This is a weekly blog looking at a refurbished HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC running Linux. Refurbished PCs offer a great solution to your computing requirements.
This machine was made available by Bargain Hardware. Bargain Hardware retails refurbished servers, workstations, PCs, and laptops to consumers and businesses worldwide. All systems are completely customisable on their website along with a vast offering of clean-pulled, tested components and enterprise replacement parts. They supply machines with a choice of Linux distros: Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora. They even install FreeBSD.
The HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini is available in a variety of configurations. Our machine unit came with a quad-core Intel i5-6500T (2.5 GHz that can turbo boost to 3.1 GHz) with Intel HD Graphics 530. It’s paired with a 256GB M2. NVMe SSD and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. There’s two memory slots with both populated in our configuration. The machine can take a maximum of 32GB of RAM.
Today, we bring you a list of the best general-purpose Linux distributions to run on your PCs and they are arranged in order of the most hits from users in the last 3 months on Distro Watch.
This list could go on for hours because so many distros in the market are already good enough to run on your machine. But I would rather stop here so that you can drop your suggestions below.
If you haven’t already seen it, check out how this list differs from its predecessor in The Top 10 Linux Desktop Distros.
First up, in our Wanderings, I make a handoff, Joe repairs more stuff, Moss is in the news, Tony Hughes continues the challenge, and Mike the Builder makes a bike.
Then, in the News, Mint sends relief, Ventoy has a birthday, JingPad gets closer, new docs Man up, and AlmaLinux soothes the soul.
In Security, your smartphone is spying on you, Facebook springs another leak, and we disclose our vulnerability.
There are many note taking applications available out there that each target a different Method used to keep track of information. Unless you are one of those blessed few with a photographic memory with endless roles of film, you may have to write some things down. Although there are a few different applications I use to record information, I consider one to be my perpetual system of record, TiddlyWiki. I have been using it for about 10 years now, the same file has grown with me over the years. I have used TiddlyWiki to keep my projects organized for work and personal projects.
Bottom Line Up Front: If you want to keep your data locally, have notes that you can use whether or not you have access to the internet, easily replicated and will not ever be left with a system that loses support and a loss of your notes. This just may be the application for you. It is simple enough to get started with it but extensible enough that you may never out grow it.
Anyway, yes, tmux lets you select and copy text with your keyboard.
In order to help keep an eye on all of the services I run, I use Prometheus for collecting metrics. For an example of the kind of metrics I collect, see here (1). In the configuration that I have, Prometheus runs on a server in my apartment and reaches out to my other machines to scrape metrics over the network. This worked great when I had my major services listen over TCP, I could just point Prometheus at the backend port over my tunnel.
When I started using Unix sockets for hosting my services, this stopped working. It became very clear very quickly that I needed some kind of shim. This shim needed to do the following things:
Listen over the network as a HTTP server
Connect to the unix sockets for relevant services based on the path (eg. /xesite should get the metrics from /srv/within/run/xesite.sock)
Do nothing else
The Apache HTTP Server (commonly referred to simply as Apache), is a free and open-source web server software brought to you by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache has been around for more than 2 decades and is considered beginner-friendly.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install an Apache webserver to host a simple HTML website running on a Linux platform.
When you install Ubuntu, you are asked to create a user and this user gets sudo access by default. This is good because you need root privileges to manage the system.
But what about new users you created later on Ubuntu? What if the new user also needs to have sudo access for some valid reasons?
In this beginner’s tutorial, I’ll show you the steps for adding a user to sudoer in Ubuntu using both GUI and command line methods.
The GUI method is suitable for the desktop version while the command line method works for both desktop and server versions of Ubuntu.
This tutorial is not about creating users in Ubuntu. I assume that the other user is already created. Needless to say that to give sudo access to another user, you must have sudo access yourself.
The Linux apt and apt-get tools are probably one of the most frequently used command-line tools in Debian-based distros when it comes to handling software packages. The two are very similar, however, a few subtle differences exist between the two. In this guide, we will aim to distinguish between apt and apt-get and how they are used.
Evolution of apt command
To get a better grasp of the two commands, let's go back in time and see how the apt command evolved over time. Prior to Debian 8 (Jessie) and Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), users interacted with the APT package manager (Advanced Package Tool) using the apt-get command. However, the command-line tool did not get much traction from the users, and most did not exhaustively use most of the options that came with it.
In this article we will introduce Remi, a third-party repository that includes up-to-date versions of Apache, MySQL / MariaDB, PHP, and related software.
PostgreSQL is a powerful, reliable, robust and open source object-relational database system.
The latest version of this database system is PostgreSQL 3.2, while versions 112.6, 11.11, 10.16, 9.6.21, & 9.5.25 still getting the regular updates.
This tutorial describe you to how to install the newest PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system.
I've been a big proponent of network-based provisioning pretty much my entire career. My second job out of college involved imaging ~800 computers multiple times a week. When I was hired, my predecessors used floppy disks to load a small operating system (OS), matching network interface card (NIC) driver, and imaging client (remember Ghost?). The bottom line was it was very time/labor-intensive and a horrible process. Imaging a group of systems took about 30-60 minutes. Long story short, we reduced that time to about five minutes after leveraging a combination of PXE, Wake-on-LAN, Universal Network Device Interface (UNDI) drivers, virtual LANs (VLANs), and IGMP snooping. My second iteration of the solution took the total attended time to less than 30 seconds. It's an amazing technology for provisioning and I even got hired at Red Hat by giving a presentation on the preboot execution environment (PXE). Needless to say, I'm a huge fan.
If you are facing difficulty while systematically reading log files. Then you are in the right place.
Simple doing cat to read log file is a kind basic way to inspect log file. But when you want to filter data in an organized way based on time, then we use awk or grep.
The awk is a popular command-line tool used to manipulate data in files and generate a report based on a given pattern in the Linux System. While grep is simple pattern tool that search pattern using a regular expression.
In case you missed the recent news, we decided to change our versioning for Godot 3.x and rename the upcoming version 3.2.4 to Godot 3.3, thereby starting a new stable branch. Check the dedicated blog post for details.
Here's another Release Candidate for Godot 3.3! Keeping this post short as there wasn't much change, just a handful of fixes - refer to the 3.3 RC 7 post for details on new features.
We're pretty confident about this candidate (Famous Last Wordsââ¢) so if no new regression is found, the next build should hopefully be the stable release! If you haven't tried 3.3 RC builds yet, now would be a great time to do it to help us ensure everything upgrades smoothly from 3.2.3 to 3.3.
For many years it's been possible to run Linux games on FreeBSD along with other Linux applications thanks to FreeBSD's "Linuxulator" Linux binary compatibility layer. With that more recently it's becoming possible to run even more recent games thanks to improvements to FreeBSD's graphics drivers, the Linux binary compatibility code, and other FreeBSD improvements -- Steam is even working out for more titles.
[...]
If all went well, FreeBSD gamers can then just run steam and enjoy Steam on FreeBSD thanks to the Linux compatibility support. Though so far this method has only been tested for Linux-native games and trying to get Steam Play / Proton working on FreeBSD will likely be an extra can of worms.
Service Registry includes a set of pluggable storage options for storing APIs, rules, and validations. The Kafka-based storage option, provided by Red Hat AMQ Streams, is suitable for production environments where persistent storage is configured for a Kafka cluster running on Red Hat OpenShift.
Security is not optional in a production environment, and AMQ Streams must provide it for each component you connect to. Security is defined by authentication, which ensures a secure client connection to the Kafka cluster, and authorization, specifying which users can access which resources. I will show you how to set up authentication and authorization with AMQ Streams and Service Registry.
Canonical and Open Robotics have announced a partnership for Robot Operating System (ROS) Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and enterprise support, as part of Ubuntu Advantage, Canonical’s service package for Ubuntu.
ROS support will be made available as an option to Ubuntu Advantage support customers. As a result, users already taking advantage of critical security updates and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) fixes will now have a single point of contact to guarantee high quality fixes for ROS.
According to Canonical, this partnership means that the two companies will be able to support the robotics community by making ROS robots and services easier to build and package, simpler to manage, and more reliable to deploy.
"With ROS deployed as part of so many commercial products and services, it's clear that our community needs a way to safely run robots beyond their software End-Of-Life dates. Canonical's track record delivering ESM, together with our deep understanding of the ROS code base, make this partnership ideal. Ubuntu Linux has been central to the ROS project from the beginning, when we released ROS Box Turtle on Ubuntu Hardy over a decade ago" said Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics. "We’re excited to be part of this offering that will enable users to access quality support from both organisations."
We’ve recently seen it’s possible to use a long cable with the Raspberry Pi camera thanks to THine camera extension kit that works with 20-meter LAN cables using V-by-One HS technology.
[...]
Up to six cameras can be connected to Jetson Xavier AGX developer kit in a synchronized manner through the company’s NileCAM21_CUXVR multi-camera solutions with two MIPI CSI-2 interfaces.
On the software side, e-Con Systems provides a Linux camera driver (V4L2), Gstreamer 1.0 support for video recording and network streaming, as well as a sample application for image capture & preview.
This is one of a series covering the new mjbots power_dist board. See part 1 and part 2 for more context.
As mentioned previously, hot swap controllers are primarily used to allow a card to be inserted live into a server backplane, while minimizing disruption to the primary power bus while doing so. Additionally, they often implement protection features like over-current and short-circuit protection, and some support energy monitoring.
Google showcased Lyra audio codec for high-quality voice calls at a low 3 kbps bitrate last February. But at the time, it was only for our eyes to see, or rather our ears to listen to, as the company did not release any software, but only audio samples with excellent quality compared to Speex @ 3 kbps or Opus @ 6 kbps.
[...]
The beta release provides the tools and APIs needed for Lyra encoding and decoding, and is currently optimized for the 64-bit Arm Android platform, but can also be run in Linux x86 64-bit.
There is also an example app – lyra_android_example – that integrates with the Android NDK and offers a minimal GUI with two buttons to either record from the microphone and encode/decode with Lyra, or runs a benchmark that encodes and decodes in the background and prints the timings to logcat.
libbluray is an open-source library designed for Blu-Ray Discs playback for media players, like VLC or MPlayer. This research project is developed by an international team of developers from Doom9. Latest release is libbluray 1.3.0.
While Firefox’s market share is significantly declining over the years, it is still one of the best Google Chrome alternatives out there.
Recently, they have been adding a lot of important privacy-focused features. But, not everyone cares about the features when considering a browser, the user experience also matters.
With Firefox Quantum and Photon, they worked on improving the performance and UX but still did not manage to regain the market share they once had.
When I ask my colleagues why they don’t get involved with Wikipedia, I no longer hear the excuse that it could hurt their reputations. The typical answer, instead, is: “Wonderful idea, but I have no time. I need to write another paper/book”. But this sense of what ought to be prioritised is misguided. Wikipedia entries appear in the top results returned by virtually any respectable search engine. It has millions of readers. There is no greater direct contribution to disseminating human knowledge that an academic could make than to lend it their expertise. And yet even academics who recognise that fact do not alter their behaviour.
The reason, of course, is that they are given no credit for Wikipedia work by university management. In the deluge of emails about various university initiatives that I scan through every day, for instance, the word “Wikipedia” is curiously absent – and anecdotal evidence makes me reasonably certain that my experience is not exceptional. It just isn’t on managers’ horizon.
If you’re a UX designer then we want to ask a few simple questions to you…
How would you decide the components or the elements in the navigation bar of your web pages?
How would you decide that you need four-column grids or three-column grids on your web page?
How would you decide on your mobile app that you need to choose a scrollable item or a fixed item of a fixed height?
Where to put the images? Where to put the videos? Where to put the links? Where to list out the items?
All the above questions need to be answered when you’re building an app. For a small and simple website, these things are clear and overlooked but for big companies such as Flipkart, Amazon, or Zomato these things can not be overlooked.
Python is a common and in-demand programming language these days because it can create applications ranging from easy to complex. This article is for those new to Python programming and want to learn it from the ground up in a short amount of time.
Hello, World! Hello Web developers! I know you all have been working great and hard on your websites, but now it’s time to give your coding a little break and explore the 20 Best Java tools of 2021 that’s sure to make your life easy.
Java is one commercial-grade programming language that no web developer can avoid. I am sure that for most of you, much of your professional life is spent using Java.
We may come from different schools of thought for Java – you may consider it to be the simplest programming language, and I might consider it to be the toughest, but the truth remains! If you got to develop, you got to Java!
I've stressed throughout this that a Google-like company could take this into their own hands and just implement it without buy in from anybody. That was what made Quic possible in the first place since anything else than that is beating up against an ossified and sclerotic industry. Indeed the Certificate Industrial Complex would completely lose their shit as their gravy train is shut down. Given DANE and DKIM, the use of DNS to authorize public keys for use elsewhere is well understood and should be completely safe given DNSSec, and arguably safer given that there are far fewer middle men CA's involved to screw up.
The master of the universe That is the title they gave That’s what they say when they pray, but They’ve got it all wrong It isn’t the master at all It’s the mystery Of the universe which Demands your fear, and care, And respect, Attention, said Humbaba Guard of the Great Cedar Forest Hacked to death by Gilgamesh And Enkidu, with the aid of Utu/Shamash This is your civilization, he says, Your myth, your law, For Utu also gave the law to Hammurabi The Code, from codex, from caudex A tree trunk, in your sacred Latin — But there are two trees, two tablets, That of Hammurabi And Sophocles’ Antigone’s Unwritten code The unwritten law and the written Order and the just The two trees, they also symbolize these Tree of life, living, flowing — Physis And Nomos, the law of tradition, Order, authority, force The positive, written law, from nemein: To seize, to take, and allot, and exploit
Taking, extracting, depriving The common, the community Is what makes private property Concentrating value, valere, Taking the health out and leaving the sick The Great Cedar Forest The Great Bull of Marduk The bull of the market Bulldozers of progress Leave wreckage, and profit The latter for only a few None for you
That bold spirit of hers, immortalized in over 50 books she published during her lifetime, and her unwavering commitment through her writing and her activism to debunk our rationalizations of religious and racialized economic and patriarchal ideologies, is what drew me to her as it did countless others across borders north and south. We met on a fateful evening in spring of 1998, when I drove my little red Suzuki car from Ossining NY, 25 miles south to where the Brecht Forum was then located in downtown NYC in Chelsea. That white shock of hair was like a secular halo around her brown, vibrant, mischievous face, her presence at once commanding and welcoming, her gaze as it looked at you, piercing and unforgiving, yet full of curiosity and humanity, her talk that night engaging, warm, full of humor and pulling all of her audience into its seductive embrace—yet deadly serious, and brilliantly scathing in its attack on all manner of pieties. Not least of these was her unmasking of Islamist right-wing movements in Arab and other Muslim countries, as having little to do with religion, and everything to do with power; both a consequence of, as well as handmaiden to, a postmodern neoliberalism that serves the needs of Empire. Her phrase for this historical conjuncture of forces, succinct and electrifying in its clarity, was “the global imperialist class patriarchal system.” As an immigrant from Pakistan, I was acutely aware and troubled by this confluence of factors that had and was continuing to create havoc in my country of birth, an unleashing of extremist Islamism aided and abetted by both the USA as well as Saudi Arabia at the expense of the rights of women and religious minorities back home. Unholy alliances, indeed.
We developed a long and enduring friendship based on, and extending the concept of feminist solidarity for which her organization, AWSA—Arab Women’s Solidarity Association—became a spark. She organized several annual conferences under its aegis in Cairo, at which she invited many of us from across the globe to attend and share our work, and thanks to which so many “dissident friendships” across race, class, gender and national borders were formed.
“Pale” – palus (Latin), wooden stake, fence: pallidus (Latin), white.
“Beyond the pale” – Outside€ the€ bounds€ of€ morality or good€ behavior (first recorded use by J. Harington (1560-1612), English author, inventor of the flushing WC).
Black ass is obvious at 2:00AM on Geddes Avenue. Should I blame N my thighs, sheering denim to skin windows? Or these cornbread- N cultivated hips Clifton passed on to me that seem much broader on back roads N void of streetlights? Either way, I’m wading the pitch black of November 9, 2016. Satisfied frat boys N walking Geddes the opposite way spot the Baartman in my stride and toss this N muffled drunken greeting to skew me: Hey, girl…Hey, girl…Hate won! N and so I wave my most vocal finger, keeping on toward the university bus stop. The joy of those boys—its color, its N god—moves me to a cystic anger, the sort of crying that licks and bends the perforated edge of ancestry. But once I’m home N I plan on steeping oolong, waxing my shins, commencing the second season of Girlfriends, then N dozing off. I’ll wake up Thursday, hush post-election coverage N with fits of Boyz II Men and vacuuming, phone some old undergrad friends that understand all too N well my need to vodka evenings to a curt and drastic end. Then I’ll N doze again. Probably wake and write at the Starbucks on State, a booth by N the lav. A novelist beside me translating war will ask, What’s the word for “patrie” in English? I’ll doze N and wake like this for two whole calendars—sun up then down like a father’s last pushups. Finally a Master in N Public Health, I’ll choose tobacco lobbying in some swollen metro like The N District. In a Foggy Bottom loft nearby a two-story Whole Foods, I’ll sleep alone until open N mic on the ungentrified side of U Street. A beautician born & trained in Orlando N will spit a piece about America’s kitchen, its nappyheaded dream, a recipe of kinks. The mic N will give a shrill feedback. The audience will unravel its blouse of hums. And pillow-talking that night, the two of us N unclothed, our breath a blessèd mess of sours, she’ll recount her hardest client— N five cornrows, sowed on the scalp of her own nephew, found wan and black blue at the foot of a juke box. /p>
Software vendors will be obliged to promptly notify their US federal government customers in the event of any security breach, a draft executive order from President Joe Biden’s administration proposes.
The order – which follows the high impact SolarWinds breach late last year – would also mandate the use of multi-factor authentication and data encryption within US federal agencies, Reuters reports.
In addition, the order would compel vendors to retain more records and work with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in responding to incidents.
Betsy DeVos did not succeed in dismantling public education during her four-year tenure as Donald Trump’s secretary of education. That’s because, despite the billionaire campaign donor’s determined efforts, the federal government is not the primary battleground in the fight for the future of our schools. Most of those big battles play out at the state and local levels of government. So, now that she’s on the outs in Washington, DeVos is taking her crusade back to states such as Wisconsin—where she and her allies are conniving to influence Tuesday’s election for state superintendent of public instruction.
The choice is between an ardent advocate for public schools, Jill Underly, and a supporter of the voucher schemes that are favored by DeVos and the billionaire donors who for years have attacked teachers and the unions that represent them, Deborah Kerr.
We should be working to strengthen the protections of the Affordable Care Act and expand health care to all, not punch holes in the foundation.
About four years ago, I was a 40 year old healthy, successful, and busy small business owner. Then I walked into a doctor’s office with a nagging cough, and walked out as a stage 4 cancer patient.
"Covid-19 has brutally exposed and deepened inequality both within and between countries, and highlighted the staggering disregard our leaders have for our shared humanity."
Offering an incisive overview of "a world in disarray" and focusing largely on how governments have responded—or failed to respond—to the coronavirus pandemic, Amnesty International on Tuesday released its annual global human rights report.
Big pharmaceutical companies have not come out of COVID-19 looking like model global citizens. Pfizer has been accused of bullying South American governments after demanding they put up military bases as collateral in exchange for vaccines. Meanwhile, Bill Gates persuaded Oxford University to sign an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca for its new offering, rather than allow it to be copied freely by all. The British/Swedish multinational quickly announced it would fall 50 million vaccines short on its first shipment to the European Union.
There were some cases of obvious neglect—Brazil was and is a prime example ( FAIR.org, 4/12/20). But the press also turned on Nicaragua, repeating allegations from local opposition groups that the Sandinista government was in denial about the dangers, and that the country was poised on the edge of disaster.
When, as the death toll in other countries grew alarmingly, Nicaragua “flattened the curve” of virus cases more quickly than its neighbors, its apparent success was ignored. Despite the importance of identifying how poorer countries can contain the virus effectively, measures used by Nicaragua remain uninvestigated by the international media. Why did this come about?
Mike Greco was worried. In early March 2020, New York City had confirmed its first case of Covid-19, and the vice president of Local 2507, the union representing employees of the city’s emergency medical services (EMS), knew how overworked and exhausted EMS workers already were. At a special City Council hearing on March 5, he testified that EMS was already handling 1.5 million calls a year. “If you were to have another half million calls in a pandemic, you would overwhelm the system,” he said.
Weeks later, the city’s 911 system was inundated. On March 30, it received more than 6,500 calls, its busiest day ever, surpassing September 11, 2001. Response times lagged, and families waited in agony for ambulances. Greco spent months working from 7 am to midnight, making sure Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) and paramedics had access to personal protective equipment.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
We look at pandemic profiteering in the medical system as a new report by Kaiser Health News reveals some of the nation’s richest hospitals recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus over the past year after accepting federal healthcare bailout grants. This comes as hospitals in New York have sued thousands of patients during the pandemic, and Northwell — which is run by a close ally of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — has faced intense criticism for practices like billing patients at its Lenox Hill Hospital over $3,000 for COVID tests — more than 30 times the typical cost. “There’s a lot of talk in our healthcare system about putting patients first, … but this is not doing that,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign. “Suing patients ruins their lives.” We also discuss how Biden’s CARES Act made 3.7 million more people eligible for the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies.
We look at pandemic profiteering in the medical system as a new report by Kaiser Health News reveals some of the nation’s richest hospitals recorded hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus over the past year after accepting federal healthcare bailout grants. This comes as hospitals in New York have sued thousands of patients during the pandemic, and Northwell — which is run by a close ally of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo — has faced intense criticism for practices like billing patients at its Lenox Hill Hospital over $3,000 for COVID tests — more than 30 times the typical cost. “There’s a lot of talk in our healthcare system about putting patients first, … but this is not doing that,” says Elisabeth Benjamin, vice president of health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York and co-founder of the Health Care for All New York campaign. “Suing patients ruins their lives.” We also discuss how Biden’s CARES Act made 3.7 million more people eligible for the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies.
While the White House in recent weeks has taken steps to overturn a Trump-era initiative enabling states to restrict Medicaid eligibility by imposing punitive work requirements, healthcare advocates on Monday urged President Joe Biden to rescind all Medicaid work requirement policies approved by his predecessor.
It’s been nearly two years since Rhode Island lawmakers approved funding to train all 911 call takers to provide CPR instructions over the phone, but new data shows no improvement in people’s chances of receiving CPR in the critical minutes prior to the arrival of first responders.
Only about one in five people who went into cardiac arrest in their homes or someplace other than a hospital or health care setting in Rhode Island last year received CPR before police, fire or emergency medical providers showed up, according to data provided to The Public’s Radio by the state Department of Health. The state’s bystander CPR rate has remained between 19% and 21% since 2018.
Once you see how the logics of necropolitics structure our society, you won’t be able to unsee it. Let’s take a closer look at this framework through an example we’re all too familiar with: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To date, over half a million people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. Marginalized communities have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Black people are far more likely to die from the virus than white people. Indigenous people are dying at a rate more than double that of white people and even that is likely an underestimate. Communities of color have been left behind by the vaccine rollout too. In a piece last spring for the New Republic, critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw denounces this racial disparity in COVID-19 outcomes as a “bald political calculus” that “pivots on an ‘acceptable’ number of deaths in poorer non-white communities.” It is, Crenshaw writes, “a kind of genocide.”
Is Slack good for actually getting your work done? That’s debatable. But the popular messaging platform — which boasted more than 12 million daily active users as of last year — is definitely a promising medium for employers, regulatory agencies, the government, and even hackers seeking a trove of data about a company and its workers. Even your coworkers could find out more about you than you might expect.
The number of Slack messages your workplace might be able to access has actually grown as Slack has built out its workplace app. Last year, the company launched a new tool called Slack Connect, which allows different workplaces to share channels on the app. The company announced that the feature was expanded again last month, so anyone could send invitations to direct message to other Slack users — even if they work at another workplace (whether users can actually send and accept these invites depends on whether their workplace has put in restrictions). But just because you’re messaging someone at a different workplace doesn’t mean your boss couldn’t necessarily see the messages you send.
According to Mikko Kenttälä, founder and CEO of SensorFu, exploitation of the bug could lead to unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information to a third party; the ability to modify a victim’s Mail configuration, including mail redirects which enables takeover of victim’s other accounts via password resets; and the ability to change the victim’s configuration so that the attack can propagate to correspondents in a worm-like fashion.
I thought we had put this sort of idiocy behind us, but I see it's back again. In 2011, some German politicians suggested the country's youths be required to obtain some sort of internet driver's license following a party that got out of hand after a private Facebook invite was accidentally made public. Somehow, obtaining an ID to use social media services would prevent this from happening in the future, but officials were extremely light on details.
Last week we noted that there was some fairly mixed up pressure mounting on UK politicians to block encryption from some confused charities which (falsely) thought that ending encryption would somehow protect children. We also noted that many of the politicians pushing to end encryption... were using encrypted messaging themselves in an effort to dodge public records requests.
The Irish Data Protection Commission is trying to “establish the full facts” since the weekend and so far “received no proactive communication from Facebook,” the regulator said in a statement on its website on Tuesday. It said the tech company assured it that “it is giving highest priority to providing firm answers” to the authority.
Personal information on 533 million Facebook users reemerged on a hacker website for free on Saturday. The information included phone numbers and email address of users, the regulator said Tuesday. Facebook has said the data is old and was already reported on in 2019.
Patel will headline an April 19 roundtable organized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), according to a draft invitation seen by WIRED. The event is set to be deeply critical of the encryption standard, which makes it harder for investigators and technology companies to monitor communications between people and detect child grooming or illicit content, including terror or child abuse imagery.
End-to-end encryption works by securing communications between those involved in them—only the sender and receiver of messages can see what they say and platforms providing the technology cannot access the content of messages. The tech has been increasingly made standard in recent years with WhatsApp and Signal using end-to-end encryption by default to protect people’s privacy.
Even though I’ve been doing web things for a while now, I confess I had never dealt with browser cookies other than clicking those cookie notifications on every other website you visit these days.
I mean, I knew that it was a form of storage on the browser, but I’d always used localStorage for that. Recently I was working on something that used browser cookies and I figured it was a good time to figure them out.
Facebook's surveillance data isn't that valuable, so it has to gather a lot of it. Most of its ad-tech advantage is just fraud: lying to advertisers about who saw its ads, lying to publishers about which kinds of content generate the most revenue.
https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/11/number-eight/#curse-of-bigness
The data advantage itself is very short-lived; for example, location data is highly prized by advertisers who want to show you an ad for shoes while you're outside a shoe-store. This value is annihilated as soon as you move somewhere else.
Data isn't the new oil, it's the new oily rag: a low-grade waste-product that is only valuable when it is piled up in such vast quantities that it poses an existential, civilization-ending danger.
On 1 April 2021, a coalition of 56 human rights, digital rights and social justice organisations sent a letter to European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, ahead of the long-awaited proposal for new EU laws on artificial intelligence (AI). The coalition is calling on the Commissioner to prohibit dangerous and harmful uses of AI that contravene fundamental rights. Specifically, they call to ban uses of biometrics that enable mass surveillance or other dangerous and harmful uses of AI, on fundamental rights groups.
This open letter builds on the January letter by 62 civil society organisations calling for red lines in the AI proposal and the letter from 116 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) calling on the European Commission to put people ahead of profit.
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about worsening relations between Russia and Ukraine. Late last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed a growing escalation of the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Russia has continued to build up troops near its borders with Ukraine. Is a full-scale war between the two countries possible? Will the United States intervene? And what will happen if Washington does decide to get involved? Meduza asked these questions to military experts and political scientists — and the answers we received were far from reassuring.
The last three decades have witnessed increasing political confusion about the meaning of anti-imperialism, a notion that, in and of itself, hadn’t previously been the topic of much debate. There are two main reasons for this confusion: the victorious end of most post–World War II anticolonial struggles and the USSR’s collapse. During the Cold War, the United States and allied colonial Western powers directly waged several wars against national liberation movements or regimes, along with more limited military interventions and wars by proxy. In most of these cases, Western powers confronted a local adversary supported by a large popular base. Standing against the imperialist intervention and in support of those whom it targeted seemed the obvious choice for progressives—the only discussion was whether the support ought to be critical or unreserved.
The main divide among anti-imperialists during the Cold War was rather caused by the attitude towards the USSR, which Communist Parties and their close allies regarded as the “fatherland of socialism”; they determined much of their own political positions by aligning with Moscow and the “socialist camp”—an attitude that was described as “campism.” This was facilitated by Moscow’s support for most struggles against Western imperialism in its global rivalry with Washington. As for Moscow’s intervention against workers’ and peoples’ revolts in its own European sphere of domination, the campists stood with the Kremlin, denigrating these revolts under the pretext that they were fomented by Washington.
Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association (NRA), revealed in a deposition released this week that he often sought refuge on a friend’s yacht following mass shooting events in the United States.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken€ states:
“We continue to disagree strongly with the ICC’s actions relating to the Afghanistan and Palestinian situations. We maintain our longstanding objection to the Court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction over personnel of non-States Parties such as the United States and Israel. We believe, however, that our concerns about these cases would be better addressed through engagement with all stakeholders in the ICC process rather than through the imposition of sanctions.
This fatigue point has been reached incrementally over the years since the end of WWII, which ended with the Big Bang of our unnecessarily nuking the Japs to spite the Russkies. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer quietly noted.Gods of Death, as Freud, and others, figured we’d end up as. After WWI, newly discovered Middle East oil became the most prevalent source of world energy, leading to “skirmishes” for its wealth, after the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire. And the other major transformative event for the region was the Jewish demand, after WWII and the Holocaust, for a homeland — based upon historical precedence.
The world has been delighted to watch the wilderness religions — Christians, Islam and Judaism — duke it out for millennia, like three irascible siblings each intent on domination. The Three Abes (they all derive from Abraham) have, individually or together, shaped the way the world has progressed economically, spiritually, militarily, and morally for at least 1000 years, going back to the Crusades. So, though we are fatigued with the whole lot of them, the Three Abes still hold our attention, and what happens in the Middle East today still has far-reaching consequences for our collective future. Arab oil, especially plastics and carbon emissions, has filthified the world, maybe beyond rescue. Tensions between Israel and its neighbors, especially Iran and Syria, threaten to act as a catalyst for apocalyptic destruction. In this still developing regional denouement with global consequences, the human rights violations in Palestine / Israel, that we hear about almost every day, just don’t move us; we no longer expect much to change.
The Gun Violence Epidemic Continues
We are still at it. On 16 March 2021, eight people were killed at three Atlanta, Georgia, massage palors, and on 22 March 2021, ten people were shot down in a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store. This is nothing new in the Land of the Free. Among the more notable victims of the nation’s love affair with deadly weapons have been Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan and, of course, John Lennon. Then there are the ongoing mass murders of which the March shootings are but the latest. For instance, 49 killed in Orlando, Florida, on 12 June 2016; 58 killed in LasVegas, Nevada, on 1 October 2017; 25 killed in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on 5 November 2017; 17 killed in Parkland, Florida, on 14 February 2018; 23 killed in El Paso, Texas, on 3 August 2019, ad nauseam. Indeed, “since the Columbine shooting in 1999, there have been 114 mass shootings with 1300 victims. … All of this happening in a country in which there are more guns than people and where laws are enacted that make it easier to buy a gun than to vote.”
Just how extreme are the soldiers in the U.S. military?
It was around noon and I was texting a friend about who-knows-what when I added, almost as an afterthought: "tho they seem to be invading the Capitol at the mo." I wasn't faintly as blasé as that may sound on January 6th, especially when it became ever clearer who "they" were and what they were doing. Five people would die due to that assault on the Capitol building, including a police officer, and two more would commit suicide in the wake of the event. One hundred forty police would be wounded (lost eye, heart attack, cracked ribs, smashed spinal disks, concussions) and the collateral damage would be hard even to tote up.
This past year has been full of change and challenges for all of us, and I’ve never been more grateful for (and amazed by!) the people that make up our CC community.€
We at Carbon Tax Center believe that removing climate deniers from the Climate Solutions Caucus could help rehabilitate carbon taxing in the public conversation.
Barely twenty days after signing his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to provide pandemic relief and wrestle Covid-19 to a halt, President Biden this week unveiled a follow-on eight-year $2 trillion plan that he called a “once-in-a-generation investment in America” to repair failing roads and bridges, revitalize rail travel and freight, get rid of water-supplying lead pipes, and generally overhaul the country’s infrastructure.
But the committee has determined that the researchers should hold off on even the preliminary equipment tests until they’ve held discussions with members of the public in Sweden. David Keith, a Harvard climate scientist and member of the research team, said they will abide by the recommendations.
The decision is likely to push the launch into 2022, further delaying a project initially slated to begin as early as 2018. It also opens up the possibility that the initial flights will occur elsewhere, as the researchers had selected the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden in part because the Swedish Space Corporation could accommodate a launch this year.
When Bill Gates $4.5 million investment in geoengineering research came to light in 2010, one of the scientists he put in charge of the project, Ken Caldeira, said the money was not funding any field experiments. But as the project has grown and moved to Harvard, that line was crossed. The Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment – SCoPEx for short – intends to release around a kilogram of calcium carbonate, essentially chalk dust, from a propelled balloon-gondola rig 12 miles up. Particles would cover the equivalent of 11 football fields and test the material’s potential to block a portion of solar radiation, countering the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide. The June test would not have released any particles, only tried out the rig’s technologies.
Last December SCoPEx announced it was moving the rig test to Sweden because of the pandemic. It was to have been in Arizona and New Mexico. The new test site was to be Swedish Space Corporation’s launch center at Kiruna near the Arctic Circle, the Saami homeland. Trouble was, nobody had talked to the Saami or much anyone else in Sweden.
The environmental organization Educa Oaxaca, which has fought large scale hydroelectric and mining projects, said that neither state nor federal authorities have taken preventative measures despite the killings of two citizens on March 14 and 15.
Wealthy frequent flyers who take several holidays a year should pay higher taxes each time they fly, a British charity says.
"It is truly groundbreaking," Greta Thunberg said of the growing concentration of the heat-trapping gas. "And I don't mean that in a good way."
The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide surged past 420 parts per million for the first time in recorded history this past weekend, according to a measurement taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the Big Island of Hawaii.
The planet-cooling scheme referred to as Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment aka: SCoPEx headed by Harvard professor Fran Keutsch hopes to save humanity from hothouse Earth with plans to sprinkle aerosols of calcium carbonate and other substances at 12 miles above Earth’s surface to reflect solar radiation to outer space. The initial flight scheduled for June 2021 was set to test the balloon and gondola equipment sans release of aerosols until later in the year.
But heavy lobbying by prominent groups against the “alleged insanity” of toying around with the planet’s climate system put an end to this test run. Still, it’s an open question as to whether it really is insanity. Although, nobody knows for sure what consequences may follow. Nobody! On the other hand, civilization has been insanely altering the climate system by spewing carbon dioxide CO2 and sulfur dioxide SO2 into the atmosphere for years upon years. The question now revolves around whether SCoPEx makes it worse by trying to fix it? As such, is it the issue at hand? Answers: maybe and yes.
"A new technological revolution is underway to replace fossil fuel heating and cooking with electric technologies."
Replacing fossil fuel-based heating and cooking systems with electric technologies in the majority of U.S. residential and commercial buildings over the next three decades would lead to a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions—equivalent to removing 65 million cars from the road, according to a new study out Tuesday.
The United States is poised to embark on a clean energy revolution. President Biden has introduced an infrastructure plan that goes beyond roads and bridges. It would produce millions of high-paying jobs with a series of investments to mitigate the impact of climate change—such as installing electric vehicle charging stations across the country, retrofitting our homes to increase energy efficiency, and expanding capacity in renewable sectors such as solar and offshore wind.
When the president unveiled his proposal last week, he spoke about a key philosophy guiding his plan: a mission to “ bring everybody along.” His bill centers on a framework known as “Just Transition”—which aims to create greater opportunity for marginalized Americans while building a greener, more sustainable economy. Perhaps no state in our country better embodies the potential of this approach than West Virginia.
"I think we need a grassroots movement that makes it clear to Joe Manchin... that the progressive agenda is what the American people want," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Senate Democrats late Monday received a green light from the chamber's parliamentarian to pass additional bills through the arcane budget reconciliation process this year, good news for the party's efforts to approve a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure package in the face of unified Republican opposition.
Today’s largest employers are Amazon and Walmart, each paying far less per hour and routinely exploiting their workers, who have little recourse.
The most dramatic change in the system over the last half-century has been the emergence of corporate giants like Amazon and the shrinkage of labor unions.
In a speech on Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen called for a global minimum tax on multinational corporations as President Joe Biden and leading Democrats defended a sweeping jobs and infrastructure proposal that analysts say would support a more equitable recovery from the pandemic by raising the corporate tax rate.
A new survey shows that "every major aspect" of the Democratic president's plan to rebuild the country has majority support, regardless of party affiliation.
A new poll released Tuesday shows that a large, bipartisan majority of voters in the United States supports President Joe Biden's proposal to spend $2.25 trillion over eight years to upgrade the nation's physical and social infrastructure.
We speak with economist Darrick Hamilton, founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School, about how U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is calling for a minimum global corporate income tax to help pay for President Joe Biden’s proposed $2.25 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan, aimed in part at combating the climate crisis and addressing racial inequities in housing and transportation. The plan includes over $650 billion for roads, bridges, railways and ports; $650 billion to expand broadband, retrofit homes and upgrade water systems and the electrical grid; $400 billion for “home- or community-based care” for the elderly and people with disabilities; and $300 billion for domestic manufacturing. “The good news is the conception of infrastructure has been expanded to include human infrastructure, as well as addressing the environment, beyond just traditional bridges and roads,” says Hamilton, but he adds the bill is still too small to properly address the economic problems facing the United States. “The scale of the problem and the size of the bill is incongruent.”
"That starts with ending incentives to ship jobs overseas and closing loopholes that allow companies to stash their profits in tax havens."
A trio of Senate Democrats on Monday unveiled a plan to force U.S.-based multinational corporations to "pay their fair share" by hiking the tax rate on companies' overseas earnings, taking steps to prevent businesses from shifting profits to foreign tax havens, and eliminating other Republican-authored incentives for offshoring.
"Instead of holding DeJoy accountable, the USPS Board of Governors confirmed what I always suspected was true," said Sen. Tammy Duckworth.
Democratic lawmakers issued fresh calls late Monday for President Joe Biden to remove all six members of the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors to enable the ouster of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy after the board declared its "full support" for the Republican megadonor accused of openly sabotaging the agency.
It’s no exaggeration to say that we’re now living in a Second Gilded Age. And today’s progressive activists may be on the verge of ushering us into a Second Progressive Era. They need all the support we can give them.
Over the past decade, growing corporate-tax avoidance has met with a growing backlash. Breakneck globalisation allowed multinationals to replace fears of double taxation with the joys of double non-taxation, using havens to game the system. By exploiting mismatches between countries’ tax laws, taxable profits could be cut or even made to disappear. The game became easier with the rise of intangible assets, which can be shifted between jurisdictions more easily than buildings or machinery. Big tech has been a big beneficiary: the five largest Silicon Valley giants paid $220bn in cash taxes over the past decade, just 16% of their cumulative pre-tax profits.
Numerous sets of talks aimed at resolving the problem have been held under the auspices of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. Progress, however, has been slow. Frustrated, dozens of countries—from Belgium and Britain to India and Indonesia—have introduced or proposed “digital-services taxes” (DSTs) on the local sales of foreign firms with online platforms. The Trump administration said these levies discriminated against American business and threatened tariffs.
"Democrats get owned on regulatory issues day in and day out," said one critic. "The problem is they didn't want to do the work."
In recent weeks, progressive public interest organizations have identified—and implored congressional Democrats to repeal—dozens of former President Donald Trump's last-minute regulatory attacks on consumers, the environment, immigrants, Social Security, and more.
The intellectual left reacted to Donald Trump’s election in 2016 in two very different ways. One group, like so many in the general public, immediately fell into full panic mode. The historian Timothy Snyder, for instance, rushed into print with a book called On Tyranny and in an interview declared it “pretty much inevitable” that Trump would follow Adolf Hitler’s example by declaring a state of emergency and staging a coup. Others urged caution. Snyder’s Yale colleague Samuel Moyn and Oxford’s David Priestland insisted in a New York Times opinion piece that “there is no real evidence that Mr. Trump wants to seize power unconstitutionally, and there is no reason to think he could succeed.” Trump, they claimed, was in reality a weak leader, despite his ability to exploit populist discontent. What was needed, they implied, was a focus less on his tweets and more on the neoliberalism and endless war that had provoked the discontent that brought him to power in the first place. The debates continued right through the 2020 election, with Snyder and many others continuing to warn of jackboots in the streets and Moyn and numerous other commentators insisting that the warnings themselves mostly worked to distract our attention from the staggering structural problems that the country faces.
The events of January 6 might seem to have resolved the debate. Trump’s incitement of the Capitol attack was a treasonous crime. The ragtag rioters caused five deaths and put many other lives in danger. But what Moyn in these pages called a “parodic coup” (others dubbed it the “Q d’état”) in fact had no chance of delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s victory for more than a few hours, let alone of overthrowing the federal government.
Whether Biden will clear the minefield Trump has left behind will primarily be determined in Washington, not Vienna. It will require both political will and capital.
"I have a feeling he thinks advocating for fair access to the ballot box is the only political act CEOs shouldn't be engaged in," said Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
After spending much of his decades-long career raking in corporate cash and combating efforts to limit money in politics, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday suddenly claimed to be deeply concerned by the political influence of "powerful and wealthy people" who have spoken out against the Georgia state GOP's sweeping assault on voting rights.
"This is the wrong approach," said the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines.
The Biden administration was accused Tuesday of holding an " indefensible" position after the Pentagon said landmines "remain a vital tool" in the U.S. military's arsenal.
As Republicans criticize large corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines for their opposition to the recent Georgia voter suppression law, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has called out the Republicans’ criticisms as “extraordinary” and says that they’re attempting to distract the public from their war on voting.
The Washington Democrat said the proposed amendment "ends corporate constitutional rights, reverses Citizens United, and ensures that our democracy is really of the people, by the people—not corporations."
Reaffirming that "corporations are not people and money is not speech," Rep. Pramila Jayapal on Tuesday led 50 members of Congress in introducing a constitutional amendment to end corporate personhood, reverse the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, and "put power back into the hands of people."
"This bill will drive families, doctors and businesses out of the state, and sends a terrible and heartbreaking message to transgender people who are watching in fear," warned the ACLU.
Defenders of LGBTQ rights denounced Republican legislators in Arkansas on Tuesday for overriding a veto by Gov. Asa Hutchinson just a day earlier that had been seen as a hard-won victory for the trans youth and other gender nonconforming people in the state.
I remember the first time I heard about the Big Chicken. It was part of directions I received so many times, “if you see the Big Chicken you’ve gone too far,” or “turn left at the Big Chicken.” But it all made sense when I drove up on Cobb Parkway, the Kentucky Fried Chicken was a 40-foot-tall red chicken.
There were more Peachtree streets in Atlanta than a person could count, and directions in Marietta did not make sense, but the Big Chicken was a landmark I could work with. It is an understatement to say people do things differently in Georgia.
President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress have reportedly won a major ruling from the Senate parliamentarian, granting them the ability to pass more of their agenda without the need to defeat a filibuster from Republicans.
After Major League Baseball (MLB) announced it would be moving its All-Star Game away from Georgia because of the state’s recently passed voter suppression law, Republicans began downplaying the law that many critics have called a rehash of “ Jim Crow .”
The Big Lie has been replaced by 50 little lies nestling in 50 different states. The Big Lie, of course, is that if only the presidential election hadn’t been stolen, then Trump would still be in office. That’s now playing out in statehouses around the country, with legislation aiming to suppress, primarily, Black voters.
Nowhere has the lie been embraced with more gusto than the state of Georgia, the very state that was scrutinized by every GOP official for fraud after the party got its ass kicked in the last election. They found nothing, despite Trump’s felonious insistence that Republican officials manufacture some votes for him.
On Tuesday, April 6, the medical workers’ union “Doctors’ Alliance” led a rally outside Alexey Navalny’s prison, demanding that he receive adequate medical care. Navalny, who has been on hunger strike for seven days now, has complained about his health deteriorating in prison and was recently moved to a sick ward due to “signs of a respiratory infection.” Several hours into the rally, police officers began arresting both demonstrators and journalists, including Doctors’ Alliance director Anastasia Vasilieva and CNN correspondent Matthew Chance. According to regional police officials, the detainees were “violating public order.”
Progressive Nina Turner’s congressional campaign announced Monday that it brought in a nearly $2.2 million haul since the Ohio Democrat launched her candidacy in December, including $1.55 million in the first quarter of 2021.
In a total war the target can be individuals, civilians, organizations, groups, or governments. The audience needs to be well delineated and studied so that the message is appropriately formed, as we’ve discussed beforehand. There are four audiences to a message:
The ultimate one, the real target.
The intermediate one, which are likely to receive the message and could be part of the target audience.
The apparent one, an audience that seemingly appears to be the target but isn’t the real intended one.
The unintended one, which the planner didn’t intend to reach but still received the message.
The receptivity, as we’ve kept saying, depends on many cultural and environment factors. However, in a military setting and with government sponsorship, vulnerabilities can be artificially created through means such as kinetic (bombs and guns), non-lethal biological weapons affecting human psyche and mood, and physical threats. The full environmental scope comes into play.
Do not believe the videos That show assault and wrecking. The videos that Trump must have Show cops and Proud Boys necking.
I had to laugh. Mr. or Ms. Tillman was likely thinking of Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen and perhaps of some other among many thousands of fibs told by the record-setting dissembler Trump.
I don’t like lies or (I am guessing) Trump any more than R. Tillman but who is he or she trying to kid?
A long-dormant judicial volcano belched some smoke and ash into the morning breeze earlier this week, leaving some of the villagers below more than a little bewildered: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas abruptly announced his support on Monday for broad and muscular government regulation of private business.
A Russian court has fined the video sharing platform TikTok for failing to remove content that allegedly incited minors to participate in unsanctioned protests in Moscow, reports the Russian state news agency TASS.
What is it with the NY Times publishing incredibly ridiculously wrong and confused articles and op-eds about Section 230? It's gotten to the point that you have to think that they're doing it on purpose. I've covered the NY Times getting 230 wrong (often in totally embarrassing ways) over and over and over and over and over again. And those are just examples from the past two years.
We've got another podcast cross-post for you this week! Mike recently joined the Cato Institute Daily Podcast to discuss the PACT Act — the more "serious" proposal for Section 230 reform that is still riddled with problems that will do damage to the entire internet. Listen to the full conversation with Mike and Cato's Will Duffield on this week's episode.
Despite accepting a petition that avoids the Supreme Court deliberating on whether a president can block social media users, Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday issued a volley that may foreshadow future legal issues surrounding social media in the United States.
On Monday, the Supreme Court sent back to a lower court and ruled as moot a lawsuit over whether former President Donald Trump could block followers on Twitter, after accepting a petition by the federal government to end the case because Trump wasn’t president anymore.
The case dates back to March 2018, when the Knight First Amendment Institute and others brought a case against former president Trump in the Southern District of New York for blocking users based on their political views, arguing the practice is a violation of the first amendment.
A Moscow district court has ordered opposition figure Lyubov Sobol to pay 500,000 rubles ($6,480) in compensation for moral damages, satisfying (at least in part) yet another defamation lawsuit filed against her by Kremlin-linked catering mogul Evgeny Prigozhin.
The problems in Slovenia and the Netherlands are typical of those that are increasingly facing public broadcasters all over Europe. In some countries, such as Hungary and Poland, illiberal governments are turning them into mouthpieces for the ruling party. In others, such as Germany and Sweden, populist movements accuse them of bias in favour of the establishment and the left. Modelled on Britain’s BBC (now facing political pressures of its own), Europe’s public media were set up to anchor democracy by providing citizens with objective reporting. But in an age of polarisation and disinformation, that is getting harder to do.
This fight against women's oppression is not just a struggle for women, but for all of humanity.
March 8, 2021, International Women’s Day, is an important day to recognize the challenges confronted and the great victories made by women around the world, especially in the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
"Students deserve more than an education system that is hell-bent on criminalizing them instead of providing them with the resources they need to succeed."
More than two-thirds of students surveyed for a report published Tuesday by a coalition of community advocates say in-house police should be removed from schools, with large numbers of pupils also saying they feel unsafe around officers and many of the youth—more than 90% of whom were people of color—reporting being harassed or mocked by campus cops.€
For Venezuelans, there is no one "January 6." There are at least half a dozen.
The January 6th raid on the Capitol and the pandemic that has upended the lives of every American seemingly have nothing to do with Venezuela. But the effects they had on U.S. political and economic stability offer a glimpse into what Venezuelans have been going through for the past several years of failed coups and sanctions.
Yulia Navalnaya has reported receiving a letter from Alexander Mukhanov, the director of the prison colony where her husband, Alexey Navalny, is being held.
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden fired Peter Robb, the Trump-appointed general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency responsible for interpreting and enforcing federal labor law.
Robb’s supporters protested that Biden had unfairly and illegally thrown him out of office 10 months before the end of his four-year term. In reality, Biden had ample legal authority for removing Robb, much of which is set forth in a legal memo penned by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts when he worked in the Reagan administration.
The clash between police and protesters in Echo Park is a microcosm of our nation’s current economic system and the role that law enforcement plays to preserve it. A decades-long housing crisis in Los Angeles has steadily pushed growing numbers of people into the streets. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, there were 41,290 experiencing homelessness within city limits in 2020—a 16.1 percent increase from the year before. Over the past year, with the pandemic-related mass layoffs, resulting overdue rents and other bills, and a tenuous barely there safety net, that number has likely risen even more this year.
Krithika Santhanam is an attorney and mass protest defense coordinator at the National Lawyers Guild of Los Angeles, which sent legal observers to the Echo Park protest to document any resulting police brutality. She explained to me in an interview that the police response on March 24 was “no different than the same sort of violent, militant response we continue to see over and over when it comes to large-scale, predominantly progressive protests demanding social justice.” Indeed, as this past year has demonstrated, regardless of location and issue, American law enforcement has applied violent police power against expressions of progressive dissent while openly tolerating or even abetting the preservation of a white supremacist capitalist order. The Echo Park sweep, taking place just as the high-profile trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd began, is disappointingly typical of law enforcement’s role in policing the poor.
With Brexit Britain feeling alone, it is time to resort to mauling targets made traditional during the 2016 campaign to exit the European Union: the asylum seeker, the refugee and anyone assisting in that enterprise.€ And the person best suited to doing so is the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, who outlined the government’s New Plan for Immigration on March 24 th.€ It has three objectives with one overarching punitive theme “to better protect and support those in genuine need of asylum.”€ The authenticity of that need will be aided by deterring “illegal entry into the UK, thereby breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and protecting the lives of those they endanger”.€ Those with “no right to be” in the UK will also be more easily “removed”.
It is in the nature of such policies to conceal the punitive element by extolling virtues.€ “The UK accepted more refugees through planned resettlement schemes than any other country in Europe in the period 2015-2019 – the fourth highest resettlement schemes globally after the USA, Canada and Australia,” reads the policy statement. “The UK also welcomed 29,000 people through the refugee family reunion scheme between 2015 and 2019. More than half of these were children.”
The South African press release called for proper healthcare for Abu-Jamal and all other prisoners who have tested positive for COVID-19. It stated that Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner whose “only crime is exposing the racist, capitalist justice system in the U.S. which for decades defended and supported the Apartheid government.”
Importantly, NUMSA’s statement to the world ends with these words: “We urge our comrades locally and around the globe to join us in this just campaign to free Mumia.”
More than a year into the pandemic and the economic crisis it generated, many workers continue to be excluded from receiving any government relief. These excluded workers include undocumented people — many of them in essential services — and people recently released from prison. Hundreds of essential workers across New York are leading marches and hunger strikes to demand lawmakers support a $3.5 billion fund that would be the first of its kind in the United States to provide pandemic relief funding to those excluded from the current system. Governor Andrew Cuomo is now in final negotiations with legislators on a budget bill that was due last month, which could issue payments to up to 275,000 people. “I truly believe that this is the job of government,” says Marcela Mitaynes, a New York assemblymember who is joining excluded workers in their hunger strike to push for pandemic relief and has called for a wealth tax to fund it. “We’re supposed to provide for our people. And this is a moment where we need to step up.”
The DEA's love for taking cash from travelers has gotten it sued. Again. In August 2019, DEA agents -- working with TSA agents -- took more than $80,000 from Rebecca Brown, who was carrying her father's (Terry Rolin) savings through an airport on her way home to put it in a bank account he could use to pay for dental work and truck repairs.
European Council President Charles Michel and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen met with the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday for talks on a reset in relations. After meeting Erdogan in Ankara, Michel spoke to reporters about the EU's deep concern over human rights in Turkey.
Larry Klayman is a famous lawyer. Perhaps more infamous than famous at this point, but he's a lawyer in every jurisdiction he hasn't been sanctioned in yet. But fear not! Klayman will get disciplined wherever possible, if only to own the libs.
Two weeks after Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, nine Minneapolis City Council members took to a provisional stage in Powderhorn Park, just west of the Third Precinct building. Large white letters leaned against the stage, spelling out their plan: defund police.
Floyd’s death under an officer’s knee quickly mainstreamed abolitionist thought by suggesting police reform is ineffective and insufficient. Floyd was not the area’s first high-profile police killing. Black Lives Matter activists organized locally and nationally around Jamar Clark’s death in 2015 and Castile’s death in 2016. By the time Floyd was killed, the MPD had already implemented many of the police reforms considered best practices.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, protests against police violence were met with militarized, aggressive police. In Seattle, police used tear gas multiple times—during a respiratory pandemic—before Chief Carmen Best temporarily banned it. In Minneapolis, public officials unleashed the largest police deployment in state history, during which officers shot rubber bullets and waged chemical warfare against citizens. Protesters suffered everything from eye trauma to brain injuries as a result.
Thousands of demonstrators marched across Britain on Saturday in protest of a massive new policing bill that would create new restrictions on protest in England and Wales and impose hefty fines for not following police instructions.
The bill, officially known as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, was introduced in early March and has been met with widespread pushback in England and Wales since then. It also includes sentencing and court reforms, among other changes, but protesters are specifically incensed by proposed new police powers concerning protests.
Today, though, more and more young people—and especially teenage girls—are using filters that “beautify” their appearance and promise to deliver model-esque looks by sharpening, shrinking, enhancing, and recoloring their faces and bodies. Veronica and Sophia are both avid users of Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok, where these filters are popular with millions of people.
Through swipes and clicks, the array of face filters enable them to adjust their own image, and even sift through different identities, with new ease and flexibility.
For a long time now, we've explained how broadband usage caps are bullshit. They serve no technical purpose on the network, and aren't genuinely helpful in managing congestion. Their real role is several fold: one, they let ISPs charge US consumers (who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world) even higher rates; two, they let ISPs falsely advertise a lower price than they actually charge; and three, they can be abused anticompetitively (exempting an ISP's own streaming content from caps while still penalizing a competitor like Netflix).
The US aerospace company Boeing and its European competitor Airbus have been fighting at the EPO for almost nine years. The disputed Boeing patent EP 1 798 872 protects a method for handling aircraft communications.
The technology uses various transmission networks to communicate flight routes and other data. Not all transmission channels are always active. The system works with a preference list from which it identifies the network that is currently available.
The patent was granted by the EPO in 2011; in May 2012 Airbus filed an opposition against the granting. In March 2016, the opposition division of the EPO revoked the patent and Boeing filed an appeal. The Board of Appeal 3.5.03 now dismissed this appeal (case-ID: T 1127/16).
The question at issue was whether a feature of the claim 1 infringes Article 123(2) EPC. The claim contains three sub-features which are repeated word-for-word in an auxiliary request. But this time the first two features were separated by a comma, whereas number two and three were included in the same clause. This results in a different interpretation of the claim to that in the patent claim originally filed.
The patent holder argued that, in case of ambiguity, it is necessary to interpret the claims in the light of the description and drawings. The Board of Appeal, however, rejected this.
It stated that the description and the drawings have not automatically to be consulted when an ambiguous feature occurs in the claim, or where the claim as a whole includes one or more inconsistencies. According to the Board, the claim should essentially be read and interpreted on its own merits.
Three Working Parties of the Standing Advisory Committee of the EPO (SACEPO) met virtually in March, following the appointment of new members last January. Three different videoconferences were organised to gather user feedback from the SACEPO Working Parties on Rules, e-Patent Process, and Patent Documentation and Information.
Nokia just announced "that it has concluded a multi-year, multi-technology patent cross-license agreement with Lenovo. Under the agreement, Lenovo will make a net balancing payment to Nokia. The terms of the agreement remain confidential. The agreement resolves all pending patent litigation and other proceedings between the two parties, in all jurisdictions."
Lenovo defended itself pretty well against Nokia's patent infringement lawsuits in the U.S., Germany, and India, and brought a FRAND action in the Northern District of California. Nokia had some success in the Munich I Regional Court, but the appeals court stayed the enforcement of an injunction. Another Munich trial was scheduled for July. Last summer, Nokia filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission seeking an import ban, but a decision on that complaint would still have taken some more time.
[...]
As for forum selection, it appears likely that Nokia will continue to bet primarily on U.S. district courts, the ITC, the Munich I Regional Court, with other jurisdictions (such as India in this particular dispute) being given a try from time to time.
In its turn, Junior Party The University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its motion in opposition to Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") motion for priority in Interference No. 106,115. CVC's motion challenges Broad's priority claim and the bases Broad set forth therein, rebutting Broad's legal arguments and mentioning more than once that Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (and by implication that the Broad inventors had not).
CVC's motion is based on two principles. First, as supported by deposition testimony of Dr. Luciano Marraffini (compelled by the Board's grant of CVC's motion to require compliance), CVC argues that Broad inventor Zhang derived the invention claimed in the patents-in-interference from disclosure of CVC's conception from Dr. Marraffini. Dr. Marraffini was in possession of CVC's invention because he was a confidential reviewer of the manuscript later published in Science as Jinek et al. (2012, "A Programmable Dual-RNA-Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity," Science 337: 816–21). Dr. Marraffini also attended a CRISPR conference at Berkley on June 26, 2012 where the Doudna lab disclosed its CRISPR findings.
Sources from four technology companies reveal diverging views about the US Supreme Court's decision to sidestep API copyrightability
Popular adult video site Pornhub has released a transparency report showing how it responds to problematic content. Last year, more than half a million pieces of content were taken down following DMCA notices. In addition, Pornhub also deployed an automatic upload filter that caught more than 100,000 videos before they went online
The RIAA and NMPA are putting Twitter under pressure to do something about the platform's piracy problem. Slamming the company for allowing pre-release music to be distributed to the public, the industry groups say that Twitter is failing to meet its legal obligations when responding to takedown notices. Licensing is the answer, they suggest, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Back in February of 2020, we wrote about several odd attempts by Activision to use the DMCA takedown process to try to bury leaks of content in its Call of Duty game franchise. It all started with the company attempting to first take down Reddit posts that showed leaked cover art for Call of Duty: Warzone, before Activision then attempted to have Reddit unmask the poster of the image in an attempt to track down where the leak came from. While Activision certainly isn't the first company that has attempted to bury leaks using DMCA notices, it was a fairly high profile attempt, which, of course, just meant that the Streisand Effect took over and suddenly tons of people were seeing the image in media outlets reporting on the matter, such as at Techdirt.
