical condition. However tests have come back negative for pathogens that affect the brain and cause aggressive behavior. A state wildlife veterinarian collected and examined samples from the bear’s head a day after it was killed. The results of analysis indicate it was an adult male and in poor health. Standard tests conducted on tissues are negative for rabies, toxoplasmosis, distemper and avian influenza. State and federal wildlife officials say there is no definitive explanation as to why the bear was in poor condition.
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As one of the world’s most endangered birds returns to its ancestral skies, partners work to eliminate a persistent threat on the ground.
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Wait, what?!
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The earliest evidence of its kind.
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Finance
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In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, conversations around workplace burnout and mental health are coming to the forefront.
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Israel-based digital entertainment company Playtika offered to acquire Rovio at 9.05 euros per share last month.
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Dell Technologies Inc. disclosed in a regulatory filing today that it plans to let go about 5% of its workforce, or about 6,650 employees.
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FTX wants that money back by Feb. 28, warning recipients that making a donation to a third-party charity “does not prevent the FTX Debtors from seeking recovery from the recipient or any subsequent transferee.”
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PC shipments are plungingdue to a tough economy and the pandemic recovery, and that’s proving to be especially painful for Dell. The company islaying offabout five percent of its workforce, or roughly 6,650 employees, to cope with a “challenging global economic environment.”
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French President Emmanuel Macron’s government faces a crunch week of defending its contested pension reform, with fireworks expected in parliament and mass strikes and demonstrations planned on the streets.
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Danish online supermarket Nemlig.com has reached an agreement for working terms for its drivers with the trade union 3F Transport.
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Staff on board Denmark’s trains are subjected to both physical and verbal abuse when at work, rail employees said in a survey.
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THE BOARD of the Industrial Union on Sunday showed a green light to new two-year collective bargaining agreements in the technology and parts of the chemical industry.
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Lithuania’s commercial banks are making excessive profits due to interest rate hikes. The central bank governor says the windfall profits could be taxed away, while the finance minister proposes to spend the money on defence.
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The Reserve Bank is expected to take the cash rate to its highest point in over a decade, as its past hikes start to bite households. The RBA board is widely anticipated to announce a 25 basis point rise when it meets on Tuesday, taking the cash rate to 3.35 per cent. RateCity says this […]
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Gov. Greg Abbott has already announced that he’d sign the bill if passed.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Opposition groups in the Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, have collected signatures to set up a temporary commission to look into whether someone leaked information about an investigation against a conservative MP.
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With the album »Time Out of Mind« Bob Dylan catapulted himself back into the limelight in 1997. Now a remix of the album is released, showing its significance – and unleashing its full musical power.
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I’ve always been a super-Googler, coping with uncertainty by trying to learn as much as I can about whatever might be coming. That included my father’s throat cancer. Initially I focused on the purely medical.
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A highly diverse company — Palestinians, Arab countries, retired military, the US, which has its own interests in the Middle East, and even the Israelis themselves, is opposing the most radical right-wing government in Israeli history.
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There is something quite unsettling about Joe Biden, the US president: in a long political career, there has never been a war he didn’t like. He voted for Bush’s Iraq war, and extended the Afghan war by multiplying US force levels. When Vice-President, he supported Obama’s bombings in Yemen (at the behest of Saudi Arabia)…
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Israeli forces killed five Palestinian gunmen in a raid on a West Bank refugee camp on Monday, according to Israeli security officials.
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Seizing a controlling majority in Hong Kong’s legislature was seen as a potential “lethal constitutional weapon” against the government, prosecutors argued in a high-profile national security case involving 47 pro-democracy figures. The closely-watched trial of 16 Hong Kong democrats who denied the charge of conspiracy to commit subversion began on Monday….
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If you ask the average Harry Potter fan how to visit Hogwarts, they will likely tell you to purchase a ticket to a Universal Studios Theme Park, where you can stroll through Diagon Alley, explore a real-life replica of Hogwarts castle and have a drink at the Leaky Cauldron.
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The acquirers said they want to “monetise and modernise these iconic legacy brands”.
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The BBC has apologised after a report on the Today programme suggested the Manchester Evening News is “just rammed with clickbait and sensationalism”. The Radio 4 discussion on 23 January was pegged on The Mill, a local journalism newsletter hosted on Substack covering the Greater Manchester area.
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Chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos told staff GB News is entering “phase three” of its development.
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Sultan Hassan was “seriously defamed” by articles on three publishers’ websites, the High Court heard.
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The president is sounding more like a candidate every day, but Democrats are having a hard time communicating his successes and even settling on a calendar of their own.
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Ray McGinnis Canada’s Liberal government couldn’t justify invoking the Emergencies Act based on the existing definition in the legislation. So, it obtained a legal opinion to embellish parameters for declaring an emergency.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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An episode of “The Simpsons” that includes a line about “forced labor camps” in mainland China has been pulled from Disney’s streaming platform in Hong Kong.
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Disney removed an episode of ‘”The Simpsons” from its streaming platform in Hong Kong that mentions “forced labor camps” in China, the Financial Times first reported Monday and Axios has confirmed.
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Six months after being stabbed, British author Salman Rushdie on Tuesday publishes his new novel “Victory City”, an “epic tale” of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city.
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In his first interview since a near-fatal knife attack in August, the novelist talks with David Remnick about his recovery, and his new novel.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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In France, nearly 125,000 women have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM). The fight against this practice has led to the creation of psychological and surgical care over the last 40 years but the subject remains taboo. FRANCE 24 provides an overview of the situation on the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, February 6.
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About 51% of women in marginalized racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. and four other countries said they’d experienced racism or discrimination at their current workplace, according to a new survey released last week.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne publicly released what amounts to a mandate letter to new CRTC Chair Vicky Eatrides this morning. The letter contains many laudable goals and aspirations: a more timely, transparent, and inclusive commission, an emphasis on competition in telecom, and an affirmation of the importance of freedom of expression in broadcast. Yet what matters when it comes to the current government and communications issues is not what it says, but what it does. The letter may represent a tacit acknowledgement of the disaster that was the Ian Scott era – the ministers themselves note the waning public trust in the CRTC – but the problems go beyond its chair.
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Many Canadians started the new year with an unwelcome surprise as they learned that Canada had extended the term of copyright by additional 20 years with no mitigation measures or efforts to limit the harmful effects of the policy. That the extension did not get much attention was seemingly by design as the government buried it in a budget implementation bill and posted no news releases on it.Mark Swartzis a Scholarly Publishing Librarian at Queen’s University and has been an active participant in copyright reform issues for many years.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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I like Cory Doctorow a lot, and tend to agree with him on most things, but this screed about Netflix changing its “family” settings is not one of them.
He drills down hard on the “family” naming and grinds his ax on a variety of things he sees as “enshittification” (I had to double-check there were two t’s) of the service in its long and winding history from physical mailer of DVDs to streaming studio.
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Monopolies
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Just leave your heart, and nationwide injunction, in San Francisco.
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Amazon’s influence over third-party sellers on its platform is substantial and spans continents, a new report says.
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Patents
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The inventors here used conventional plant breeding to create a new form of petunia (Calibrachoa). WinGen first obtained a plant patent (PP23,232); followed by a utility patent that was filed as a continuation-in-part (US9313959). The claims require two components (1) a particular petal phenotype and (2) a particular genotype…
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CodeFest on Green Plastics: Finalists announced [Ed: EPO promoting software patens with a tinge of greenwashing to distract from the EPO's crime]
The countdown begins to the online award ceremony on 23 February, when the winners will be revealed.
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The EPO BoA says the choice of format now rests with individual boards, sparking outrage from attorneys who say in-person hearings are the ‘gold standard’
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On February 3, 2023, Unified filed a petition forinter partesreview (IPR) againstU.S. Patent 10,791,502, owned by Togail Technologies Ltd., anMagnetar Capitalentity. The ’502 patent relates to error-handling procedures for system information requests in communications and has been asserted against 3GPP devices.
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JUVE ☛ Meissner Bolte and Santarelli launch new UPC litigation network [Ed: JUVE takes money from pushers of illegal UPC agenda. Now they run puff pieces (SPAM) for them. This is corrupted "media".]
Just four months before the Unified Patent Court is set to open its doors, mixed IP firms Meissner Bolte and Santarelli have announced the launch of a new cooperation. It will function under the brand name ‘European Patent Litigators Network’ (EPLN).
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Trademarks
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Attempts to register common slogans, internet memes, and informational material regularly hit the failure-to-function wall at the USPTO. But the Office has the burden of proof, and here its evidence fell short with regard to two refusals of the mark 100% THAT BITCH for certain clothing items, including t-shirts and baseball hats. The Board concluded that the evidence failed to show that the proposed mark is a common expression in such widespread use that it fails to function as a mark for the identified goods.In re Lizzo LLC, 23 USPQ2d 139 (TTAB 2023) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Peter W. Cataldo).
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Copyrights
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The first time I ever heard a sample in a hip-hop song was in Jay-Z and Ye’s anthem, “N—– in Paris.” Just as the song reaches its peak, a clip from Will Ferrell’s satirical “Blades of Glory” (2007) interjects with the now-classic line, “It’s provocative … it gets the people going!”
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Like an empty pair of boots, I don’t have a footer in my blog. Which means I don’t have a copyright statement. A few of you have asked if it was a sign my blog theme was broken or incomplete.
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Getty Images Holdings Inc. is suing Stability AI Ltd., a generative artificial intelligence startup, for allegedly misusing its stock photos. The Verge reported the case today. Getty Images’ lawsuit, which was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, is the second the company has brought against Stability AI.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Curious stuff. But it made me think about elections. In many countries, no type of card would have overall control. Analysts would predict a coalition of “number on the front” cards would emerge, agreeing to ignore their differences on embossing. Meanwhile in the UK, the first-past-the-post voting system would mean a landslide win for embossed cards, with voters left to ponder whether tactical voting could be the only way to bring about more progressive card numbering.
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Last week I finished reading “Flying Blind” by Peter Robison. The book details the story of the Boeing 737 MAX, a passenger airliner that suffered two fatal crashes less than two years into service, and the changing culture of Boeing from the days of “The Incredibles” that built the 747 to the shareholder value-driven philosophy of today’s executives. The author–an investigative journalist with Bloomberg–has an evident left-wing bias, but his proclivities ultimately don’t distract too much from the harrowing tale of a company that put quarterly stock reports over safety and quality assurance. If you are interested in civil aviation or business ethics, I highly recommend this book. ISBN: 9780385546492.
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Reading back on my recent posts, I’ve definitely settled in to a pretty boring formula for these posts. Initially I thought it would be interesting to be upfront about how familiar I am with an artist before writing about an album, but it often feels more like a weak way of defending the opinion that I don’t think everyone needs to hear today’s album before they die. That’s not really an opinion that needs a lot of defending. The idea that there are 1001 albums that anyone needs to hear before they die is ridiculous. So I can probably cool it with the justifications.
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Technical
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Linux kernel has an integrated firewall named netfilter, but you
manipulate it through command lines such as the good old iptables, or
nftables which will eventually superseed iptables.
Today, I’ll share my experience in using nftables to manage my Linux
home router, and my workstation.
I won’t explain much in this blog post because I just want to introduce
nftables and show what it looks like, and how to get started.
I added comments in my configuration files, I hope it’s enough to get a
grasp and make you curious to learn about nftables if you use Linux.
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My personal experience with the GhostPC (one day I will dedicate a gemlog to it) is doing globally well, but its very weakest points are correlated and are: the slow internet connection in conjunction with the web browser experience. So far I have been using the stock Firefox but it struggles a lot so I decided to try out a couple of alternatives.
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I believe that there are far too many blogs trying to sell us something. Often that something is the author. Those authors face the added challenges of attracting readers, guessing what they would like to read, offering exactly that and, on top of all that, selling what they want to sell them. Those authors can fear rejection, because, for them, rejection is failure. If I don’t fear rejection, if I don’t value my work at how others react to it then I am free, “as in free speech”.
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This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery.
It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank).
The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a simulation of where a random visitor would end up if they randomly clicked links on websites. With this model in mind, the modification replaces the link-clicking with using explore2 for navigation.
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my computer history is long and complex. i spent a good chunk of it just hanging around various communities doing nothing but lurk.
over time i got more and more into doing more and more with less and less. i got to a point where i was spending 90% of my time in the terminal, with the only time i needed out of it was to use a web browser. i’m sure you’ve noticed how crazy the internet is with all it’s java-y stuff and everything, and terminal browsers just ain’t up for most of it.
the thing with software that uses less, is for some reason it breeds a level of elitism. i’ve never had a desire to be ‘elite’ just a general desire to enjoy my computing time in ever more weird ways. things get more and more close to pushing an ideology i don’t enjoy the less lines of code people use and i don’t really understand why.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, complained to the press last week, after the deadline had passed for a consensus agreement between the seven states that share Colorado River water along with Mexico and 30 Indian tribes
“They haven’t shared with us any cumulative ballpark … I believe it’s imperative we know the ballpark at least, and eventually the specific number, because it will be less of a gap to close on the necessary reductions.”
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This week brought us a lot of goodies, starting with the release date and codename of the upcoming Linux Mint 21.2 release, a new major LibreOffice office suite release, and continuing with more details on System76’s Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment and the progress to porting Xfce to Wayland.
KDE fans got two new releases of Plasma Mobile and KDE Gear suites and Xfce fans got their monthly roundup of app updates. There’s also great news for Linux gamers with new Steam Client and Proton releases that bring support for more games, controllers, etc.
Below, you can read the hottest news of the week and access all distro and software downloads available in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for February 5th, 2023.
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Applications
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We really like PyRadio. The developer has spent a lot of effort in fine-tuning the software, ironing out tons of bugs some of which used to cause the software to crash.
The implementation of Radio Browser is very impressive. Great work!
PyRadio now runs radio-active very close as our favourite terminal-based internet radio app.
According to the ps_mem utility, PyRadio uses around 33.8MB of RAM. We tested using mpv which uses around 91.8MB of RAM.
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As a writer, I frequently need to determine the correct spelling or definition of words. I also need to use a thesaurus to find alternate words that may have a somewhat different connotation than the one I might otherwise use. Because I frequently use the Linux command line and text-mode tools to do much of my work, it makes sense to use a command line dictionary.
I really like using the command line for a number of reasons, the primary one being that it is more efficient for me. It is also far more comprehensive than any one or multiple physical paper dictionaries, could ever be. I have been using the Linux dict command for many years and I have come to depend on it.
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Iotas is consciously bare-bones features-wise, especially if compared to likes of Simplenote, Evernote, Quentier, etc
But its stripped-back simplicity is arguably its strength: [...]
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MakeUseOf/Technical
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LibreOffice is a powerful, open-source, and cross-platform office suite. It’s also a great alternative to commercial and proprietary software such as Microsoft 365.
Most Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, elementary OS, and Linux Mint come with LibreOffice pre-installed.
Unfortunately, LibreOffice comes with some packages that you will never even use in your life. Fortunately, you can install only the components that you require, saving you disk space and RAM usage.
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Vulnerability scanning is an essential aspect of modern-day cybersecurity and Nessus is a well-known tool that provides a comprehensive solution for vulnerability assessments. It is a popular choice among security professionals and enthusiasts, due to its compatibility with Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
So how can you download and install Nessus on Kali, a widely-used penetration testing platform? With this step-by-step guide, you’ll be up and running with Nessus in no time, equipped to proactively identify and mitigate vulnerabilities in your network.
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A system protected by default credentials is an open invitation for adversaries to exploit. It is highly recommended that you set a custom root password for your Kali Linux machine as soon as it boots up post-installation.
In this primer, you will find the easiest and swiftest way to change the root password of your Kali Linux desktop with the passwd command or, if you forgot your root password then with the GRUB bootloader.
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SSH is a network protocol that allows you to securely access and manage a remote system over a network. While connecting to a remote machine via SSH, you might have encountered the “connection refused” error. Experiencing this issue can be frustrating especially if you are a system admin and have to perform some tasks on the remote system on an urgent basis.
Let’s look at some of the possible causes of getting the SSH “connection refused” error and methods to resolve it.
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Every Linux user knows that the most frequently used key combination is Ctrl + R. You use it to search through your Bash history for some fragment of text you’ve previously inputted into the terminal, hitting the combo again and again until you find the command you need.
Stop your keycaps from wearing out by using McFly—a neural network-powered shell history search replacement, that takes your working directory and the context of recently executed commands into account.
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Managing files on remote servers can be tricky, especially if you shun apps that take you away from the terminal. Sure, you can use SSH and SCP to browse directories and shoot files between machines, but, while simple and elegant, these commands lack the utility of a full-fledged file manager.
Termscp is a feature-rich terminal file explorer, with support for SCP, SFTP, FTP, and S3, which allows you to interact with your remote machines through a friendly Terminal User Interface and copy files effortlessly.
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Pastebins have been a feature of the internet since the 1990s, and are simple text repositories where you can dump large amounts of writing, code, or any other type of documentation. They’re super useful if you don’t want to clutter up other communication channels with walls of text.
Traditionally, you need to create an account with a website-based service to use a pastebin, however, with pastes.sh, you can create pastes without ever leaving your terminal.
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You open your document, you click print, you wait. You close the document, open a new one, click print, and wait… and so on. But printing really shouldn’t be that dull. We can send bulk emails with little effort; why can’t we bulk print with the same ease?
Well, if you’re using Linux, it turns out you can. Via the terminal you can issue various Linux printer commands that basically make printing far more agreeable. A host of other terminal-based printing tricks are available on Linux.
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GNOME, a popular Linux desktop environment, comes with many default apps. The GNOME desktop’s suite of built-in apps can cover a desktop user’s everyday needs.
Among GNOME’s apps is Boxes, a virtualization tool that lets Linux users emulate other operating systems. With this app, you’ll be able to get virtual machines working right out of the box.
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The Steam Deck is a great gaming device, but it’s also a full-fledged personal computer. For many of us, it may be the most powerful PC in our house. With a powerful APU meant for pushing intense graphics, the machine is also capable of rendering video at speeds that can best what many of us experience on devices with Intel-integrated graphics.
So if a Steam Deck is potentially your best video-editing machine, here’s how to get set up.
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A VPN, or virtual private network, is one of the most important tools to maintain your online privacy and security. VPNs are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux systems, as well as mobile devices.
As such, you can install a VPN on your Raspberry Pi thanks to OpenVPN. This is useful for avoiding censorship, region-blocking when streaming video, and various other tasks.
Here’s everything you need to know about installing a VPN on a Raspberry Pi.
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Your Raspberry Pi can do a whole host of things that will take you by surprise.
That little computer can run as a desktop replacement, or even a retro game station, and that’s just the beginning. One of the most popular uses is as a media center.
For Raspberry Pi users, the best solution currently is Kodi. It comes in a number of different guises, so which Raspberry Pi Kodi distro should you choose?
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At some point in your Linux journey, you may have found yourself scouring the internet for things to do after installing Linux. While it’s essential to know what you should do after booting Linux for the first time, knowing what not to do is more important to avoid wrecking your newly set up system.
Let’s look at some common things you should steer clear of when using your new Linux installation. These tips are helpful for all Linux users, irrespective of their expertise.
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Ubuntu is a popular Linux desktop distribution, but some of its design choices have been criticized lately.
What if there was a friendly desktop distro based on Ubuntu but kept unwanted changes out of the core system? Vanilla OS may be what you’re looking for.
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Games
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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New Releases
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The first Core Update in 2023 is ready for testing: IPFire 2.27 – Core Update 173. It introduces support for Qualcomm’s MSM Interface (QMI), features a kernel fresh from the latest 6.1 stable series, as well as the usual plethora of package updates, security improvements and bug fixes.
IPFire users running 32-bit ARM devices should note that support for this architecture will sunset on February 28, 2023, as announced previously, and are advised to migrate their installations to a hardware architecture supported by IPFire now.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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Last year I wrote about thenew level for _FORTIFY_SOURCEand how it promises to significantly improve application security mitigation in C/C++. In this article, I will show you how an application or library developer can get the best possible fortification results from the compiler to improve the security of applications deployed onRed Hat Enterprise Linux, for instance. There are shades of previous articles about GCC. But that just goes to show how compiler features tie in together to provide security protection at multiple levels, from prevention to mitigation. First, we should take a closer look at the potential impact of_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3
on performance and code size of applications.
The performance impact of the new fortification level
The_FORTIFY_SOURCE=3
builtin improves fortification coverage by evaluating and passing size expressions instead of the constants seen in_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2
, which generates additional code and potentially more register pressure. But the impact of that additional code appears to be trivial in practice. When I compared nearly10 thousand packagesin Fedora rawhide, I found barely any impact on code size. Some binaries grew while others shrunk, indicating a change in generated code, but there was no broad increase in code size.
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U.S. politician Daniel Webster described the U.S. government as, “… the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”[1]Similarly, the Fedora Project is “a community of people working together”[2]and it is “led by contributors from across the community.”[3]In other words, “It is what you make of it.”[4]
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Debian Family
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The 6th update of Sparky 6 – 6.6 is out.
It is a quarterly updated point release of Sparky 6 “Po Tolo” of the stable line. Sparky 6 is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
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It is the sixth update to SparkyLinux, also known as “Po Tolo,” and it is powered by Debian 11 (Bullseye), which brings with it a stable, secure, and reliable experience.
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Devices/Embedded
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EDATEC CM4 Industrial is both a Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board and a computer for industrial IoT, control, and automation that expands on the company’s CM4 Sensing and CM4 Nano solutions with more features and interfaces.
The system notably offers two RS485, one RS232, three analog inputs, two digital inputs, and one relay output through terminal blocks, as well as optional WiFi, Bluetooth, and 4G LTE + GPS connectivity, and a wide DC voltage range of 8V to 36V.
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The ICS-I370 is a fanless industrial cyber security network appliance powered by the Intel Atom E3900 CPU series. Lanner’s ICS-I370 also includes 1x M.2 B-key for LTE/5G networking, 1x M.2 E-Key for Wi-Fi connectivity and multiple storage options.
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Young creators, it’s time to share your ideas with the world! Registration for Coolest Projects is now open.
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Everyone should have the retrocomputing experience of a 1976 1MHz MOS 6502 single-board computer with 1K of memory, six hex digit LEDs and a keypad. One of the earliest such systems and one of the least expensive, you program the KIM-1 in 6502 assembly language right on the keypad in hexadecimal and it’s amazing what you could do with a system that little. You could even hook up a cassette deck and an external terminal and have a full system for just a few hundred dollars; MOS Technology (and later Commodore) consequently sold a ton of them. We first experienced the KIM-1 in high school and having grown up with Commodore 64s and 128s it was like meeting their long-lost little brother. We spent the whole weekend typing in hex opcodes and learned how to bang on the hardware and make it do surprising things in a space that small. That’s the very unit in the picture, still in my possession, and over four and a half decades old it still works.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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One benefit of moving to an API-based architecture is that you can iterate quickly and deploy new changes to our services. There is also the concept of traffic and routing established with an API gateway for the modernized part of the architecture. API gateway provides stages to allow you to have multiple deployed APIs behind the same gateway and is capable of in-place updates with no downtime. Using an API gateway enables you to leverage the service’s numerous API management features, such as authentication, rate throttling, observability, multiple API versioning, and stage deployment management (deploying an API in multiple stages such as dev, test, stage, and prod).
Open source API gateway (Apache APISIX and Traefik) and service mesh (Istio and Linkerd) solutions are capable of doing traffic splitting and implementing functionalities like canary release and blue green deployment. With canary testing, you can make a critical examination of a new release of an API by selecting only a small portion of your user base.
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Another classic free and open source game continues getting better, with the Transport Tycoon Deluxe remake OpenTTD version 13.0 out now. A business sim where you make money by transporting passengers and cargo via road, rail, water, and air.
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The obvious use of ‘keep_firing_for’ is to avoid having your alerts flap too much. If you set it to some non-zero value, say a minute, then if the alert condition temporarily goes away only to come back within a minute, you won’t potentially wind up notifying people that the alert went away then notify them again that it came back. I say ‘potentially’, because when you can get notified about an alert going away is normally quantized by your Alertmanager group_interval setting. This simple alert rule setting can replace more complex methods of avoiding flapping alerts, and so there are various people who will likely use it.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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[Fathy] gets a kick out of doing odd things with Chromium, and Carbonyl is a clever byproduct of that hobby. In this case, it’s what you get when you connect chrome’s renderer to an SVG output module and then convert that SVG to colored characters on a terminal. See, html2svg is an earlier project, taking Chromium’s Skia engine and plugging it into an SVG back-end. And once you have SVG, why not render it to the terminal?
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Mozilla
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Servo is a rust-based experimental browser engine initially developed by the research wing of Mozilla but was later delegated to The Linux Foundation as a community-maintained project.
Since then, no significant development has taken place, even though the members involved have been trying to do their best.
Until now.
Things are looking up for Servo in 2023, as the team behind it has shared a promising roadmap.
Let me take you through it.
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GNU Projects
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This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.19.2.
Note that starting with this release, we will no longer ship a verbose ChangeLog file in the tarball. The git log serves this purpose now.
Download links
The GPG key used to sign is:3D11063C10F98D14BD24D1470B0998EF86F59B6A
Note that due to mirror synchronization, not all links may be functional
early after the release. For direct access tryhttp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnunet/
A detailed list of changes can be found in thegit log, theNEWSand
thebug tracker.
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Programming/Development
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GCC supports some function attributes for function multi-versioning: a way for a function to have multiple implementations, each using a different set of ISA extensions. A function attribute specifies different requirements of ISA extensions. The generated program decodes the CPU model and features at run-time, and picks the most restrictive implementation which is satisfied by the CPU, assuming that the most restrictive implementation has the best performance.
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Setting computing history aside, some of the dinosaurs that still require them (like SMTP), and various esotericisms (like data: URI’s), not many people use such encoding schemes.
There are however still a few cases where they are the proper tool, like for example: [...]
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This is my own take on “all token related swiss army knife tool”, that besides generating passwords / passphrases and other tokens, has this nice exchange armor / exchange dearmor sub-command that tries to put together in a unique package some of the features I’ve discussed in the mentioned article.
Please note that at the moment the format is experimental, and most likely prone to backward incompatible changes!
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I use the following code to benchmark both the decoding and encoding process. Initially, the Decode() method is a thin layer above GoFlow2 producer and stores the decoded data into the in-memory structure generated by protoc. Later, some of the data will be encoded directly during flow decoding. This is why we measure both the decoding and the encoding.2
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Python
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There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are confused about virtual environments. But does it have to be this way? Are the current solutions to packaging problems any good? And is the organization behind most of the packaging tools and standards part of the problem itself?
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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In the early days of C, you’d occasionally see someone — probably a former Pascal programmer — write something like this:
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The bash command history shows the previously used commands. By default, the history is saved in memory per session and can be saved to a file for later sessions. We will explore ways to show, search and modify the history in this blog post.
I use RHEL and Debian-based Linux distributions and bash in this blog post as a reference.
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Leftovers
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When it comes to demining or finding victims after a disaster, dogs are well-known to aid humans by sniffing out threats and trapped humans with ease. Less well-known, but no less impressive are rats, with the African giant pouched rat being the star of the show. Recently a student at the Dutch Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) has demonstrated how these rats can sniff out buried victims, aided by a high-tech backpack that gives them a communication link back to their human handler.
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In the following section I am deliberately ignoring an advanced strategy in the shower planning toolkit. I am, of course, referring to the strategy of prolonging shower time by varying flow rate, thereby obtaining more shower-seconds while consuming the same amount of water (again, water itself is the true metered commodity here).
The calculations for Advanced Showering are left as an exercise to the reader.
Returning to the topic at hand: What are we to do with our precious accrued 34.3 shower seconds per day? There are a couple options to consider:
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Entrepreneurs believe Lithuania is losing millions because of bad flight connections. The government has chosen to solve the problem with subsidies to private carriers, although setting up a national airline – like airBaltic in Latvia – is ever on the table.
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A magnitude 7.8 earthquake has hit southern Turkey, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. The quake’s depth is 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), located 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, Gaziantep province, according to the USGS. CNN’s Jomana Karadsheh reports on the earthquake’s impact on the region.
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The deadly earthquake was felt in at least four countries, with most of the casualties and the heaviest damage reported in Turkey and Syria.
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Authorities have previously been warned that the airport would be built on a fault line. Aid and rescue flights are currently prevented from landing at the airport.
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At least 284 were reported dead, 2.323 injured, and 1.710 buildings collapses in ten different cities, Türkiye’s vice president Fuat Oktay announced this morning.
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For years, Somalia has by and large suffered through droughts, famine, flooding, and sustained terrorist insurgencies that mostly harm peaceful citizens.
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Broken windows policing reflects racialized assumptions about what is disorder and which communities are disorderly.
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On Wednesday, RowVaughn Wells joined the grim sorority of Black mothers who have buried their children after deadly police encounters and then pleaded for those deaths to spur reform. Parents of other victims were in attendance at the funeral — along with Vice President Kamala Harris and the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Tyre Nichols, 29, was blocks away from Wells’ home when five Memphis, Tennessee, police officers pummeled him after a short foot chase in early January. He died three days later in the hospital, his face a mash of swollen flesh. The officers have been fired and charged with second-degree murder.
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It all started with a vague error code (shown in the image above) on [nophead]’s Bosch SMS88TW01G/01 dishwasher, and it touched off a months-long repair nightmare that even involved a logic analyzer. [nophead] is normally able to handily diagnose and repair electronic appliances, but this time he had no idea what he was in for.
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Science
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Moons we never knew existed.
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Fragments of our Solar System’s beginnings.
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“Look with your eyes, not your hands” is something many of us have heard while growing up, but that doesn’t apply to the touch-sensitive microscope [Steve Mould] got to play with.
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Sampling turns many one-off estimations into jobs that are feasible to do by hand. For example, suppose we are considering revising an error-prone API and want to estimate how often that API is used incorrectly. If we have a way to randomly sample uses of the API (maybe grep -Rn pkg.Func . | shuffle -m 100), then manually checking 100 of them will give us an estimate that’s accurate to within 5% or so. And checking 1,000 of them, which may not take more than an hour or so if they’re easy to eyeball, improves the accuracy to 1.5% or so. Real data to decide an important question is usually well worth a small amount of manual effort.
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Hardware
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We always enjoy unique clocks, and a recent 3D print from [David Kingsman] caught our eye. It converts an Ikea clock into a very unusual-looking “wandering hour” clock that uses a Geneva drive to show a very dynamic view of the current time. The concept is based on an earlier wandering clock, but [David] utilized a different mechanism.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Critics slam SoCal air regulator for adopting weak emissions rules for the potent carcinogen ethylene oxide.
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A U.S. physician took to the op-ed pages of The New York Times on Sunday to offer a scathing condemnation of the country’s for-profit healthcare system and his profession’s historical complicity in campaigns against universal coverage.
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So now I’m entering the nerd phase of logging some data. I started researching “open source air monitoring”, because I’m not going to buy another enterprise piece of monitoring technology that locks out features and changes terms (cough Canary).
This was some tough research in a way because all my results fell into the following buckets: [...]
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With the arrival of the conquistadors in the 1500s, that traditional chocolate drink began to evolve to the hot cocoa we know today. Hernán Córtes brought it back to Spain on one of his expeditions, and the bitter but delicious and exotic chocolate drink quickly became an indulgence of the wealthy upper class. (As with most imported foods — still true today! — cacao beans were expensive.) The chocolate-loving Spaniards omitted the chiles, added sweetener and served the drink hot, albeit still made with water.
It would be another 100 years before “hot cocoa” spread to other parts of Europe. In London, where “chocolate houses” became all the rage, milk was substituted for water, creating a richer, more palatable drink. That idea was also imported, this time from Jamaica, where the president of the London Royal College of Physicians had first encountered it.
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Proprietary
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Thousands of computer servers have been targeted by a global ransomware hacking attack targeting VMware (VMW.N) ESXi servers, Italy’s National Cybersecurity Agency (ACN) said on Sunday, warning organisations to take action to protect their systems.
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The attack targets vulnerabilities in VMware ESXi technology that were previously discovered but that still leave many organizations vulnerable to intrusion by hackers.
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Italy’s national cybersecurity agency says thousands of computer systems worldwide exposed to ransomware attack
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The attack targeted VMware ESXi servers. The vulnerability exploited by [crackers] has already been corrected in the past by the manufacturer but, [ACN] points out, “not all those who use the currently affected systems have solved it” and the targeted servers, if lacking the adequate corrections, “can open the doors to [crackers] busy exploiting it in these hours after the strong growth of attacks recorded over the weekend” .
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Former Vice President Mike Pence, a possible 2024 presidential candidate, has voiced support for a Social Security privatization scheme that the George W. Bush administration unsuccessfully pushed nearly two decades ago.
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Security
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Julius “Zeekill” Kivimäki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimäki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to show up in court and Finland issued an international warrant for his arrest.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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This is achieved by means of a protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS). It relies on a number of trusted Certification Authorities (CAs) to issue certificates to websites. These certificates allow websites to prove their identity.
When investigating South Korea’s so-called security applications I noticed that all of them add their own certification authorities that browsers have to trust. This weakens the protection provided by TLS considerably, as misusing these CAs allows impersonating any website towards a large chunk of South Korean population. This puts among other things the same banking transactions at risk that these applications are supposed to protect.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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“Digital sovereignty has roots in the intent to control, and is tied to nationalism. There are economic elements too, as data is valuable,” said Prateek Waghre, policy director at digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation.
“The government has more leverage with local companies, which may not have the option of not complying – and that raises the concern that they won’t stand up to surveillance requests,” he said, pointing to recent cases of local media firms being hit with lawsuits when standing up to the government.
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Defence/Aggression
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India is preparing to relaunch its INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier after a major refit, a critical step toward fulfilling its plan to deploy two carrier battle groups as it seeks to strengthen its regional maritime power to counter China’s increasing assertiveness. The former Soviet carrier acquired from Russia will joins India’s first domestically built carrier that was launched late last year, the INS Vikrant, in undergoing outfitting and sea trials.
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A drone was shot down in a forest near the Russian city of Kaluga on Monday morning, according to Governor Vladislav Shapsha. Suburban residents reported hearing the resulting explosion.
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Woke culture, devoid of class consciousness and a commitment to stand with the oppressed, is another tool in the arsenal of the imperial state.
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The war in Ukraine did not start on 24 February 2022, but already in February 2014. The civilian population of the Donbas has endured continued shelling from Ukrainian forces since 2014, notwithstanding the Minsk Agreements. These attacks on Lugansk and Donetsk significantly increased in January-February 2024, as reported by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine[1].
Like all wars, this war is a tragedy for all concerned, — not only for Ukrainians and Russians, but also for the continued validity of international law and the primacy of the UN Charter. Already NATO’s military campaigns in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990’s and early 2000’s sorely tried the authority and credibility of the United Nations as an Organization. These military campaigns conducted outside Chapter VII of the UN Charter rendered the United Nations nearly irrelevant, because the Organization was unable to prevent the illegal use of force or mediate peace. The unilateral actions of a number of states were never subject to accountability, not even the grave war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, as documented by Julian Assange in the Wikileaks publications. NATO countries grossly violated articles 2(3) and 2(4) of the Charter, absent any Charter justification, since article 51, which stipulates the right of self-defence does not cover pre-emptive military actions.
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Sixty years ago, a crowd of us young people anxiously massed around a black-and-white TV in my college student union building. The US and the USSR were in an existential standoff. The US had deployed ballistic nuclear missiles in Turkey. When the Soviets responded by placing missiles in Cuba, the US demanded their removal or face dire consequences.
We all breathed an enormous collective sigh of relief when Nikita Khruschev publicly agreed to withdraw the Soviet missiles from Cuba. John F. Kennedy secretly reciprocated by removing US missiles from Turkey aimed at the Soviet Union. The whole world rejoiced. A close encounter with a war, which could have threatened civilization, had been avoided.
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Five people were injured in a missile strike on central Kharkiv on the morning of February 5.
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Sergey Menyaylo, Governor of North Ossetia, came under fire by Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Zaporizhzhia region while visiting “the positions of Ossetian volunteer detachments and mobilized fighters from the republic,” claims Russian state news agency TASS. A film crew from the Kremlin-controlled Channel One television network and Nizami Gadzhibalaev, TASS editor for the North Caucasus region, were also there.
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The Malian interim government on Sunday said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission’s human rights division had 48 hours to leave the country as he had been declared persona non grata.
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Vadim’s workaround reflects a larger story, as Russia reverts to primitive means to muddle through. Tough European and American sanctions, introduced in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine last February, were supposed to isolate the Russian economy. But with only half the world observing the measures, reality was always going to be more complicated. Traders in friendly countries like Turkey, Kazakhstan, India and China now facilitate the import of the restricted goods Russia needs, for a price. By September 2022 Russian imports in dollar terms exceeded their average monthly value for 2019. And these countries also take a large share of the raw-material exports Russia once sent to Europe—at a steep discount.
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Environment
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Energy/Transportation
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Republicans and right-wing commentators suddenly want to save the whales—and much of the news media is buying it.
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Finance
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Community wealth building initiatives are taking hold in cities across the world, strengthening worker pay, local economies and democracy.
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Labor Force Participation Measures Unchanged After Adjusting for Population Controls
The January jobs report was far stronger than had been predicted, with the economy adding 517,000 jobs. There was also a big increase in the length of the average workweek from 34.4 hours to 34.7 hours, which led to an extraordinary 1.2 percent rise in the index of aggregate hours. The average hourly wage increased by 10 cents, bringing the annual increase over the last three months to 4.6 percent. The overall unemployment rate fell to 3.4 percent, the lowest level since 1969.
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The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings—the corporate entity itself.
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The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings – the corporate entity itself.
Ever since 1886 when a U.S. Supreme Court reporter, in a headnote for the Court’s opinion, wrote that corporations possessed equal rights under the Constitution, judges and corporatist legislators have equipped corporations with an arsenal of inequitable rights. (The Constitution makes no mention whatsoever of “corporation” or “company”).
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Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill that allows lawmakers not to declare their income publicly.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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When it looked like ultra-right-wing forces, led by former President Trump, might win the elections to the U.S. Congress on November 8, there was alarm that democracy in that country could suffer a huge setback, potentially even the disappearance of the democratic system itself. As political analyst John Nichols noted, “The November 9 election could be the last for a vanished democracy.”
After the results of the elections were known, it seemed that these fears were exaggerated. Although the extreme right – the Republican Party – won the elections in the House of Representatives, one of two legislative chambers in Congress, it lost the elections in the other, more powerful chamber, the Senate, which continues to be controlled by the Democratic Party. Hence, there was an outpouring of relief in the U.S. media (except those close to the extreme right) assuming that democracy had been saved.
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Scheerpost ☛ Bill Gates Sees ‘China’s rise’ as ‘Huge Win For the World’ [Ed: A "forum in Australia" invites Jeffrey Epstein's enabler to pretend to be political expert??? Grotesque. Lioning serial criminals.]
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During World War I, British forces sent up hot-air balloons to spy on advancing enemy forces. In recent times, a number of countries, including the US and France, have launched data-gathering balloons. The Chinese military last year reported favorably on many uses for such balloons, including for surveillance, communication, weather information, and communication. The detection yesterday of a Chinese balloon hovering over Montana, where the US houses ICBMs, probably falls into the category of military surveillance, though the fact of the matter remains to be determined.
To my mind, the US has overreacted to the discovery, postponing an important visit to Beijing by the secretary of state. Granted, a Chinese high-altitude balloon should not have been floating over US territory; as Secretary Blinken said, it violated sovereignty and international law. Still, there are mitigating circumstances, to wit:
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Why is the Biden regime not making serious, vigorous representations in Beijing—threatening a break in relations, diplomatic expulsions, or other such retaliation for a breach of American sovereignty—about this “spy craft?”
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This is an urgent bulletin from FOX News (2). I’m Sean HaNutty along with Fucker Gnarlson. We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to announce that Top Gun Maverick has just popped a balloon. Let’s watch it in slow motion for the 6,752nd time. Yes, that’s Top Gun up there, and you see something – it looks like a large needle – pop the balloon.
Down it goes. Excuse the interruption while we set this video to the Blue Danube Waltz (3), or the last 20 minutes of Phillip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (4).
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Chechnya Governor Ramzan Kadyrov said he finds it “funny” when he’s accused of breaking the law by giving his relatives government posts.
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Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov, may resign next week, writes Ukrainian Pravda, citing sources in the Office of the President, the Cabinet of Ministers, and law enforcement agencies in Ukraine.
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After being besieged relentlessly throughout his 16 months in office, Pedro Castillo was removed from the presidency on December 7 by Peru’s national Congress after he announced a gutting of the institutional order. Castillo’s attempt to dissolve Congress was followed just hours later by the move to “vacate” him, the third attempt during his term, and the first successful one.
Without informing Cabinet members (except for the president of the Council of Ministers and the Minister of Defense), Castillo ordered the dissolution of Congress, called for elections to create a new one with the authority to draft a new Constitution within nine months, and declared a reorganization of the justice system. He also imposed a curfew and ordered the seizure of all illegal weapons, threatening imprisonment for anyone who failed to deliver such arms to the National Police within 72 hours.
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Last month, we joined more than 1000 representatives from all sectors of civil society who came together in Santiago de Chile to debate the future of – and threats to – public services the world over.
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A year ago, Amazon had its most profitable quarter ever, with $14.3 billion in net income. But the downshifting economy and Amazon’s own attempt to roll back expansion plans cut into its earnings this year, hacking profit back to $278 million. The reduced profit included $2.3 billion in lower valuation for its investment in the electric-truck maker Rivian.
-
On Thursday, the company posted its fourth consecutive decline in profit as it grapples with a slowdown in digital advertising. Net income plummeted 34 percent to $13.6 billion, falling short of Wall Street expectations of $15.3 billion, according to data compiled by FactSet.
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It is important to make sure you aren’t discriminating against people. And it can be useful to know the demographics of people who are interacting with you. And, sure, you probably want broad enough categories which are relevant to your culture.
But… Are you measuring something which meaningfully exists?
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Meta’s Reality Labs unit recorded a $4.28 billion operating loss in the fourth quarter, bringing its total for 2022 to $13.72 billion.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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The first act of Kevin McCarthy’s tenure as house speaker was decidedly ominous: In the early hours of January 7, 2023, he posed for a congratulatory selfie with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right GOP colleague notorious for her early professions of faith in the shape-shifting hard-right movement known as QAnon. As she has moved closer to the centers of D.C. power, Greene has downplayed her past Q affiliation, blaming it on excessive Internet engagement. But her equivocations don’t explain away her other conspiratorialist and insurrectionist sympathies. Greene has since threatened in an online meme to gun down members of the left-wing Democratic “Squad” in Congress, and she recently introduced Steve Bannon at a Young Republicans event as someone who, along with Greene herself, would have ensured that “we would have won” on January 6, in no small part because the insurrection “would have been armed.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Sindh Board of Film Censor has demanded the Firework Events to cancel its shows immediately and the screenings have been stopped. Reports suggest that most of the theatres which were screening Pathaan illegally were houseful.
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According to the SBFC, only films certified by them are allowed for public or private viewing. “No person shall make or arrange a public or private exhibition of a film by means of cinematograph unless the film has been duly certified for public exhibition by the Board.”
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A different report in the Pakistani daily also shared details of the screening, revealing that it was supposed to be “not HD, but really good and clear”. It added that the screen size was 8ft by 10ft, confirming that it was not a regular movie theatre screening Pathaan.
In 2019, Indian filmmakers and producers decided against working with any Pakistani artists and Pakistani filmmakers made a similar decision regarding artists from India. The screening of films from each other’s countries also stopped then.
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Although the reasons for the last-minute dissolution are yet to be made public. Chaudhry, who was not part of the team that reviewed the Saim Sadiq directorial, opened up to The Express Tribune about his time at the helm making “tough” calls. The 41-year-old, who has made numerous contributions to local cinema, also detailed why certain things can or cannot be allowed to be screened in Pakistan.
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Bills SB 2123 and HB 1205 seek to censor library materials and to charge library staff with offensive books with Class B misdemeanors. Criminalizing library staffers does not advance social purposes. Libraries do not house “dirty books,” but they do feature multiple views about humans and their relationships. Library policies already allow users to object to materials and are used.
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Some campaigners hailed the news as a breakthrough. But there are no guarantees about what action these companies will take. It will come down to whatever best protects their interests and possibly finances, which could mean less change than people are hoping for.
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On multiple occasions, Kenneth Roth has claimed that donor-driven censorship led to Harvard’s decision to rescind his fellowship offer from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. “If anybody was in a position to not let donors dictate,” he told The Crimson, “ — or not let donors censor — topics of academic inquiry, it would be Harvard.”
Neither Roth, however, nor his most ardent supporters on campus have marshaled any evidence documenting the alleged plot by moneyed interests to censor him and hobble academic freedom.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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A Moscow court has sentenced Russian journalist and food blogger Veronika Belotserkovskaya in absentia to nine years in prison for spreading “disinformation” about the Russian army.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Nguyen So Lo sent books on how to improve Vietnam’s politics and economics to senior Communist Party officials.
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Hsing Yun, 95, died at a temple in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a day after undergoing dialysis.
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Today marks Global Day of Solidarity with Leonard Peltier.
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On an unremarkable November morning, Jimmie Conner is hunched over his laptop at a dining table in an open-concept kitchen flooded with light. The fourth-year student at California State University, Fullerton, lives in the John Irwin House, a residence for formerly incarcerated students just over four miles from the CSUF campus. The house, in a pleasant Orange County neighborhood with a park, a reservoir, and horse stables, is furnished in a modular style. Two chairs by the fireplace sit ready for one-on-one tutoring, a cluster of ottomans nearby can accommodate a study group, and spaces to hunker down with a book or notes abound: a couch by the front door layered with pillows and blankets, a desk tucked into a corner, a fire table on the patio, and a backyard. Before living here, Conner was at a halfway house, and for the 14 years before that, he was in prison, most recently at the California Men’s Colony.1This story about Project Rebound was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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Postal jobs have long been a road to the middle-class for Black Americans. The Postal Service began employing Black workers shortly after the Civil War and became a major source of good, middle-class jobs for this share of the workforce in the early 20th century.
During the 1940s, civil rights advocacy, combined with wartime needs, created even more opportunities for Black postal workers. By the mid-1960s, their leadership had increased significantly, with the three biggest post offices in the country — New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — all headed by Black postmasters. By the end of the 20th century, Black employees made up 21 percent of the U.S. postal workforce.
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Another demonstrator, Lina Ali, said: “We will keep mobilising because of rising domestic violence and killings of women.”
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Lawyers for the family of Tortuguita, whose full name is Manuel Esteban Páez Terán, are questioning the police account of the shooting and say the GBI has not answered the family’s questions about the shooting.
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Authorities have portrayed the protests – which are still continuing – as foreign-backed “riots” and at times have responded with lethal force.
Human rights groups say more than 500 demonstrators have been killed, including 70 minors, and around 20,000 have been arrested.
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Last April, Governor Abbott of Texas began sending migrants from the US southern border to Washington, D.C., with Arizona joining soon after. The media attention around this program has largely quieted down, but the buses continue to come.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The suspected local head of notorious pirate box manufacturer Unblock Tech has been indicted in Taiwan. He stands accused of conspiring with Chinese partners to illegally obtain video content from 72 legal suppliers before illegally distributing it online via ‘overseas’ servers. The USDOJ got involved when servers were traced right back to the United States.
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The International Intellectual Property Alliance represents the interests of the movie & TV show industries, major recording labels, the videogame industry, and American publishers. In a report to the U.S. government, the IIPA says that Canada’s piracy problem is so severe, it’s “almost impossible” to overstate its magnitude. A laundry list of demands aims to put that right.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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Only 32 people voted so probably not truly representative but this is still interesting as it implies that card companies are further along with the transition than I had expected. Already there are (perhaps) more cards that are no longer embossed out there, than those that are. Furthermore, given the time to replace cards (some companies take 5+ years), perhaps no company (or very few) is making embossed cards any longer? Also of those unembossed cards, the majority already have their numbers hidden from the front of the card (at the very least).
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It was rather warm yesterday, for a change. I’m not sure what the high was, but
but I didn’t have to bundle up. I had to head into town to run a few errands,
and decided to do some video here and there along the way.
In my last entry I wrote that I’ve been watching a lot of old videos of Tokyo
in the 1990s, and it has motivated me to do something on my own, so yesterday I
shot a few clips to get my toes wet. I am more accustomed to still photography
than motion picture, and it’s an interesting change. Since I don’t have a video
camera I used my iPhone, which is now a few years old but it’s okay, though it
has limited zoom.
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… to put you down. That’s only you!
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I want a better memory, to be able to recite good wholesome poems when quietly walking by myself, with no distracting tech.
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I always assumed I’d have a Smiths phase, as inevitable as a Beatles phase and a Bowie phase. It didn’t happen. This is the second smiths album to come up in my list, and now I’m fairly sure it never will.
I’ve tried as hard as possible to set aside that Morrissey has become (has always been?) been a bit of an edgelord. It’s tough when that’s what he’s been famous for for longer than The Smiths existed. And maybe it’s why all the best moments of the album are the music between the lyrics – the times he lets the band shine.
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Technical
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Programming
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languages are interesting because they are primarily irrelevant to computing, an implementation detail software creators handle that computers simply don’t care about.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Links 06/02/2023:

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On this episode of This Week in Linux: we’ve got a new release from the WINE project, elementary OS 7 is out, we’ll get some previews for the next releases of GNOME and KDE Plasma. Plus we’ve got some news from openSUSE — Ubuntu and so much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Chris attempts to get Fedora 37 on his M1 Max MacBook Pro, while Wes and Brent try the “every distro at once” desktop.
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Kernel Space
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So the 6.2 rc releases are continuing to be fairly small and
controlled, to the point where normally I'd just say that this is the
last rc. But since I've stated multiple times that I'll do an rc8 due
to the holiday start of the release, that's what I'll do. And we do
have a few regressions outstanding that Thorsten is tracking, so just
as well.
Nothing in here looks all that scary, and we just have smallish fixes
all over the tree, in all the usual places. I think the single biggest
patch is a race fix to zsmalloc, which I guess is fairly unusual, but
I think that's more indicative of everything else being pretty small.
We've got driver fixes (gpu, networking, sound, but a smattering of
other stuff too), some core mm stuff (that zsmalloc one dominating),
various selftest updates, and just random other things. The shortlog
below gives the details.
Linus
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Applications
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Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud storage services available today. With the increasing number of Linux users, the demand for Google Drive clients on Linux is also growing. In this article, we will introduce you to the 6 best Google Drive clients for Linux, each with its unique features and capabilities. Whether you’re looking for an easy-to-use interface, advanced features, or robust synchronization options, you’ll find it here.
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Instructionals/Technical
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REMI is a comprehensive third-party repository that offers the most recent and cutting-edge versions of PHP and its modules for RHEL-based systems.
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Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Nala on Ubuntu 22.04 Let’s see. Introduction Nala is a front-end for libapt-pkg. Specifically, we interface using the python-apt api. Strictly speaking, it is not a new package manager that will replace APT, but rather an improved form of APT.
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Hello techies, in this post, we will cover how to Install Elementary OS 7 step by step with screenshots on laptop or desktop. It is based on latest and stable Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
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AI tools are currently the talk of the town, both positively and negatively.
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Kali Linux is Debian-based Linux distribution, a powerful operating system for penetration testing, ethical hacking, and network security assessment. It is widely used by ethical hackers, security researchers, and penetration testers.
It’s the ultimate “go-to” operating system for security and hacking workloads.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Kali Linux on VirtualBox on Windows.
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Testing your internet speed from the Linux terminal can be useful for troubleshooting connectivity issues or for monitoring the performance of your network. The process is straightforward and requires the use of a few simple commands.
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REMI is a comprehensive third-party repository that offers the most recent and cutting-edge versions of PHP and its modules for RHEL-based systems.
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The Xfce desktop environment is a popular alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment with many Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. Xfce is designed to be fast, lightweight, and highly customizable, making it an excellent choice for users who want a more efficient and personalized computing experience.
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How to send schedule backup success and failure emails from Duplicacy with Mailgun
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This simple tutorial shows how to easily check your SSD health in Ubuntu and/or Linux Mint desktop. I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux on my old laptop for about 7 years.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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OpenSSH 9.2 and 9.2p1: security fixes and other improvements were released this week, giving system administrators and users the latest in secure remote access protocols.
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Devices/Embedded
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ATOMS3 Lite is the latest ESP32-S3 IoT platform from the M5Stack Atom series wireless programmable controllers, doing without the 0.85-inch display and IMU sensor found in the ATOM S3 development kit simply using an RGB LED instead.
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Robustel R5020 Lite is an industrial 5G router with 4G LTE Cat 18 fallback, two Gigabit Ethernet ports and WiFi 5 connectivity, as well as features such as an RS232 or RS485 serial port, wide 12-36V DC power input, and support for an extended temperature range.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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The fediverse is a grand improvement in many ways over walled gardens like Twitter, but there’splentyof room to improve. For example, federation does little good for users on a site that unexpectedly shuts down without time for users tomigrate.Today I was seeing concern that the admin in charge of mstdn.party and mstdn.plus had gone silent. These instances have thousands of users. It looks like they’ve resurfaced but were radio silent for weeks. Consider this a drill, eventually some of the instances with thousands of users will almost certainly fail without notice.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Chromium
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RTX Video Super Resolution is ready in the stable Chrome 110 release, and Nvidia should launch an enabling driver shortly.
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Programming/Development
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Rust
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This will relate my short learning journey in implementing a
procedural macro in Rust:i18n-format.
The problem
Building Rust applications means having to deal with localization, ie allowing the UI to be translated in other languages. This is a big deal for users, and thanks to existing tooling, if you use gtk-rs and if you use therust-gtk-template
to boostrap your project you should be all set. The GNOME community has an history of caring about this and most of the infrastructure is here.
However there is one sore point into this: gettext, the standard package used to handle strings localization at runtime doesn’t support Rust. For some reasonthe patch to fix it is stuck in review.
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Leftovers
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A strong earthquake has hit Turkey and been felt in other parts of the Middle East and Europe.
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Almost 200 people have died in Turkey and Syria after an earthquake, with the death toll expected to rise.
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Turkey, a hotbed of seismic activity, sits on the Anatolian Plate, which borders two major faults as it grinds northeast against Eurasia.
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A powerfulearthquakestruck southeastern Turkey early Monday, killing dozens of people and wounding hundreds of others in the country and across the border inSyria, and razing many buildings.
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A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake has hit southeast Turkey and Syria, toppling buildings and sending panicked residents pouring outside in a cold winter night. More than 230 people were killed in both countries, hundreds were injured and the toll was expected to rise.
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A magnitude 7.8 earthquake has hit southern Turkey, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) said. The quake’s depth is 24.1 kilometers (14.9 miles), located 23 kilometers (14.2 miles) east of Nurdagi, Gaziantep province, according to the USGS. CNN Supervising Meteorologist Brandon Miller explains why this earthquake could be particularly devastating.
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A 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook central Turkey early Monday and was followed by another strong temblor
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At least 118 people were killed in two countries after one of the strongest earthquakes to hit Turkey in more than 100 years sent tremors across the region, collapsing buildings and sending residents running into the streets.
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Read on to discover why an actor, playwright, director, artistic director and musical theatre school owner impressed us the most in 2022
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The girl, 16, may have jumped into the water to swim with a pod of dolphins when she was attacked, the authorities said.
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Science
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The cows are able to produce 18 metric tons of milk per year.
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Whoa!
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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“We are not fully sure why it’s happening now.”
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Experts say food insecurity has worsened amid sanctions and Covid-19 lockdowns.
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Proprietary
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Oracle Corp plans to invest $1.5 billion in Saudi Arabia in the coming years as it builds up…
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Security
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The hackers of LOpht testified before Congress and went on to shape today’s cybersecurity industry. This is the story of how it started.
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Cybersecurity agencies in Europe are warning of ransomware attacks exploiting a 2-year-old computer bug as Italy experienced widespread internet outages.
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Pig Butchering, also known as Sha Zhu Pan and CryptoRom, is an ugly name for an ugly scam.
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Italian news agency Ansa reported that the most affected countries in Europe have been France, Finland and Italy.
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Defence/Aggression
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Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov is being replaced by General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the country’s military intelligence agency, according to the leader of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s faction in parliament.
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There is nothing new about superpowers spying on one another, even from balloons. But for pure gall, there was something different this time.
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The Albanese government deserves credit for its handling of the China relationship.
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Ted Olson — the former US solicitor-general in the George W. Bush administration who argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture — made a stunning admission Thursday…
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Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta discusses China’s response to a suspected spy balloon being shot down off the East Coast of the US.
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In December, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced the most ambitious expansion of military power in Japan since the creation of the country’s self-defence forces in 1954.
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One South African Air Force (SAAF) crew member has been killed and another wounded after their Oryx transport helicopter was hit by gunfire in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Sunday 5 February.
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Ukraine’s defence minister said on Sunday the reluctance of Western allies to send fighter jets would cost Ukrainian forces “more lives” as fierce fighting continued in the eastern battleground city of Bakhmut. Earlier, Germany’s prosecutor general said his office had collected “hundreds” of pieces of evidence showing war crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine, calling for an international effort to bring leaders to justice. Follow our live blog to see today’s events. All times are Paris time (GMT+1).
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Police in Massachusetts say an officer shot and killed a woman with a weapon after a family member requested a wellness check
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An envoy for Qatar’s foreign minister visited the Afghan capital on February 5 and met with the Taliban administration’s acting foreign minister, according to the Afghan Foreign Ministry.
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Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has joined opposition figure and ex-Prime Minister Mir Hossein Musavi in calls for political change as the country continues to be stricken with widespread anti-government protests.
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Russia and Iran are moving forward on plans to establish a factory in Russia aimed at producing some 6,000 Iran-designed drones of the type Moscow has used in the Ukraine war.
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House Republicans are indicating plans to investigate the Biden administration’s response to a suspectedChinese surveillance balloonthat wasshot downoff the coast of South Carolina on Saturday.
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American officials worry that commercial activities in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates could be fueling Russia’s war machine and have threatened to punish those involved.
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When Stefan Passantino (91L) graduated from Emory University School of Law, he had already started to make a name for himself.
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India is preparing to relaunch its INS Vikramaditya aircraft carrier after a major refit, a critical step toward fulfilling its plan to deploy two carrier battle groups as it seeks to strengthen its regional maritime power to counter China’s increasing assertiveness. The former Soviet carrier acquired from Russia will joins India’s first domestically built carrier that was launched late last year, the INS Vikrant, in undergoing outfitting and sea trials.
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The body of Pakistan’s exiled former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who became a key U.S. ally during the “war on terror,” is expected to be repatriated on February 6.
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A burial is expected later on Monday.
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KMT deputy chairman Andrew Hsia would leave for China on Wednesday.
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About 200,000 Russians have left their homeland for Serbia since the start of the war in Ukraine
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Environment
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In Moncton city, temperatures dropped to -28.1 C, which broke a 1917 cold weather record of -27.8 C.
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Brazil on Friday sank a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the Navy announced, despite environmental groups claiming the formerly French ship was packed with toxic materials that will contaminate the ocean.
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Energy/Transportation
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Japanese industrial company Daikin has signed a deal with the northern English city of Manchester…
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Fortum wants to keep its Loviisa facility operational until the end of 2050.
-
Markets still undervalue the myriad benefits DERs provide for resiliency and decarbonization, and incumbents aren’t willingly ceding ground any time soon.
Will we come to embrace DERs before it’s too late?
-
Wildlife/Nature
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Victims, detectives and federal agents are expected to speak in court Monday before a Las Vegas-area judge decides whether to grant bail to a former “Dances With Wolves” actor.
-
Finance
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We offer advice on what to do if your account has been frozen
-
-
Asian stock markets are lower after strong U.S. jobs data fanned fears of more interest rate hikes to cool inflation. Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul retreated. Tokyo gained. Oil prices rose. Wall Street wilted after government data showed U.S. employers hired twice as many people in January as the previous month.
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Meme stock mania was supposed to be over, right? Guess what: It’s not.
-
NET MIGRATIONto Finland should be increased by almost 300 per cent to around 44,000 to stabilise the number of working-age people in the country, declares a newly published report from Etla Economic Research.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a major mercenary force fighting in Ukraine called the Wagner Group, is rising in power, but could he replace Russian President Vladimir Putin? Russian investigative journalist Mikhail Zygar discusses with CNN anchor Erin Burnett.
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The deep-pocketed network associated with billionaire Charles Koch is preparing to throw its money and weight behind a single Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential primary — in a move that could significantly reshape the GOP field.
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At least 200 people have lined up outside a Hong Kong court on early Monday morning, as the trial of the city’s largest national security case against 47 democrats begins after some defendants have been detained for almost two years.
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Iranian media reported Saturday the dismissal from Tehran Azad University of nine professors, allegedly as a result of expressing views critical of the Islamic Republic. This development follows recent protests by Tehran students sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, as well as new disciplinary procedures against students refusing to wear hijab.
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The first Newspoll of the year has delivered good news for federal Labor and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Labor has maintained its 10-point margin over the coalition on a two-party-preferred basis as parliament returns for a sitting week expected to be dominated by the economy and the referendum on an Indigenous voice.
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Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe is preparing to announce her intention to quit the Greens party and move to the cross bench. Senator Thorpe is expected to make the announcement following a partyroom meeting on the first parliamentary sitting day, where the Greens discussed their approach to the upcoming referendum on an Indigenous voice to parliament.
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A majority of Democrats now think one term is plenty for President Joe Biden, despite his insistence that he plans to seek reelection in 2024. That’s according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It shows just 37% of Democrats say they want Biden to seek a second term, down from 52% in the weeks before last year’s midterm elections.
-
Democratic unity in Arizona helped the party pick up two U.S. Senate seats and the top three state offices over the last few years. But Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s estrangement and subsequent divorce from Democrats is fueling fears that discord in the state could complicate President Joe Biden’s path to reelection. It could also dim the party’s hopes for maintaining control of the Senate.
-
Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Amid high egg prices, social media users are claiming that common chicken feed products are preventing their own hens from laying eggs
-
The Canadian government on Friday further amended the Special Economic Measures (Russia) Regulations to list an additional 38 Russian individuals and 16 entities.
-
Censorship/Free Speech
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“A special committee will be formed to monitor the behaviour of MPs in Parliament.
-
Iranian media reported Saturday the dismissal from Tehran Azad University of nine professors, allegedly as a result of expressing views critical of the Islamic Republic. This development follows recent protests by Tehran students sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, as well as new disciplinary procedures against students refusing to wear hijab.
-
A spokesperson for Pakistan’s media regulator says it has blocked Wikipedia for hurting Muslim sentiment by not removing allegedly blasphemous content
-
Civil Rights/Policing
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Actions underscore the lengths to which Chinese police will go to keep tabs on Uyghurs abroad
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The three Christian leaders said gay people should be welcomed by their churches, during an unprecedented joint airborne news conference returning home from South Sudan.
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Police bribes and harassment are part of everyday life for those who flee the war-torn country
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Recent migrants say they fled a political crackdown in the wake of the 2019 protest movement, some in a big hurry
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Australia and the United Kingdom consider themselves global leaders in the modern anti-slavery movement.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) had accumulated at least $561 million in unmatched royalties as of 2021’s end, according to tax documents reviewed by Digital Music News.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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today was my first day trying some new logging software. previously, i was using the roastime software from aillio and now i’m on artisan which is open source and supports many different machines. i am excited to join the community using artisan and a free and open source data logger/control suite.
the coffees today are the rest of the kenya from the previous 1lb bag, and starting out a 5lb bag of Columbia Honey Process Aponte which will be my gift coffee for friends once i have it a bit more dialed in, plus my go-to espresso roast.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
02.05.23
Posted in News Roundup at 9:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Linux Magazine Latest Issue
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The topic of non-free firmware has caused some turbulence within the Debian project, but now the community has a new direction.
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The Minuimus Perl script helps you save disk space by reducing the file size of PDF files with just a few commands.
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This month in Kernel News: Bug Tracking
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Over the past couple of months, Graham’s ever-versatile Steam Deck has synced books to an e-reader, played movies on a television, joined Mumble, recorded two podcast episodes, and even played a few games.
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Restricting uses for FOSS may seem appealing, but it also might not be the solution some imagine.
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The Angry Reviewer style check can be used to evaluate and improve any type of writing, including academic articles and grant applications.
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MX Linux 21.3 and Puppy Linux FossaPup 9.5
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The elite gathering known as Davos is not an ordinary business convention. The annual conference of the World Economic Forum is an uber-exclusive event, not a meeting of governments but rather a gathering of representatives from around 1,000 member companies – the biggest companies in the world – along with a smattering of political leaders and academics.
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A forecast service and some Perl magic help predict the solar power yield of a residential photovoltaic array.
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In the right circumstances, apt-clone can be a simple option for cloning your Debian system.
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In the news: Nobara Project; Gnome 44; Nitrux 2.6; Vanilla OS; Critical Linux Vulnerability Found to Impact SMB Servers; Linux Mint 21.1; Another Attempt at a Linux Tablet; Designing with LibreOffice 2nd Edition; and KaOS Linux 2022.12.
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DWS Remote Control offers convenient browser access to computers outside of your home network.
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Spotify, the Internet music service, collects data about its users and their taste in music. Mike Schilli requested a copy of his files to investigate them with Go.
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LDraw and LeoCAD help you become a virtual LEGO architect.
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This month in Linux Voice.
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Thanks to the IPTV standard and free software, you can view your favorite channels on Linux without any problems.
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YAD lets you customize your system tray with one-line Bash tray scripts.
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Thierry Nuttens, the developer of NuTyX, shares a behind-the-scenes look at a small Linux distribution.
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If you want to move away from Ubuntu’s Snap package format, the unsnap script removes snaps from your computer and replaces them with Flatpaks where possible.
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Simplify your searches and get better results with fzf, a modern search tool based on fuzzy logic.
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Machine learning can be maliciously manipulated – we’ll show you how.
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Whether at work or on vacation, every pet lover worries about how to take care of their little roommates in their absence. What aquarium owners need is an automatic feeder.
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Do you work with Ubuntu but want to test something quickly on an openSUSE system? You don’t need a second PC or a virtual machine to do it – a single container is quite enough.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This night of Linux Saloon chat was some of my most favorite I have had since this started. I would say that the show went completely off the rails but that would imply that it was a disaster.
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**libkdepim** , **libkedevocdocument** , **libkexiv** , **libkgapi** , **libkipi** , **libkleo** , **libkmahjongg** , **libkomparediff2** , **libksane** , **libkscreen** , **libksieve** , **libksysguard** , **libktorrent** , **lokalize** , **lskat** , **mailcommon** , **mailimporter** , **marble** , **markdownpart** , **mbox-importer** , **messagelib** , **milou** , **minuet** , **modemmanager** , **networkmanager-qt** from the Slackware **kde** package set.
shasum -a256=b54e187450d7502596b9b252b984e9b8e9f01e4cd6d5236ffaba49c6e66a60d1
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Graphics
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We are getting towards the freeze for Debian/Bookworm so the current state of packages isn’t going to change much before the release. Bugs will get fixed but missing features will mostly be missing until the next release.
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In honor of the ten year anniversary of the xvidtune 1.0.3 release, here's
a new release to deliver everything accumulated in git in the past decade.
Alan Coopersmith (8):
configure: Drop AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
autogen.sh: Honor NOCONFIGURE=1
Update README for gitlab migration
Update configure.ac bug URL for gitlab migration
gitlab CI: add a basic build test
Build xz tarballs instead of bzip2
gitlab CI: stop requiring Signed-off-by in commits
xvidtune 1.0.4
Emil Velikov (1):
autogen.sh: use quoted string variables
Mihail Konev (1):
autogen: add default patch prefix
Peter Hutterer (1):
autogen.sh: use exec instead of waiting for configure to finish
Stéphane Aulery (2):
Use real program name for help message
Ensure consistency between the manpage and the output of the -h option
git tag: xvidtune-1.0.4
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Applications
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To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 11 high quality open source podcast tools that let you manage and download podcasts. The selection includes terminal-based tools only. We feature GUI podcast tools in this roundup.
Here’s our verdict captured in a LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. We only feature free and open source software here.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The cat command in Linux is a simple yet powerful tool that is used to view and manipulate text files. It is short for “concatenate,” which means to combine or link together.
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The sleep command is a simple command-line utility that pauses the execution of a script or process for a specified amount of time. This can be useful in a variety of scenarios, such as waiting for a process to complete, or automating tasks that need to be performed at regular intervals.
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The traditional way to do a VPN is that your VPN endpoint (‘server’) is the single point of entry for all traffic from VPN clients. When a VPN client talks to anything on your secured networks, it goes through the endpoint. In what I’m calling a mesh-capable VPN, you can have multiple VPN endpoints, each of them providing access to a different network area or service. Because it’s one VPN, you still have a single unified client identity and authentication and a single on/off button for the VPN connection on clients.
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That’s a problem if you really want to be anonymous. If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity. You know who they are, but they don’t know who you are. It feels rude. An obsessive personality might make it their damn mission to figure out who you are! You don’t want that.
So for real anonymity, don’t create a mystery. Create a believable persona. Then nobody will wonder.
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Universities are not one of those places. In universities, quite often you’ll find that people actively need to use your VPN server for all of their traffic, or otherwise things will break in subtle ways. One culprit is the world of academic publishing, or more exactly online electronic access to academic publications. These days, many of these online publications are provided to you directly by the publisher’s website. This website decides if you are allowed to access things by seeing if your institution has purchased access, and it often figures out your institution by looking at your IP address. As a result, if a researcher is working from home but wants to read things, their traffic had better be coming from your IP address space.
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WineHQ is a compatibility layer that allows users to run Windows applications on Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, and BSD.
Its purpose is to provide a way for users to continue using their favorite Windows applications on a non-Windows platform without the need for a virtual machine or dual-booting. WineHQ translates Windows system calls into their equivalent POSIX calls on the host system, allowing Windows applications to run seamlessly on the host operating system.
It is an open-source project and free software, actively developed and maintained by a community of developers and users.
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Games
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Between 2023-01-29 and 2023-02-05 there were 103 new games validated for the Steam Deck.
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So I usually try to save my money where possible and I don’t celebrate my birthday but I wanted get an updated gaming console so that I could continue to play Fortnite when I have some free down time. Way back in the day, my grandpa gave me an original Nintendo (which I sadly didn’t think of keeping over time) and eventually I got the Nintendo 64 when it came out as well. I then purchased the original Xbox (which had the Halo title on it) and that was one of my first Microsoft products that I enjoyed owning. After that, I switched over to the Sony side and purchased the Playstation 2 – and then the Playstation 3 – and then the Playstation 4 (so that I could keep playing the different GTA versions).
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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OpenSSH is a free, open-source software suite of security-related network-level utilities based on the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol, which provides encrypted terminal connections between networked computers. It is widely used for secure remote login, file transfers (using the SCP protocol), and creating secure tunnels for other network connections.
The latest OpenSSH release, v9.2, fixes the “PermitRemoteOpen” issue, which specifies the destinations to which remote TCP port forwarding is permitted when RemoteForward is used as a SOCKS proxy.
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The delay in the release has been due to issues with several mports. We’re still working through those problems, but one can’t ship a desktop OS without a working desktop.
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Fedora Family / IBM
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At CentOS Connect yesterday, Jack Aboutboul and Javier Hernandez presented atalk about AlmaLinux and SBOMs[video], where they are exploring a novel supply-chain security effort in the RHEL ecosystem.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The drive had some data from a relative who passed away, so I was keen to read it. But the disk wasn’t showing up on the computer any more. Why?
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As part of our ongoing collaboration with K-Way, Justin Lutz set out to integrate intelligent electronics into one of the company’s iconic outdoor jackets. Due to the active lifestyle of the brand, Lutz chose to use the Arduino Nicla Sense ME board to detect gestures while hiking as well as monitor the barometric pressure for potential storms.
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When a vintage computer is all but unobtanium, software emulation is often all that remains. Unless you are [Michael Gardi], who saw an opportunity to reproduce Canada’s home-grown MCM/70 microcomputer using a combination of software emulation and modern hardware.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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BharOS is being pitched as the country’s answer to Google-owned Android and Apple-owned iOS.
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Welcome to the first report for 2023 from the Reproducible Buildsproject!
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This post is very late, but better late than never! I want to take a look back at the work that was done on FreedomBox during 2022.
Several apps were added to FreedomBox in 2022. The email server app (that was developed by a Google Summer of Code student back in 2021) was finally made available to the general audience of FreedomBox users. You will find it under the name “Postfix/Dovecot”, which are the main services configured by this app.
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From the Mac OSX release history, Mac OSX versions appear to be supported for three years, so in three years, my bc should be in the majority of Mac OSX installs, which would make my bc the most widely-deployed bc in the world!
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Week highlights: new features in GIMP, Inkscape, Penpot, and Ardour, Mayo review, Paul Davis in the Bezos movie, and more.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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From its open-source nature and robust security features to its flexibility and scalability, MySQL has a lot to offer. Let’s take a closer look at MySQL and the benefits it offers, so you can make the right choice on determining whether to use it in your technology stack.
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GNU Projects
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Hi, a new release,.
Version 0.3.4 is now available as
https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/gpaint/gpaint-2-0.3.4.tar.gz
This release combines existing patches from GNU/Linux distributions into an official release. In addition,
the build infrastructure is modernized to be based on
current versions of the GNU Autotools
Changes in this version:
* adding guix.scm, development under GNU Guix support
Debian patches from Goedson Teixeira Paixao <goedson> incorporatd into main release
includng patches for
* fixing missing heds libs by <goedson>
* Fix toolbar behaviour so that gpaint follows the style set in
the user preferences by <goedson>
* Fix foreground/background color selection by <goedson>
* Fix crash when saving in unsupported format by <goedson>
* Add accelerator keys to common functions by Matt Wheeler <m@funkyhat.org>
* Ignore non-printable characters on text input by Ying-Chun Liu (PaulLiu) <grandpaul@gmail.com>
* fix crash on fill button click by <goedson>
* Fix line width combo box by Thomas Viehmann <tv@beamnet.de>
* Fixes rotation operations: Implement the rotation in multiples of 90 degrees using the
gdk_pixbuf_rotate_simple function by <goedson>
* Avoids crash on font selection by <goedson>
* Fixes the gpaint.desktop file by <goedson>
* Removes reference to non-existent menu.h file by <goedson>
* Fixes compiling with recent versions of libgtk by <goedson>
This release represents gpaint is resuming active development.
Roadmap is detailed in README file but suggestions are welcome.
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Programming/Development
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This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.
How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).
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On December 14th, 2022, in collaboration with technologists on team CTO and attorneys in BCP, I gave a presentation at the Federal Trade Commission’s December Open Commission meeting on the systemic approach to security found in the Commission’s orders.
The goal of this post is to first explain how the FTC has worked to strengthen its remedies to address the underlying causes of risk in complex systems. The post then highlights some of the Commission’s recent order provisions from data security and privacy cases and explains how they seek to systemically address risk.
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Standards/Consortia
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Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless”, “complicated” or “bad”. After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.
In other words: a format that is lossy, simple and quite ok. Naturally, it’s called QOA — the Quite OK Audio Format.
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It’ll be even better in the coming years because data #interoperability via FHIR will let apps and hospitals go GET the data … or, even better, let consumers already have their data in their own app, to do anything they want with it. True patient autonomy.
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Leftovers
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The fonts seen with old computer systems such as those from Apple and Commodore, as well as Microsoft Windows 3.1 and older, form an integral part of our interaction with these systems. These days such bitmap fonts are a rarity, with scalable vector-based fonts having taken their place on modern-day systems. This unfortunately also means that these fonts are at major risk of being lost to the sands of time. This is where [Rob Hagemans] seeks to maintain an archive of such bitmap fonts, ranging from Acorn to MSX to Windows.
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What is an FDM filament coloring’s purpose but to be an aesthetic choice? As it turns out, the additives that create these changes in coloring and transparency also affect the base properties of the polymer, whether it’s PLA, PETG, or another material. This is where a recent video by [CNC Kitchen] is rather illustrative, using a collection of colored PLA filaments from a single filament manufacturer.
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Science
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History gets rewritten, again.
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You can’t escape destiny.
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Education
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Federal funding lapsed in June 2022, forcing most public schools to charge all but the poorest students for food.
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Politicians fire teachers and ban books, but more and more Americans are standing up against this effort to erase our history.
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In December, legislators killed a controversial abatement program known as Chapter 313, but its effects will last decades.
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The increasing shift to remote work in higher education has threatened the power and influence of the professional managerial class (PMC). In response, the PMC are throwing everything at the wall from baseless claims about work productivity to coercive policies to cement their power over faculty. Coined by John and […]
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Hardware
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It turns out that typing all day just might be bad for your hands and fingers. Repetitive Strain Injury, RSI, was a real problem for [David Schiller], particularly when coding. So, naturally, he started designing his own keyboard. And bless him, he’s shared the whole project on GitHub.
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A computing platform is never really dead unless people stop developing new software for it. By that measure, the Commodore 64 is alive and well: new games, demos, and utilities are still being released on a regular basis. Getting those new programs onto an old computer was always a bit of a hassle though, requiring either an SD card adapter for the Commodore or a direct cable connection from an internet-connected PC. Luckily, there’s now a simpler way to get your latest software updates thanks to a WiFi adapter called WiC64. This adapter plugs into the expansion port of a classic Commodore and lets you download programs directly into memory. [Tommy Ovesen] over at [Arctic Retro] bought one and explored its many features.
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Home shop machinists know dust shields are important for keeping swarf out of expensive linear rails and ball screws. [Petteri Aimonen] demonstrates three inexpensive ways to DIY some bellows-style dust covers. Such things can of course be purchased, but they’re priced at a premium and not always available in the size one needs.
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We see a lot of clocks, and many of the better ones have some 3D printed elements to them. But [Carl Sabanski] shows us his kits for making sundials for either hemisphere using a conventional printer (you know, one that puts ink on paper), some styrofoam, and possibly some other materials like wire coat hangers, threaded rods, thumbtacks, glue, and different papers like transparencies or card stock.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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The power index shows China registered the greatest decline out of 26 nations and territories.
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Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Andrew Neff, with caution, expounded the benefits of ketamine, psychedelic mushrooms and long walks in the woods as ways to address serious mental health issues during a Jan. 25 panel to an audience of 150 students.
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Proprietary
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ChatGPT has sent shockwaves through higher education, creating a moral panic about the threat that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to the classroom. As critical media literacy scholars, we are not panicking, and we do not think any educator should. Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chat bot released in late 2022. Industry insiders were amazed by the technology, with Microsoft quickly moving to integrate OpenAI features into its products.
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Twitter will no longer provide free access to the Twitter API from February 9th. As announced by the official Twitter Developer account late Wednesday night, Elon Musk’s social media hobby will stop supporting free access to the Twitter API and will instead provide a “paid basic tier.” Twitter hasn’t provided any information regarding pricing, but said that it will provide “more details on what you can expect next week.”
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[Attackers] are spreading malicious installers by leveraging KoiVM virtualisation technology that enables malware to evade detection when installing it. KoiVM is a plugin that obfuscates a program’s operation codes so that the virtual machine (a compute resource that uses software instead of a physical computer to run programs and deploy apps) only understands them.
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Security
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Letters have not gone out yet and will not be going out in the mail until February 13, but Highmark Health will be notifying 300,000 patients of a data security breach that occurred on December 13, 2022, after an employee clicked on a link that they should not have clicked on.
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Diligent Corp is a software as a service company, headquartered in New York.
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iRent service provider Hotai Motor accused of not reacting to major cyber security loophole
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Matthew Strong reports: Car rental and carshare platform iRent will prepare a compensation package for 400,000 clients deemed at risk from a recent leakage of private data, reports said Saturday (Feb. 4).
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Admins, hosting providers, and the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR) warn that attackers actively target VMware ESXi servers unpatched against a two-year-old remote code execution vulnerability to deploy a new ESXiArgs ransomware.
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JoshandKurttalk about the recent GitHub breach. It wasn’t terribly exciting, but there are some interesting conversations to have around securing certificates, source code, and hardware security modules. In general GitHub did most things right on this one.
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The ransomware outbreak that erupted at ION on Tuesday has disrupted trading and clearing of exchange-traded financial derivatives, causing problems for scores of brokers, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters this week.
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How to work with quality uncertainty and scaling different forms of security.
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Integrity/Availability/Authenticity
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One of our duties at work is monitoring and renewing SSL certificates for customer services. Now that certificate issuers regularly expire certificates after only one year, renewals are a regular occurance. Plus, we like to verify what protocols and alternative hostnames are supported by a specific service. This script helps.
The script requires that you have the openssl and curl utilities available to your shell environment. Versions of openssl newer than 1.1 provide superior output. OpenSSL 1.0 and earlier have limited filtering options, so the script is forced to send you way more information than you need.
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Defence/Aggression
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…this is a war that will yield no victors and will, in guaranteed fashion, make a mockery of victory.
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Gone are the acres of jubilant crowds that filled Freedom Square with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags that swayed like heads of wheat when the Russians were driven out. Now the crack-crunch of Russian artillery eating into the city echoes around the plaza.
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Ukrainians have flocked to resorts nestled in the Carpathian Mountains, largely spared the worst of the war, for a respite. One soldier recuperating there explored what it means to heal.
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The expected move against Oleksii Reznikov comes amid a widening corruption scandal, although he was not implicated in wrongdoing.
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Ukraine’s defense minister is expressing confidence in securing Western allies’ agreement to his country’s latest weapons request, warplanes to fight off Russian forces that invaded nearly a year ago. Oleksii Reznikov told a news conference in Kyiv on Sunday that Ukraine has already received everything from its “wish list to Santa,” except planes. He predicted confidently: “There will be planes, too.” So far, Ukraine has won support from Baltic nations and Poland in its quest to obtain Western fighter jets. But several Western leaders have expressed concern that providing warplanes could provoke the Kremlin and draw their countries deeper into the conflict. German-made tanks are on the way to Ukraine. Reznikov said his forces would begin training on Leopard tanks on Monday.
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The discovery of the spy balloon comes at a sensitive time for China. It happened right before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit China and meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Blinken canceled his trip after the discovery of the spy balloon.
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Abusers are five times more likely to kill their female victims if they have access to guns, according to one report.
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The decision to allow US to access more Philippine military bases under the controversial EDCA deal has been criticized by progressive groups and activists.
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The United States military shot down a Chinese balloon off the South Carolina coast on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
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“The Chinese side clearly requested that the U.S. appropriately deal with this in a calm, professional, and restrained manner,” the ministry said, again dismissing the Pentagon’s claim that the high-altitude balloon was part of a surveillance operation aimed at monitoring sensitive military sites.
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Alrighty then, as TV news is still consumed by the Chinese balloon thing, I need to get a couple of things in. Did the US shoot it down when over Cheney’s sparse area of the country? Nope. Nor before that.
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In recent years, Afghanistan has witnessed a surge in the influence of non-state actors such as the Taliban and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). These groups have exploited the political vacuum in the country to carry out acts of violence and terrorism, creating instability and insecurity for the Afghan people and neighboring countries.
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“If the U.S. is involved directly it’s more likely to use military force to defend its allies in Europe,” Carlo Masala, a German military expert with strong ties to the country’s political establishment, said on German public television.
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“Now for the inconvenient truths that mainstream media (MSM) refuse to present to their audiences regarding the Ukraine war.”
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Everyone is talking about the “Chinese spy balloon” this week, for some reason. It’s apparently a big deal, it even has its own Wikipedia page already. After days of back-and-forth, the US finally got tough with the dirigible and blew it out of the sky. Boom. Take that, China. Now comes the post-balloon drama.
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By destroying judicial review, they would empower the narrow right-wing majority to violate the rights of minorities.
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Environment
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Melbourne Water’s new alert system was supposed to give early warning of impending danger but did not give Melburnians much chance to escape a disastrous flood.
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Energy/Transportation
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Bankrupt crypto exchangeFTXis sending notices to former donor recipients asking for the donated funds to be returned, the company said in apress releaseSunday.
Why it matters: Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX Digital Markets Co-CEO Ryan Salame weretwo of the largest political donorsduring the last election cycle. Now the company’s debtors want the money back.
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Finance
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Why the Republicans’ routine threat to wreck the economy, rather than raise the borrowing limit, could end differently this time.
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Former British Prime Minister Liz Truss says her failure wasn’t her fault
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Sunday’s agreement is expected to speed up salary negotiations in other sectors.
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The White House on Saturday condemned a newly introduced Republican bill that would repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, a law that includes a number of changes aimed at lowering costs for Medicare recipients.
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By Ralph Nader The word “inequality” is everywhere in the media. It usually refers either to race, gender, rich vs. poor, or other differences between human beings. Absent from the public debate is the biggest perpetrator of “inequality” against human beings – the corporate entity itself. Ever since 1886 when a U.S. Supreme Court reporter, […]
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On Wednesday, over half a million workers in the UK took part in a “mega strike,” the largest labor protest in the country in over a decade.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Following an assassination attempt, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister discusses his views on the Taliban, his relationship with the military, and why he’s more “evolved” than other people.
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Former President Trump denied the Department of Defense’s claims that suspectedChinese surveillance balloonshad also transited the U.S. during his administration, tellingFox News DigitalSunday that it “never happened.”
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Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder look at the recent House vote to denounce socialism and what that means for the future of socialist policies like M4A, with 109 Democrats joining the Right on the vote.
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Last month, the Biden administration unveiled a slate of new agency-level actions it claimed would “protect renters and promote rental affordability.” The announcement followed nearly a year of public pressure from Congressional Democrats and the tenant-led Homes Guarantee campaign to get President Biden to crack down on rent-gouging and unjust evictions. In late January, the campaign sent the White House a list of 11 essential policy directives to include in its tenant protection plan.
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The original proposal is already pretty bad, but the changes by the Council of the European Union make it much, much worse. I’ll assume you’ve some familiarity with the original proposal. If you are unfamiliar with the proposal, my introduction post about chatcontrol might help a bit, however the changes to the proposal are not as focused on detection/scanning as the introduction post is.
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In May 2022, the European Commission presented its proposal for a Regulation to combat child sexual abuse (CSA) online. The proposal contains a number of privacy intrusive provisions, including obligations for platforms to indiscriminately scan the private communications of all users (dubbed ”chat control”). There are also blocking obligations for internet services providers (ISPs), which is the focus of this article.
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Guatemala’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal ruled earlier this week that a leftist presidential ticket headed by Indigenous human rights defender Thelma Cabrera should be barred from the June ballot, prompting fury and vows of mass protests from Cabrera’s supporters.
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[Netanyahu's] government is fiercely far-right, although from the standpoint of the Palestinians there is steady continuity in Zionist state policy, whether the government is led by the far-right or by less right-wing sections.
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Rep.George Santos(R-N.Y.) has been accused of sexual harassment and ethics violations by a prospective staffer who briefly worked in Santos’ office.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The move was announced on Saturday after the free online encyclopaedia was given a 48-hour deadline to remove some material.
The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said Wikipedia failed to comply with its ultimatum.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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From backroom deals between Hillary Clinton and Goldman Sachs to US covert operations in Haiti, Tunisia, Italy and beyond, WikiLeaks revealed the dark underbelly of US power.
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CNET built a trusted brand for tech reporting over two decades. After being acquired by Red Ventures, staff say editorial firewalls have been repeatedly breached.
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Martinez Zogo, 50, who spoke out against embezzlement and cronyism in the central African nation, was abducted on January 17 outside a police station in the suburbs of the capital, Yaounde.
His heavily mutilated corpse was found five days later.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Iran’s supreme leader reportedly has ordered an amnesty or reduction in prison sentences for “tens of thousands” of people detained amid the nationwide protests shaking the country
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A lawsuit filed last week in Federal court in Oklahoma City by the Council on American-Islamic Relations on behalf of Oklahoma native Saadiq Long challenges unconstitutional searches and seizures (sometimes at gunpoint) and interference with freedom of movement on city streets and highways on the unlawful basis of a combination of warrantless dragnet surveillance and arbitrary extrajudicial blacklists.
According to Mr. Long’s application for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to protect his rights and his life while the case proceeds…
Mr. Long’s mistreatment by the US government — the government of the country where he was born and of which he was and still is a citizen — began when, while serving in the US Air Force from 1987-1998 and living in Turkey, he converted to Islam and applied for discharge from the Air Force as a conscientious objector on the basis of his new beliefs.
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Sanitized histories of the Civil Rights Movement have erased the long history of activism and struggle that defined the life of Rosa Parks long before she defied Jim Crow codes on a Montgomery bus. Yet Rosa Parks’s dedication to the Black freedom struggle preceded the Montgomery Bus Boycott […]
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Last month, GitHub disabled the website of a Pirate Bay proxy information portal after receiving a DMCA notice from City of London Police. The operator protested the removal, arguing that the site doesn’t link to any copyright-infringing material. That challenge was successful and as a result, proxybay.github.io has been restored.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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The only productive activity today was that I read a passage of Latin
text and did the vocabulary in Anki.
To my horror, I realized that I had not left the house the whole week!
That’s crazy. Once again I had some health issues so on Monday I
decided to work from home, which I then extended till Friday.
Wife took Friday off as she also felt some flu symptoms.
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The chaos makes sense. The chaos means activity and the activity means… something, I swear. I’m trying. What story should I tell this time? I need to write it down, do I? Do I pick the story based on the story or do I pick it based on the reaction? Is there even a difference? I tell myself that it is because the cynicism will overpower my power of will otherwise.
It’s like 3am and I’m fully awake. Where is the Pilot 912? I woke up early, I stay up late. It’s a new day? What happened to my hamsters? The I, the II… Named as kings, treated as such, favorite pastime was time passing. They were onto something and I looked at them amazed by their simplicity, their foolishness. Stop with the ball, Hamtaro.
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Technical
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Electronic music is perhaps my second favorite hobby (programming being #1, of course). My earliest memory in this field is from the C64, where one of the tapes “borrowed” from a friend had a piano simulator where you could play and record a short song. It was slow, clunky and sounded horrendous in every way, but the idea of using a computer as a musical instrument really resonated with me — there are endless possibilities for creativity!
Over the years I played around with ProTracker on the Amiga 500 and later did more serious work with Scream Tracker on the PC. My skills growing, eventually I moved on to MIDI trackers on Windows, intent on composing some orchestral music using Standard MIDI instruments. This was around the year 2000. My music was starting to gain some complexity at that point, thanks to not being restricted to keyboard and mouse input and using an actual synthesizer keyboard for recording the notes. Later on, after becoming a Mac user, I went all in on Logic Pro and even recorded a couple of songs with lyrics.
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A wrapper script is one that makes various changes (flags, environment, logging, etc) and then runs some other program. Variations are possible.
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I have decided that I want the battery status in the Waybar (a bar on
the top of the screen). It wasn’t that easy on the MNT: the battery
status is controlled by the system controller (that thing which also
communicates with you through the small OLED screen at the top of
keyboard) and to be able to read the data inside the operating system a
kernel driver is needed.
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Programming
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Filtering a list is a pretty fundamental operation when programming and most modern programming languages provide such a function as part of their standard library.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Contents
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GNU/Linux
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Desktop/Laptop
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We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of New Jersey. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Question: I want to use Linux but it’s free and I’ve heard, “‘Free’ is not a viable business model.” How can I put my trust in a Linux operating system if the developers don’t charge for it? Answer: Offering substantial products and services that provide value for free only becomes a financial problem when the developer has no other revenue source to support the free product. Here is how Linux accomplishes that.
Episode Time Stamps
00:00 Going Linux #436 · Welcome to Linux! Pt7 – How Can Linux Be Free?
02:16 The question: Free isn’t a valid business model. How can open source software be provided at no charge?
04:12 Microsoft’s business model
06:07 Google’s business model
06:32 The Killed By Google list
07:40 Add-ons and ‘crapware’ to provide some missing features in Windows
11:14 Offering free software is not unusual
11:44 Examples of free Linux distributions backed by businesses with solid revenue models
14:12 How open source software features are made available for other open source software to adopt
17:13 Why Linux is not going away!
18:53 Linux provides significant value to its users
22:06 Not everything that’s free is bad
25:59 Switching to Linux is much like switching to macOS, Windows, or ChromeOS
26:47 Linux fights planned hardware obsolescence
28:29 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe
29:30 End
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Applications
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Last year, I dabbled with LXQt on our old laptop (a secondary machine) but I had not taken an in-depth look at it until recently. I read the announcement about the release of LXQt version 1.2.0 — on Nov. 5, 2022. Shortly thereafter, forum member daniel (Daniel Meiß-Wilhelm) created a Community LXQt 2022.11 .iso which incorporates the newest LXQt release. My curiosity was piqued, so I downloaded it, made a Live USB flash drive and installed the .iso on a spare partition of our Lenovo ThinkCentre M800 desktop computer. I would like to thank Daniel for sharing his remastering skills with the PCLinuxOS community.
My knowledge has expanded since I have been using LXQt almost exclusively for the past month. Thus far, I am impressed by LXQt; I find it comfortable enough that it could become my sole daily driver. It is a lightweight desktop environment that is useful for older PCs with limited resources. LXQt is visually appealing, feels responsive and strikes a balance between lightness and usability. Another advantage for “set-it-and-forget-it” users is that LXQt lacks the sometimes confusing multitude of configuration options in KDE Plasma.
If you are just starting with LXQt, I hope you will find these tips helpful and that they will save you some time as you explore the desktop environment.
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Today I will talk about the lightweight and versatile VNC client, SSVNC Viewer, which is in the PCLinuxOS repos.
SSVNC Viewer is the work of Karl Runge. Karl Runge worked on the LibVNCServer/LibVNCClient libraries and implemented a VNC server (the x11vnc) and the SSVNC-Viewer client.
The author, Karl Runge, however, disappeared around 2011, and there is currently no news about him.
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Koodo Reader is a modern and feature-rich ebook reader powered by Electron. It offers support for Epub, Mobipocket, Kindle, PDF, HTML, and numerous other common ebook and document formats. It is also ideal for use in study work, as you can easily highlight and annotate text in any document.
Sporting a modern and well designed user interface, Koodo Reader is quick and easy to use. It also has optional support for touchscreen gestures and usage. A dark interface mode can be enabled for reading books at night as well.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we’ll cover 20 of the most essential Linux commands that every system administrator should know. These commands are the building blocks of many common tasks, and with a good understanding of them, you’ll be able to accomplish a lot on your Linux servers.
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You can use your Yubikey 4 or 5 for the rest of the tutorial.
Why?
If you mark your Yubikey presence is required to unlock your computer, then one not only needs your password, they will have to gain physical access to your Yubikey.
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balenaEtcher is a popular and open-source tool used to create bootable USB drives. Its user-friendly interface is a preferred tool for many Fedora users. If you are new to Fedora, this guide will help you understand how to install BalenaEtcher on your system and get started with creating bootable USB drives. W
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WoeUSB is a free, open-source tool that allows you to create bootable Windows USB sticks from ISO images. This tool is handy for those who want to install Windows on their Ubuntu machine or for those who want to create a bootable Windows USB stick for use on other devices.
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Back in 2015 I helped record a course in security economics in a project driven by colleagues from Delft. This was launched as an EDX MOOC as well as becoming part of the Delft syllabus, and it has been used in many other courses worldwide.
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GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful and versatile open-source image editing software. It offers a range of features and capabilities that rival commercial image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop, making it a popular choice among graphic designers, photographers, and digital artists.
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OnlyOffice is a comprehensive online office suite that offers a range of powerful tools for teams to collaborate and work efficiently. Its history dates back to 2010 when the development of OnlyOffice started with the aim of providing a better alternative to traditional office suites.
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I go on YouTube regularly to try to learn more about GIMP & Inkscape. Recently, I found another channel called IronEcho Design, and he had a couple of videos about creating a mandala. Mandalas are symmetrical geometric designs and are getting a bit more popular. They can be simple lines, or more complicated. I got these first two from Pixabay.
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I began the series of articles about PDF files in the October 2022 issue. In that article, we talked about creating PDF files. Then, in the November 2022 issue, we talked about editing PDF files. In the January 2023 issue, we talked about how to use various GUI tools to manipulate PDF files.
This article represents what I plan to be the last article in the series. In this one, we’ll look at using some of the many command line tools available for manipulating PDF files. While I know that there are many users who avoid the command line like the proverbial plague, these command line tools are exceptionally easy to use. They are definitely the fastest way to manipulate PDF files, too. These tools follow the do-one-job-and-do-it-well philosophy that is so common for so many Linux utilities.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS Magazine
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We played them on a small child size phonograph that was capable of playing records at 78, 45, and 33 1/3 rpms. We had a lot of these records. They were very popular in the 1950s and 1960s. We’d save up our allowance to be able to buy more of these records periodically. One of the stores my parents frequently shopped at had a large section of these records, and we always visited it every time we went to that particular store. From there, we would purchase new ones for prices between 29 and 69 cents each.
It seems that these child focused phonograph records have become quite the collector’s item. Of course, this happens with all sorts of things once they aren’t produced any more. Depending on condition, the seller, the titles offered for sale, and a host of other assorted criteria, they now routinely sell for as much as $100 for a 29 item lot. Others sell on eBay for mostly between $6 and $12 per copy. The most expensive one I could find is a super rare 12″ Vogue Picture Record (78rpm) – A Trip To Slumberland, Part 1 & 2, that usually sells for $2,200 to $2,500 whenever it does show up for sale. The guy that had it listed for sale was offering it at a bargain $1,800.
Meanwhile, when I visited the home of my childhood best friend, his mom had an O-L-D crank-up Victrola record player. It didn’t need to be plugged in. It just needed to be cranked up. We’d spend afternoons playing old 78 rpm records from the early 1900s. Those old records looked way different than any other records we were familiar with. They were 12 inches in diameter, and THICK. Some were as thick as 1/4″. His mom had a “collection” of a few dozen of those old records, stored in a cabinet below the Victrola. Some of the songs were pretty good, while others made us laugh hysterically because they were just horribly bad. We’re talking about the mid 1960s here.
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Both of my kids just competed in the annual Pinewood Derby race in their Cub Scout pack (Pack 4865, Heart of America Council, Independence, MO) on January 21. This was their third Pinewood Derby (even though my daughter wasn’t an official Cub Scout for her first Derby, my son’s pack allowed her to enter a car in the sibling category). This meant that dad had not the customary one car to build, but two cars. But, that’s been the way it has been ever since we started racing in the Pinewood Derby.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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If you are looking for an easy-to-use, low learning curve, compatible, reliable Ubuntu-based distribution — Linux Mint is the ultimate choice. Here are some reasons to switch to Linux Mint. Ever considered that you are trapped in the vicious cycle of paying for Windows that came with OEM pre-installed on your desktop or laptop?
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Devices/Embedded
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The Ultron is a PLC system based on the NVIDIA Jetson designed for commercial and industrial AI edge applications. The main unit includes an IMU, dual RJ45 ports, CAN Bus and optional LTE, Wi-Fi and 5G connectivity. The system can be expanded with up to 7x additional I/O to suit diverse applications.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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Programming/Development
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A Merge Sort Tree (MST) is a data structure that allows for efficient querying of the number of elements less than or equal….
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Here’s a short post about two bugs I wrote while writing C++ code for the external scanner of my TLA⁺ tree-sitter grammar. External scanners use handwritten C or C++ code to parse the non-context-free parts of your language. I’ll try not to dump on C++ too hard but both of the bugs are highly ridiculous and exemplify why I hope to write as little of the language as possible for the rest of my career.
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Ok. Not ALL of them are about programming…
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Leftovers
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Nearly 50 vehicles were involved in multiple collisions along a highway in Hunan province within the span of 10 minutes.
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Nine people were missing while three crew members were picked up by rescuers.
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The Independent Singaporeposted a guest articleby someone offering advice for those caught in thefriend zone, a mental space where someone’s unrequited feelings are a source of resentment. Instead, it offers a cautionary tale.
We hung out and things seemed to flow so naturally that when she mentioned that she needed a place to stay – I invited her in. I was, as they say, a helpless romantic. But once she moved into the flat, I got “friend-zoned.”
If he wasn’t upfront with his feelings, she saw a friend offering help.
However, she was troubled and while she did honour her two promises to me (This was back in the Asian Financial crisis and I lent her 2,000 GBP for her school fees and got her to promise that she would do well in her career. In fairness, she paid back what she owed and if the profile I saw was really her – she seems to have done well), she had some funny ideas of what friendship meant.
This exposes the fundamental mistake friend zoners make.Love isn’t a transaction.
Being an honourable, caring person can surface feelings, but they can’t magic them into existence. The truth comes out with empathy: would you develop feelings for someone you don’t feel that way about if they took you to dinner or bought you a nice phone? Would you… want it to work like that?
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Science
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A real gift.
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Not all that glitter are bright.
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Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
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Most experts say the best solution is to simply give away the kits or to recycle them.
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Government parties disagree on how much meat you should eat.
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Just the tip of the iceberg.
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We celebrate the ninth World Cepelinai Day this Sunday. Proposed by Lithuanian-American Jonas Vaičiūnas, the holiday has been celebrated since February 2014, with people around the world making and devouring the hearty Lithuanian dish.
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Kit Knightly Hey remember last year? Remember the spring “bird flu outbreak”? Remember how it was all just a fear-porn story designed to discourage people from eating real food, drive up the price of poultry and eggs and sell more vaccines? Well, guess what… It’s groundhog day again. And I mean that quite literally since …
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Proprietary
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I have to disambiguate A380 now, given Intel’s foray into discrete GPUs. There’s something entirely nonsensical but fun about buying an ARC GPU for my next build so I can say it has an Airbus inside. But I digress.
Next time you’re feeling inadequate about a software incompatibility or miscalculation, spare a thought for the various A380 development teams.Simple Flyingquoted a final assembly mechanic as saying…
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The unraveling of market enthusiasm continued in the fourth quarter of 2022 with the earnings reports from the U.S. hyperscaler cloud providers now all in.
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Security
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Last month it was LastPass, and the dust has hardly even started to settle from that data breach. Now, it’s someone else’s turn. Thousands of Norton LifeLock customers had their accounts compromised in recent weeks, potentially allowing criminal hackers access to customer password managers, the company revealed in a recent data breach notice, according to an article on TechCrunch. The information was also relayed on Slashdot.
[...]
Bitwarden and other password managers are being targeted in Google ads phishing campaigns to steal users’ password vault credentials, according to an article on Bleeping Computer. User beware. It’s vitally important to inspect links before you click on them to make sure they aren’t a spoofed version just looking to grab as much of your data as they can.
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Defence/Aggression
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The Mozart Group, one of the most prominent, private American military organizations in Ukraine, has collapsed under a cloud of accusations ranging from financial improprieties to alcohol-addled misjudgments, writes Jeffrey Gettleman at ‘The New York Times’.
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The measure affects 38 individuals and 16 entities, including the Russian state-owned media group MIA Rossiya Segodyna.
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With the new year 2023, the visits of top American diplomats to South Asian countries have increased. These recent visits are concluded as the counter steps of the US against the Chinese influence in the region.
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Pope Francis wound up a peace mission to South Sudan on Sunday urging the people to make themselves immune to the “venom of hatred” to achieve the peace and prosperity that have eluded them through years of bloody ethnic conflicts.
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The Biden administration lauded the Pentagon for shooting down an alleged Chinese spy balloon off the US Atlantic coast on Saturday, but China angrily voiced its “strong dissatisfaction” at the move and said it may make “necessary responses.”
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The massive white orb that drifted across U.S. airspace and was shot down by the military has triggered a diplomatic maelstrom and blown up on social media.
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It was a blunder. Worse than that, it was a crime.
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China is threatening what it calls “further actions” after an American fighter jet shot down a suspected spy balloon off the East Coast of the United States on Saturday. The U.S. says the massive balloon was a surveillance craft that spent days crossing over sensitive military sites in North America.
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Eyes were locked on the Carolina skies Saturday as a suspected Chinese spy balloon ended a weeklong traverse over the U.S., drifted over the Atlantic Ocean and was shot down by a fighter jet. In Myrtle Beach, South Carolina people lined a boardwalk and cheered as a missile from an F-22 fighter struck the balloon and it plummeted into the water. As the balloon came over Myrtle Beach, software consultant Haley Walsh says she saw it floating in the clear blue sky. She felt and heard a boom and ran outside where she saw the balloon tumbling down.
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Pakistani former President Pervez Musharraf died on Sunday following a prolonged illness at a hospital in Dubai, after years in self-imposed exile.
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He died after a prolonged illness at a hospital, Pakistani media reported on Sunday.
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Pakistan’s former President General Pervez Musharraf has died in Dubai after a prolonged illness at Dubai American Hospital, according to a statement from the Pakistani military.
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Gone are the acres of jubilant crowds that filled Freedom Square with blue and yellow Ukrainian flags that swayed like heads of wheat when the Russians were driven out. Now the crack-crunch of Russian artillery eating into the city echoes around the plaza.
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The United States downed the Chinese balloon off the Carolina coast after it became the latest flashpoint in tensions between Washington and Beijing.
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After years of crippling problems and a changing mission, the Navy pushed to retire nine of its newest ships. Then the lobbying started.
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Ukraine has used the strategic town of Vuhledar to launch attacks disrupting transit on a critical rail link between the war’s southern and eastern fronts.
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General Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a bloodless coup and later led a reluctant Pakistan into aiding the U.S. war in Afghanistan against the Taliban, has died at 79.
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(Reuters) -Pakistani former President Pervez Musharraf died on Sunday following a prolonged illness at a hospital in Dubai…
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Pakistani police killed two commanders of the Pakistani Taliban militant group in the country’s northwest, a local officer said February 4.
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Chinese chipmakers accelerate wafer fab equipment purchases.
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The Ukrainian President’s Chief of Staff announced Saturday that 116 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been released and returned home.
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Hamilton County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Powers announced Friday that three officers involved in the fatal shooting of Joe Frasure, Jr. will not face criminal charges because their actions were justified. The shooting occurred after a 911 caller reported suspicious behavior outside an apartment building in Wyoming, Ohio.
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Two Russian missiles hit the center of Kharkiv in Ukraine’s northeast, with one of the missiles striking a residential building, local officials said, as intense fighting continues in the eastern Donbas region.
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UFO sightings are up across the country, but more stuff is also moving through the sky than ever before.
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A novel community-safety department has been taking calls off the hands of a force with the country’s second-highest fatal-shooting rate. Has it improved public safety?
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February 05, 2023 5:00 AM
USS NIMITZ, South China Sea –The first crossing of the Pacific by the USS Nimitz in 1987 probably went unnoticed. The world’s oldest serving aircraft carrier was then a strapping teenager; China was just beginning to stir. The Asian giant was a decade deep into its market reforms, immersed in building up its private sector and climbing up the GDP ranks.
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The Russian president made the promise during a desperate attempt to broker peace in the days after the invasion of Ukraine.
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Tensions between Washington and Beijing have intensified after two suspected Chinese spy balloons were detected flying over the US and Latin America.
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Washington to use Philippine sites to stage military response to a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan
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At least two civilians were wounded in a bomb blast in Kabul city on February 4, police said.
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The United States and Russia faced off on February 4 over a World Health Organization report on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, with Moscow saying it was politically motivated and Washington calling for it to be swiftly updated.
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The United States is considering new sanctions on Chinese surveillance companies over sales to Iran’s security forces.
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Two 16-year-olds face juvenile charges after social media posts showed them flashing handguns at their St. Paul charter school
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Germany has collected evidence of war crimes in Ukraine, the country’s prosecutor general said in a newspaper interview…
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Environment
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The wind chill atop Mount Washington in New Hampshire approached minus 110 degrees and an infant was killed when a tree fell on a car in western Massachusetts.
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Energy/Transportation
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Honda is accelerating its hydrogen strategy and aims to produce 60,000 fuel cell units by 2030.
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European Commission Press release Brussels, 04 Feb 2023 This decision will hit Russia’s revenues even harder and reduce its ability to wage war in Ukraine. It will also help stabilise global energy markets, benefitting countries across the world.
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David Boies is no stranger to quandary or controversy. In fact, over his long legal career he always seems to be courting it. You might recall how the 81-year-old super lawyer argued famously before the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore in the disputed 2000 election.
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Wildlife/Nature
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More than 80 hectares of bushland, including endangered animal habitat, is slated for development at two popular holiday spots near Jervis Bay on the NSW South Coast.
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Finance
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Dodgy personal and household goods drew the most complaints last year, as supply issues and shortages continued to frustrate the state.
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Former British prime minister Liz Truss blamed on Sunday the economic “orthodoxy” in the country’s finance ministry…
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Former British prime minister Liz Truss blamed on Sunday the economic “orthodoxy” in the country’s finance ministry, other nations and in parts of the governing Conservative Party for derailing her premiership and “plan for growth”.
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FINNAIRon Wednesday announced it is discontinuing both in-flight and pre-order retail sales on all of its flights this spring.
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French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne offered on Sunday to soften a planned pension overhaul to let some people who started work early also retire early in order to win conservatives support for the reform in parliament.
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Tammy Ho put on a brave face for the farewell photograph. But as the sign on her family’s fabric stall was taken down, she was silent and tearful.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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A law requiring photo identification in order to vote passed in Ohio Jan. 6, tightening restrictions on voting in the state. House Bill 458 was signed by Governor Mike DeWine, making Ohio one of the strictest states in the country in terms of voting regulations. Ohio joins just seven other states that strictly require photo…
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The young woman rifles through a fridge of popsicles, pulling out several to show the camera.
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Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has faith in Australians to ignore misinformation about the Indigenous voice to parliament and instead support the proposal.
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Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
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Authors: Dr. Maria Alesina and Ivan Kolpakov* The world has fully realised the power of the Russian propaganda machine only after the 24th of February 2022. The full-fledged invasion of Ukraine would have been impossible without the popular support – or at least silent toleration – of the Russians at home.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Wikipedia was blocked in Pakistan on February 4 after authorities censored the website for hosting “blasphemous content” in the latest blow to digital rights in the deeply conservative country.
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Network data confirm the restriction of online encyclopedia Wikipedia in Pakistan on multiple internet providers from Friday 3 February 2023.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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2/4/1824: Gibbons v. Ogden argued.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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By now, it’s common knowledge that the days of sharing Netflix passwords with friends and family across countries are numbered.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Finland has seen patent numbers decline over the past two years.
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Gemini* and Gopher
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Personal
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I was an off-and-on cannabis user from my mid teens through my early 30s. But then something changed. I couldn’t smoke without becoming paranoid, jumpy, and emotionally distraught. It’s possibly noteworthy that I was also well into a decade+ of severe untreated depression by then. So I quit. My body and psychology are obviously saying “don’t do this”, so I wasn’t gonna do it. I tried a few times between 2013 and 2023, but I always had the same terrible experience.
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* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
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