Apache and Nginx are great Web Servers. Linux and FreeBSD are fantastic systems for running them on. But… what if… we wanted to do something a little more off the beaten path? What if… we ran a Web Server… on DOS? Yeah. DOS. It's doable. Truly it is. And, while DOS may not be the high-up-time, massively scalable Web Server platform of the future… it's still a heck of a lot of fun to set up.
Welcome to the 323rd installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss amateur radio and the fires in Australia, state QSO parties, Brexit and CEPT, new extra pool questions, CERN, Facebook, Jericho, UNICEF and much, much more. Thank you for downloading and listening. We hope you have a fantastic week.
Wes and Ell sit down with Duncan McAlynn to discuss what mistakes we might all be making that could be putting our privacy and security at risk.
The companies that we entrust our personal data to are using that information to gain extensive insights into our lives and habits while not always making those findings accessible to us. Pascal van Kooten decided that he wanted to have the same capabilities to mine his personal data, so he created the Nostalgia project to integrate his various data sources and query across them. In this episode he shares his motivation for creating the project, how he is using it in his day-to-day, and how he is planning to evolve it in the future. If you're interested in learning more about yourself and your habits using the personal data that you share with the various services you use then listen now to learn more.
Systemd inventor Lennart Poettering described the new feature at the All Systems Go event in Berlin, September 2019, as reported here. Poettering said it would improve security as well as being more logical. "It solves a couple of problems we saw with traditional ways to manage home directories, in particular when it comes to encryption," he said in the release notes for version 245.
One use case is where a user has a PC running Linux in both their home and office, and is able to carry their home directory with them on a portable storage device. The advent of cloud storage has made this less of a problem than would have been the case a few years back, and a common reaction to the new systemd approach is that the problems it fixes are not pressing and may be outweighed by potential incompatibilities.
MuQSS is Con's CPU scheduler that evolved out of his prior BFS scheduler implementation with a focus on mobile/desktop systems. With the new MultiQueue Skiplist Scheduler v0.198, the principal change is just re-basing it against the Linux 5.5 source tree.
Announcing a new -ck release, 5.5-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.198. These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.
The first stable driver release of 2020, yesterday NVIDIA put out the 440.59 driver for Linux users.
It brings in a few new features like support for audio over DisplayPort Multi-Stream which requires Linux Kernel 5.5 at a minimum, PRIME Synchronization support for Linux kernel 5.4 and newer, a default filename when saving the Display Configuration file in nvidia-settings if an existing configuration file is not detected and they also updated the driver to allow NVIDIA High Definition Audio (HDA) controllers to respond to display hotplug events while the HDA is runtime-suspended.
Some fixes made it in too like solving a bug that could cause the X server to crash while exiting DPMS with HardDPMS enabled and also an issue got fixed "that caused DXVK titles to endlessly loop during shader compilation if no OpSource instruction was present"—which is the same fix from the previous Vulkan Beta driver that was specifically for using vkBasalt with DXVK.
If you’ve ever wanted a graphical tool to track and manage basic permissions for Flatpak applications, you should know that there’s now Flatseal.
Flatpak apps are becoming more and more popular these days as they allow you to install certain apps that aren’t available or regularly updated in the software repositories of your GNU/Linux distribution. While they run sandboxed, limited access to the host environment, Flatpak applications require certain permissions.
Tracking and changing these permissions for all of your installed Flatpak apps could become cumbersome or time consuming. Developed by Martin Abente Lahaye, Flatseal features a simple, straightforward design that does exactly what it says on the tin. It presents users with a list of installed Flatpak apps and basic permissions.
By default, the application displays all available permissions for all installed Flatpak apps and which permissions each app requested. Users will be able to inspect all available permissions and grant or deny app permissions for each application.
Linux does a great job automatically recognizing, loading, and exposing attached hardware devices from countless vendors. In fact, it was this feature that, many years ago, convinced me to insist that my employer convert its entire infrastructure to Linux. The pain point was the way a certain company in Redmond couldn't load drivers for the integrated network card on our Compaq desktops while Linux did it effortlessly.
In the years since then, Linux's library of recognized devices has grown enormously along with the sophistication of the process. And the star of that show is udev. Udev's job is to listen for events from the Linux kernel involving changes to the state of a device. It could be a new USB device that's plugged in or pulled out, or it might be a wireless mouse going offline as it's drowned in spilled coffee.
Raspberry Pi’s own Mac Bowley shows you how to make the beginnings of a top-down driving game inspired by 1983’s Spy Hunter.
Since the day of Google's launch of Stadia, its video game streaming platform that was supposed to be the end of home consoles, the platform arrived to reactions that ranged from "meh" to laughter at how terribly the launch was going. Between that reception and the public backlash from the platform not living up to its promises, a whole lot of folks have cast very narrow eyes at Google's platform as a whole.
MediaTek introduced their first mobile processors designed specifically with gaming in mind last year with MediaTek Helio G90 and G90T SoC’s coupling Arm Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 cores...
Veloren, inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft this new and in-development open-world RPG certainly has a lot to live up to and a lot of promise.
Mentioned here on GOL a few months ago, the team put out a huge new release recently with Veloren 0.5 bringing in absolutely tons of new and improved features. These include the ability to drop items, clouds, a "proper" SFX system, jumping while underwater, a death+hurt screen, an animated Map and Minimap position indicator, rivers and lakes which follow realistic physical paths, overhauled NPC AI, NPC pathfinding, a waypoint system, Pets now attack enemies and defend their owners, 28 new creatures and an absolute ton more.
ULTRAKILL, mentioned briefly here on GOL recently is an upcoming retro-inspired FPS that's about violent machines powered by Blood and there's a brand new demo.
Set in a time long after we went exctinct, the only beings left are these robots and the Blood is running out so they're racing to the depths of Hell in search of more. As you can expect, it's quite violent and Blood will be spilled everywhere.
Three Flip Studios have announced their local/online competitive multiplayer party game Armed and Gelatinous is releasing with Linux support in Q3 this year.
Originally funded on Kickstarter and then moving into Early Access on Steam, they decided to stop purchases and get working on the game in a closed-Beta form to ensure it's properly ready for release. They're almost ready, with the addition of online multiplayer for the full release to expand the audience.
Choose one of four colourful blobs and race through space for tacos in Food Fight mode, compete in Dodgeball and Football (Soccer to some) games or enter the Deathmatch of the century. Master weapons including grenade launchers and machine guns in the single player campaign. Absorb firearms, balancing increased damage with increased mass and declining mobility to dominate the competition. Sounds like a huge amount of fun.
Book of Travels has to be one of the most intriguing games releasing all year. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Might & Delight have now confirmed their TMORPG (Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG) will go into Early Access.
Not heard of Might & Delight? They created Tiny Echo, Meadow, Shelter and more and have created quite a name for themselves for the incredible worlds they made. Book of Travels continues their unique world-building, with an online RPG that focuses on exploration and discovery rather than stats and numbers.
I come across a lot of really weird games, sometimes though they're the right kind of weird which is the case with KARLSON.
A first-person shooter with simple visuals, fast-paced action with a little parkour thrown in and slow-motion which makes this a little bit hilarious. It helps that there's some silly physics going on, you can throw things around and make stuff explode.
Inspired by the classic Frontier: Elite II, Pioneer is a free and open source space adventure sim. Open-ended exploration, allowing you to do whatever you want and there's a big release out now.
The first release in some time too, with the last being in February 2019. Yesterday's update brings in an initial implementation of atmospheric lift and drag, a manual player face generator, many UI improvements, star rendering optimisation, the ship warning system also now detects missiles, a music upgrade, it's now using SDL2's AudioDevice APIs to hopefully give less crashes, more station names added and more.
Rokabium Games recently announced that Something Ate My Alien will be releasing this April, with Linux support. A strange mixture of digging through tunnels, solving puzzles, upgrading/crafting and a little action-platforming in between with wonderful hand-painted visuals.
Three years after the Kickstarter campaign, the great looking dark sci-fi action RPG Hellpoint from Cradle Games and tinyBuild is confirmed for launch with Linux support on April 16.
Hellpoint is an intense, dark sci-fi RPG set on a derelict space station orbiting an ominous supermassive black hole. Taking inspiration from games like Dark Souls and Dead Space and movies like Event Horizon and Hellraiser, Hellpoint is doubling down on co-op multiplayer (with both split-screen and online support) while immersing players in a twisted narrative involving Cosmic Gods, quantum physics, and extinct space civilizations. Sounds awesome, everything I want in a sci-fi game.
Lately, tiling window managers have been gaining popularity even among the regular desktop Linux users. Unfortunately, it can be difficult and time-consuming for a user to install and set up a tiling window manager.
This is why projects like Regolith and PaperWM has come up to provide tiling window experience with minimal efforts.
We have already discussed Regolith desktop in details. In this article, we’ll check out PaperWM.
What is PaperWM?
According to its GitHub repo, PaperWM is “an experimental Gnome Shell extension providing scrollable tiling of windows and per monitor workspaces. It’s inspired by paper notebooks and tiling window managers.”
PaperWM puts all of your windows in a row. You can quickly switch between windows very quickly. It’s a little bit like having a long spool of paper in front of you that you can move back and forth.
This extension supports GNOME Shell 3.28 to 3.34. It also supports both X11 and Wayland. It is written in JavaScript.
In my role as a community architect at Red Hat, I advise a number of project leaders on the ways in which they can develop the audience and community for their projects. In that capacity, I often talk to the leaders of projects with which I am not very familiar. Over time, I have found myself asking the same questions over and over, and I have found them useful, not only to help me understand the projects, but to help the project leaders understand what they are trying to achieve.
I have asked these questions so often, I have created a template that I use during these conversations, to take notes and share the results with the project leaders afterwards. In this post, I will run through the seven questions I ask, and how the answers to these questions can shape all follow-up recommendations for community development.
Now we have official Tor RPM repositories for Fedora, CentOS/RHEL. The support documentation is already in place.
Using this repository, you can get the latest Tor build for your distribution from the upstream project itself. Tor already provides similar packages for Debian/Ubuntu systems.
Anyone who has used libvirt should be familiar with the libvirtd daemon which runs most of the virtualization and secondary drivers that libvirt distributes. Only a few libvirt drivers are stateless and run purely in the library. Internally libvirt has always tried to maintain a fairly modular architecture, with each hypervisor driver being a separated from other drivers. There are also secondary drivers providing storage, network, firewall functionality which are notionally separate from all the virtualization drivers. Over time the separation has broken down with hypervisor drivers directly invoking internal methods from the secondary drivers, but last year there was a major effort to reverse this and re-gain full separation between every driver.
There are various problems with having a monolithic daemon like libvirtd. From a security POV, it is hard to provide any meaningful protections to libvirtd. The range of functionality it exposes, provides an access level that is more or less equivalent to having a root shell. So although libvirtd runs with a “virtd_t” SELinux context, this should be considered little better than running “unconfined_t“. As well as providing direct local access to the APIs, the libvirtd daemon also has the job of exposing remote access over TCP, most commonly needed when doing live migration. Exposing the drivers directly over TCP is somewhat undesirable given the size of the attack surface they have.
The biggest problems users have seen are around reliability of the daemon. A bug in any single driver in libvirt can impact on the functionality of all other drivers. As an example, if something goes wrong in the libvirt storage mgmt APIs, this can harm management of any QEMU VMs. Problems can be things like crashes of the daemon due to memory corruption, or more subtle things like main event loop starvation due to long running file handle event callbacks, or accidental resource cleanup such as closing a file descriptor belonging to another thread.
Libvirt drivers are shipped as loadable modules, and an installation of libvirt does not have to include all drivers. Thus a minimal installation of libvirt is a lot smaller than users typically imagine it is. The existance of the monolithic libvirtd daemon, however, and the fact the many apps pull in broader RPM dependencies than they truly need, results in a perception that libvirt is bloated / heavyweight.
Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a 3 month programming project during their break from school. In the previous year, Fedora had an awesome participation and we would like to continue to be mentoring Org this year too.
Migration to a new, bigger server is almost done, all the services works from the new one already. Important! A new Sparky repository public key has been generated so manually intervention is required!
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In January, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 23.75h for LTS (out of 30 max) and 20h for ELTS (max) of which I did 1.5h.
I couldn't work much on ELTS because there are very few sponsors left for oldoldoldstable (sic!), hence not many packages to support, hence not much possible work.
In a direct communication, one team member expressed that team workflow is to be discussed on a private mailing list because according to them these problems don't need to be discussed in public and only results count. I have an opposite approach -- anything that isn't strictly confidential / security-sensitive is to be discussed publicly. The Debian Social Contract says "We don't hide problems" so if we want to address problems in a Debian workflow, this is to be public.
I am a huge proponent of using Linux-based desktop operating systems, and I try to convert people from Windows whenever it makes sense. Why do I do this? Well, Linux distributions, believe it or not, are often easier to use than Microsoft's operating system. With so many people living in the web browser these days, a Linux installation with Google Chrome is largely all an average user needs. More advanced users can install excellent free software such as LibreOffice or GIMP -- if needed. Not to mention, it can be argued that Linux is more secure than Windows. Overall, switching to Linux is a huge win for many.
Even installing a Linux distro is easy these days. Long gone are the days where the installation required a degree in computer science (except for Arch, maybe). The current Ubuntu installer, for instance, is more straightforward than the one found on Windows 10! So why in the hell is Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, making it seem so damn hard? You see, the company has put out an installation guide that will make a person curious about switching to Ubuntu to instead run for the hills.
Installing an operating system is not an easy task. For most people, this is something they will never have done. The vast majority of people buy computers with the operating system already installed, so they never have to manually run through the system setup. The process can be intimidating, but we will try to make it as simple as possible.
In this article, we’d like to continue the journey we started last week – how to successfully migrate from Windows 7 to Ubuntu. In the first article, we talked about the preparation steps – the differences between Windows and Ubuntu, software parity, hardware support, and data backup ahead of the change. Here, we will show you how to safely install Ubuntu. In the last tutorial of this series, we will tour the Ubuntu desktop, install popular applications, and learn how to use Ubuntu.
Industry leaders such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud have made it possible to run Windows 10 and Linux-based open source operating systems on the cloud.
This functionality has helped many startups and enterprises flourish their businesses without setting up an infrastructure of their own and get the benefit of open source technologies.
Pine64's new $150 Linux-powered smartphone, the PinePhone attracted a lot of attention among ZDNet's readers when it was launched last month. The company has now announced a new single-board computer (SBC) that's closer to its roots in making challengers to the more famous Raspberry Pi. At the FOSDEM open-source conferences in Brussels last weekend, Pine64 unveiled the HardRock64 SBC, which uses the same Rockchip RK3399 system on chip (SoC) it employed in last year's $200 PineBook Pro laptop.
Pine64 has followed the Raspberry Pi Foundation's move with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B by offering three SKUs and matching the Raspberry Pi on price, too.
As the first new Pine64 board in a year you will be forgiven for assuming that the HardROCK64 will, by nature of being new, be more powerful, or better featured than its predecessor.
But it’s not.
The HardROCK64 is built around the same six-core Rockchip RK3399 chip in the older RockPRO64 board (which also sits at the heart of the Pinebook Pro laptop). This offers 2 powerful ARM cortex A72 cores @ 2.0GHz, and 4 low-power ARM Cortex A53 cores @ 1.6GHz.
Similarly, the HardROCK64 comes with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, ethernet, Bluetooth 5, and a microSD card slot as standard.
So what is different, you ask?
Firstly the price. The HardROCK64 costs from $35. That’s a whole $30 cheaper than the board its related to without any major sacrifice in the power or performance — a pretty big deal, I think.
Secondly, it omits a couple of hardware features its sibling touts, namely a USB-C port and PCIe connectors. While these are “nice to have”, they weren’t essential for a lot of the tasks developers are using the board for, so jettisoning them to lower the price is a pragmatic move.
Otherwise, The HardROCK64 is maintains all the other benefits of the regular RockPRO64, including full GPIO pins, SPI flash, eMMC socket, CSI and DSI connectors, IR receiver, heatsink mount (which will be needed, as the board is said to run hot) and more.
Next month SCaLE 18X the 18th annual Southern California Linux Expo will take place running from March 5-8th, 2020 at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 18X expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events. SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area. This year’s schedule of events is now available to view over on the official SCaLE 18X website allowing you to plan your visit.
“Master new cyber security skills at our three-day SCaLE 18x Capture The Flag competition. Whether you’re a beginner who’s never tried a CTF before, an experienced competitor looking for an energizing challenge, or a professional who just wants to have fun, this event is for you. This year we have a new delivery platform and all-new content. We are welcoming back Cal Poly Pomona’s Swift student club and Attivo Networks as our platform hosts.”
Michel Weimerskirch, the extension’s maintainer, explains more: “My goal is to provide good quality spell-checking tools for the Luxembourgish language. LibreOffice is available on all major platforms for free, and also has the necessary programming interfaces I needed to even implement a phonological rule that could now be implemented using standard spell checking libraries. Since then, LibreOffice has grown to be even more mature, so that nowadays there is definitely no reason anymore not to use it in a professional environment.”
Paolo Vecchi, a local LibreOffice supporter – and recently elected as member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation – worked with Michel Weimerskirch to publish the new dictionary on the LibreOffice extensions portal, and will coordinate with the local Government and European institutions established in Luxembourg to help them upgrade to the most complete and professional open source office suite.
History time! LibreOffice is a successor to OpenOffice(.org) and StarOffice before that. We have new major releases every six months, bringing important new features, security updates and compatibility improvements… (Click to enlarge)
There have recently been concerns raised on various mailing lists about the identity of Cryptie in FSFE.
For many years, Amandine Jambert has wandered around the free software world using a pseudonym, Cryptie. While anybody else using an alternative name has been accused of trolling, Jambert has had some immunity. Why? As concerns grow about the hidden conflicts of interests and corporate influence in free software organizations and as these organizations use the weight of their reputations to shame and humiliate people, it is more important than ever to identify the controllers of the organizations.
Thanks to Wright's investigations, we can now search for information about Cryptie and search for information about Amandine Jambert @ CNIL and find they are the same person.
[...]
There have recently been concerns raised on various mailing lists about the identity of Cryptie in FSFE.
For many years, Amandine Jambert has wandered around the free software world using a pseudonym, Cryptie. While anybody else using an alternative name has been accused of trolling, Jambert has had some immunity. Why? As concerns grow about the hidden conflicts of interests and corporate influence in free software organizations and as these organizations use the weight of their reputations to shame and humiliate people, it is more important than ever to identify the controllers of the organizations.
Thanks to Wright's investigations, we can now search for information about Cryptie and search for information about Amandine Jambert @ CNIL and find they are the same person.
glibc hits 2.31
The team behind GNU project’s implementation of the C standard has finished work on version 2.31 and pushed it into the open. To many, one of the most interesting additions contained in the release is a feature test macro enabling features from the draft ISO C2X standard, the next major C release which might be ready for vote in 2021.
To make the project more accessible to Myanmar users, it now comes with a new locale to support the Mon language. Other goodies include type-generic macros to go along with some functions that round their results to a narrower type, a function enabling join with a terminated thread with a specific clock, and a new mode for the DNS stub resolver.
A Qt account is mandatory to download binary Qt packages. The offline installer is not available to FOSS users any more.
LTS (long-term support) releases are not available to FOSS users, once the next minor or major release is out.
The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. It features interactivity, modularity, extensibility, with flexibility of data types.
Logo offers a rich programming environment providing multimedia tools, robotics and network access. Full-featured Logo packages provide hundreds of commands for exploring all sorts of applications, from the simplest turtle graphics to artificial intelligence.
After having several more of these conversations over the course of a few weeks—many of them lively and fruitful—I came to one clear conclusion: Although I was getting lots of great input, I wasn't going to find any kind of consensus about priorities among the leadership team.
So why was I asking?
Eventually I realized what was really underlying my desire to seek input: not just a desire to learn from the people I was interviewing, but also a nagging question in my gut. "Am I doing the right thing?"
One manifestation of anxiety is a worry that we're doing something wrong, which is also related to imposter syndrome (worry that we're going to be "found out" as unqualified for or incapable of the work or the role we've been given).
I've previously described a positive "anxiety performance loop" that can drive high performance. I can occasionally fall into another kind of anxiety loop, an "inaction loop," which can lower performance. Figure 1 (below) illustrates it.
Early on, software development didn't really fit under a particular management umbrella. Then along came waterfall, which spoke to the idea that software development could be defined by the length of time an application took to create or build.
Back then, it often took long periods of time to create, test, and deploy software because there were no checks and balances during the development process. The results were poor software quality with defects and bugs and unmet timelines. The focus was on long, drawn-out plans for software projects.
The demand for software developers continues to grow. The US is expected to add nearly 300,000 new software developer jobs in the next 10 years, according to HackerRank's Developer Skills report released on Tuesday.
Additionally, job seekers from varied educational backgrounds and demographics are now turning to tech. Coding bootcamps are helping to facilitate career changes by making the necessary skills more accessible.
This week saw a lot of releases! First of all, the Rakudo Compiler Release 2020.01 was finished by Alexander Kiryuhin, quickly followed by Claudio Ramirez packaging the release for many, many Linux distributions and JJ Merelo with an Alpine Docker image. Then Fernando Santagata started releasing modules that support the GNU Scientific Library (see the New Modules section). Jonathan Worthington released a new version of Cro 0.8.2.1 as well as a new version of the Comma Community IDE (main new features). And Stefan Seifert released a new version of Inline::Perl5. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg this week. Good to see so much new stuff!
Data Structure is a collection of data types, the relationship among them and the functions or operations that can be applied on the data. Data type can be string, Integer, Floating value and so on.
Python comes with built-in data structures as well as users can define their own data structures. The built-in data structure includes LIST, DICTIONARY, TUPLE, and SET. Some of the examples for user-defined data structures are STACK, QUEUES, TREE, HASHMAP, etc…
Adding images to your application is a common requirement, whether you're building an image/photo viewer, or just want to add some decoration to your GUI. Unfortunately, because of how this is done in Qt, it can be a little bit tricky to work out at first.
In this short tutorial, we will look at how you can insert an external image into your PyQt5/Pyside2 application layout, using both code and Qt Designer.
Day One consisted of setting up at the venue, Campus 4 of the Sorbonne University, as well as collecting and discussing our tasks for the next days, and starting the work.
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh said he’s been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
When a sports legend dies, the emotional and political aftermath can speak volumes. For some like me, the death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant along with his daughter and seven other souls in an LA-area helicopter crash on January 26 feels a bit like losing a close friend. That sounds confused and confusing. Bear with me.
The semiconductor industry last year suffered its worst annual slump in almost two decades, hurt by a trade war between the largest chip producer, the U.S., and the largest consumer, China.
Revenue fell 12% to $412 billion in 2019, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Monday in a statement. That’s the biggest drop since 2001, when industry sales slumped 32% as the dot-com bubble burst.
The Japanese government told embassy officials from nearly two dozen countries that releasing the water into the ocean was a "feasible" approach that could be done "with certainty."
It is at long last time for the United States to move from providing the world's most expensive sick care to providing the world's greatest healthcare.
On February 2, Zimbabwe joined global efforts to mark World Wetlands Day with the theme, “Wetlands and Biodiversity.” This comes at a time when environmental groups have raised concerns about the government’s poor protection of wetlands in the country, particularly in the capital, Harare, which faces a major water crisis. More than half of the city’s 4.5 million residents are without access to clean water and are at risk of waterborne diseases like cholera and typhoid.
Wetlands are important for several reasons. They filter water by breaking down harmful pollutants including chemicals, separate them from the water, and use the chemicals as fertilizer for vegetation growing on the wetland. They are also natural sewage systems, filtering out waste and running clean water into rivers.
The news: Facebook has started deleting posts that contain false claims about the coronavirus, especially ones spreading dangerous misinformation about treatment—such as that drinking bleach cures the virus—and incorrect advice about available health resources.€
On February 3, Russian Railways suspended all passenger services to and from North Korea, the state-owned company’s press service reported.
I frequently write about the misinformation and disinformation about cancer, chemotherapy, and other modalities used to treat cancer spread by believers in alternative medicine and, in particular, in alternative cancer cures. If there’s one thing that characterizes the disinformation about chemotherapy promoted by cancer quacks, it’s an extreme demonization of chemotherapy as ineffective poison. Of course, chemotherapy is indeed toxic, although lost in the fear mongering is that the toxicity of chemotherapy depends a lot on the specific chemotherapeutic agents used. In other words, some chemotherapy drugs are not that toxic, while others are very toxic, with others ranging somewhere between the two extremes. Yet, to those promoting alternative cancer cures, “chemotherapy” is to describe all chemotherapy, which is always described in the most horrific terms. Recently, I came across an article by Kelsey Osgood entitled “Chemotherapy Truthers Are the New Anti-Vaxxers“.
Over 100,000 people have registered for the free ‘Introduction to Kubernetes’ course, hosted by The Linux Foundation with edX.org.
Security researchers at Check Point have identified two major security flaws in Microsoft Azure that could be exploited by hackers to gain access to sensitive information stored on machines running Azure or to take over Azure servers.
The first security flaw was discovered in Azure Stack and if exploited, it would enable a hacker to gain access to screenshots and other sensitive information from machines running Azure.
Azure stack is a cloud computing software solution that was developed by Microsoft to allow enterprises to deliver Azure services from their own data centers. The software giant created Azure Stack as a means of helping organizations embrace hybrid cloud computing on their own terms while still being able to address business and technical considerations.
The email didn’t give details on why the event had been canceled, but it had to do with an unexpected item on Kayyem’s resumé. She had served as a consultant for NSO Group, a prominent spyware vendor that has been linked to several hacks against journalists in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Bahrain.
Over the last month, researchers at security firms including Sentinel One and Dragos have puzzled over a piece of code called Snake or EKANS, which they now believe is specifically designed to target industrial control systems, the software and hardware used in everything from oil refineries to power grids to manufacturing facilities. Much like other ransomware, EKANS encrypts data and displays a note to victims demanding payment to release it; the name comes from a string it plants as a file marker on a victim computer to identify that its files have already been encrypted.
But EKANS also uses another trick to ratchet up the pain: It's designed to terminate 64 different software processes on victim computers, including many that are specific to industrial control systems. That allows it to then encrypt the data that those control system programs interact with. While crude compared to other malware purpose-built for industrial sabotage, that targeting can nonetheless break the software used to monitor infrastructure, like an oil firm's pipelines or a factory's robots. That could have potentially dangerous consequences, like preventing staff from remotely monitoring or controlling the equipment's operation.
According to the latest report published by The Debian Project, a Sudo vulnerability exists that allows hackers to gain access to root privileges and execute commands.
The vulnerability exists in the Sudo package (Sudo stands for “superuser do”) which allows users to execute programs and commands with security privileges of a superuser.
It happens to everyone.€ You’re scrolling through your Facebook feed and encounter a name you either dislike or admire.€ You head over to their page to check out the latest news or analysis, or to laugh at their latest bad take, but something’s off.€ The page seems incomplete.€ And then you realize why.€ You immediately direct message [DM] a trusted partner in private gossip:€ “I think that fucker unfriended me.”
Late last week, legally and ethically-dubious facial recognition tech developer Clearview was sued for violating an Illinois law making certain collection and storage of biometric information illegal. I was very dismissive of the lawsuit, stating that scraping of publicly-posted photos couldn't possibly create an actionable violation of privacy.
The New Zealand Supreme Court has declined Kim Dotcom's appeal in his bid to access private communications captured illegally by the country's spy agency. Dotcom will still be entitled to damages for the unlawful intrusion into his private life but he says this matter is not about money. Instead, he seeks to hold the GCSB agency accountable for its illegal behavior, for the benefit of all New Zealanders.
The latest attack on encryption is here, and it’s being championed under the cover of – surprise surprise – a necessary step to protect the children. Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Richard Blumenthal are proposing a new bill called the ‘‘Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2019,” abbreviated as the EARN IT Act.
Almost three years ago, artist Simon Weckert noticed something unusual at a May Day demonstration in Berlin: Google Maps showed there was a massive traffic jam, even though there were zero cars on the road. Soon enough, Weckert realized that it was the mass of people, or more specifically their smartphones, that had inadvertently tricked Google into seeing gridlock on an empty street. And then he decided to do it himself.
“The question was if it might be possible to generate something like this in a much simpler way,” Weckert says. “I don’t need the people. I just need their smartphones.”
And so Weckert borrowed phones from friends and from rental companies until he had acquired 99 devices, which he piled into a little red wagon. The Google Maps Hack project had begun.
Google Maps is an invaluable tool for anyone who drives a car in a big city, offering details on traffic snarls or bottlenecks on major roads. A lot of us religiously check Google Maps before going anywhere, to properly plan our routes. Google itself runs ad campaigns encouraging users to do the same. But the system isn't foolproof and can be deceived, as hilariously demonstrated by a man in Berlin who used 99 smartphones and a hand cart to create ‘fake' traffic jams in the German capital.
Simon Weckert, a Berlin-based artist, pulled off the stunt and detailed his findings in a video published on his YouTube channel, as well as on his own blog. In the video, Weckert is shown pulling 99 smartphones with location turned on in a hand cart on city streets, including the street right outside Google's office in Berlin.
" 99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic. "
Dasha Metropolitansky and Kian Attari, two students at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, recently built a tool that combs through vast troves of consumer datasets exposed from breaches for a class paper they’ve yet to publish.
“The program takes in a list of personally identifiable information, such as a list of emails or usernames, and searches across the leaks for all the credential data it can find for each person,” Attari said in a press release.
They told Motherboard their tool analyzed thousands of datasets from data scandals ranging from the 2015 hack of Experian, to the hacks and breaches that have plagued services from MyHeritage to porn websites. Despite many of these datasets containing “anonymized” data, the students say that identifying actual users wasn’t all that difficult.
What is the purpose of having passwords on our phones?
For most of us, the answer is obvious: to protect our personal information. Our phones, like our online accounts, our email address and even our private chats, hold an increasing quantity of information, covering every aspect of our lives, that we want to keep private.
This information can range from your banking information to corporate trade secrets and even intimate details about your sexual orientation. People seek privacy to protect themselves from oppressive governments, thieves, abusive partners, bullies or simply because they enjoy the freedom it provides in an increasingly exposed world.
Two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza during a flare-up in fighting with Palestinian armed groups in November 2019 killed at least 11 civilians, in apparent violations of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said today.
Between November 12 and 14, Palestinian armed groups also fired hundreds of rockets and mortars into Israel, causing shock or light injuries to 78 civilians, according to the United Nations. These attacks also violated the laws of war. Human Rights Watch found that at least two rockets apparently fired by Palestinian armed groups landed in Gaza, one killing a Palestinian man and injuring 16 others, and the other hitting the offices of a local human rights organization, causing damage but no casualties.
The Organization of Islamic Cooperation emphasized that "peace and security in the Middle East region, as a strategic option, will only be achieved with the end of the Israeli occupation."
When the two old political fraudsters emerged at the White House this week with the most deranged, farcical tragi-comedy in Middle East history, it was difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.
Hatice Cengiz's "courage to sit in the House Chamber Tuesday night should serve as a clarion call to the president," said Rep. Gerry Connolly.
Thailand’s attorney general should overturn a departmental decision to drop the most serious charges against four park officials for the abduction and murder of a prominent ethnic Karen activist, Human Rights Watch said today. The officials currently face only minor malfeasance charges for the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial execution of Porlajee “Billy” Rakchongcharoen in April 2014.
“The handling of Billy’s case makes a mockery of Thai government pledges to pursue justice and end the culture of impunity,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “For five years, Thai authorities have failed to prosecute officials who allegedly abducted this prominent rights defender, brutally murdered him, and burned his remains in an oil drum.”
The fundamental flaw at the heart of Trump’s Palestine/Israel plan, presumptuously titled Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People, is that Trump — like his predecessors — believes that the Israelis are the aggrieved party and the Palestinians are the not-fully-human aggressors inherently unworthy of even the minimum trust accorded fellow human beings. You can see this premise throughout Trump’s corrupt blueprint for the future of Israel and Palestine.
Media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict over the years has typically portrayed Palestinians as obstinate and imperious negotiating partners who insist on unreasonable preconditions before reaching an agreement (e.g.,€ US News,€ 6/20/12;€ Wall Street Journal,€ 4/28/13;€ Jerusalem Post,€ 7/18/17). When Israel’s preconditions are€ reported, the precondition that the peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians should be€ mediated by the US€ is often omitted.
On January 20, something rather strange happened in orbit. A Russian satellite suddenly maneuvered itself so that it was closely shadowing a US spy satellite. The pair are now less than 186 miles (300 kilometers) apart—a short distance when it comes to space. While we don’t know for sure what’s going on, the Russian satellite’s actions strongly suggest it is there to spy on the US one—and there is very little the US can do about it.
Neel V. Patel
The Telegram-based investigative news outlet Baza has reported that four officers from the Special Operations Center of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) have been killed near Aleppo, Syria. Baza claimed that a vehicle carrying the officers rode over a land mine, and a group of armed fighters subsequently shot the wounded troops.
The joint investigation between Iran and Ukraine into last month’s downing of a passenger airliner appears to have collapsed amid acrimony over the level of compensation Iran should pay, as well as the leak of a recording that appears to confirm Iranian officials knew immediately that their military had shot Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 out of sky with a missile.
The three members of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA) had already been charged by Danish police for supporting an attack in Iran in 2018.
"It is the view of PET (The Danish Security and Intelligence Service) that the three people, in the period from 2012 to 2018, have been spying for a Saudi Arabian intelligence service," PET chief Finn Borch Andersen told reporters.
Denmark said on Monday it had arrested three leading members of an Iranian Arab opposition group on suspicion of spying for Saudi Arabia.
But here’s something you’ve probably never heard of, and it’s something not even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has really considered: thermokarst. That’s the land that gets ravaged whenever permafrost thaws rapidly. As the ice that holds the soil together disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up. Climate scientists have been working gradual permafrost thaw into their models—changes that run centimeters deep over decades or centuries. But abrupt permafrost thaw happens on the scale of meters over months or years. That shocks the surrounding landscape into releasing potentially even more carbon than would have if it thawed at a more leisurely pace.
Today in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers argue that without taking abrupt thaws into account, we’re underestimating the impact of permafrost thaw by 50 percent. “The amount of carbon coming off that very narrow amount of abrupt thaw in the landscape, that small area, is still large enough to double the climate consequences and the permafrost carbon feedback,” says study lead author Merritt Turetsky, of the University of Guelph and University of Colorado Boulder.
A class of chemicals abbreviated as PFAS has contaminated water in at least 425 military sites, pushing Department of Defense (DOD) Secretary Mark Esper to take action on his first day in office and start a task force to address the substance.
The review from the DOD’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) is a response to a request spearheaded Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) that asks how long the DOD has known PFAS was harmful to human health, how the military will address cleaning up the substance, and how it will take care of service members and communities harmed by PFAS.
A recent wave of endorsements reflects the Vermont Senator’s appeal for younger voters who are concerned with climate.
Without Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, "the climate issue would not have been on the agenda to such an extent as it is today."
"Unless we ban fracking, these terrifying climate trends will intensify."
"The best reason to divest fossil fuel stock is that you'd like to help preserve a livable planet. Another reason is so that you won't lose your money."
https://www.projectcensored.org/podcast-player/22099/peter-phillips-and-tim-ogburn-should-pacific-gas-electric-co-be-a-public-power-authority.mp3
Two European states with a traditional reliance on coal are taking radically different paths as the climate crisis worsens.
“We think we are at or near peak Permian,” Waterous told Bloomberg. “The North American oil market has been grossly overcapitalized, which is not€ sustainable.”
“This data shows that in reality, the bigger your bank balance, the bigger your megaphone. And that instead of representing our interests, our politicians are beholden to the big donors who fund their campaigns.”
In 2011, the year that they studied, Americans streamed 3.2 billion hours of video, which consumed 25 petajoules of energy (enough to power about 175,000 U.S. households for one year) and emitted 1.3 billion kilograms of CO2. More than half of the energy usage went to data transmission, according to the study by Arman Shehabi of Berkeley Lab and Ben Walker and Eric Masanet of Northwestern University. Their study, “The energy and greenhouse-gas implications of internet video streaming in the United States,” was published online recently in Environmental Research Letters.
Raúl Hernández Romero's family says he received threats regarding his work campaigning against illegal logging in the weeks before he disappeared.
Billionaires are soaring, poor kids are losing more.
Big news, everyone! Billionaires don’t like socialism.
The Trump administration unveiled a plan Thursday that would dramatically revamp Medicaid by allowing states to opt out of part of the current federal funding program and instead seek a fixed payment each year in exchange for gaining unprecedented flexibility over the program.
I have been a proponent of financial transactions taxes (FTT) since I first came to Washington more than a quarter-century ago. Back then, the idea of taxing Wall Street was considered pretty ridiculous. Among elected members of Congress, only then-Rep. Bernie Sanders and a few other progressive types were willing to publicly get behind the idea.
Alarmed by warnings that his neglect of the need to protect the Amazon could lead to disinvestment and export bans,€ Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro€ has turned to his usual solution to problems: call in the army.
In a 5-4 decision this week, the Supreme Court temporarily lifted a nationwide preliminary injunction that had kept the Trump administration from implementing its rule that vastly expands the reach of the public charge provision in federal immigration law. Immigration officials will now be able to deny lawful permanent resident status (“green cards”) to immigrant spouses and otherwise eligible immigrant family members of US citizens based on their prediction that the immigrant will “become a public charge at any time in the future.” The rule also allows immigration officials to permit entry to someone found likely to become a public charge if the person provides a “public charge bond” of $8,100 or more.
One year ago, I worked with a group of Australian environmental activists, discussing their diverse projects in regenerative agriculture, as well as other pilot projects. One involved turning Canberra into the first green-energy city. Now, 12 months later, Canberra is in flames. One of my colleagues has lost his home. He posts about what it’s like to live with the heat, dust and risk of fires spreading. At this writing, his city is on alert for out-of-control blazes and possible evacuation orders.
Only Sanders among the candidates understands the urgency of the Crisis of Plutocracy and has a workable plan for dealing with it.
"If Donald Trump really thinks Bernie Sanders' 'democratic socialism' is equivalent to Soviet-style communism, then the renowned Wharton School, with which he identifies himself, should consider revoking his degree."
"The Bernie surge has Chris Matthews on the verge of tears."
"The Senate is broken, and only a change in leadership can fix it."
In Washington, two events on the same day show the promise of American democracy—and the mortal danger to it.
It is remarkable how the Democratic Presidential candidates allow themselves to be pigeon-holed by the media as “moderate,” “centrist,” “extreme,” “left-wing,” and other abstract fact-deprived nomenclature.
We must stop the killing, take the trillions of dollars devoted to endless war and instead invest in our people, invest in our environment, and invest in our future.€
When Bernie says it's not about him, I see my values and fears and hopes represented in a way I never have before.
Before a single primary vote has been tallied a number of big-shot progressive Democrats are already calling for the Green Party to stand down in an “open letter.”
The epicenter of China’s coronavirus outbreak is widely thought to be a wet market in Wuhan. At such markets, seafood, chicken, and other conventional foodstuffs are on sale alongside live animals. You can buy more than just dogs and cats there. Local epicures also shop for more exotic fare like foxes, badgers, civets, and snakes.
The deft spin from the Buttigieg apparatus and the huge media hype about him have obscured the significance of his deep-pocketed backers.
Takes came in hot and heavy last weekend after the New York Times editorial board endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for the Democratic presidential nomination, mercifully ending the paper’s self-aggrandizing pseudo-event widely compared to … that’s right … “The Apprentice.”
When the mainstream media writes about war, even critically, the image that often comes to mind for me is an infant wrapped in plastic. That infant is naked reality, a.k.a., the present moment, suffocating and screaming for its life; the plastic smothering it are the journalistic euphemisms by which murder and terrorism turn into abstract acts of national necessity.
Impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump are limping to an end in the Senate this week. As Kyle Cheney and Anthony Desiderio write in Politico, Democratic senators have one last chance to make their case against the president, but the “Republican-controlled Senate … has all but decided the president will be acquitted.”
"For all that talk about 'overturning the will of the voter,' Senate GOP seems pretty okay with impeaching a future president... as long as that president is a Democrat."
Good old Lamar! That would be Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee — known for that exclamation point after his name, his plaid shirts and his quixotic presidential campaigns. Well, Lamar! threw his reputation and legacy into the fetid compost heap of Donald Trump’s presidency last Friday. Alexander is retiring after this term, so I guess Republicans figured he was the most expendable human sacrifice to step into the breach and betray his oath by casting the deciding vote refusing to hear witnesses in the president’s impeachment trial.
"We the people do not accept this disgraceful attempt to cover up Donald Trump's abuse of the powers of the presidency and we will make our voices heard in protests Wednesday and on Election Day."
Unless you’ve been in a deep coma or a lengthy, drug-induced stupor, you know that the House of Representatives has failed in its bid to remove President Trump from office on two articles of impeachment. The articles charged Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress arising from his scheme to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in exchange for U.S. military aid.
The former vice president made the comments Monday morning in an interview with€ NBC News.
Closing arguments Monday in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial were directed more toward history than to sway the outcome, one final chance to influence public opinion and set the record ahead of his expected acquittal in the Republican-led Senate.
Trump must be defeated politically.
"The horrors at our border and throughout our immigration system are too often ignored by the public and politicians."
"Instead of testifying before Congress, you are now apparently going to Iowa to campaign on behalf of President Trump today and then to Pennsylvania for another campaign event for him on Wednesday."
The Republican-controlled Senate appears poised to acquit President Trump in just the third impeachment trial in U.S. history, with a final vote on the two articles of impeachment scheduled for Wednesday. On Friday, the Senate voted 51 to 49 against calling witnesses to the Senate trial. Just two Republican senators supported calling for witnesses and collecting new evidence: Mitt Romney of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine. Without new witnesses, Republicans have cleared the biggest hurdle in their drive to acquit President Trump on the two impeachment charges, which relate to his withholding of military aid to Ukraine in return for that country launching investigations into his political rivals. The final vote in the Senate is scheduled for 4 p.m. on Wednesday, a day after President Trump gives his State of the Union address. To talk more about the impeachment trial, we are joined by John Nichols of The Nation. He is the author of many books, including The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. John Nichols joins us from Des Moines, Iowa, where he is covering the Iowa caucuses.
The combination of a chaotic and incoherent primary schedule and antiquated voting rules makes winning as much the product of dumb luck as anything relating to the quality of candidates and their ability to unify voters.
Democrats in Iowa are voting for their lives as they gather for the presidential caucuses today. Besides beating President Trump, polling shows that health care is the top issue among likely caucus-goers. The vision of a Medicare for All system that provides health insurance to everyone has energized activists and the party’s progressive base.
The impeachment trial of Donald Trump for power abuses is winding down, with his acquittal all but ensured when the Senate reconvenes on Wednesday to vote on the articles of impeachment. Yet, his real crimes continue to receive scant attention, and it is Sen. Bernie Sanders who is regarded by the political establishment as the most dangerous politician because of his commitment to a just and equitable social order and a sustainable future. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the Davos meeting in January demonstrated the global elites’ ongoing commitment to unimpeded planetary destruction.
"The whole world is looking at Iowa. The whole world is asking whether or not the people in Iowa are prepared to stand up and fight for justice," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
In the immediate run-up to the Iowa Caucus, CBS This Morning aired a segment highlighting wealth inequality in the United States. Correspondent Tony Dokoupil invited mall shoppers to estimate how wealth is distributed nationally by arranging pieces of a pumpkin pie across five plates, each representing a fifth of the wealth spectrum. Participants repeatedly — and incorrectly — estimated the middle or upper-middle fifth as owning far more than they actually do. This unscientific sample mirrors what previous studies have found — that most people have no idea how bad wealth inequality in this country is.
An Emerson/7 News poll released on the eve of the Iowa caucuses found that Sen. Bernie Sanders, buttressed by strong support from younger voters, is leading the 2020 Democratic presidential field in the state by seven percentage points heading into Monday’s voting.
Iowa Democrats anxious for fundamental political change headed toward caucus centers late Monday to decide the opening contest in the 2020 presidential primary season. It could bring new clarity to a field that still features nearly a dozen White House contenders vying for the chance to take on President Donald Trump.
This is the second part of periodic reports from the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, and perhaps beyond, should the republic last until South Carolina and Nevada. This was written before the voting in Iowa.
I am writing this the night before the Iowa caucuses.
In the first week of February, every four years, coastal correspondents decamp to Iowa to cover the first-in-the nation nominating contest. Face-to-face, caucus by caucus, what the state lacks in demographics, it makes up for in down-home democracy, we’re told. And down-home democracy rests on down-the-street media. That’s why when the Des Moines Register endorses Elizabeth Warren, it makes national news. When Bernie Sanders leads in the Register’s celebrated Iowa Poll, it sends shockwaves through the Democratic establishment. But much as we may want to believe that Iowa takes us back in time, it’s not a time capsule. It’s the frontier face of our media future.
"We recognize that this does not replace the full data from the Iowa Democratic Party, but we believe firmly that our supporters worked too hard for too long to have the results of that work delayed," said senior campaign advisor Jeff Weaver.
Prolonged wait for the officials results due to "quality checks" that turned up discrepancies in the result totals.
"Not sure why this is even a discussion but by any reasonable historical or comparative standard Michael Bloomberg is literally the definition of an oligarch."
Here’s the deal: Rather than going to a polling station and casting a secret ballot, as voters do in primary elections, caucus voters gather in their precinct and group together based on the candidate they support. Only candidates who garner a certain level of support -- typically 15 percent -- can gain convention delegates, so backers of candidates bringing up the rear in the “first alignment” at a caucus site can then peel off and declare for someone else, which ultimately results in a “final alignment.”
The problem is much bigger than Winterset. In 2016, the FCC estimated more than 24 million Americans lack access to broadband, and even that was probably an underestimate. Two years later, Microsoft ran its own study and found the FCC had vastly underestimated, determining that close to 163 million people were being left out of the push for the faster web. It’s particularly a problem for rural communities, which are ten times more likely to lack broadband access.
In Iowa, it’s been this way for years. According to the commission’s most recent study, only 77 percent of rural Iowans had access to high-speed fixed broadband (25 Mbps down and three up, per FCC standards). That’s only a 17 percent increase over the past five years. Nearly all homes in the urban areas of the state have access to high-speed internet, but rural areas have been slow to catch up, largely because of the sheer expense of connecting them.
They were granted entry into No 10 but a security official then read out a list of names for those who were allowed entry to the briefing - with those from left-of-centre outlets forced to stand on the opposite side of the entrance hall.
Those banned from the briefing, in a move reminiscent of Donald Trump's administration which has tried to exclude journalists from critical organisations, included The Daily Mirror, The i, Huffington Post and the Independent.
One of Russia’s leading universities has banned its academics and students from identifying their institutional position when making public political statements, in a move seen as a further erosion of academic freedom in the country.
Critics claimed that Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), known for its relatively liberal leanings, has clamped down on dissent in response to its students’ involvement in anti-government protests last summer.
When Trump surrogates' lackeys attempted to disempower Lemon on the air, he firmly stopped them in his tracks. He still produces his share of gaffes, but overall Lemon has gone a long way towards comeback from 2014, when the Columbia Journalism Review named him one of the worst journalists of that year.
Recently, however, Lemon went viral for breaking his composure on air, doubling over with guffaws, as Republican strategist Rick Wilson and fellow CNN contributor Wajahat Ali went after Trump's supporters, a group Wilson describes as the "credulous boomer rube demo."
SUNY Geneseo, a liberal arts college in upstate New York, just wanted the parody Twitter account @SUNYGenseeo deactivated. Instead, Twitter handed over the keys to the unofficial account created by a student, a school representative says, giving the school access to delete most of sophomore Isaiah Kelly’s tweets, as first reported by Business Insider.
Cops kill dogs. And they do it at a rate even the Justice Department is concerned about it. This comes from pro-cop site PoliceOne, so if there's any bias in this article, it's for cops rather than timcushinghatescops.com.
February 4, 2020 VideoVenezuela: Violent Abuses in Illegal Gold MinesCredible Allegations of Government Involvement, Acquiescence (New York) – Residents of Venezuela’s southern Bolívar state are suffering amputations and other horrific abuses at the hands of armed groups, including Venezuelan groups called “syndicates” in the area and Colombian armed groups operating in the region, both of which exercise control over gold mines, Human Rights Watch said today. The armed groups seem to operate largely with government acquiescence, and in some cases government involvement, to maintain tight social control over local populations.
Venezuela has reserves of highly valued resources like gold, diamonds, and nickel, as well as coltan and uranium. Although the government has announced efforts to attract partners for legal mining and a crackdown on illegal mining, most gold mining in southern states, including Bolívar, is illegal, with much of the gold smuggled out of the country. The various syndicates that control the mines exert strict control over the populations who live and work there, impose abusive working conditions, and viciously treat those accused of theft and other offenses – in the worst cases, they have dismembered and killed alleged offenders in front of other workers. Launch Gallery
I’m 39. I have lived most of my life with a disability.
America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical amnesia.
The more things change, the more whistleblowers still don't have protections worth a shit. President Trump is waging a war on whistleblowers -- about the only thing he's doing that isn't the polar opposite of his predecessor. For three straight presidencies, government employees seeking to report wrongdoing and misconduct have been shut down, ignored, and retaliated against, despite periodic protections being erected by legislators.
Two things that happen, like clockwork, every Super Bowl? Bogus completely fabricated claims that sex trafficking increases whereever the Super Bowl is held, and ICE making bullshit seizures of "counterfeit" sporting goods. This year, both Associated Press and the local Miami Herald ran bogus stories claiming that sex trafficking ramps up around the Super Bowl -- a claim that every single year is debunked and unproven. Reason always does a good job debunking those claims. so I'll just point you there for now.
In a now established Superbowl ritual, media consumers on both sides of the border are getting another big bite of the avocado. For the sixth year in a row, the Mexican Association of Avocado Producers and Exporters (APEAM) rolled out a pricey Superbowl ad, reportedly costing $5 million for 30 seconds of airtime.
Newly surfaced footage reveals that Jay-Z and Beyoncé remained seated during Demi Lovato’s National Anthem Performance at Super Bowl LIV.
For two decades, the names of Catholic priests accused of sexual abuse or misconduct trickled into the public sphere, largely through court proceedings, vocal survivors and news articles. That changed in 2018 after an explosive Pennsylvania grand jury report prompted scores of church leaders, many for the first time, to release lists containing the identities of clergy members in their jurisdiction against whom there were accusations they deemed credible.
ProPublica spent more than a year cataloging these lists. We published our database of more than 6,000 names — and a story explaining what information is still missing — in January.
We published a database in January of Catholic clergy who have been deemed “credibly accused” of sexual abuse or misconduct by nearly 180 dioceses and religious orders around the country. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have searched the database.
A number of those people have reached out with questions about the project. Many have shared personal stories as survivors of abuse. And although the officially released lists total more than 5,800 unique names, dozens of people have written in to suggest names of clergy who they believe have been left off. We’re glad to hear from readers, and we wanted to provide answers to several of the most common questions we’ve received.
The union victory sends a message to other gig workers around the country who are fed up with working conditions at Silicon Valley tech companies like Instacart—which has faced months of backlash in the form of worker-led strikes, protests, and online boycotts.
In the days leading up to the election, Instacart enlisted high-level managers to visit the Mariano’s grocery store where the unionizing workers pick and pack groceries for delivery. The managers distributed anti-union literature warning employees that a union would drain paychecks and “exercise a great deal of control” over workers. “I encourage you to look at all of the FACTS and vote “NO” on February 1st,” a senior operations manager for Instacart wrote in one of the memos obtained by Motherboard, dated January 22.
The news comes amid increased U.S. and Iran tensions. A leaked CBP memo published by CNN Thursday shows the agency directed border officers to question travelers of Iranian descent, including American citizens, in the aftermath of the Trump administration's killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani.
The memo states that, among others, anyone born in Iran, Lebanon or the Palestinian territories between 1961 and 2001 should be vetted, along with anyone who has connections to those countries and territories. The focus is clearly placed on Iran and some of its potential sympathizers from the region.
CBP officials have previously denied that there was any directive to question people at the border based on ethnicity after dozens of American citizens of Iranian descent said they were stopped at a port of entry in Blaine, Washington, in early January following the general's death. Some were detained for hours and reported that they were asked detailed questions about their country of birth as well as religious affiliations and military service. Others alleged their passports and car keys had been taken by officers during questioning.
As giants like Amazon, Apple, AT&T, and Comcast rush to dominate the TV market, smaller cable providers are suddenly finding themselves unable to compete. Pay TV margins have been tightening for years, and without the kind of scale enjoyed by companies like AT&T/DirecTV/Time Warner or Comcast/NBC Universal, smaller cable companies have warned for years how they would probably have to ditch the TV business and focus exclusively on broadband.
Last year when Sinclair attempted acquire Tribune Broadcasting for a cool $3.9 billion, you might recall the company was accused of some highly unethical behavior in order to get the deal done. Despite the FCC doing its best to neuter most media consolidation protections to help move the deal forward, the union would have still resulted in the merged company violating media ownership limits and dominating local broadcasting in a huge number of new markets.
Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, explained that's exactly the point, "While many of our more than 3,100 licensees have either developed for, or have been users of, free and open-source software, Taiyo Yuden joining OIN is significant because it is their customers that are developing and integrating Linux and other OSS software. Their parts enable higher order devices like smartphones to work and Taiyo Yuden recognizes the need for and advantages of patent non-aggression in the core."
What the OIN and its members get out of Taiyo Yuden joining is access to the company's significant patent holdings. Berglet concluded, "We are pleased that the company has recognized the importance of participating in OIN as part of its intellectual property strategy."
Shigetoshi Akino, General Manager of Taiyo Yuden's Intellectual Property Division, added, "Although Taiyo Yuden does not directly incorporate open-source software in our products, our customers do, and it is important for us to support open-source initiatives that are critical to the continued success of our clients. By joining the Open Invention Network, we are demonstrating support for open source through patent non-aggression in Linux and adjacent open source technologies."
According to its web site, Shields of Strength “provides fashionable, functional, and durable Christian fitness jewelry and accessories.” Those items include military “dog tags” engraved with quotes from scripture and sometimes the logo of the armed forces branch the customer belongs to.
After being fined $1 billion, Cox Communications is seeking a drastic reduction in penalties.
Internet provider Cox Communications has asked the court to overturn or lower the $1 billion piracy liability verdict a Virginia jury issued late last year. The company argues that there were fundamental flaws in the verdict. Even if the court disagrees, the 'shockingly excessive' damages amount should be lowered, Cox notes.
