Legit, what the hell?
3:24 Linux Innards 52:34 Vibrations from the Ether 1:10:46 Check this Out 1:13:19 Announcements & Outro
We discuss old and new ways to manage, organize, index, and search your photo collection. It's our favorite Google Photo's alternatives.
Plus Chris' hands-on review of System76's customizable Launch keyboard.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Sent in last weekend to the Linux 5.13 kernel was the change so Linux x86/x86_64 will always reserve the first 1MB of RAM in order to avoid corruption issues with some BIOS and frame-buffers sometimes fiddling with that lowest portion of system memory. While the thought was reserving that first 1MB unconditionally was a bit onerous and that perhaps Windows has some way of determining how much low memory area to reserve, it turns out Windows has been employing this same behavior for years.
While Linus Torvalds landed the change in Linux 5.13 to reserve that first 1MB of RAM on Linux x86/x86_64 systems, he did comment, "This seems a bit draconic. How does this work at all under Windows? There must be some windows knowledge about what the BIOS updates that we're not aware of. I've pulled it, but it does seem like something odd is going on."
Last week the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti review embargo lifted while today NVIDIA has lifted it on the RTX 3070 Ti ahead of the official availability tomorrow. Here are the initial Linux gaming benchmarks looking at the performance of the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti up against the rest of the GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs as well as AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series competition.
The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti is quite similar to the existing RTX 3070 graphics card except that it has 6144 CUDA cores over 5888 on the non-Ti variant and enjoys a 1.58GHz base clock compared to 1.50GHz and a 1.77GHz boost clock compared to 1.73GHz. The RTX 3070 Ti also has 8GB of GDDR6X video memory compared to standard DDR6 on the original RTX 3070. These improvements with the RTX 3070 Ti lead to a 290 Watt graphics card power compared to 220 Watts on the non-Ti RTX 3070. Aside from that, the RTX 3070 family part of the RTX 30 Ampere series is quite similar.
Extracting zip files on Linux using the command line a piece of cake. It is super easy and the tool we require to do that mostly comes pre-installed. However, if not then here we let you know not only how to install and use ZIP commands on Linux such as Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, Linux Mint, etc.
Archives files are very useful to compress and store multiple files into a single file. For example, if want to upload a folder containing multiple files online, then rather than doing this for every single one, we bundled them in an archive. So that other users can easily download them. Furthermore, various compression algorithms are there to keep the data size as small as possible, which also favors the transfer.
In most Linux distributions, standard tools are already installed that allow to extract ZIP files graphically and unpack an archive. For that usually, you have to just right-click on the archive file and select the unzip option. However, if you are looking for a command-line way then here it is.
An understanding of authentication is essential in any IT environment; Jörg Kastning covers the fundamentals. Paragraphs A fundamental understanding of authentication, its factors, and usage is vital for IT specialists, sysadmins, and users. In this article, I’ll explain what authentication is and look at how it’s used.
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
Have you ever felt a need to change the configuration of your website running on an Apache webserver without having root access to server configuration files (httpd.conf)? This is what the .htaccess file is for.
The .htaccess file provides a way to make configuration changes to your website on a per-directory basis. The file is created in a specific directory that contains one or more configuration directives that are applied to that directory and its subdirectories. In shared hosting, you will need to use a .htaccess file to make configuration changes to your server.
In this series celebrating Kubernetes' 11th birthday, I've introduced some great tools for chaos engineering. In the first article, I explained what chaos engineering is, and in the second, I demonstrated how to get your system's steady state so that you can compare it against a chaos state. In the next four articles, I introduced some chaos engineering tools: Litmus for testing arbitrary failures and experiments in your Kubernetes cluster; Chaos Mesh, an open source chaos orchestrator with a web user interface; Kube-monkey for stress-testing your systems by scheduling random termination pods in your cluster; and Kube DOOM for killing pods while having fun.
This brief guide explains what is a runlevel, how many runlevels are there in Linux and how to check the runlevel in Linux operating systems.
Modoboa is an open-source mail server hosting and management platform for Linux. It is written in Python uses Postfix, and Dovecot to send and receive email. It uses an Nginx webserver and MySQL/PostgreSQL database. It allows you to create unlimited mailboxes and unlimited mail domains. It can be integrated with Let’s Encrypt to encrypt all communications between your email server and the outside network. It comes with a web-based admin panel to manage domains, mailboxes, aliases, and more. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Modoboa on Debian 10 server.
Dnf is the default high-level package manager in the Red Hat family of distributions, which includes Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all its clones. It is the successor of Yum, and indeed using the yum command in recent versions of the distributions mentioned above, is just another way to call dnf. Dnf has a lot of nice features and plugins which help us install, update and remove software packaged in the “.rpm” format. In this tutorial we explore dnf package groups and learn how to handle them.
I'm reading Ansible's builtin.file sources for, uhm, reasons, and the use of follow stood out to my eyes.
It is always recommended to use encrypted passwords in Linux bash shell scripts. Typically, in bash shell script we may need password for remote user while connecting to remote system, ftp user and proxy user etc. In this article, we will cover how to encrypt password using openssl command and then will see how this encrypted password can be used in bash shell script.
In this article, we’ll show you how to manage the systemd units using systemctl command.
In Linux, there are many ways to achieve a single task. To make it precise there are many commands to get the same information. When you start using Linux distribution you should know how to get information about what distribution, kernel version, architecture, etc.
In this article, you will learn how to get your Linux kernel version, distribution name, and system-related information using different command-line tools.
The swap space is a unique space on the disk that is used by the system when Physical RAM is full. When a Linux machine runout the RAM it use swap space to move inactive pages from RAM.
Swap space can be created into Linux system in two ways, one we can create a dedicated partition for swap or another one is created a swap file and use it as swap space.
Usually, when we are creating VPS with any provider like Digital Ocean, Linode, etc., we don’t have the swap partition into the server, in this case, we need to create swap file to use as swap space in server.
In this tutorial, we have explained all necessary steps to create or add swap space on Ubuntu 21.04 machine.
Before we install BIND DNS server, let us try to have a quick overview of the DNS protocol.
Jenkins ( fork of the Hudson) is a web-based open source continuous integration server system. It is written in Java and is platform-independent. The Jenkins base supports numerous tools including SVN, Ant, Maven, and JUnit. The community can add additional functions with the help of plugins. This means that Jenkins can be customized for each project. Also for projects with other languages ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹/ technologies such as B. PHP, Ruby or .NET Jenkins is suitable. Test tools can be integrated via plugins via the intuitive user interface.
It is a web application as well as administration, and the testing of the projects takes place entirely via the browser.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XAMPP on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, XAMPP is a free and open-source web server package developed by Apache Friends. The XAMPP software package comprises the Apache web server, MariaDB database server, PHP, and Perl. And it is basically local host or a local server. This local server works on your own desktop or laptop computer. You can just install this software on your laptop or desktop and test the clients or your website before uploading it to the remote web server or computer.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the XAMPP server on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
Updates are essential in any operating system environment because it allows application, processes and the operating system itself to be in a consistent working condition. That’s also the reason that most of the updates include security compatibility and enhancements.
Why are security updates so important to install?
Your computer’s vulnerabilities are fixed with the help of security updates. These updates protect your system from local and remote threats. When developers found any vulnerability, they try to fix it quickly and then distribute the “quick fix” as a security update for you to install it as soon as possible. As those vulnerabilities become public, permitting the potential attackers to exploit them. This statement declares that an outdated system is vulnerable, but it is also recognized as a vulnerable system for attackers.
Security updates also play a significant role in the Linux environment since they give the administrator complete control over performance expectations. Therefore, it’s usually a good idea to keep your Linux software up to date, especially when we talk about its security. Users should generally install security updates in Linux systems within 30 days of their release date. This post will demonstrate the manual and automatic installation method of security update on your CentOS 8. So let’s head towards this journey!
This article discusses and demonstrates how you can implement duty rostering with Red Hat Business Optimizer. Business Optimizer, a component in Red Hat Decision Manager, is an AI (artificial intelligence) constraint solver that optimizes planning and scheduling problems with Decision Manager.
The duty rostering use case requires us to assign shifts to employees based on their respective duty—for example, cleaning, drying, delivery, and so on.
Have you ever wanted to try out a new operating system, but you didn’t want to blow away your hard drive and start over? Discover an awesome piece of software, but you were unsure of the author or how it would interact with your workflow? Maybe you work in IT, or you’re interested in IT, and you want to learn about Active Directory, SCCM, PowerShell, and Group Policy, but you don’t have space or the budget for a full server rack at home. With virtual machines, you can tackle all of these scenarios with ease. All you need is a computer with decent hardware and the willingness to learn and break things.
Today we are looking at how to install Mega Man Maker on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
“iftop” is a network monitoring command in Linux that displays real-time information about your network bandwidth usage. This command can easily be installed on any Linux distribution and can be used very conveniently. This article will be based on the installation method of this command, followed by a few of its use cases.
Git user performs different types of tasks by using multiple branches in the local repository. Sometimes the user needs to undo the local changes after or before commit for the project purposes. This operation can be done easily in git. Git saves the snap of the repository at different points and stores the history of the task. The user can move backward or forward at the particular committed or uncommitted point using git history. The local changes of the repository can undo before publishing to the remote server by discarding all changes or leaving the staged changes.
DaemonSets are quite simple to understand. In Kubernetes, a DaemonSet architecture guarantees that a pod operates on each node in a cluster (when applicable). For each daemon, a single DaemonSet encompassing all nodes would be utilized in the simplest instance. Numerous DaemonSets for the same type of daemon might be used in a more complicated arrangement, each with distinct flags and/or memory and CPU requirements for various hardware types. Garbage collection is used to remove pods as nodes are eliminated from the cluster. When you delete a DaemonSet, it will also delete the Pods it produced.
DaemonSets are analogous to Kubernetes deployments; in that way, they are automatically dispersed to assure that pods are deployed on every node in the cluster. In addition, if a new node is added to the cluster after the DaemonSet is already deployed, the scheduler would deploy the DaemonSet to a new node upon the join.
Undoubtedly, Linux is a bit tricky operating system to use. Many people switch from proprietary operating systems like Windows and macOS to Linux distributions because of their stability, performance, security, and open-source nature. But at the same time, many beginners find it challenging to use because of its Command Line Interface (CLI).
CLI is a bit intimidating, but as you get to know it, you will be amazed at the benefits it offers and even find it extremely easy to use compared to GUI-based environments. Through terminal, you can do just about anything you want. For example, you can manage files, edit files, download any package, run a program, view images, and even play videos.
Terminal is a very important program and available in all operating systems. There are various tasks that can only be done in terminal. Many beginners get annoyed when terminal gives them errors while performing some tasks. One of those errors is the “Command ‘vim’ not found” error, which you usually encounter when you copy commands from an online source. This write-up is all about guiding you on how to fix this error. So, let’s begin.
Linux administrators often need to know the number of cores while managing the Linux servers and assigning various tasks to multiple server machines. Initially, Computer systems come with single-core CPUs, but nowadays, we have multi-core CPUs to increase performance. This post will provide numerous methods and commands to find the number of cores in the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
The git users need to work with different types of files in a local repository. The file adds to the repository by using the `git add` command, and this is called staging of the file to the local repository. The user can confirm the file addition task by using the `git commit` command. But suppose the user accidentally added any file and did not want to keep the file in the repository after adding. In that case, he/she can remove the file from the stage area by using the `git reset` command or removing the file. The staging index is located at .git/index. If the user modifies the content of any added file, then the user has to re-add the file again to keep the changes or restore the file in the previous stage to undo the changes. The different ways to unstage the file of a local git repository have been explained in this tutorial.
A git repository contains many commits depends on the project task. Sometimes the git user needs to clone a repository with the existing commits and may require to know the previous git commit history. `git log` command is used to view the commit history and display the necessary information of the git repository. This command displays the latest git commits information in chronological order, and the last commit will be displayed first. The different ways to view the commit history of the git repository by using the `git log` command have been explained in this tutorial.
Fstab stands for File System Table, which is a system configuration file. This file is known as one of the most critical files in any Linux distribution because it handles the mounting and unmounting of file systems to the hardware. When you attach a new Hard Drive or SSD, you need to edit the fstab file to mount it and integrate it into the file system. So, when making an entry in fstab in Linux, we first need to understand the structure of the fstab file.
VirtualBox is an open-source, multi-platform application developed by Oracle, primarily used as a virtualization tool for x86 hardware. VirtualBox can host many operating systems at a time. Is it resource-intensive? No, it has built-in software virtualization technology that makes it less dependent upon host hardware. One of the key features of VirtualBox is that it supports multiple screen resolutions. But by default, the screen resolution appears very small upon installing the guest operating system, as demonstrated in the image below.
For many people, computer clocks in your devices, network machines, and servers are generally accurate. But that’s not true! These clocks are manually maintained and backed by batteries which over time drift the clock, especially in the older machines.
So why is accurate time so important? Having exact time on your machine is quite significant because of several reasons. Many aspects of your computer activity are linked with time. Perfectly synched time is crucial for tracking security-related issues; troubleshooting can become quite difficult if the timestamps in log files are incorrect. Even for financial services, keeping accurate time is critical.
Many companies solve time-related issues by connecting their networks with NTP.
While you are using Ubuntu Linux, you may want to watch Netflix or YouTube videos with your Bluetooth headset. The interaction of various modules such as Bluez, PulseAudio, drivers, Linux kernel, and client applications allow Bluetooth to work. However, in Ubuntu, you could face some issues in establishing the Bluetooth connection.
For instance, you may experience some problems with Bluetooth connectivity after suspending the whole system. In this case, you think that restarting the entire system for making the Bluetooth headset work is the right option. You also go for the “universal solution, ” removing the device and pairing it up again. Unfortunately, these solutions are not going to work for you in Ubuntu. After significant research, we have compiled some solutions for restarting Bluetooth in Ubuntu. To solve this problem, try each of these solutions one at a time.
We often need to install two different operating systems side by side on our machine in dual boot mode. However, when we install a second operating system like Ubuntu, it becomes the primary operating system against our will. We do not want it to be the default operating system. We want to keep it as a secondary operating system. In such scenarios, we need to change the boot order according to our choice, and this post will provide you the exact solution on how to change the grub boot order in Linux.
While working in a VirtualBox and its virtual machines, it is often needed to copy and paste some content between the Virtual machine and the host. In other words, if we use real technical terms, we need to share the clipboard between guest and host. For sharing the clipboard, all you need to do is install the Guest Additional Image in your Virtual Machine and enable the sharing of the clipboard.
When we create a new Virtual machine in VirtualBox and install any Operating system in that machine, it is often faced that the internet is not working or not connected. There can be multiple reasons if the internet is not working on the Virtual machine in the VirtualBox. This post will help you and provide you a step-by-step guide on fixing or enabling the internet connection in a virtual machine of VirtualBox.
Steam is a popular platform for video game distribution and provides a convenient way to purchase and download PC games through a Steam account. Apart from that, it allows users to interact with a huge gaming community. Installing games through Steam gives various advantages like proper management of your purchases, automatic updates, no DVD boxes, re-installing a purchased game with a single click, and much more. These conveniences have made Steam a must-have program by every PC gamer.
There are multiple reasons why someone would want to uninstall Steam. One reason is that having too many games can make your PC slow and games could start behaving abnormally due to the lack of adequate storage. Moreover, the congested disk space may heat up your PC and even make the Steam app crash. Most of the time, a fresh installation of Steam solves many of these issues because it clears out the corrupt files.
Uninstalling an app does not mean it will delete all the related directories or data from your Ubuntu device. We need more steps to completely remove an application and its associated folders. This write-up is a thorough guide to completely remove Steam from Ubuntu. So, let’s begin.
While using Linux, you may encounter various errors. One of them could be “/var/lib/dpkg/lock” error. Is it fixable? Well, yes! It is not a panicky error. But before we learn how to fix this error, let’s understand why this error occurs.
While using a Linux terminal, there exist many situations where you want to redirect the output of a command to a file and screen simultaneously, ensuring that the output is written to a file so you can refer to it later. You will be pleased to know that a Linux tool can perform this function effortlessly. “tee command” is added in the Linux-based systems specifically for this purpose. So, let’s go ahead and learn about this fantastic tool.
When you have a massive PDF file or a large number of PDF files to transfer, it is a better practice to compress PDF files. In Linux, there are various methods for compressing the PDF files like command-line tools and GUI tools for free.
This post will have a brief and step-by-step guide on how to compress a PDF file in Linux for free through the command line using GhostScript. GhostScript’s installation process and usage method are demonstrated on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system, and it can work on every other Debian-based operating system.
Linux is a multi-user operating system. Here, the root user holds the ultimate power over the entire system. For security reasons, it’s mandatory to have it password protected. In some cases, the root user is even disabled. CentOS has root user enabled by default.
Besides security concerns, access to root privilege is necessary when it’s required to perform system maintenance. The sudo command does exactly that. It grants a command/script root privilege as long as it is executed. Users having access to the sudo command are managed by the sudoers file.
In this guide, check out how to fix CentOS 8 error “User is not in the sudoers file”.
When we create a new machine in the VirtualBox and install an operating system, the VirtualBox sets a default screen resolution of 800Ãâ600(4:3). However, while working in a Virtual Machine, we often need to have a screen resolution of our own choice. Therefore, there are two ways to change the resolution of any Virtual Machine in VirtualBox.
The `git commit` command is used to confirm any changes done in the repository, and the git keeps the history of each committed task. Sometimes the user needs to change the committed message before or after publishing the repository. The user requires to rewrite the git history to change the older or newer commit of the repository. The –amend option is used with the `git commit` command to rewrite the git history. This tutorial explains how this option can be applied to the local and remote git repository to change the git commit or git commit message.
Here we learn the steps and commands to install the InfluxDB database server and secure it on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8 using the terminal. And also how to access it remotely using Influx’s HTTP API…
Valve has long been trying to get game developers and publishers to see Linux as a serious and profitable gaming platform and not simply because it loves the open source operating system. It basically wants games to be free from their reliance on Windows and Microsoft’s development frameworks and, eventually, to have them available on its own Linux-based Steam OS. Steam OS and Steam Machines have largely failed but Valve seems to still be pushing for Linux support for Windows games and its latest attempt is to get NVIDIA’s fancy DLSS technology to work on some of those titles.
Short for Deep Learning Super Sampling, DLSS is NVIDIA’s marketing term for supersampling that involves AI and machine learning to optimize the process. In a nutshell, machine learning determines which parts of an image frame are of more interest to gamers and, therefore, should be upsampled rather than applying it to the whole frame and all in real-time. The result, at least in theory, is faster frame rates that don’t perceptibly degrade graphics.
NVidia has announced that it is bringing Deep Learning Super Sampling or DLSS to gamers who are using Valve’s Proton compatibility to run Windows games on Linux operating systems.
DLSS works by rendering games at a lower resolution and then using machine learning algorithms to upscale the image, resulting in a higher quality image at a lower performance outlay from the user’s hardware.
Reporting on the story, The Verge discovered that running Nvidia’s list of games that support DLSS through the ProtonDB (a site designed to let users report how ell games work when using Proton) showed that around 30 games out of 50 DLSS-enabled games were working Linux.
Want to configure the likes of MangoHud, vkBasalt and ReplaySorcery? Check out the latest release of Goverlay.
Linux users and gamers often want to make tweaks, whether it is to squeeze the last bit of performance out of a machine, mod it, or just play around to see what you can do (or see how it breaks). You might say we are tinkerers. And with a wealth of tools at our disposal for Linux gaming, from Lutris, WINE, Steam, Proton, mods…there’s a lot to do and keep track of.
Enter SteamTinkerLaunch (aka stl), a tool that does nearly everything you can think of, and then more. We recently interviewed the creator, frostworx, all about it. While the Readme and wiki have everything and is quite detailed, one look at the wiki pages will tell you there is a lot.
So I present to you a quick getting started guide for SteamTinkerLaunch. I’ll walk you through getting set up and the basics, along with some examples of what you can do with stl. Recently I’ve been using stl to enable gamemode for my games, play with post-processing effects, and even to try out regular flat games in VR, all of which I’ll go through below.
This guide is geared a bit more towards beginner Linux gamers and/or those just hearing about stl, but I hope that more experienced users who may be overwhelmed by stl will also find this useful. (I also helped sort the giant Readme into wiki form over on GitHub, yet still learn something every time I open stl.)
Paradox are continuing to expand the excellent Crusader Kings III with another free update out now, which expands the game in a few nice ways. Usually, Paradox do big feature releases free along with DLC. This time around though, it seems a bunch of the changes simply could not wait and so CKIII 1.4 is out now for all players.
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What's above is only some of the bigger main additions. There's tons of balance changes, and a healthy dose of AI improvements to that should make for much more interesting games like children and grandchildren now being married off by "their liege if their liege is their parent or grandparent and is allowed to marry on their own" and all vassals can now declare war "no matter how deep down in the vassal tree they are".
Valheim is an epic game, selling multiple millions and clearly loved by many. Another fresh fixer-upper update is out now, which has some curious fixes.
The developers say that there should have been more in-world events, however they almost never happened and certainly not as expected. Iron Gate AB now say to expect to see "You are being hunted…" and "The horde is attacking" to brighten up your day. I've seen the horde attacking probably twice but never the hunted event so that will be interesting.
Plasma 5.22 was released yesterday and so the hard working continuous automation and continuous deployment guinea pigs at KDE neon compiled it all and bumped the version number and spun new installable ISOs and Docker images for you to try it. Existing users can just upgrade as normal.
Plasma 5.22 includes many small tweaks that make the experience just a little bit better. The release focuses on usability, stability, and flexibility improvements.
The first one is the Adaptive Transparency for panels and their widgets. This feature will let you have your panel be transparent when you just have open windows floating around and have those panels turn opaque when you have a maximized window. Transparent panels do look pretty weird when you have a solid window occupying the whole screen. If you prefer you can elect to make panels completely transparent or completely opaque.
KDE Plasma 5.22 is finally here.
While we previously covered the exciting changes coming to KDE Plasma 5.22 before the release, everyone can now get to experience it.
The announcement mentions that the release focuses on usability, stability, and flexibility improvements.
Here, let me highlight the key changes in this release.
Today, we're going to take a look at Plasma 5.22, the next release of KDE Plasma. There are no groundbreaking changes here, as expected, since Plasma 5.21 released about 3 months ago, and it mostly focuses on improving support for Wayland, but there are some nice quality of life imporvements in here as well.
Krita 4.4.5 comes about two and a half months after Krita 4.4.3, since there wasn’t a Krita 4.4.4 version released during this time, and brings two excellent news for digital artists, the first being the fact that it incorporates a whole bunch of bug fixes to make the Krita 4.4 series more stable and reliable.
The second piece of good news is that this looks to be the very last bugfix release in the Krita 4.4 series and the Krita 4.x series as the development team plans to unveil the next major branch in the coming weeks, Krita 5.0, which is expected to be a massive update with numerous new features.
One last bugfix release before Krita 5.0! We found a nasty bug on MacOS, and while we’re on the cusp of finishing up Krita 5.0, we didn’t want to leave MacOS users in the cold till then.
Hi everyone, I am Santhosh Anguluri from NIT Bhopal (actually from KDE Community). I am a participant of GSoC’21 as a part of which I am working on the painting platform Krita.
I’m happy to publish new Mabox Linux 21.06 release Geralt.
The release party in the openSUSE bar continues on more than a week after the release of openSUSE Leap 15.3, yet that’s not the only thing soaring for the project.
The adaptation of the new release continues to show a steady increase on metrics.opensuse.org as a pattern trends up and to the right with 40,000 installations a week after the release. Major increases in adaption traditionally happen within a few months after a release as users are expected to upgrade to the latest minor release within six months of its availability.
An area where the project can use help is with the promotion of openSUSE Leap 15.3. Users can find new Leap flyers in the github artwork repository along with updated banners and a new Leap image.
Enterprise organizations have faced a compendium of challenges, but today it seems like the focus is on three things: speed, speed, and more speed. It is all about time to value and application velocity—getting applications delivered and then staying agile to evolve the application as needs arise.
In order to get maximum speed, the first requirement is to make developers maximally productive. They can’t be if they don’t have the tools they need, are waiting for someone else to set up their environment, or have to get up-to-speed on a new environment. And it is irritating as well. For many, cloud services are the antidote to these inefficiencies.
Hybrid work - combining office and remote work - raises new challenges for leaders. Apply these strategies to avoid potential bad feelings, hurtful habits, and other team troubles.
Since the advent of the pandemic, ongoing change has touched all aspects of our lives, including the way we do business. To keep employees and customers engaged in a world that’s swiftly morphing from brick-and-mortar to bricks and clicks, executives across industries are aggressively driving change agendas – from CIOs implementing new digital technologies at a dizzying pace to CFOs looking to fast-track new products and services to speed economic recovery.
Enterprise IT leaders have heard plenty about the potential of edge computing and 5G networks working together to solve problems – but where do we stand right now? The rollout of 5G connectivity has gained momentum in the past year, primarily in North and America and Asia-Pacific. "All major telecommunications companies in the U.S. and Canada are aggressively pursuing 5G rollouts and have developed comprehensive B2B offerings for enterprises," says Shamik Mishra, chief technology officer for connectivity at Altran, part of the Capgemini Group. "In addition to these, we are seeing significant traction in 5G (and 4G) private networks amongst enterprises, which want to connect their business through cost-efficient wireless technology."
However, it's still early days for 5G globally, not only in terms of coverage, but in devices that are 5G-enabled. "5G deployments are relatively nascent, with limited availability and efficacy. Many countries haven't completed spectrum auctions yet or otherwise made desired spectrum available," says David Lessin, director at technology research and advisory firm ISG.
In this blog post, I’ll do a deep dive into the process of designing a small feature on ubuntu.com – from the original need, right through the design phase until it’s handed over to engineering. It intends to give you a good high-level overview of how we do user experience (UX) design at Canonical on a small feature like this.
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The final step before we hand our work over to the front-end engineers is the visual design stage. Working with the Vanilla Framework, our Senior Visual Designer will take the basic wireframes and transform them into simple, elegant, high fidelity mock-ups of the pages.
Thinking about information hierarchy, typography and sticking to the patterns within the Vanilla framework, they’ll ensure that the feature is usable and consistent with the rest of the product.
Toradex is extending its Torizon operating system for use as a full IoT development and operations (DevOps) platform for Linux devices. The operating system will now include free remotely hosted updates, device monitoring features, and a fleet management solution.
Torizon enables modern, iterative product development by seamlessly integrating hardware, a Linux OS, development tools, remote updates and fleet operations. The result is a scalable solution for devices requiring high reliability and security.
The latest work happening on AMD's Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) front is a new release of AOMP, their LLVM Clang downstream focused on carrying the latest patches around Radeon OpenMP offloading support.
AOMP 13.0-3 is based on an early snapshot of the LLVM/Clang 13.0 Git state as of April while adding in a lot of AMD's own patches that haven't yet had the time to go through the processes to be upstreamed.
Often times when checking out thin clients and industrial PCs / IoT units from OnLogic and other industrial PC vendors, they tend to be Intel powered and within the forums the first question is often about any AMD equivalent... For those wondering about any new AMD-powered thin clients / mini-ITX systems within an aluminum chassis, OnLogic has introduced the TM800.
M.2 sockets are typically used to connect wireless or storage expansion boards to laptops, computers, and SBC’s. But nothing precludes them from being used for another purpose, and earlier this year we wrote about Sparkfun MicroMod MCU boards with an M.2 connector for GPIOs, I2C, SPI, etc…
Makhber is a lightweight open-source multi-platform data analysis, visualization and plotting application. It works smoothly on Windows, Linux (Tested on Solus OS, Ubuntu and Zorin Linux) and macOS.
It is created "Mehdi Chinoune" a developer from Algeria. Although the product is fairly new and in active development, Mehdi took time and effort to create a production-ready package for Linux, Windows and macOS.
The app uses C++ and Python which explains the lighting speed performance and experience.
Remember Settlers II? Well, Widelands has been going for a long time as a free and open source game inspired by it and they're progressing towards the big 1.0 release.
From a release standpoint, it's going to be absolutely huge. The changelog for the 1.0 Release Candidate out now is seriously long full of fixes, feature improvements and optimizations. It's difficult to pick out a few big features because there's just so much to look for. There's new maps, AI improvements, user interface upgrades, tons of gameplay improvements both big and small - seriously the changelog is mighty impressive.
WordPress 5.8 Beta 1 is now available for testing!
This software is still in development, so it is not recommended to run this version on a production site. Instead, we recommend that you run this on a test site to play with the new version.
REUSE is a set of best practices to make Free Software licensing much easier. It helps developers with simple guidelines to declare their copyright and conditions for code re-use and provides help documents and low-threshold tools to get the job done. With REUSE Booster, we start to give direct support for Free Software projects.
Since its beginning, the aim of REUSE, an initiative led by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has been to make licensing and copyright drastically easier for developers, especially those without legal experience and assistance. It is fair to say that this goal has already been achieved.
REUSE offers standardised ways to mark all files in a project with their respective license and copyright. For developers, creating Free Software and communicating their conditions for code re-use are easier than ever before. REUSE offers a tutorial and FAQ, as well as the REUSE helper tool and the API to automate once manual processes. We are continuously working on improving all of these. But we won't stop here.
We thank jiderlesi for her/his commitment for contributing to GNU Chinese Translation. We wish jiderlesi has a wonderful and successful free journey.
How people use Search to access Wikipedia is a common question by researchers. Until now, however, there has been little data available about this relationship. To help address these questions, the Wikimedia Foundation is releasing a new, faceted dataset on search engine traffic to Wikipedia so you can ask questions like “What is the most common search engine in my country?” or “Which search engine is most-used by Android users?”
The C language is efficient enough to handle its memory management. It means that whenever you declare a regular variable of any data type in C, the programming language itself is responsible for deallocating or releasing this memory once your program has been executed successfully. However, in the case of dynamic memory allocation, since you are allocating the memory manually, that is why you also have to release it on your own.
In the “stdlib.h” library, there is a dedicated function for serving this purpose, i.e., the “free()” function. Today, we will explore the need to use this function in the C programming language. After that, we will look at a few examples in which this function has been used to free up the memory manually in the C programming language in Linux.
The gradient descent is an algorithm that helps us find the minimum error or where the loss value is less. We choose any point on the function and then move slowly towards the negative direction so that we can achieve the minimum error. But while moving, we also care about the error value, which is the value that is subtracted from the prediction and truth value. Also, it should not become negative.
AVIF is basically AV1 in a HEIF container; it's one of several contenders (among WebP, WebP2, HEIC, JPEG XL and probably others) for the next-generation still image codec on the web.
A big part of my work on Fedora/RHEL is to troubleshoot and do root cause analysis across the software stack. Because many of these projects are decades old, this usually feels like being stuck somewhere between being an archaeologist and a detective.
Many bugs are boring but some are interesting, either because the investigation made me learn something new or due to the amount of effort that was sunk into figuring out the problem. So I thought that it would be a nice experiment to share a little about the ones that are worth mentioning.
Rails provides a smooth assets:precompile task to prepare application assets but keeps all required gems for assets generation as a standard part of the generated Gemfile. Let’s see if we can avoid these dependencies for runtime.
A new Rails application comes with various gems concerning assets compilation and minification:
I’m learning Rust and this is the first post about my experience with it. I’m a Ruby programmer, so you may wanna check out my post about the decision of learning Rust for more background.
I delayed this post a lot because I didn’t do a lot of Rust in my first month. I had several things going on in my life, so I couldn’t focus on Rust as much as I would like. Anyway, I know that I have to put on paper some of my impressions before I forget them, so here I am.
If you've read my previous articles about Java serverless, you learned how to get started developing Java serverless functions with Quarkus and how those serverless functions can be optimized to run on Kubernetes. So what should you do next to make your serverless functions fit better with the many choices available to you?
When it comes to new specifications/certifications from The Khronos Group for royalty-free open standards we are used to very low-level interfaces with exciting innovations like Vulkan and glTF but today they are doing something rather different and announcing a 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program.
When invited to a new Khronos virtual event around a new 3D certification program, expecting to hear about online shopping with 3D Commerce Viewers certainly wasn't what was expected. Long story short, they want to help ensure that 3D viewers used by Internet retailers, social media sites, and other retail websites are uniform in their presentation of 3D assets. The focus is on reliable 3D and AR-enabled shopping across devices.
There are plenty of quiet bar scenes in each film, to amplify the local camaraderie and the beer-teary sentimentality of oldies sitting in not-so-clean, not-so-well-lighted corners sadly mumbling Nada, Nada, and making me (I don’t know about you) thirsty for a pint of Tennent’s and a bowl of salty, pretzled stories to share with some new mates you don’t remember in the morning, even if she’s right there next to you in the bed.
Death of a Ladies’ Man represents a third panel of a triptych directed by Matt Bissonette, who has directed two other Leonard Cohen-themed films, Looking for Leonard (2002) and Passenger Side (2009). In addition to Byrne, the film features the talents of Jessica Paré, Brian Gleeson, Antoine Olivier Pilon, and Karelle Tremblay.€ The latter, playing Josée, delivers a rich, ardent young intellectualism that makes you smell the rosy pungency of your liberal arts undergraduate years again, and, for a while in the film, gives you visions of the New Hellenic age ahead — all boats afloat! A future worth rescuing.
Ten thousand people. That’s how many Olympic volunteers quit their posts in Tokyo, with the games just 50 days away. That is one of every eight volunteers needed to pull off the 2021 (still called the 2020) Olympics. This is just the latest warning sign that, despite the Panglossian protestations of the International Olympic Committee, this summer’s Games are in peril. Japan is currently wrestling with a coronavirus upsurge and less than 3 percent of the population is vaccinated. According to polls, as much as 80 percent of the country does not want to host the games, for fear of it exacerbating this omnipresent public health crisis, currently classified as a state of emergency.
The past two decades of incompetent leadership has left Pacifica Radio on life support. Despite growing audiences for publicly funded stations, progressive podcasts, and online news, Pacifica is fracturing, its listenership is nosediving, its credibility is deteriorating, and it is in danger of insolvency.€
Pacifica Foundation was€ created 75 years ago€ to foster peace through informed dialogue, serving as a commercial free venue for progressive ideas and providing a model for future public broadcasters.€ Unflinching, unapologetic€ coverage of the most important issues of the 20th€ century – including the House Un-American Activities Committee/McCarthy, the Iran-Contra hearings, and the Women’s, LGBTQ, Environmental, Civil Rights, and Anti-Vietnam War movements – helped reshape America’s political landscape. Pacifica’s€ legacy has been defined by not just informing the public and speaking truth to power but speaking truth ABOUT power.
In Starting From Scratch, art historian Svetlana Alpers’s biography of the American photographer Walker Evans, the images come first. All the classics are here: the iconic Great Depression–era portraits of white tenant farmers; the economic immiseration contrasting with natty, white-suited cool in his pictures from Cuba; the subway portraits surreptitiously taken using a hidden camera. They are joined with lesser-known works that index the interior and exterior architecture of an America that was already receding into history in Evans’s time. Dilapidated buildings and the tattered, upholstered violence of once glorious plantation homes are captured alongside so many wagons, statues, and show bills—an Americana that slept in its makeup the night before and looks fragile in the light of day. A corrugated tin facade, its variegated surface palimpsestic with faded ads, a pile of dirt out front. A frowning woman in a cloche hat and furs on a busy shopping street. A spiny succulent bursting out of a bucket marked “TRIPLE WHITE,” floral wallpaper, a tiny American flag.
The bill — titled the US Innovation and Competition Act or USICA — builds off a previous proposal from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the Endless Frontier Act. Endless Frontier was lauded as one of the first big bipartisan bills to come from the Biden administration. But over the last few months, the bill, which was seen as a must-pass piece of legislation for both parties, was bloated with political mush and much of the original funding was watered down as it moved through the Senate process.
In its current form, the bill provides $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing, as well as a 30 percent boost in funding for the National Science Foundation and $29 billion for a new science directorate to focus on applied sciences.
The month has started off with some big surprises for me. For the low price equal to roughly 34 Beta Edition PinePhones or roughly 72 Raspberry Pi 400 units I wound up having to pay to get my home’s central heating and cooling system replaced. It has been a few days of disruption since the unit failed which combined with the rather hot weather has made my home not quite fit for habitation.
Congressman Ro Khanna received praise from progressive lawmakers and Medicare for All advocates€ on Tuesday after reintroducing a bill that would provide states with€ access to the federal funding and regulatory flexibility needed to implement€ universal healthcare programs.
"If the last year proved anything, it is that universal health coverage is not optional: it's urgent,"€ the California Democrat, a€ member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in a statement.
It is June 2021. We are emerging from the pandemic here in the U.S. at the same time global vaccine inequity enables the virus to continue to ravage most of the world's population. Covid-19 has revealed our exceptional (American) ability to hoard life-saving resources (even if we cannot figure out how to use them), at the same time we squandered more lives than any other nation. The 3.5 million, including 600,000 U.S. deaths to date (official national and global numbers are likely undercounts) should haunt us, should at least spur us to demand better distribution, education, and a people's vaccine.
For months, President Joe Biden has laid out goal after goal for taming the coronavirus pandemic and then exceeded his own benchmarks. Now, though, the U.S. is on pace to fall short of his aim to have 70 percent of Americans at least partially vaccinated by July 4.
The White House has launched a month-long blitz to combat vaccine hesitancy and a lack of urgency to get shots, particularly in the South and Midwest. But it is increasingly resigned to missing the president’s vaccination target.
The administration insists that even if the goal isn’t reached, it will have little effect on the overall U.S. recovery from the virus.
Using the AndroidOS, different types of devices are now upgraded. For instance, you will get Android TV, Android Tablet, Android Watch, and so on besides Android smartphones. So, why does a popular device like a laptop stay downstairs without having this revolutionary system? Well, Chromebook is the recently invented Laptop that comes with the Chrome OS operating system and supports lots of Android apps. However, if you have one on your hand, I have some apps to recommend to boost your Chromebook experience. So, stay focused on the best apps for Chromebook.
A new stable version of the Vivaldi web browser is available to download and it comes with a new built-in translation feature.
Vivaldi 4.0’s translation capability is touted as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Translate and Bing Translator. The text transmogrification tech is tackled using tech from Lingvanex but is hosted by Vivaldi on their servers in Iceland.
Microsoft today released another round of security updates for Windows operating systems and supported software, including fixes for six zero-day bugs that malicious hackers already are exploiting in active attacks.
Adding to the list of planned improvements for Fedora 35 is switching to make use of Yescrypt for hashing of user passwords.
Fedora developers are looking at using Yescrypt as the default hashing mode for new user passwords within /etc/shadow. While SHA256/SHA512 haven't yet been broken as common used today for Linux account password hashing, Yescrypt would beef up the security.
Detecting vulnerabilities and managing the associated patching is challenging even in a small-scale Linux environment. Scale things up and the challenge becomes almost unsurmountable. There are approaches that help, but these approaches are unevenly applied.
In our survey, State of Enterprise Vulnerability Detection and Patch Management, we set out to investigate how large organizations handle the dual, linked security concerns of vulnerability detection and patch management.
The results produced interesting insights into the tools that organizations depend on to effectively deal with vulnerability and patch management at scale, how these tools are used, and which restrictions organizations face in their battle against threat actors. Download the copy of the report here.
We successfully deployed ThreadSanitizer in the Firefox project to eliminate data races in our remaining C/C++ components. In the process, we found several impactful bugs and can safely say that data races are often underestimated in terms of their impact on program correctness. We recommend that all multithreaded C/C++ projects adopt the ThreadSanitizer tool to enhance code quality.
There is increasing evidence that this may become a common approach to tackling privacy abuses. Both the EU and the UK have announced that they are investigating how Facebook gathers and uses huge amounts of personal data to sell targeted advertising. Here’s what Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of the EU’s competition policy, said in a press release on the move:
We’ve been attentively listening to customer feedback, and working hard in the background to incorporate many ideas from our user base to make PIA VPN better than ever.€
FE is the equivalent to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While the FE jurisdiction also covers military intelligence, they must not spy on Danish people—only foreigners and those in other countries. The Police Intelligence Service (PET) surveils Danes, as the FBI surveils people within the U.S.
Both FE and NSA refuse to comment. Nor has Barak Obama or Joe Biden apologized to Merkel, whom Obama told in 2013 that such tapping into her phone would not occur again.
La Quadrature du Net is a signatory of an international open letter, signed by more than 170 worldwide associations and written by EDRi, Access Now, Amnesty International, Human Right Watch, Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), et l’Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor (IDEC).
It was on this day in 1991 that Pretty Good Privacy was uploaded to the Internet. I had sent it to a couple of my friends for distribution the day before. This set in motion a decade of struggle to end the US export controls on strong cryptographic software. After PGP version 1.0 was released, a number of volunteer engineers came forward and we made many improvements. In September 1992 we released PGP 2.0 in ten foreign languages, running on several different platforms, upgraded with new functionality, including the distinctive trust model that enabled PGP to become the most widely used method of email encryption.
q I became the target of a criminal investigation for violating the Arms Export Control Act by allowing PGP to spread around the world. This further propelled PGP's popularity. The government dropped the investigation in early 1996, but the policy debate raged on, until the US export restrictions finally collapsed in 2000. PGP ignited the decade of the Crypto Wars, resulting in all the western democracies dropping their restrictions on the use of strong cryptography. It was a storied and thrilling decade, and a triumph of activism for the right to have a private conversation.
One of the first lessons in cryptography 101 is Kerckhoffs’s law: a cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge. This is an often-repeated maxim accompanied with “there is no security with obscurity.”
I always found this framing confusing: it felt inconsistent within itself. “don’t rely on secrecy except for the secrecy of the key” What is so special about keys? Why is it ok to rely on the secrecy of keys and not on secrecy of anything else? And because it is so focused on keys, it’s hard to really take this foundational lesson and apply it in contexts other than cryptographic algorithms.
When the British invaded Tibet in 1904, the Tibetan rulers fled, and waited from a distance for the river to turn blue. It is not clear what they did with their time. The victors were meticulous in their notes about the land they sought to strip. They observed, as though they were first to discover, how dryness dulls leaves. The only wet thing being water, even there, no great beauty. Tibet, the correspondent Perceval Landon wrote, was undiscoveredland or the last country to be discovered by the civilized world.1 Noting the night-sky’s fury spilling, staining, from where the army camped upon a tongue of land, the empire’s scribe related it was fitting that the English, faithful servants of progress had taken up the task. The diary of the conqueror is transparent, the pure white remains referent. Oaks growhere, though in a chastened way. A lone bird in the air, rock, lichen, feathery stunted juniper. A curious place.
—
But apparently not big enough.
China abuts 14 other countries—the most neighbors in the world—and has had border disputes of some kind with all of them. Two of these disputes, with Vietnam and India, have broken out into open, deadly fighting. In all, China is claiming territory or rights at sea from nine nations. In the South China Sea, armed standoffs and threats—most recently with the Philippines—are regular occurrences.
Fifty-four (54) years later these brave soldiers have yet to be recognized for their valor. Since that shameful day, every US Administration, Secretary of Defense, Pentagon Brass, and a whole passel of corrupt politicians have refused to acknowledge this heinous act because Israel and her politicians are Washington’s darlings. And for this brazenly murderous assault, billions upon billions have been showered on a nation that thrives on hatred, racism, apartheid, religious fanaticism, € and war mongering.
Joe Biden and his ilk € proclaim that they are fighting for the soul of America.
The bill opens by claiming the United States “actively worked” to incorporate China into the world economic order after its normalization of relations in 1979. To read the list of claims—which run from providing access, economic assistance and research collaboration—one would think Washington and Wall Street did all of this and more out of the magnanimity of its heart. Besides the fact that governments are essentially heartless and the capitalist system even more so, these claims are at best a joke. In fact, they are lies. The United States opened up to China to combat Soviet Union influence and because the US capitalist system needed another source of cheap labor, scientific research and potential markets. Now that China has become a capitalist economy and succeeded quite nicely at it, Washington is crying foul. In large part, this is because China is doing what the United States has done for decades, if not centuries. It is engaging in what this bill labels “predatory economic practices.”€ Practices which, after all, are the essence of monopoly and financial capitalism.
Those practices include the advancing of various Chinese government initiatives like the so-called Belt and Road Initiative and the associated Silk Road initiative.€ These various endeavors are obviously designed to spread China’s economic reach into the Asian, African and Latin American world.€ Until now, these regions of the world have been considered by the US to be in its sphere.€ The fact that China is threatening this hegemony is made quite clear in the introductory paragraphs, which read (in part):
For some reason, the FBI is targeting readers of reporting on a shooting of FBI agents -- something that's both inexplicable and an oblique assault on the First Amendment rights of those targeted. The news service is fighting back, as Josh Gerstein reports for Politico.
While the EU Commission wants to regulate AI applications for police and justice, the current Council Presidency is in favour of as few restrictions as possible. The processing of facial images from public spaces is becoming a bone of contention.
At some point before the summer of 2018, an arms deal from the U.S. to Saudi Arabia was sealed and delivered. A 227kg laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of many thousands, was part of that sale. On August 9th, 2018 one of those Lockheed Martin bombs was dropped on a school bus full of Yemeni children. They were on their way to a field trip when their lives came to a sudden end. Amidst shock and grief,€ their loved ones would learn that Lockheed Martin was responsible for creating the bomb that murdered their children.
Analysts on the left have long toiled against the ad Venezuelum by pointing out the myriad genuine explanations behind the economic crisis that has been roiling the country since around 2014. Caleb Maupin, for instance, has argued that falling oil prices were a key factor in the collapse of Venezuela’s economy. This is hardly a controversial point given that Venezuela’s dependence on oil, which was first discovered in the 1920s, has led to a highly unstable economy featuring regular bouts of economic chaos caused by a sudden drop in the price of crude. In the early 1980s, during the government of Luis Herrera (of the right-wing COPEI party), for example, there was a huge economic crisis with many of the same features as the one confronting the country today. Needless to say, no one at the time tried to pass this off as proof that capitalism doesn’t work.
Ryan Mallet-Outtrim, who himself lived in Venezuela for several years, has argued that the government’s monetary policy has been one of the main factors behind the crisis. In particular, he pointed out that the fixed exchange rate, which of course is hardly socialistic in nature, had an unintended effect on demand for currency that in turn led to an inflationary spiral. He is not alone is his criticism of the fixed exchange rate; economist Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), who like Mallet-Outtrim is broadly sympathetic to the Chavista government, has argued for years that Venezuela should drop it in favor of a floating exchange rate.
Like any African who grew up with a TV,€ € I’ve always been exposed to Western perceptions of Africa. Living in a postcolonial African education system that still relies heavily on Western literature, one becomes intimately aware of how the world sees Africa.€ Still, I have always bristled against what is now famously called “the single story,” which presents Africa as a one-dimensional scene of tragic suffering and endless despair. Coverage of Covid-19 in Africa, despite the continent’s relatively low infection rates, is disproportionately grim and macabre compared to the rest of the world, as two€ New York Times€ articles illustrated.
These changes were the replacement of President Trump, prepared to do whatever Netanyahu asked him to do, with President Biden, who is reverting to the traditional pro-Israel US posture, but without endorsing a fanatical far-right agenda. Secondly, the outcome of the 11-day Gaza “war” in May showed that the Palestinians cannot be marginalised and ignored as Trump and Netanyahu tried to do.
The permanent fall of Netanyahu remains highly uncertain, but if it does happen, it will end the career of the most powerful Israeli politician since its first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Netanyahu, first elected prime minister in 1996, was the pioneer for a generation of populist nationalist leaders, with many features in common, who have since popped up all over the world. All rely on exacerbating and exploiting polarisation, and inflating real and imaginary threats for their own political advantage.
Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in Covid-stricken but improving America.
The Capitol Police's possession of the specific intelligence had been previously flagged by the department's inspector general in a report that has not made public, NBC News and other news organizations have reported. But the Senate document sheds new light on it. The failure to distribute the information widely, the report says, left rank-and-file Capitol Police officers unprepared to defend themselves from the armed mob.
The findings are part of a report issued Tuesday by the Senate Rules and Homeland Security committees looking into the series of failures of intelligence, security preparations and emergency response before and during the insurrection.
Among new public details, the panels say Capitol Police had seen information from a pro-Trump website that included comments about the Capitol's tunnel system, and that encouraged demonstrators to bring weapons to subdue members of Congress and police, and reverse the presidential election's results.
The United Nations Security Council is under pressure to refer allegations of genocide by Islamic State militants against the beleaguered Yazidi community in northern Iraq to the International Criminal Court (ICC), following a major new report by UN investigators.
The UN team that found “clear and convincing evidence” of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes was led by British lawyer Karim Khan QC, who briefed the security council this week and who takes over as ICC prosecutor – one of the most influential jobs in international law – next month.
Islamic State (also known as Isis) overran the Yazidi heartland in August 2014, forcing young women into servitude as “wives” for its fighters, massacring thousands of families, and displacing most of the 550,000-strong community – with the aim, said Mr Khan, to “destroy the Yazidi, both physically and biologically”.
Global climate catastrophe could be nearer than we think. New research suggests how it could happen.
The€ climate-focused€ Clean Creatives campaign released a mocking ad video Tuesday to rebuke the greenwashing€ of€ corporate advertising giant WPP, which represents some of the world's biggest polluters.
The satirical video is a send up of WPP's announcement ahead of Earth Day this year in which the ad agency claimed it was setting€ targets for its own greenhouse gas emissions going "beyond the required carbon reductions outlined in the Paris Agreement."
In the largest act of civil disobedience to date to halt the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, more than 100 water protectors led by Indigenous women have been arrested in Minnesota. We get an on-the-ground update on the day of action and how water protectors blockaded a pipeline pump station north of the town of Park Rapids, with many locking themselves to heavy machinery as authorities tried to disperse protesters by sending in a low-flying Customs and Border Protection helicopter which produced a sandstorm. Thousands gathered for a Treaty People Gathering weekend of action to stop Line 3, which would carry more than 750,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day through Indigenous land and fragile ecosystems and endanger lakes, rivers and wild rice beds. If completed, Line 3 would be “the largest tar sands pipeline in the world,” says Winona LaDuke, an Anishinaabe activist and executive director of Honor the Earth who lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. “We have a Canadian corporation coming in here trying to make a buck at the end of the fossil fuels era and run over a bunch of Indigenous people, and we’re not having it.”
Nearly 200 people were arrested on Monday while protesting the Line 3 pipeline, a long-distance tar sands pipeline that runs across Indigenous land and threatens food and water resources, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Indigenous and environmental groups, and even some elected officials, condemned the aggressive use of a helicopter to disperse protesters.
More than 2,000 people began gathering at an undisclosed location in Northern Minnesota over the weekend, answering a call from Indigenous Anishinaabe people and a coalition of environmental groups to disrupt the construction of the pipeline.
The agency defines forest health as a lack of tree mortality, mainly from wildfire, bark beetles, root rot, mistletoe, drought, and a host of other natural agents. To the Forest Service, such biological agents are “destructive,” but this demonstrates a complete failure to understand how forest ecosystems work.
This Industrial Forestry Paradigm espoused by the Forest Service views any mortality other than that resulting from a chainsaw as unacceptable.
A species of orchid has been rediscovered on Saaremaa for the first time in over 100 years. The island is known to be home to more than 30 types of orchid.
Last Sunday, it was known 35 types of orchid grow in Estonia but as of Monday that number has increased to 36. As many as 34 species can be found blooming on the country's largest island.
Their difficulty, felt across this country, is crippling Italy's birth rate, now at the lowest since its unification in 1861. It's declined every year since the 2008 financial crisis.
But Covid-19 has accentuated the fall, with its devastating financial effect and its impact on the divorce rate, which has risen in part, it's thought, due to couples being stuck at home together.
In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.
President Biden’s tax proposals, the Tax Foundation charges, add up to a 61.1-percent tax on “high-earning” taxpayers.
In reality, no actual taxpayers are going to face anything close to a 61-percent tax if the Biden proposals become law. The Tax Foundation, to reach that 61-percent figure, has had to add together two separate taxes on two different and totally mythical taxpayers.
ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of IRS data on the tax returns of thousands of the wealthiest people. It reveals just how effectively the richest sidestep the tax system, which we’ll show below. But first, to understand the scale of that wealth, let’s look at the richest person in the United States: Jeff Bezos.
Here are the main takeaways from the article.
Today, ProPublica is launching the first in a series of stories based on the private tax data of some of our nation’s richest citizens. We obtained the information from an anonymous source who provided us with large amounts of information on the ultrawealthy, everything from the taxes they paid to the income they reported to the profits from their stock trades.
In the coming months, we plan to use this material to explore how the nation’s wealthiest people — roughly the .001% — exploit the structure of our tax code to avoid the tax burdens borne by ordinary citizens.
The very richest Americans win at the tax game no matter which measure you use. ProPublica has published an article, based on a vast trove of never-before-seen IRS information, that reveals the pittance in taxes the ultrawealthy pay compared with their massive wealth accumulation.
But that trove of IRS data also reveals new information on how little the 25 wealthiest Americans pay in taxes by the most conventional measure: income. Not all are able to minimize their income and avoid taxes; some report very substantial sums. But even then, the data — and a new analysis by ProPublica — shows they still pay strikingly low rates.
For the article “Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax,” ProPublica delved deep into the taxes and strategies of the 25 wealthiest people in America. The story’s main finding was that these 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018 while paying a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes. That amounts to what we called a “true tax rate” of 3.4%.
Below, we’ve laid out how we performed this analysis. Our story also included calculations of more typical American households in order to provide context for the ultrawealthy’s numbers, and we explain those here as well.
Slight increases in the rate of inflation in the United States and Europe have triggered financial-market anxieties. Has US President Joe Biden's administration risked overheating the economy with its $1.9 trillion rescue package and plans for additional spending to invest in infrastructure, job creation, and bolstering American families?
A first-of-its-kind analysis of newly disclosed Internal Revenue Service data shows that the richest 25 billionaires in the United States paid a true federal tax rate of just 3.4% between 2014 and 2018—even as they added a staggering $401 billion to their collective wealth.
"Many will ask about the ethics of publishing such private data. We are doing so—quite selectively and carefully—because we believe it serves the public interest in fundamental ways, allowing readers to see patterns that were until now hidden."—Richard Tofel & Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica
The legacy of Milton Friedman, the founder of America’s modern political economy, was a representation of this very dichotomy: the use, misuse and manipulation of the concept of the free market.
Through the Chicago School of Economics, whose disciples have proved most consequential in the formation of the American approach to foreign policy, especially in South America, Milton constantly championed the virtues of the free market, emphasizing a supposed link between freedom and capitalism and insisting that governments should not micromanage markets.
In 2008 the United Nations designated June 8 as World Oceans Day, “a day for humanity to celebrate the ocean.” Since then, it’s had about as much to do with the ecological economic and human rights disasters affecting our seas as Arbor Day has to do with global deforestation. Because it’s so vast and poorly regulated, the ocean sector of the global economy has been largely out of sight and out of mind.
More than 80 per cent of refugees are hosted by developing countries, which are struggling to vaccinate even small proportions of their own citizens. Almost 30 per cent of refugees are in camps in the world’s least developed states, with healthcare systems that barely function even for regular citizens.
Refugees are typically last in the line in any crisis, but most particularly in this one. Confined to camps or corralled in remote border areas where they’re prevented from moving on by pandemic protocols, it’s hard even to estimate their numbers. In many places (South Sudan, Tigray/Ethiopia, Central African Republic) aid agencies are struggling to gain sufficient access. Conflict, pandemic regulations, and geographical hurdles hobble their efforts.
Houses were the key source of wealth, accounting for about half (48 ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹per cent) of total assets. Nearly all households (98 per cent) had deposits, while 72 per cent owned transport equipment.
The data agency revealed that the median household's net wealth was 104,000 in 2019, but 25 percent of households had a net wealth of over 257,900 euro while another quarter of households had under 9,400 euros.
Some of the richest people in America had years in which they did not pay anything in federal income taxes, according to a report from ProPublica published Tuesday.
They include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla founder Elon Musk, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire investors Carl Ichan and George Soros, ProPublica reported.
The news outlet obtained IRS data, covering more than 15 years, about the tax returns of thousands of the wealthiest Americans. ProPublica said that it obtained the information from anonymous source, that it doesn't know the identity of the source, and that it didn't solicit the information provided.
Experiences like these were common during the golden era of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy, which is what I like to call the period from roughly 2012 through early 2020, when many of the daily activities of big-city 20- and 30-somethings were being quietly underwritten by Silicon Valley venture capitalists.
With gas prices already at $3.50 a gallon and rising in Lake County, Illinois this week, the county board (nearly all Democrats after the previous election) voted to raise gas prices another 4 cents a gallon by opting to add a county tax. The tax increase will go into effect on July 1st.
I asked my mother what gas prices are in Indiana, and she told me she paid $2.79 a gallon today.
With the price of gas already being 36 cents per gallon cheaper just an 8 mile drive up the road at the BP in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, that would signify that the spread will be 40 cents per gallon shortly, and very nearly all of that being Illinois taxes.
I go through about 40 gallons on an average month. Even if I have to make a couple of round trips to the state line costing me some fuel, I’d still be saving a net total of $130 a year in tax to go up there every now and then, and that’s assuming that things don’t get even worse down here.
CNN reported yesterday that the American economy is humming along in red states, many of which are back over 100% of their Gross State Product from before the recession.
Most notably, South Dakota is at 106% of their previous Gross State Product.
The states that haven’t recovered? Mostly blue states.
Everyone knows that Democrats bring tax hikes and lost jobs with them everywhere they go.
In my state, Illinois, we had previously been experiencing persistently high unemployment even before the “Coronavirus recession” which at one point was almost double (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Seasonally Adjusted, December 2018) vs. neighboring Indiana.
From calls to break up Big Tech to Florida’s latest anti-tech law, one thing is clear—America’s lawmakers and bureaucrats are looking to regulate the online world. Building on the momentum of the Facebook Oversight Board’s recent ruling on President Trump and Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Biden v. Knight Institute, alternative proposals like common carriage are gaining traction among conservative lawmakers looking for new regulatory solutions.
Progressives responded with disgust on Monday after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott€ signed a law establishing the so-called "1836 Project," which the Republican official€ said "promotes patriotic education and ensures future generations understand Texas values."
"To keep Texas the best state in the nation, we can never forget why€ our state is so exceptional," Abbott tweeted.€ "Together, we'll keep our rich history alive."
Federalist Paper 62 (generally thought to have been written by James Madison) argued for the need for a Senate in addition to a House of Representatives to prevent Congress from yielding “to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.” The Senate was specifically designed to wield more power that its House counterpart and to prevent (or at a minimum to deter) an ‘excess of democracy’ that (it was, and is, feared) might result if decisions (e.g., legislation, appointments of judges) \ were made solely by a more democratically elected and more representative body. Consequently, the ’Founding Fathers’ specifically gave Senators longer terms (6 years) than Representatives in the House (2 years). The Senate was also assigned a singular range of key responsibilities such as declaring war and approving judges and cabinet members, whereas the House has no such position, and both the House and the Senate are required to approve Federal budgets.
Senators were initially chosen by State legislatures and only in 1913 was the Constitution changed (Amendment 17) to allow for direct election of Senators. The Senate, by virtue of systematizing equal representation for states (hence establishing a federal system) still systematizes a non-equitable system of representation with respect to individuals; the number of Senators is fixed at two per State rather than proportionally reflecting the population size within a state.
Self-absorbed in their bubble and disconnected from reality, the Chilean government and the political and economic elites were not able to envision the devastating defeat they suffered at the polls last week, in the election of the 155 delegates to the Constituent Assembly that will draft the new Constitution. The rightwing parties, congregated under the banner “Vamos por Chile” (Let’s go for Chile) did not even reach a third of the vote, the fraction that would have allowed them to overrule the content of the text. They hardly obtained 37 seats, representing 23% of the vote. The fact that the group accounted for 63% of the campaign expenditure was in this case of no help.
The political make-up of the 155 elected delegates to the Assembly implies the termination of the neoliberal model established under the dictatorship of General Pinochet and enshrined in the Constitution of 1980. Therefore, when the Constituent Assembly takes over, Chile will write a new Magna Carta, in which the subsidiary role of the state will be replaced by the estate’s leading role in helping reduce the inequalities that an imperfect market system worsened and was unable to alleviate.
How do we know anything at all about the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020? Are they mostly racist? Sexist, homophobic, xenophobic? Are they white working-class males who suffer from status anxiety as the U.S. population grows more diverse?€ Are Trump supporters wealthier voters or poorer? Are they anti-elites, or elites themselves?€ Are working people becoming the core of the Republican Party, as Senator Josh Hawley proclaimed on election night?€ Or did Joe Biden bring them back into the Democratic fold?€
San Pedro Sula, Honduras—Above a steaming hot floodplain at the edge of gang territory, a ragged group of tents lays sprawled beneath the highway.
Humanitarian advocacy groups and progressive members of Congress warned Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris' remarks discouraging would-be migrants from attempting to flee to the United States run counter to the nation's asylum laws and could endanger lives.
Standing alongside Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, Harris said during a press conference in Guatemala City that migrants "will be turned back" if they arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the Biden administration continues to send away the majority of people attempting to enter the country.
In her first foreign trip as vice president, Kamala Harris is in Mexico City to meet with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after first visiting Guatemala to meet with President Alejandro Giammattei. Harris is tasked by President Joe Biden with stemming the flow of Central American migrants fleeing corruption, violence and poverty, even after the two campaigned on allowing more migrants to apply for asylum along the U.S.-Mexico border, and issued a stern warning to migrants: “Do not come.” Her visit comes after voters cast their ballots in one of Mexico’s largest and deadliest elections in history, as over 80 politicians were killed in the run-up to the election, which had 21,000 local and national seats up for grabs. “This electoral process has been one of the most violent,” says Erika Guevara-Rosas, a human rights lawyer and Americas director for Amnesty International. “It is reflective of the human rights crisis that Mexico has been facing for many years.”
With his wide-brimmed peasant hat and oversized teacher's pencil held high, Peru's Pedro Castillo has been traveling the country exhorting voters to get behind a call that has been particularly urgent during this devastating pandemic: "No más pobres en un país rico"—No more poor people in a rich country. In a cliffhanger of an election with a huge urban-rural and class divide, it appears that the rural teacher, farmer and union leader is about to make history by defeating—by less than one percent—powerful far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, scion of the country's political "Fujimori dynasty."
Progressives pushed back forcefully on Tuesday against right-wing Peruvian presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori's allegations of fraud in Sunday's election, saying there has been no evidence so support such claims.
"There is a clear intention to boycott the popular will," Fujimori asserted at a press conference Monday at which she pointed without evidence to€ "irregularities" and "signs of fraud."€
With his wide-brimmed peasant hat and oversized teacher’s pencil held high, Peru’s Pedro Castillo has been traveling the country exhorting voters to get behind a call that has been particularly urgent during this devastating pandemic: “No más pobres en un país rico” – No more poor people in a rich country. In a cliffhanger of an election with a huge urban-rural and class divide, it appears that the rural teacher, farmer and union leader is about to make history by defeating–by less than one percent–powerful far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, scion of the country’s political “Fujimori dynasty.”
We get an update from Peru, where socialist candidate Pedro Castillo has pulled ahead of his right-wing rival Keiko Fujimori in the country’s presidential election on Sunday. Castillo is the son of peasant farmers, and a union leader who led a nationwide teachers’ strike in 2017. Fujimori is the daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who is in prison for human rights abuses and corruption. Political scientist Carlos León Moya discusses the history of the two candidates and describes how the election took place amid a years-long political crisis. “You have most of the Peruvian political elite charged by corruption,” he says. “Keiko Fujimori was in prison herself two years ago for a corruption case.”
Outraged by Joe Manchin's obstruction of Democratic efforts to protect and expand voting rights and end the Senate filibuster, the faith-led Poor People's Campaign has announced it will lead a Moral Monday demonstration in the West Virginia senator's home state next week.
"It's time to march on his office," Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign, said of Manchin, the Senate's most conservative Democrat, in an interview with Religion News Service. "It's time for people of all differences to stand together against him—we call it 'from the hollers in the mountains to the hood.'"
On Sunday, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin published a 1,000-word op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail to explain why he was knifing Black Americans in the back and voting against the For the People Act, which is aimed at stopping Republicans from disenfranchising Black and brown voters. Manchin also used the space to defend his refusal to reform the filibuster. And he made his now de rigueur calls for bipartisanship, while again offering no theories or plans for how to achieve it beyond wishing for 10 Republicans to magically transubstantiate into moral beings.
Senator Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) opposes passing democracy reforms such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “in a partisan manner,” for that “will all but ensure partisan divisions continue to deepen.” But Manchin can’t find four, much less 10, GOP senators to overcome any filibuster. Meanwhile, across the country, Republicans are brazenly and systematically undermining elections in states that they control. They are not only employing the traditional tactics of making registration and voting more difficult while gerrymandering districts to stack the deck—they are also giving partisan majorities in state legislatures the power to overrule independent election officials and even to overturn results that they don’t like. Partisan voter suppression is central to their political strategy because their platform is an electoral loser.
A dark money group funded by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch has been actively lobbying Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin to keep up his opposition to the For the People Act, a sweeping voting rights bill that would expand ballot access and crack down on the kind of secretive spending that has made the deep-pocketed Koch network such a powerful force in U.S. politics.
"Manchin isn't moved by the views of his constituents. Manchin isn't moved by GOP voter suppression bills in 43 states. Because Manchin is only moved by corporate donors and their agenda."—Rep. Jamaal Bowman
In case you've been living under a rock for all of 2021, following the January 6th mob attack at the Capitol, where then President Donald Trump went to social media and posted things that could be read as egging on his insurrectionist followers, Twitter and Facebook suspended Trump's accounts. A few weeks later, the still relatively new and untested Oversight Board that will review a few Facebook decisions agreed to review the Trump decision. In late April, it upheld the removal, but said that Facebook's decision being for an "indefinite" length violated the company's own policies, and told the company it needed to either put a time limit on it, or come up with an actual rationale for a permanent suspension.
An oped in the most prominent state newspaper is as non-negotiable a position as a politician can assert.
A€ new petition€ on Change.org is calling for voters, from supporters of former president Trump to independents and Democrats, to endorse their becoming the Trumpublican Party.
Let’s review. Once Mr. Trump secured the presidential nomination in 2016, the GOP unofficially became the Trumpublican Party. Today, five years later, it’s virtually official. All that is needed now is ratification. A petition bearing millions of signatures could really help. It makes zero sense for loyal believers in the twice-impeached president to be members of the same party as, say, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger,€ or Sens. Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski.
Court documents released in the Colonial Pipeline case say the FBI got in by using the encryption key linked to the Bitcoin account to which the ransom money was delivered. However, officials have not disclosed how they got that key. One of the reasons criminals like to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the anonymity [sic] of the entire system, as well as the idea that funds in any given cryptocurrency wallet can be accessed only with a complex digital key.
In the wake of his divorce, however, it has become increasingly clear that there is an undeniable duality to Bill Gates. The decades of stories about him being difficult to work with are correct, said one former employee. They have been largely suppressed by Gates’s liberal use of nondisclosure agreements, ostensibly to keep more damning details under wraps, this person said. “For such a long time you were told, ‘You have an NDA. You can’t talk,’” said the former employee, who signed such an agreement. The current wave of reporting around Gates’s behavior encouraged this person to open up, but they are keenly aware that Gates has lawyers at the ready. “And these are not nice lawyers,” they added.
Companies such as TikTok and Facebook are to step up deletions of internet content if it could encourage the entry of irregular migrants. Calls for this came from the British Criminal Investigation Department. A department for ââ¬Å¾removal orders“ has also been set up at Europol along the same lines.
Turkish rapper à žehinà Ÿah, whose real name is Ufuk Yñkñlmaz, was detained on charges of insulting the president, he said on social media on June 5. Insult charges are widely deployed by Turkish courts in retaliation to criticism targeting the president and his government.
It's now a sin to insult Malaysia's rulers.
This is according to a recent ban by Malaysia's religious governing body, the Department of Islamic Development (Jakim).
In a Facebook post on June 3, 2021, Jakim quoted al-Baihaqi's verse from the Syu'ab al-Iman Hadith.
Julian Assange’s partner, Stella Moris, traveled to Geneva last weekend to attend the Geneva call to free Assange. A press conference€ hosted by the Geneva Press Club launched the appeal, followed by a public inauguration of the AnythingToSay? Statue the following day.The initiative’s six demands, included a call on the U.S. administration to drop the charges without delay, while urging the British authorities to resist any extradition attempt.
Digital and human rights groups were largely sidelined during the drafting process of the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention, an international treaty that will establish global procedures for law enforcement in one country to access personal user data from technology companies in other countries. The CoE Cybercrime Committee (T-CY)—which oversees the Budapest Convention—adopted in 2017, as work on the police powers treaty began, internal rules that fostered a narrower range of participants for the drafting of this new Protocol.
The process has been largely opaque, led by public safety and law enforcement officials. And T-CY’s periodic consultations with civil society and the public have been criticized for their lack of detail, their short response timelines, and the lack of knowledge about€ countries' deliberation on these issues. The T-CY rushed approval of the text on May 28th, signing off on provisions that put few limitations and provide little oversight on police access to sensitive user data held by Internet companies around the world.
The Protocol now heads to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, which can recommend further amendments. We hope the PACE will hear civil society’s privacy concerns and issue an opinion addressing the lack of adequate data protection safeguards.€
Matched with expressions of grief and anguish, progressives in both Canada and the U.S. are calling on the broader public€ to stand against Islamophobia after the murder of four members of a Muslim family in London, Ontario on Sunday.
Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday blasted Republican leadership for its "radical" opposition to legislation to close the gender pay gap and strengthen workplace protections for women.
"This is a fundamental issue of fairness. And we have very simple, commonsense legislative proposal to address the issue," Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Tuesday referencing the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Like many of you, the anniversary of George Floyd's murder has inspired us to reflect on these commitments and the work of so many courageous people who stood up to demand justice. Our world has been irrevocably changed. While there is still an immeasurably long way to go toward becoming a truly just society, EFF is inspired by this leaderful movement and humbled as we reflect on the ways in which we have been able to support its critical work.
EFF believes that people engaged in the Black-led movement against police violence deserve to hold those in power accountable and inspire others through the act of protest, without fear of police surveillance of our faces, bodies, electronic devices, and other digital assets. So, as protests began to spread throughout the nation, we worked quickly to publish a guide to cell phone surveillance at protests, including steps protesters can take to protect themselves.
We also worked with the National Lawyers Guide (NLG) to develop a guide to observing visible, and invisible, surveillance at protests—in video and blog form. The published guide and accompanying training materials were made available to participants in the NLG’s Legal Observer program. The 25-minute videos—available in English and Spanish—explain how protesters and legal observers can identify various police surveillance technologies, like body-worn cameras, drones, and automated license plate readers. Knowing what technologies the police use at a protest can help defense attorneys understand what types of evidence the police agencies may hold, find exculpatory evidence, and potentially provide avenues for discovery in litigation to enforce police accountability.
In the 31 years since he opened his law practice on Lisbon Street in downtown Lewiston, Maine, Jim Howaniec has never been in a situation like the one he now faces. He has four murder cases awaiting trial, on top of 77 other cases he’s defending as a court-appointed lawyer for the state of Maine. In a normal year, he says, he has 40 to 50 public defense cases, and he has only handled four other murders since he opened his practice.
“It’s unbelievable. It’s almost ridiculous,” said Howaniec, a defense lawyer contracted by the state to represent indigent clients.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is running for president in 2024.
Thomson Reuters shareholders will vote Wednesday on a proposal to review the human rights impact of the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The vote will gauge the strength of a campaign to pressure the Canadian technology and media giant into severing ties with the U.S. agency.
While an outright victory is unlikely, and even approved shareholder proposals are nonbinding, activists and investors are hoping Wednesday’s vote will draw attention to the company’s work with ICE.
Australian media reported that the country's most wanted fugitive, Hakan Ayik, was given early access to the device by undercover agents and unwittingly promoted ANOM to his associates.
Demand for the messaging app grew when European investigators dismantled the popular EncroChat encrypted platform in July 2020. And usage exploded when the FBI dismantled Sky Global, another encrypted platform, in March 2021, officials said.
Operation Trojan Shield is the most wide-ranging attack on underworld communications, but not the first. Last year, the EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol, revealed that an operation initiated by French police had [cracked] a system known as EncroChat, which many criminals used. The [crack] has led police to arrest more than 1,000 people so far.
ANOM's users believed the devices to be secure, according to Jannine van den Berg of the Dutch National Police at the press conference. Access to the communications of those involved in criminal networks meant that law enforcement agencies were able to read encrypted messages.
For years, organized crime figures around the globe relied on the devices to orchestrate international drug shipments, coordinate the trafficking of arms and explosives, and discuss contract killings, law enforcement officials said. Users trusted the devices’ security so much that they often laid out their plans not in code, but in plain language.
b Unbeknown to them, the entire network was run by the F.B.I., in coordination with the Australian police.
On Tuesday, global law enforcement officials revealed the three-year operation, in which they said they had intercepted over 20 million messages, and arrested at least 800 people in more than a dozen countries.
So last week we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had taken to Newsweek to dust off a fifteen year old AT&T talking point. Namely that "big tech" companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks, and, as a result, should throw billions of dollars at "big telecom" for no real reason. You'll recall it was this kind of argument that launched the net neutrality debate, when former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proclaimed that Google wouldn't be allowed to "ride his pipes for free." Whitacre was effectively arguing that in addition to paying for bandwidth, tech giants should pay him a troll toll, just because.
The most puzzling aspect of this is that payoff for the betrayal is so limited. Even with the gag order, it seems very unlikely that the bill will clear both the House of Commons and Senate before the summer break. If there is an election call early in the fall, the bill will die. If not, there is time for the bill to continue to work its way through the Parliamentary process without the need for a gag order. Either way, that seems like an awfully small return for betraying your principles.
Foes of Section 230 are always happy to see a case where a court denies a platform its protection. What's alarming about Lemmon v. Snap is how comfortable so many of the statute's frequent defenders seem to be with the Ninth Circuit overruling the district court to deny Snapchat this defense. They mistakenly believe that this case raises a form of liability Section 230 was never intended to reach. On the contrary: the entire theory of the case is predicated on the idea that Snapchat let people talk about something they were doing. This expressive conduct is at the heart of what Section 230 was intended to protect, and denying the statute's protection here invites exactly the sort of harm to expression that the law was passed to prevent.
There's been this bizarre fascination among conservatives that tons of internet companies should be declared "common carriers." Of course, this ignores decades upon decades of conservatives fighting against any and all attempts to use common carrier designations on businesses that might legitimately be common carriers, like telcos. Again, there are a few key factors that make something a common carrier: (1) that it's about transport (things, people, data) from one place to another and (2) it's a commodified service in which what you get from any particular provider is likely to be mostly the same and (3) there is at least some argument that it's a natural monopoly, in that rebuilding the same infrastructure for multiple providers would be ridiculously inefficient or disruptive or both.
In Becton, Dickinson & Co. v. Baxter Corp. Englewood, the Federal Circuit overturned a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in an inter partes review that claims in the challenged patent were not invalid for obviousness.
The patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 8,554,579, is directed to telemedicine methods and particularly to methods for preparing patient-specific doses of pharmaceuticals.
The EPO has launched its new online magazine Patent Knowledge News, which will feature news, updates and facts relating to patent knowledge from the EPO and beyond.
Global public health campaigners are lashing out at the leadership of the European Union for attempting to undercut a temporary patent waiver for coronavirus vaccines by pushing an alternative proposal that critics say would fail to address supply shortages or stark inequities in vaccine distribution.
"The E.U. and other nations opposing this waiver need to stop blocking other countries' efforts to protect their populations in a public health emergency."—Dimitri Eynikel, Doctors Without Borders
Months into a debate at the World Trade Organization over suspending patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines in order to end€ the global pandemic, the delay has left Africa facing a third wave of deadly infections as countries across the continent confront dwindling supplies of vaccines.
As The Guardian reported Tuesday, eight countries have seen cases rise by more than 30% in the last week and officials have raised alarm over possible looming shortages of hospital beds and oxygen, unless the outbreaks can be brought under control.
The Association of American Publishers, like most industry lobbying groups, has a reputation for jealously guarding industry profit-making, no matter the larger implications of their doing so. In the past, the AAP has advocated for secret copyright treaties designed specifically to protect the publishing industry, getting Google to make its Google Library project far less useful, and has sued the Internet Archive's digital library program in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Again, the AAP is a lobbying group and we should expect them in some respects to behave like one, but it's important to tease out what they're lobbying for and against and whether its interests are shared with the interests of the general public. Spoiler alert: they absolutely are not.
For more than a week, Verizon customers have been unable to access several popular pirate sites. The IP-addresses of sites such as NYAA and Mangadex are null-routed instead. While the blocks appear to be intentional, Verizon is keeping its motivation quiet. So why are these sites blocked and has it got anything to do with piracy? Could it be related to Russian CDN provider DDoSGuard, which the sites have in common?
Nintendo has booked a major legal victory against DSTORAGE SAS, the operator of file-hosting site 1fichier. After the platform failed to remove infringing copies of Nintendo games from its servers following takedown demands, a Paris court has ordered the company to pay $1.13m in damages. The Court noted that rightsholders do not need a court order to have pirated content removed from online platforms.
