If you follow us or other sources like Chrome Unboxed you are by now aware that there’s ample rumors about Google/Valve working on bringing Steam on ChromeOS. We know the technology pieces are there, as recently discussed with Luke Short in our recent podcast. However, we are still waiting for an official announcement that would turn the expected rumors into reality.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Trenchboot continues to be worked on for providing boot integrity technologies that allow for multiple roots of trust around boot security and integrity. Oracle engineers on Friday sent out their latest Linux kernel patches so it can enjoy a "Secure Launch" by the project's x86 dynamic launch measurements code.
The latest kernel patches are a second revision to patches sent out last year around the Trenchboot launch support for enhancing the integrity and security of the boot process. This kernel work goes along with Trenchboot support happening for GRUB.
For nearly one decade there has been talk of UPower 1.0 while in 2021 that still has yet to materialize for this former "DeviceKit-Power" project but at least now there is UPower v0.99.12 as the first release in two years.
UPower 1.0 has yet to materialize and it certainly isn't advancing these days like it was in the early 2010s. With Thursday's UPower 0.99.12 release the key changes to land over the past two years are supporting more device types and power reporting for newer Apple iPhone smartphones like the iPhone XR, XS, and other newer models.
We are pleased to announce that the Tracing Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. Tracing in the Linux kernel is constantly improving. Tracing was officially added to Linux in 2008. Since then, more tooling has been constantly added to help out with visibility. The work is still ongoing, with Perf, ftrace, Lttng, and eBPF. User space tooling is expanding and as the kernel gets more complex, so does the need for facilitating seeing what is going on under the hood.
GPULab is a turnkey JupyterLab Notebook environment atop a feature-packed Ubuntu Linux operating system.
In recent months RADV lead developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen began working on Vulkan ray-tracing support for this Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver that isn't officially supported by AMD but as an alternative to the company's open-source AMDVLK driver or their cross-platform proprietary Vulkan driver. Hitting the Mesa 21.2-devel code a few minutes ago is the initial Vulkan ray-tracing bits for RADV!
Landing in Mesa 21.2-devel this Friday evening is implementing most of the acceleration structures with BVH building both for CPU and GPU-side builds.
In short, an issue was filed recently about getting the Nine state tracker working with zink.
Was it the first? No..
Was it the first one this year? Yes.
Thus began a minutes-long, helter-skelter sequence of events to get Nine up and running, spread out over the course of a day or two. In need of a skilled finagler knowledgeable in the mysterium of Gallium state trackers, I contacted the only developer I know with a rockstar name, Axel Davy. We set out at dawn, and I strapped on my parachute. It was almost immediately that I heard a familiar call: there’s a build issue.
Mesa's Zink is well known for working to provide a generic OpenGL implementation over the Vulkan API that can be used across hardware/drivers. While still focused on OpenGL-over-Vulkan, with some pending patches it turns out Zink can support Gallium3D Nine for ultimately allowing Direct3D 9 atop this layer.
Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz who continues making impressive progress on Zink recently took to getting the Gallium3D Nine state tracker working with Zink.
Let’s talk about compression. As a Linux user, you’re probably already familiar with longtime staples like gzip, bzip2, and xz. They’ve been around for a while, and most everyone has at least stumbled across them by now, if they’re not actively using them on a regular basis.
As if there weren’t enough already, there’s a newcomer in the compression arena. Zstandard (often abbreviated to zstd) was released in 2015 and since then has risen sharply in popularity. In the Linux world, official adoption of new standards can be rather slow, but Zstandard is seeing big support by distros such as Arch Linux, which switched from xz to Zstandard for package compression in the official repository back in 2019.
I remember when I was first learning Git I had trouble understand how the commands and how branches work so today we're looking at a simple game could Oh My Git (Not to be confused with the Git prompt) that will walk us through it.
For security reasons, Linux systems can reduce the ability of processes to gain elevated privileges under certain situations or provide additional constraints to reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities to be exploitable. SELinux developers, too, honor these situations.
As everything in SELinux works with contexts, even processes are assigned a context, also known as the domain. Let’s see how we can obtain this information, how SELinux transitions from one domain to another, and learn how to query the SELinux policy to find more information about these transitions.
We now know how to set SELinux contexts, both directly through tools such as chcon as well as through the restorecon application, which queries the SELinux context list to know what context a file should have. Yet restorecon is not the only application that considers this context list.
When we think that the context of a file is wrong, we need to correct the context. SELinux offers several methods to do so, and some distributions even add in more. We can use tools such as chcon, restorecon (together with semanage), setfiles, rlpkg (Gentoo), and fixfiles. Of course, we could also use the setfattr command, but that would be the least user-friendly approach for setting contexts.
Now that we are aware that file contexts are stored as extended attributes, how do we ensure that files receive the correct label when they are written or modified? To set an SELinux context on a filesystem resource, a few guidelines exist, ranging from inheritance rules to explicit commands.
SELinux file contexts are the most important configuration that a system administrator will have to work with when working with SELinux on the system. Contexts for files are generally identified through a label that is assigned to the file. Mislabeled files are a constant source of headaches for sysadmins, and most common SELinux issues are resolved by correcting the SELinux context.
Now that we know more about types (for processes, files, and other resources), let’s explore how these are used in the SELinux policy in more detail.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Spotify on Manjaro 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Spotify is a music streaming platform providing DRM-protected content to its subscribers. Spotify operates under a freemium model (basic services are free, while additional features are offered via paid subscriptions). Spotify makes its revenues by selling premium streaming subscriptions to users and advertising placements to third parties.
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 Spotify streaming player on a Manjaro 21 (Ornara).
Do you want to create many virtual storage volumes on top of a single storage device for easier and flexible administration? Here's how to set up flexible file system storage with Logical Volume Management (LVM).
Creating a secure connection between the local host and the remote host is called SSH tunneling or port forwarding. All connections made by SSH tunneling are encrypted. This feature of SSH is useful for many purposes, such as managing the database of the restricted server safely, implementing basic VPN (Virtual Private Network), using different services without opening port on the firewall, etc. SSH port forwarding can be done in three different ways. These are local port forwarding, remote port forwarding, and dynamic port forwarding. The ways to use SSH tunneling or port forwarding have been explained in this tutorial.
Creating a secure connection between the local host and the remote host is called SSH tunneling or port forwarding. All connections made by SSH tunneling are encrypted. This feature of SSH is useful for many purposes, such as managing the database of the restricted server safely, implementing basic using different services without opening port on the firewall, etc. How to use SSH tunneling or port forwarding is explained in this article.
While managing users, Linux administrators need to manage different types of users based on the privileges he/she wants to set. User management includes access control and Group management of the user. It is often seen that when we create users in Linux, there are two types of commands available useradd and adduser. This post will have an overview of both commands and discuss some key differences between them.
When working with files, renaming them is one of the most basic actions. In Linux, renaming a file or directory is mostly done using mv. However, when it comes to renaming multiple files or folders, using mv becomes complex. It requires constructing complex loops and piping to get the job done. The rename command is specifically designed for such situations.
Rename is a powerful batch renaming tool that uses Perl expression to rename multiple files and directories in a single command. In this guide, check out how to rename files with rename.
Two-factor authentication (2FA) is a login process consisting of a double authentication mechanism. Most known implementations include the classic SMS or email code confirmation for new/unknown browsers and devices.
In this scenario, even if a hacker gets a PayPal or hosting password, he won’t be able to log in without the confirmation code sent to the victim’s phone or email.
Implementing the two-factor authentication is one of the best practices to protect our email, social network accounts, hosting, and more. Unfortunately, our system is not the exception.
This tutorial shows how to implement the two-factor authentication to protect your SSH access using Google Authenticator or Authy-ssh. Google Authenticator allows you to verify a login using the mobile app, while Authy-ssh can be implemented without an app using SMS verification.
Every couple of months, one of my users falls prey to phishing attacks, and send their login/password data to an unknown somebody who poses as… Well, as me, their always-friendly and always-helpful systems administrator.
What follows is, of course, me spending a week trying to get our systems out of all of the RBLs/DNSBLs. But, no matter how fast I act, there’s always distruption and lost mails (bounced or classified as spam) for my users.
Most of my users use the Webmail I have configured on our institute’s servers, Roundcube, for which I have the highest appreciation. Only that… Of course, when a user yields their username and password to an attacker, it is very successful at… Sending huge amounts of unrequested mail, leading to my server losing its reputation
Choosing the right font for your documents can be hard if you don't know much about typography and design. But if you have a document with a font that you like, you can easily extract the font name through the command line. All you need is a tool called pdffonts.
In this article, you will learn about pdffonts and how to install it on your computer. You'll also find a detailed guide on how to identify fonts in a PDF document using it.
If you need to connect to a remote computer using the command line, you might be tempted to use Telnet, one of the oldest protocols still in use on the internet. But you shouldn't, because it's not safe for your digital privacy.
This article will discuss the reasons why you shouldn't use Telnet and what other secure protocols you can use to connect to servers remotely.
We saw how SELinux users define the role(s) that a user can hold. But how does SELinux enforce which role a user logs in through? And when logged in, how can a user switch their active role?
During the execution of a program, the kernel creates a process that helps store the program’s execution details in the system’s memory. When a program executes, it becomes a process for the system. So, we can say a process is a program until it executes.
The process created by the kernel is known as the “Parent Process,” and all the processes derived from the parent process are termed as “Child Processes.” A single process may consist of several child processes having a unique PID but with the same PPID.
The Secure Shell (SSH) key is the access credential for SSH protocol. Although the SSH protocol supports multiple approaches for authentication, the Public key is considered one of the best ways that help in automated and interactive connections.
While working on the unsecured open networks, the SSH protocol helps for remote connections among different devices. Using this, users can transfer the files remotely and also manage the network.
As there are multiple devices on the unsecured networks, the SSH uses a set of keys, i-e Private Key and Public Key, to create a secure connection between devices remotely.
Programmers frequently classify exceptions as code faults that result in errors whenever the program is executed. Exceptions represent errors that take place as a result of a script. Some programmers still can’t tell the difference between mistakes as well as exceptions. The majority of such errors seem logical. In Python, exceptions are caught using straightforward logic. Whenever a Python interpreter encounters an exception, it terminates the workflow. It is dealt with by going through the calling procedure. The software will crash if this is not done.
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source (such as a database or API) must be read. Also it is a high performance free and opensource in-memory key-value store used as a caching system. It’s mainly used for speeding up database-driven sites and web applications by caching data in RAM. In so doing, it significantly reduces the frequency that an eternal source of data read.
Memcached was first developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for his website LiveJournal, on May 22, 2003. It was originally written in Perl, then later was rewritten in C by Anatoly Vorobey, then employed by LiveJournal. Memcached now used by many other systems
Memcached is simple and easy to deploy and its API is widely available for a wide range of popular programming languages such as Python.
Installing packages in any Linux-based Operating system is like a task that happens on a daily basis, and it is seen that we often need to install some packages for a brief period. However, the packages required for very little time stay inside our system and consume the disk space.
In a system where we have fewer resources in terms of disk space, the disk space stays almost full, and we have to keep check on unwanted applications and packages and remove them from time to time.
For such scenarios where you have to install and use some packages for a short period, it is a better practice and recommended to install the packages in some specific or temporary directory. The directory will stay separate from all other package clusters, and you can easily remove the packages.
SSH or Secure Shell is designed to access the content of the remote host for doing different types of tasks remotely. SSH is not installed on Ubuntu by default. The SSH can provide password-protected encrypted access to the remote system after the installation. The SSH server runs on the remote host, and the SSH client runs on the system that will establish the remote connection. The authorized_keys file is the most important part of the SSH connection. It specifies the keys used to authenticate the users permitted to log into the remote host using public-key authentication. The uses of this file for the SSH connection have explained in this tutorial.
rsync is a popular tool for synchronization files between two computer systems. It is a valuable utility for syncing files locally and remotely. This file transfer and synchronization tool are often seen in Linux or Unix-based systems. For saving network bandwidth, rsync employs a type of delta encoding. This delta encoding enables rsync to send only the differences between the destination and the source files.
In SELinux-enabled environments, the login binary calls the libselinux API to establish the initial mapping between SELinux users and local users. Then, after finding the right SELinux user, the system looks up the role and domain that the user should be in and sets that as the user’s context.
Once logged in to a system, our user will run inside a certain context. This user context defines the rights and privileges that we, as a user, have on the system.
MySQL is the globe’s most popular open-source database software used to manage the relational database. Besides having powerful features, it is fast, scalable, and easy to use than Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database. As a result, PHP scripts are commonly used for creating powerful and dynamic server-side/web-based applications.
Note: A database is a structured collection of data
SQL is an abbreviation for Structured Query Language, and it is the standardized language used to access the database.
If you have been facing challenges related to MySQL/MariaDB administration and/or development and are in dire need of an ideal solution, then look no further than Navicat for MySQL. With Navicat for MySQL existing as a single application, making a MySQL or MariaDB database connection is easy and simultaneous.
Navicat for MySQL shares awesome compatibility with cloud database infrastructures like Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Amazon RDS, Google Cloud, and Amazon Aurora. If you are looking for a reliable solution to manage, develop, and maintain databases, the all-inclusive frontend nature of Navicat for MySQL is intuitive and graphically powerful enough to get the job done.
This database administration solution is applicable and supported by popular OS environments like Windows, macOS, Linux, and iOS.
LaTeX is a free and open-source software for typesetting documents. It is a preparation system for high-quality typesetting and the defacto for large technical documents, computer science, and mathematics documents. For example, you can use LaTeX to create math formulas, equations, cover letters, present assignments or thesis, or edit presentations, syllabi, and exams.
Leslie Lamport originally wrote LaTeX to extend the functionality of the TeX typesetting engine by Donald Knuth. Technically, LaTeX is a set of macros and commands for the programming language TEX.
This article is the second part of our LaTeX typesetting series. You can refer to Part 1 for a comprehensive introduction to LaTeX, learn about page designs, formatting, tables, lists, and how to work with graphics. Part 2 will cover how to typeset math formulas, cross-references, listing contents, and bibliographies.
Let’s see the steps and commands to install Glances on the monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and start keeping track of system processes and resources.
Glances is a system monitor for the command line. Compared to the classic top and htop, the program offers process information as well as additional real-time statistics on the file system, network, hardware components, etc. It has a ncurses interface and can be easily operated with the keyboard. It was created with Python and the library psutil, thus, supports any major platform having python installed such as Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and Android.
If you want to monitor a remote computer, you can use the integrated web server in addition to an SSH connection, server/client mode, or API (XML-RPC and RESTful). Stats can also be exported to files or external time/value databases such as InfluxDB, Cassandra, CouchDB.
The Wine development release 6.11 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Theming support in all builtin programs. - All remaining CRT math functions imported from Musl. - MP3 support requires libmpg123 also on macOS. - Support for codepage 720 (Arabic). - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.11.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.11.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Another two weeks and another bottle of Wine has been opened. This Wine 6.11 development release pulls in an interesting patch too for Roblox.
I doubt Roblox needs much of an introduction. Sadly it's another game that doesn't support Linux and stopped working in Wine long ago - until now. Wine bug #39142 (Roblox Client/Server connection is dropped with error "This server has shut down.") is now solved with this commit. So the Roblox client should now work but keep in mind there's a number of caveats, some of which can be seen here.
Wine 6.11 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for running an increasing number of Windows applications and games on Linux.
Wine 6.11 now has theming support for all of its built-in programs thanks to some recent COMCTL32 theme improvements, all remaining CRT math functions have been imported from Musl libc, and Unicode support for the 720 codepage in handling Arabic / Farsi / Urdu.
Time for a weekend of testing as the next version of Steam Play Proton is closing in with Proton 6.3-5 having a first Release Candidate now available. Quite a big one too by the looks of it! Don't know what Steam Play and Proton are? Be sure to check out our dedicated page for the full run-down.
Just in time for the weekend Linux gamers is a new release candidate of the upcoming Proton 6.3-5 that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.
With the Proton 6.3-5 release candidate there is the newly-released DXVK 1.9 for bettering the Direct3D 9/10/11 support atop Vulkan. This update also now uses DXVK's DXGI by default for handling GPU device selection. On the Direct3D 12 front, the latest VKD3D-Proton code is now incorporated.
A big highlight from 2020 was art of rally, the indie racer from Funselektor Labs developer of Absolute Drift (get it free until June 19) and there's a big overhaul update out now.
This update has been in the works for about 6 months now the developer said, bringing with it an updated UI from one an artist who worked on the also fabulous Mini Metro. There's even a dark mode included (hooray, my eyes!) and there's UI scaling now too. You can also see cross-platform leader boards and downloadable ghosts now too. C
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive popularly known as CS: GO is one of the most popular games of all time. Released in 1999, the game involves two teams where the Terrorist team tries to plant explosives whereas the Counter-Terrorists team tries to prevent it.
After nearly 21 years of its launch, the game still has millions of active players worldwide. According to Statista, CS: GO had 24 million active users in February 2020. The game is also played in eSports where professional CS: GO teams such as Cloud9, G2, and NaVi take part to win the trophy.
So it’s not just a game but can also be a profession if you’re good at it. There are hundreds of streamers on Twitch who have a large number of subscribers.
Today we are looking at how to install Steam Link 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.
 This week we have yet another interesting new user interface feature to talk about. The old “What’s This?” feature has been re-worked as a shiny and new user interface convention we’ve come up with: expandable tooltips! Many tooltips in KDE apps that use the KXMLGui and Kirigami frameworks now have a little label saying “Press Shift for more”, and if you do so, it will show you the longer text. This makes the feature much more useful since it’s invokable right at the point where you would need it. Big thanks to Felix Ernst for this work! It will land in Frameworks 5.84.
I am still digesting the load of information that Marc Mutz gave in his intense training session last night between 6 and almost 11 p.m. about C++/STL history, containers, iterators, allocators, the Non-Owning Interface Idiom and all that other good stuff. Great job Marc.
When rolling out a new feature that lets you skip (offline) updates on boot-up earlier this week we have messed up and also brought in a nasty bug that prevents updates from applying. Unfortunately we can’t automatically rectify this problem because, well, updates are never applied.
In case you find Discover showing the same updates over and over again, even after rebooting to apply the update, you may be affected.
Over the years, I have blown hot and cold over whether to have a donation button. Did take it down for awhile, about a year ago I think.
I received an email asking if can send me a bank cheque, which reminded me about that donation button. I declined the offer.
I really don't need donations. It is really my pleasure to upload blog reports about EasyOS, Puppy, DIY hiking gear, and all the rest that have posted about. Ibiblio.org is still very kindly hosting downloads, and I also went back to the Puppy Forum.
If you are not familiar with the Parameter Store it provides hierarchical storage for config data, strings, and other values. As well as being used for storing private information the parameter store provides a public namespace for SUSE, /aws/service/suse, which is now being leveraged to provide the latest image id’s for all active SUSE images.
Open-source software giant Red Hat Inc. is getting into the application migration game with a new offering that helps companies move legacy apps based on traditional infrastructure to its container-focused Red Hat OpenShift platform.
Most modern applications these days are built using software containers that host the components of those apps, enabling them to run on any kind of computing infrastructure and be updated more often.
The problem developers have is that some of their existing apps and systems just aren’t compatible with container infrastructure. So modernizing these kinds of workloads is time-consuming, costly and in many cases, simply too overwhelming for developers.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
Don’t forget to take the Annual Fedora Survey and claim your badge!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Finally getting around to capturing the fact that CentOS 8.4 has been released 2 weeks ago. It followed the prior RHEL 8.4 release closely enough this time around.
I’d like to try CentOS Stream with 8.4 updates and specifically the part of dnf downgrade functionality - but it seems that for that I need to install an earlier version of CentOS Stream, upgrade in place and then try downgrading.
Earlier this week, Neowin reported that the Linux Mint 20.2 beta ISOs were undergoing final testing before being made available. Today, you can now download Linux Mint 20.2 beta from a choice of the Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce editions.
One of the main updates in Linux Mint 20.2 is to the Update Manager and the way it handles and alerts users to updates. On Linux Mint systems, all of the installed software, including apps, are updated centrally in the Update Manager. To bring more centralisation to the system, Cinnamon spices (add-ons in Cinnamon) are now visible in the Update Manager whenever there’s an update for them.
Canonical has announced that Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla is set to lose support on July 22, 2021. As the release was one of those between the Long-Term Support (LTS) releases, it only has nine months of life. Those running this particular version of Ubuntu are urged to upgrade their systems to Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo which has been available since April.
To assist you in upgrading your computer, Canonical has published a guide that runs through everything you need to know and do to get to the latest version. If you’re not sure which version of Ubuntu you have, open Settings, scroll down the left-hand pane until you reach About, and then look under OS Name and you should be able to see which version you are on. Most people checking should find that they’re on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS, which is supported until 2025.
Wind River has released Wind River Linux LTS21, advancing to Linux LTS 5.10, Yocto Project 3.3, and Qt 5.15.2. New features include a Linux Assembly Tool for image creation and a pre-built binary distribution.
We last heard from Wind River in Feb. 2020 when the company released an unnamed version of Wind River Linux that added an optional CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) model with more frequent updates, among other features. The company, which also offers the VxWorks RTOS, has now released Wind River Linux Long Term Support (LTS) 21, featuring a new Linux Assembly Tool and an option for a pre-built binary distribution.
Digi International has announced the Digi ConnectCore 8M Mini System-on-Module (SOM) which is an addition to its ConnectCore family modules. We saw the Android application development kit featuring earlier Digi Wireless modules based Freescale i.MX51 (ConnectCore Wi-i.MX51) and i.MX53 (ConnectCore Wi-i.MX53) in early 2012. The new Digi ConnectCore 8M Mini comes with a built-in Video Processing Unit specialising in vision use cases.
The Digi ConnectCore 8M Mini SOM is an industrial i.MX 8M Mini quad-core system-on-module that comes with Arm Cortex-A53 cores, one Cortex-M4 core, and the Cortex-M0-based Digi Microcontroller Assist. This enables optimal power consumption while simultaneous maintenance of highly efficient performance.
Pin configuration is more complex than you might expect. The problem is that the processor chip has 144 pins (in a 12Ãâ12 grid), but the microcontroller provides a much larger number of functions. The solution is that each pin has up to 8 different multiplexed functions, and you can select one of these functions for each pin. Thus, you can't use all the features of the chip at the same time, but hopefully you can use the features you need.
Dogs are not known to be the most advanced communicators, so figuring out what they want based on a few noises and pleading looks can be tough. This problem is what inspired a team of developers to come up with PUPPI — a small device that utilizes tinyML to interpret your canine companion’s mood through vocal signals. Their project employs an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and its onboard microphone to both capture the data and run inferencing with the model they trained using Edge Impulse. After collecting ample amounts of data for barks, growls, whines, and other noises, their model achieved an accuracy of around 92%.
Classical computing is based on bits. Zeros and ones. This isn't because there's some inherent advantage to a binary logic system over logic systems with more states—or even over analog computers. But on-off switches are easy to make and, with modern semiconductor technology, we can make them very small and very cheap.
But they're not without limits. Some problems just can't be efficiently solved by a classical computer. These tend to be problems where the cost, in time or memory, increases exponentially with the scale (n) of the problem. We say such problems are O(2n) in Big O notation.
Founded in 2011, Mattermost targets enterprises with various self-managed and hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) options. The Palo Alto, California-based company has raised around $70 million since its inception and claims some major customers, including Samsung, SAP, Deloitte, Nasdaq, and BNP Paribas, with a typical “large enterprise deployment” of between 10,000 and 40,000 users.
Mattermost offers various plans covering most potential use cases, including its foundational free and open source Mattermost Team edition. It also has a commercial self-managed free edition called Mattermost Enterprise Edition EO, which provides the added ability to upgrade to more feature-rich paid versions. And if a customer on a hosted enterprise plan is concerned about their data becoming locked into commercial software, they can “downgrade” to the open source Mattermost Team edition without losing any data.
Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.
This is not to be confused with freeware, which is simply just software that does not come with a direct financial cost attached to it, but which likely won’t have any of the freedoms associated with open source software. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, famously helped define what is meant by “free” in FOSS when he said:
Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in free speech, not as in free beer.To emphasize that the “free” denotes liberty rather than financial cost, the term FLOSS (“free/libre open source software”) is often used instead. But for all intents and purposes, FOSS and FLOSS mean the same thing.
[...]
MySQL, for example, is an open source relational database management system that Oracle releases under a dual license — one a GNU General Public License (GPL), the other proprietary. The former affords most of the freedoms one would expect from FOSS, though the license is what is known as copyleft, which means that any derivative software must be issued under similar license terms. In other words, new software built from the open source software must be released under a similar open source license.
Oracle’s secondary license is how it commercializes MySQL, selling it under the MySQL Enterprise Edition banner, which offers additional services not included in the GPL license, such as a fully managed database service; an enterprise-grade data backup service; a document store; and security smarts such as encryption and a firewall. Also, companies holding the commercial license are allowed to sell MySQL-based products without making the derivative product open source.
In contrast to copyleft licenses such as GPL, so-called permissive software licenses such as the MIT License, GNU All-permissive License, and the Apache license don’t impose derivative software restrictions, making it easier for a private company to repurpose it as part of a proprietary product. In fact, they could also re-license their new software under a GPL license if they wish.
Hey everyone! At the CTCFT meeting this Monday (2021-06-21), we’re going to try a “social hour”. The idea is really simple: for the hour after the meeting, we will create breakout rooms in Zoom with different themes. You can join any breakout room you like and hangout.
The themes for the breakout rooms will be based on suggestions. If you have an idea for a room you’d like to try, you can post it in a dedicated topic on the #ctcft Zulip stream. Or, if you see somebody else has posted an idea that you like, then add a emoji. We’ll create the final breakout list based on what we see there.
OASIS Open, the international open source and open standards consortium, and Samvera, an international open source community with best in class digital asset management solutions, are pleased to announce their Foundation-as-a-Service partnership. The program streamlines the process of forming and running foundations by letting groups operate independently while enjoying the benefits of the OASIS nonprofit corporate structure and expertise.
[...]
From its beginning in 2008, Samvera (originally called Hydra) set out to build a community to support and sustain its software, which is free and open source
Music has long been shown to boost both cognitive performance and productivity. With more and more people working from home, listening to music can help combat loneliness, increase happiness and wellbeing, and provoke analytical thinking.
Certain jobs and professions are more suited to background music than others. One such profession is coding, which requires high levels of analytical and problem-solving skills.
Daft Punk Most Popular Artist to Code to
With regards to the most popular artists to code to, Draft Punk take the number one slot. The French electronic musicians average more than 15 million monthly listeners on Spotify and their songs appear most frequently across the Spotify playlists of coders. Daft Punk were followed by Odesza, as the most popular artist for programmers to listen to when working. When it comes to musical genres, electronics seem to be a favorite for coders. As Ko2 notes, it must be something to do with the consistent beat that helps coders establish a rhythm. KO2’s research provides useful insight into how professionals use music to get them in the mood and improve performance. In this sense, employers may want to consider encouraging the use of background music in the workplace.
DBD::SQLite 1.67_07 (with SQLite 3.36.0) is a release candidate for the next stable DBD::SQLite. This release has a notable change to improve how to deal with Unicode/Latin-1 characters, contributed by Felipe Gasper.
Although Python is not strictly an object-oriented programming language, it is strong and flexible enough to let you use the object-oriented model to construct your programs. Python accomplishes this in part by allowing inheritance, which it ensures through super(). The super() built-in produces a surrogate entity (a transient superclass object) which we may use to reach the base class functions. In addition, the super() method grants the right to use to a parental or sibling class functions and attributes. Dealing with Simultaneous Inheritance helps us to evade having to use the parent class name directly. In this tutorial, you will be guided about invading a superclass using a super() method.
Enumerate () is present in the python library and is a built-in function. As an input, it takes a collection of words and gives them an enumerated object. Enumerate function is similar to the for loop in other languages like C. Enumerate () function always acts as an iterable object that counts in each iteration. The start index or start parameter is optional in the enumerate function code. The enumerated object obtained as output is then directly used for further amendments like usage in for loops etc. Enumerate () function helps us to allow looping over strings, dictionaries, and lists and display the output with data indexes. Taking advantage of enumerating as compared to using loops is a pythonic way in the programming sector. It also makes the code clean and easily understandable. Because as we extend the code, it becomes messier and causes many errors. In this article, we will cover different examples to see the functionality of Enumerate function.
This happened to me recently by a film with the magic and tragic title,€ River’s End.
I watched the film and then I read carefully the transcripts. That immersion brought me back to all I had done in my work at the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the US Environmental Protection Agency. I, too, felt I was a river coming to an end.
ISC would like to end maintenance of the ISC DHCP *client and relay* by the end of 2021. We plan to continue maintaining the DHCP *server*, and any code that is common between the server, client and relay for a couple more years at least. Our January 2020 release of ISC DHCP incorporated a number of submitted patches, mostly for the client, but otherwise we have done little maintenance on the client or relay. To be honest, the client and relay have simply not been a focus of ours for several years. As a small non-profit organization, we have to allocate our limited resources carefully and we think the ISC DHCP server, and Kea have more future value for users.
At the time, Ken Bennett, an audit official, informed the Arizona Republic that he wasn't aware of how the data in the hands of Cotton and his firms was being kept safe. Weeks later, Bennett told CNN that CYFIR was allowed to send copies of voter data to Montana on a truck.
"Bennett tells us he doesn't know where the so-called 'lab' is," CNN reporter Gary Tuchman said during the televised report. "It is apparently a secret."
I’m returning my book to the library this week, 467 days after I borrowed it. And there is no fine.
If you were lucky enough to have checked out a book before the library shut its doors last year, then the due date kept moving with the uncertainty of the pandemic.
On the days when my online account showed I’d been given a bonus month — then two, three, six, a year! — the weight of the pandemic lifted. It was as good as saying, “We’re giving you a break. Life is hard.” Many other books came and went from my house through curbside pickup, but this one was reliably not due.
In 2021, a vulnerability was revealed in a system that lay at the foundation of modern computing. An attacker could force the system to execute arbitrary code. Shockingly, the vulnerable code was almost 54 years old—and there was no patch available, and no expectation that one would be forthcoming.
Fortunately, that's because the system in question was Marvin Minsky's 1967 implementation of a Universal Turing Machine, which, despite its momentous theoretical importance for the field of computer science, had never actually been built into a real-world computer. But in the decade or so after Minsky's design, the earliest versions of Unix and DOS came into use, and their descendants are still with us today in the 21st century. Some of those systems have had bugs lurking beneath the surface for years or even decades.
This week has been busy, but not here unfortunately. I had a minor crisis at a certain other weblog to deal with, leading me to neglect things here at the shebeen (as Charles Pierce would put it). When I came back, I started noticing a mantra from antivaxxers that I had seen before dating way back to the early days of the blog. It’s one that I’ve alluded to before but haven’t really looked at head-on, probably mainly because I haven’t seen it stated so baldly. Unsurprisingly, I saw it at Natural News, that repository of quackery, antivaccine fear mongering, and conspiracy theories that Alex Jones would have a hard time topping in the form of an article that “inspired” the title of this post, If you’re pro-science, then you should be anti-vaccine. It’s not by the big macher himself, Mike Adams, but one of his drones churning out less rabid content, S.D. Wells, whose real name is apparently Sean David Cohen. I rather suspect that Adams uses Wells to churn out the more “reasonable-sounding” content for his conspiracy site, leaving himself free to speculate about vaccine depopulation agendas in which the global elite conspires with extraterrestrials.
April (who uses “they” pronouns and declined to give their last name for privacy reasons), a recent graduate of George Mason University, said they’ve always had an aptitude for learning, and even described themselves as a bit of a teacher’s pet. While attending lectures before the pandemic, they would always make sure to speak at least once and sit near the front. During remote learning, they lost the ability to connect to professors and their peers in a meaningful way. “In one of my classes, I literally never saw my professor’s face, because she would just upload her voice onto a Powerpoint and then once every three or four weeks, there would be a short quiz on the content of the lectures,” April said. “The information I acquired these past semesters could have been acquired with a Google search.”
The Center for Popular Democracy’s Senior Policy and Campaign Strategist Kate Terenzi said the school-to-prison-and-deportation pipeline was one of the most “egregious examples of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence in the country.… Students deserve more than an education system that is hell-bent on criminalizing them instead of providing them with the resources they need to succeed.” Many of these children have learning disabilities or histories of poverty, abuse, or neglect, and would benefit from additional educational and counseling services. Instead, when they act out in school, they are isolated, reprimanded, and sometimes criminally charged. As of 2013, 51 percent of high schools with majority Black and Latino enrollment had law enforcement officers on campus, compared to only 32 percent of majority white schools. Across the country, Black students are more than twice as likely as their white classmates to be referred to law enforcement or arrested at school. Studies have also shown that those involved with the criminal justice system as adolescents are more likely to go to prison as an adult. Roughly 40 percent of kids who go into juvenile detention end up in prison by the age of 25.
Big beast Intel has come crashing out of the semiconductor jungle into the Data Processing Unit gang’s watering hole, saying it’s the biggest DPU shipper of all and it got there first anyway.
Data Processing Units (DPUs) are programmable processing units dedicated to running data centre infrastructure-specific operations such as security, storage and networking — offloading them from existing servers so they can run more applications. DPUs are built from specific CPU chips, FPGAs and/or ASICs by suppliers such as Fungible, Nvidia, Pensando, and Nebulon. It’s a fast-developing field and device types include in-situ processors, SmartNICs, server offload cards, storage processors, composability hubs and components.
A new poll released Friday found that a€ whopping 94% of adults in the U.S. do not want pharmaceutical corporations to€ control the global supply of Covid-19 vaccines, lending additional support to international demands for achieving universal access to inoculation through more knowledge€ sharing, technology transfer, and public production of doses.
"These findings show that Biden has the support of the U.S. public to help countries across the world take back control of the vaccine supply and save millions of lives."—Solange Baptiste, ITPC
The Affordable Care Act has survived so many conservative attempts to kill it that it could star in a new Die Hard movie. The simple premise that Americans have a right to access health insurance at an affordable price regardless of previous illness angers conservatives to the point of hysteria. They’ve tried to bash it, repeal it, dismember it, and get the whole thing declared unconstitutional.
Instead, Huang opted to shave the top of the teen's head completely bald, leaving a thin ring of hair around the lower third of his head. The haircut had the desired effect, with the boy crying and exclaiming "I don't want to go out!"
Nearly 15 months ago, a large, fast-moving and unscheduled experiment began: probing a key protein of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 to find chemical starting points for drug discovery. The end point was to develop pills that people could take to treat COVID-19 and related diseases.
This experiment pulled together a spontaneous, open, global, Twitter-fuelled collaboration called the COVID Moonshot. Urgency and a commitment to working openly recruited more than 150 active participants, spanning a huge range of expertise and technology across academia, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and more, all working without claiming intellectual property. Open drug-discovery efforts are invariably super slow — ours has been an express train on tracks we have laid down as we go. It is a way of working that none of us realized was possible.
Linux fans suffered a not-so-minor inconvenience when packages.microsoft.com went down on June 16. Everything from Visual Studio Code to Microsoft Edge and Teams package links were affected as repositories suffered a serious outage that lasted almost the entirety of a day.
Though a day isn't a long time relative to most things, it's a virtual eternity for those whose entire ecosystem is crippled by such an outage. As reported by Ars Technica, Microsoft took five hours to acknowledge the issue, then another thirteen hours to claim said issue had been resolved. Commenters on the report cited that even though repositories were back online and functioning, the download speeds were brutally slow.
This week, Microsoft's Linux package repositories suffered an hours-long outage, followed by performance issues spanning over a day.
Users relying on the packages.microsoft.com repository to pull Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, OpenSUSE, and Fedora received errors.
Microsoft engineers have acknowledged the issue and are working towards a resolution.
In May 2019, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that the website of mortgage settlement giant First American Financial Corp. [NYSE:FAF] was leaking more than 800 million documents — many containing sensitive financial data — related to real estate transactions dating back 16 years. This week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settled its investigation into the matter after the Fortune 500 company agreed to pay a paltry penalty of less than $500,000.
Estonia is no stranger to the cyber threat posed by Russia. Back in 2007, a decision to relocate a Soviet-era war memorial from central Tallinn to a military cemetery sparked a diplomatic spat with its neighbor and former overlord. There were protests and angry statements from Russian diplomats. And just as the removal works started, Estonia became the target of what was at the time the biggest cyberattack against a single country.
The Estonian government called the incident an act of cyberwarfare and blamed Russia for it. Moscow has denied any involvement.
The attack made Estonia realize that it needed to start treating cyber threats in the same way as physical attacks.
The study surveyed nearly 1,300 security professionals around the world and found that 80 percent of businesses that paid after a ransomware attack suffered a second attack. Of those hit a second time, 46 percent believed it came from the same group that did the first attack.
Censuswide, which performed the study on behalf of the international cybersecurity company Cybereason, found that 25 percent of organizations hit by a ransomware attack were forced to close. In addition, 29 percent were forced to eliminate jobs.
RUSSIA'S HISTORICALLY DESTRUCTIVE NotPetya malware attack and its more recent SolarWinds cyberespionage campaign have something in common besides the Kremlin: They're both real-world examples of software supply chain attacks. It's a term for what happens when a hacker slips malicious code into legitimate software that can spread far and wide. And as more supply chain attacks emerge, a new open source project is angling to take a stand, making a crucial safeguard free and easy to implement.
The founders of Sigstore hope that their platform will spur adoption of code signing, an important protection for software supply chains but one that popular and widely used open source software often overlooks. Open source developers don't always have the resources, time, expertise, or wherewithal to fully implement code signing on top of all the other nonnegotiable components they need to build for their code to function.
This offers a number of benefits including secure connections and visibility of communications. The two main competitors in the service mesh space are Istio and Linkerd, and the market has recently seen a shift towards the latter. We spoke to William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and co-creator of Linkerd, to find out more about service mesh and why the shift is happening.
Google and the Linux Foundation separately debuted new tools to improve supply chain security, with a specific focus on open source software, as federal agencies work on software-related standards and guidelines called for in President Biden’s recent cybersecurity executive order.
Google launched Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts or SLSA, pronounced “salsa.” It’s a framework for ensuring the integrity of software artifacts throughout the software supply chain. The cloud giant also included SLSA in its proposed recommendations to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which called on organizations to submit solutions for boosting supply chain security.
The sources told the wire service that the order could force apps owned and made by foreign entities such as China to take tougher measures to protect sensitive information.
The goal is to keep foreign adversaries like China and Russia from gaining access to large amounts of personal and proprietary business information.
The Open Voice Network aims to bolster consumer trust through communally-developed standards and governance that developers, designers, strategists and makers can go by to give users more data ownership and control.
It also aims to provide these core tenets to any ecosystem and architecture that developers prefer.
The association operates on the directed fund of the Linux Foundation and is independently funded and governed.
+ The last time a group like this got together in a villa on a Swiss lake Bryon composed the third canto of Childe Harold, Mary Shelley drafted Frankenstein, Percy tripping on laudanum wrote the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and Polidori, pilfering Byron’s notebook, produced the first vampire novel. The best we can probably hope for from this despotic pair is that they don’t leave intent on dismembering body and with an unquenchable thirst for more blood…
+ In reading the transcripts from the post-summit press conferences, nearly every question from the US media was an attempt to goad Biden into making even more belligerent comments about Russia and, once FoxNews got the microphone, China, than he was already inclined to do. The press hasn’t changed all that much since the days of Hearst. In fact it’s probably worse, since there was still a muckraking tradition, even in Hearst’s papers, and the beat reporters themselves were largely working class then. If the administration shows any reluctance to escalate a confrontation, then the media is more than willing to light a match for them and then hide in the green room at CNN as it all goes up in flames.
Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy.
The geographies of today’s cold civil war are far more complicated. States are split between urban and rural.€ Metropolitan regions are splintered.€ € Urban cores and increasingly multiethnic and working-class inner suburbs are in tension with largely White outer suburbs and exurbs.
The fragmented geography of a dividing U.S. is the center of a recent book by Phil A. Neel,€ Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict.€ (Reaktion Books, London, 2018). In this two-part series, I first offer Neel’s overview of this fractured landscape, then in the second part give my own analysis with some ideas on how to pull it back together.
After more than a decade, four elections, three corruption charges, and a tumultuous parliamentary vote, someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister this week.
The effects of American racial bias and anti-Asian sentiment do not end at the nation's borders. The racial attitudes of white people also influence their support for American military intervention abroad, according to our working paper on U.S. foreign policy and racism.
Those lines are called “borders,” and in the case of my upcoming trip they separate areas known to most as Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
There are also a bunch of other borders, too numerous to mention, within THOSE borders, separating places called “counties,” “cities,” etc.
As the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday easily passed a bill by Rep. Barbara Lee to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, peace advocates called on Congress to enact similar legislation to end the 2001 AUMF upon which the open-ended so-called Global War on Terror has been waged for nearly 20 years.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press Daily" on Thursday, Lee (D-Calif.), who was the only member of Congress to vote against the post-9/11 AUMF (pdf)—passed one week after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States—told host Chuck Todd that H.R. 256, her bill repealing the 2002 AUMF that passed by a bipartisan vote of 268-161, "is an important step toward repealing the 2001 authorization."
Human rights defenders on Friday mostly welcomed a United Nations General Assembly resolution "strongly condemning" deadly violence perpetrated by Myanmar's military coup regime in recent months and calling on member nations to "prevent the flow of arms" into the country.
The 193-member U.N. General Assembly voted 119 to 1—with Belarus casting the sole dissenting vote—in favor of the resolution. There were 36 abstentions, including China, Egypt, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates. Thirty-seven other U.N. member states did not vote.
After a few years in Texas and Alaska, we ended up in Maryland.€ We were my older sister, myself, two younger brothers and a younger sister.€ The family was just beginning.€ Dad was assigned to the newly chartered National Security Agency.€ Three years later our family (which had added three more members) was in Peshawar, West Pakistan on a small USAF station.€ It’s raison d’etre was to eavesdrop on the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union.€ While we were there India and Pakistan fought a brief war and my mom and siblings were evacuated to another USAF base in Turkey.€ Meanwhile, the US war on Vietnam was ratcheting up.
It was that latter war that would cause my father more distress than probably any other element of his life.€ In March 1968, he was told he would be going to Danang, Vietnam in February of the following year.€ I remember the night he shared that information with me.€ It was the same night that President Johnson announced that he would not seek nor accept the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. As anyone who was paying attention at the time knows, 1968 was a hell of a year.€ Assassinations of political figures, student worker rebellions, antiwar protests attacked by police, insurrections by Black residents of the US after Martin Luther King was murdered; it was an unforgettable year.€ My political sympathies were with Robert F. Kennedy and his antiwar platform.€ My thirteen-year-old self knew the war was wrong and many of my friends’ older siblings were already either marching against it or getting drafted to fight it.€ I preferred the former over the idea of killing and risking getting killed.€ My father prepared to go there.
June 18 is election day in Iran. There are two main candidates for president, the arch-conservative Ebrahim Raisi, Iran's chief justice, and the centrist Abdolnaser Hemmati, an academic who served as chief of the national bank for the past three years.
Biden promises only half a million doses, but none for Venezuela.[3] Not only that, but the USA is actively engaged in stopping vaccines reaching the country. If this is not a crime against humanity, then nothing is.
The USA has tried to overthrow the government of President Nicolas Maduro with coup d’etats, cyber-attacks, infrastructure sabotage, assassination attempts, fake “humanitarian” invasion, military invasion by paramilitaries and mercenaries, currency manipulation, financing violent urban gangs, and a vile media campaign of defamation.€ Now, amid a pandemic the USA is not hesitant to use disease as a weapon. It has pressured the UN COVAX program whose sole mission is to give access to vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, not to allow vaccines to reach Venezuela. The USA has blocked four outstanding money transfer from Venezuela to COVAX amounting to $10 million outstanding to complete Venezuela’s $120 million payment for 11 million vaccine doses. This despicable interference has been confirmed by COVAX itself and the Pan-American Health Organization.[4]
Notably, Raisi, 60, was involved in the regime’s brutal crackdown on Iran’s political Green Movement protests that claimed the 2009 presidential election was stolen. But his real infamy dates back to his role in the 1980s when he served as the deputy prosecutor general of Tehran.
During that time, the Islamic Republic imprisoned tens of thousands of political dissidents as the clerics consolidated power during the early years of the Iran-Iraq war. When the eight-year war ended in 1988, Raisi was a member of the so-called death commission that ordered the extrajudicial executions of at least 4,000 political prisoners.
According to a log of Capitol riot arrests from the Justice Department, three other defendants have been charged with firearms offenses. But these charges have to do with unlawful possession of firearms and other weapons.
Drawing on interviews with survivors and data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), a consultancy that tracks political violence, Save the Children’s analysis reveals a series of incidents where boys and girls were targeted, sometimes in large groups.
The attack is the latest in a string of kidnappings in northern Nigerian schools since December, and the third in the last month.
Bump notes that there were two factors that led to what happened on January 6th. First, Trump's followers were persuaded that the election had been stolen with a steady stream of lies from Trump and the right-wing media. Second, they were called to gather on the specific day the vote was to be formally certified by a joint session of Congress to stand against it. We know what happened. Now they remain agitated and upset over the Big Lie and there hasn't been anywhere for them to focus all of that wrath. In light of this week's FBI assessment that QAnon may be moving away from digital extremism into real-world violence, this bogus Arizona audit may be the catalyst they've been looking for.
Hi everyone,
I had intended to write this dispatch about the survivors I met while investigating DNA evidence that had gone untested for decades in Baltimore. A few of their cases were solved through unbelievable twists of fate. For many others, their cases are still open and they’re actively searching for answers.
Mateen Omar called 911 before the attack and pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. According to CBS News, Mateen identified himself to the 911 operator, mentioned the Tsarnaev brothers, who were behind the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, and screamed “Allahu Akhbar” as he murdered his victims.
A study conducted by NASA has revealed that Earth has experienced an imbalance in the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019, indicating that the absorption rate of the energy has been constant, but the reflection rate has dropped considerably, trapping more heat on our planet.
The study (published in Advancing Earth and Space Science) showed that Earth usually takes in around 240 watts per square metre of energy from the Sun. In 2005, it was radiating around 239.5 watts, while creating a positive imbalance of 0.5 watts.
The amount of heat trapped by Earth’s land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun’s energy was entering Earth’s atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up. Their results were published in Geophysical Research Letters this week.
Last February, the president signed an executive order that, among other things, called for a report to be written on the international security implications of climate-driven migration and on options for protecting and resettling people displaced by climate change. That report is due in August. In April, Biden asked Congress for $861million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, money that would be spent on measures to bolster economic opportunities, security, and resilience to climate change.
That same month, Senator Edward J. Markey and Representative Nydia M. Velazquez reintroduced legislation, originally introduced in 2019 and co-sponsored by then-Senator Kamala Harris, to develop a “global climate change resiliency strategy to guide U.S. government policy and programming,” and create a “U.S. resettlement pathway for climate-displaced persons.”
Supermarkets are failing to cut their emissions and reduce the climate impact of their meat and dairy products, according to a report by environmental charity Feedback, with the German retailer Lidl judged to be the worst performer.€
Using a range of nearly 40 indicators, such as labelling and sourcing policies, the 2021 Meat and Climate Scorecard assessed the top 10 UK supermarkets that make up over 90 percent of the country’s groceries market share.€
Climate campaigners claimed a "historic victory" after a Brussels court on Thursday condemned Belgium for its climate policy that breaches the country's duty of care and human rights obligations.
The verdict from the Court of First Instance followed a six-year legal battle first launched by non-profit group Klimaatzaak (Climate Case) representing over 58,000 citizens.
As what the National Weather Service described as "dangerous and record-breaking heat" affects 50 million people across the Western United States even before the first day of summer, climate experts and activists are using the hot conditions to reiterate warnings and calls for policy change as scientists are seeing their dire predictions come true.
"The current heatwave and drought leave no doubt, we are living the dangerous effects of the climate crisis," activist and former Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer tweeted Friday. "Action is urgently needed."
On June 10, two separate United Nations bodies—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)—released a joint report that they hope will alter the way society is tackling these crises. The report is the result of a four-day virtual workshop convened by the Scientific Steering Committee assembled by IPBES and IPCC and attended by 50 of the world’s preeminent climate and biodiversity experts who examined how climate and biodiversity policies and strategies relate to each other, work at odds with each other, and can be dovetailed to maximize positive impacts.
The report’s authors call for a “new conservation paradigm [that] would address the simultaneous objectives of a habitable climate, self-sustaining biodiversity, and a good quality of life for all. New approaches would include both innovation, as well as the adaptation and upscaling of existing approaches.”
The grizzlies of Jackson Hole deserve better, as do the many citizens across the country and the world who care passionately about their well-being. But progress will depend on numerous government agencies redoubling commitments to public education, conflict reduction, crowd control, and law enforcement — which means stronger leadership, more resources, and better collaboration. Lack of information and knowledge about how to manage people and foster coexistence are not the problems. We just need to apply our collective insights more comprehensively, consistently, and at the scale of the lands used by 399 and her kin.
Even so, the obstacles to implementing practical next steps are formidable.
An apt motto for BLM’s Sage-grouse habitat management across the West would be Kick ‘Em When They’re Down. The agency’s grazing program is dead set on locking in everything that’s bad for the birds. Cattle water projects and fences ripping apart habitats continue to proliferate across public lands. The livestock industry is driving this. Grazing permittees submit applications to BLM prodding authorization of facility construction binges. Instead of saying flat out No, BLM obsequiously obliges, fine-tuning NEPA documents to support rancher demands. In its grazing permit renewal NEPA processes, the servile agency evaluates often outrageous rancher-submitted grazing schemes and wish-lists of projects as legitimate alternatives and follows the rancher lead in finalizing decisions. Alternatives submitted by environmental groups are spurned.
Cover ups of land damage pervade land health assessments. Facility development and chaotic flexible grazing schemes are endorsed as cure-alls for any problems found. Assessments portray conditions as meeting health standards or improving, with projects needed to patch over rough spots. The cowering agency’s endless concessions to ranchers are rapidly digging a deep grave for declining sagebrush wildlife. As it cements in more permanent facilities, in addition to the plethora of existing ones, BLM is helping the public lands livestock industry drive Sage-grouse extinct.
President Biden has signed an Executive Order directing the Interior Department to outline steps to achieve the president’s commitment to conserve at least 30% of America’s lands and waters by the year 2030.
The 30Ãâ30 Initiative, as it’s commonly called, is sorely needed as America—and the world—confronts the dual threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. Thankfully, thus far, over 450 elected officials from across the country, and political spectrum, have affirmed their support for 30Ãâ30.
More than 100 prominent individuals throughout Canadian society, along with a handful of international supporters, urged British Columbia Premier John Horgan on Friday to fulfill his campaign pledge to immediately protect the region's imperiled€ old-growth forests, which continue to be logged despite scientific warnings against further destruction.
"Even though they promised to implement the recommendations from the expert panel, and scientists have clearly laid out what areas of at-risk old growth need to be deferred, the government has yet to stop the chainsaws."—Tzeporah Berman, Stand.Earth
Moving to reverse one of the Trump administration's many corporate-friendly deregulatory actions, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday announced plans to revive a rule aimed at establishing specific animal welfare standards that food producers must meet to qualify for the USDA's organic seal.
"A major victory for all those who care about a meaningful organic label."—Amy van Saun, Center for Food Safety
A hotter world will mean a hungrier world. On the evidence so far, the world’s farmers cannot adapt fast enough.
A report released Friday by the United Nations Refugee Agency finds that more than 82 million people across the globe were forcibly displaced by war, persecution, the climate crisis, and other factors by the end of 2020, a record high that one international aid group called "an epic failure of humanity."
"Behind each number is a person forced from their home and a story of displacement, dispossession, and suffering."—Filippo Grandi, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees
The deliberate creation of poverty and scarcity was necessary for the corporations to consolidate their power. It did not just happen on its own. Austerity required far-reaching structural changes in the US economy.
Beginning in the 1970s the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society were gradually gutted and the economy was recast to suit corporate demands. Biden’s corporate-centered, temporary, and incremental approach won’t touch austerity. Biden promises a small fraction of what is needed and will not reverse the wage cuts at the core of austerity. The major parties will not reform the corporate system that enforced austerity in the first place — instead, they aim to defend it.
This 10-part series is based on the novel “Diavoli” that was written by Guido Maria Brera, an Italian who worked for a number of years in the financial industry. His experience help gives the book a palpable reality of the sort that makes ex-attorney John Grisham novels about law firms so compelling. Saying that, it is necessary for those viewing “Devils” to be prepared for financial industry minutiae, especially selling short—Massimo’s specialty. Showing little concern for the consequences of its impact, he left behind ruin everywhere he decided to make profits off ordinary peoples’ losses.
To give you a head’s up on the financial terminology, selling short refers to an investor borrowing a stock, then selling the stock, and finally buying the stock back to return it to the lender. They are betting that the stock they sell will drop in price. If the stock does drop after selling, the short seller buys it back at a lower price. The difference between the sell price and the buy price is the profit. Hedge funds make this an important part of their strategy, especially like the one Massimo ran since it profited from the 2008 mortgage-backed securities collapse.
But our own period, and with the rise of neoliberalism, the way in which the superhero has shaded into the politics of the affluent and powerful seems almost absolute. Consider Marvel’s Tony Stark, played to manic intensity by Robert Downey Junior.€ € Twitching, feverish and brilliant, he is a high-grade weapons manufacturer, a capitalist billionaire and technical savant – think Bill Gates on steroids – equipping himself with his Iron Man suit in order to destroy the baddies with the type of military hardware and drone technology which, in the real world, has left Middle-Eastern populations decimated and much of the region reduced to a smouldering wasteland.
Indeed the Marvel films often glamorise power so gratuitously that they get to the point where they feel almost apolitical; just never-ending scenes of carnage whereby the ‘good guys’ battle the ‘bad guys’ and the whole thing has more the feel of a video game rather than a consciously worked out plot.€ € € All of which makes Amazon’s series,€ The Boys, an incredibly welcome proposition.€ € € The Boys€ is set in a new age of superheroes or ‘supes’, a selection of people who have been ‘born’ with super abilities and have banded together in an elite group – ‘the seven’ – in order to fight crime based on good old American values of justice, tradition and decency.
Refusing to touch the 2017 GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations, a bipartisan group of 21 senators is proposing a series of alternative infrastructure funding mechanisms that critics say amount to a thinly veiled scheme to privatize the nation's roads, bridges, and water systems.
"Communities across the country have been ripped off by public-private schemes that enrich corporations and Wall Street investors."—Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch
Please. Some relevant and deep pockets sections of the ruling class (especially in the fossil fuel and other polluting industries) did in fact back Trump from the start. The corporate and financial elites who didn’t want the demented monster in the White House in 2017 were happy to leave him there for a full first term thanks to his tax cuts and neoliberal de-regulation policies. “Those who hold the levers of the private power€ that dominates the society and political system,” Chomsky himself observed in the aforementioned interview, “never liked Trump’s€ behavior, which harmed the image they project as humanists dedicated to the common good.€ But they€ were willing to tolerate the€ vulgar performance€ as long as€ Trump€ and his accomplices€ delivered the goods,€ lining their pockets by€ robbing the public.” Indeed, as Doug Henwood reflected last April:
Trump was not the bourgeoisie’s favorite candidate. He had support from provincial plutocrats but not from the executive suite at Goldman Sachs. When he took office and immediately began ransacking, one wondered if the deep state would rein him in. Maybe the CIA would even arrange a malfunction in Air Force One’s fuel line. But it was not to be. Tax cuts and deregulation made capital forget all their reservations about Trump, and the stock market made 128 fresh daily highs€ — on average, one every six days€ — between inauguration and the onset of the coronavirus crisis. It took the encouragement of an attack on the U.S. Capitol for the big bourgeoisie to complain [about Trump’s extremism] openly – 99 percent of the way through his time in office.
President Biden's European sojourn was a signal effort to restructure the global disorder to reinforce U.S. global dominance and to contain and manage China's rise. Not limited to NATO's new 2030 doctrine, adopted to reinforce U.S. military power across the newly designated Indo-Pacific region with European forces, Biden and his associates are working to turn Europe's economic, technological, diplomatic, and cultural resources to "overmatch" China.€
In recent months, we’ve seen a concerted attack on critical race theory. Though most opponents probably couldn’t even give an accurate definition of it, this hasn’t stopped state legislatures across the country from banning critical race theory in schools. They argue that CRT promotes racial separation, insists that America is an irredeemably racist country, and germinates self-hate within the hearts and minds of white youth.
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
This week on CounterSpin: NBC News recently reported that “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said…he is ‘100%’ focused ‘on stopping’ President Joe Biden’s administration.”
The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy [billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.” Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth, something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.
The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.
But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.
The songwriter is confident that his political perspective is accurate because, he asserts, “I can see the history of the whole human race.” If anyone has a right to make that claim —so grandiose it would be absurd in straight prose and could only be made by a created character— it’s Dylan. € He’s brilliant, he reads all the time, there’s nobody more widely traveled, he runs with people from all walks of life, he studies Arabic and Sanskrit to improve his mind.
This isn’t the first time that Dylan has taken a shot at the co-author of The Communist Manifesto. On € Slow Train Coming (1979) an album proclaiming his admiration for Jesus, there’s a powerful song called “When you gonna wake up?” The chorus has a simple directive for America: “Strengthen the things that remain. ” Politically charged verses decry social breakdown:
Should either face censure for such remarks as Joe Biden continues the war machine, and doesn’t bat an eye upon the slaughter of Palestinians? It seems wrong for a democracy to be so opposed to words and so supportive of violence. Equally important to supporting the free speech of all is drawing a distinction between the fascist right and the progressive left.
The fact that the corporate duopoly want to clump in Omar with Greene on a broad-based smear of anti-Semitism shows just how little the corporate state cares about anti-Semitism. Contrary to what you’ll hear on the right, it is not Israel who is driving US policy. There is not a mysterious Jewish influence operating behind the supremacy of the American dollar.
Amid a tussle between the Union government and Twitter over the new IT rules, members of a parliamentary panel on Friday strongly objected to Twitter India officials’ observations that they abide by their policy and categorically told them that the rule of land is supreme.
According to sources, members of the Parliamentary Panel on Information Technology also asked Twitter why it should not be fined as it has been found “violating” rules of the country.
Earlier this month, the Centre issued a notice to Twitter giving it one last chance to “immediately” comply with the new IT rules and warned that failure to adhere to the norms will lead to the platform losing exemption from liability under the IT Act.
Twitter India accepted before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology that it differentiates between tweets- promoting the healthy ones and suppressing the harmful- and gives priority to its own laid down policies over the law of the land in cases of conflict, leading the panel to conclude that this is a gross violation of the IT Act, 2000.
The Shashi Tharoor-led parliamentary panel grilled Twitter India representatives at a sitting on Friday for over 90 minutes on issues ranging from failure to appoint a full time compliance officer and its claims of being an intermediary despite “manipulating content” on its site, which would put it in the category of a publisher, according to sources.
As you may recall, Rep. Devin Nunes has been involved in a bunch of totally frivolous SLAPP suits that seem designed to try to intimidate journalists from writing stories criticizing Devin Nunes. A key one that seems to have gotten deeply under Nunes' skin is an Esquire piece from a few years ago entitled Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret written by reporter Ryan Lizza. In the fall of 2019 he sued over that article, and a few months later his family sued over it as well.
The artist wrote a blog in 2019 which said that a woman is “an adult human female” and “not an identity or feeling”, adding: “I can not accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born.”
She argued that the “ideology” of gender politics placed people into reductive boxes, enforced censorship akin to that found in her birthplace of East Germany, and had a detrimental impact on the rights of women and girls.
Ms de Wahls, who claims to have been subjected to online abuse over her views, nevertheless expressed support for the rights of transgender people as a marginalised group.
Maya Forstater, who won an appeal after losing her job following tweets stating trans women were “not women”, has raised concerns over the action taken against Ms de Wahls.
She told The Telegraph: “Organisations have got used to overreacting to complaints of transphobia. They need to take a deep breath, look at the Equality Act and consider that everybody has rights.
“The social media are being flooded with hate posts against us and the two judges who ordered the couple’s release,” Malook said. “The lives of all of us involved in the case are at great peril. These messages from influential clerics belonging to various religious parties are prompting millions of Pakistani Muslims to kill us so that ‘they may go to paradise.’ It’s incentives like these that prompt poor Muslims to commit murders in cold blood.”
Malook said that he was being accused of “collaborating” with blasphemers, while the judges are accused of freeing the couple under international pressure.
For whatever reason, perhaps a mistaken belief in the rule of law, the power of a free press and the force of public opinion, Assange did not take refuge in Russia, China or Venezuela. This was a fatal mistake. Legal niceties simply fall like matchsticks in the wind when the empire takes offense. Its gaudy invocations of truth and justice are then exposed as mere words.
If you doubt that, recall U.S. military jets forcing the grounding of Bolivian president Evo Morales’ plane in Vienna in 2013, because Obama hacks were convinced Snowden hid on board en route to Latin America. The U.S. didn’t hesitate to violate international law, not for a second. Eight years later, the West hollers its outrage over the authoritarian government of Belarus doing the same thing. But it’s useless to call out this hypocrisy, because the U.S. does what it pleases almost anywhere in the world, and the first law of its precious, thoroughly mendacious rules-based order is that those rules never apply to IT.
Analysts and those who cover the camps say the ban comes amid a more restrictive environment for reporting in Burkina Faso, including a 2019 law that carries a 10-year sentence for reporting that "demoralizes" the military.
"This new policy follows the worsening censorship trend in Burkina Faso," said Alexandra Lamarche, a senior advocate for West Africa at the Washington-based advocacy group Refugees International. "While the government may claim to be preserving the dignity of its displaced citizens, this is yet another effort to deny and hide the true magnitude of the crisis."
In her press conference soon after successfully pushing the bill through committee, Representative Fowler Arthur was asked what was different about her bill and she responded,
Fowler Arthur may be forgiven for ginning up neo-McCarthyism with such weird and wildly inaccurate characterizations of Marxism, as she herself never went to college, and, in fact, never spent a day in a school as she was homeschooled on her Rock Creek egg farm.[3] But her bill should be taken seriously, not merely for the harm it may do to Ohio colleges and universities, but also because it is just the tip of the iceberg, or better, the feather poking from the guano pile, that is contemporary cultural conservatism.
"The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie."
Davis’ induction makes more visible the long and deep ties connecting African Americans to the labor movement and anti-capitalist politics, particularly in the ILWU. One could argue that the ILWU, especially Local 10, has set the standard for antiracist unions for eighty-five years and counting. She spoke in Oakland on Juneteenth last year as part of a huge rally organized by the ILWU which shut down every port on the US West Coast. The dockworkers did so to honor the holiday and especially the memory of George Floyd, murdered by Minneapolis police three weeks earlier. Surrounded by a throng, masked up to prevent the spread of Covid, Davis declared last year: “If I had not chosen to become a university professor, my next choice probably would have been to become a dockworker or warehouse worker in order to be a member of the most radical union in the country, the ILWU.”
Trent Willis, Local 10’s current president and a long-time union activist, played a central role in the ILWU Juneteenth 2020 coastwide work stoppage so it should come as no surprise he also was deeply involved in inducting Angela Davis into his union. Willis, an African American and native Oaklander whose own brother died at the hands of law enforcement, praised her as “A Black Woman who exemplifies all of the ILWU’s 10 Guiding Principles,” a statement of working-class solidarity and unionism. Willis appreciates her as “a revolutionary icon who empowers and encourages freedom fighters, Black people, women, the oppressed and political prisoners to continue to fight on until all oppressed people are free.” The ILWU has been advocating for such causes since its founding in the 1930s.
In February 2018, 24 armed officers from the Flint Circuit Drug Task Force engaged in the raid of a McDonough, Georgia house. Led by Captain David Cody, the officers deployed flash-bang grenades and forced their way through the door of the house at 303 English Road. Inside, they found only Onree Davis, the 78-year-old owner of the house.
Republican frenzy has reached a fever pitch with attacks in at least 16 states on schools that allegedly teach Critical Race Theory.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Chris Murphy on Thursday announced reintroduced legislation to direct budget resources away from police presence in public schools and instead toward providing students with "trauma-informed services"—an approach the lawmakers say will put student well-being over criminalization.
The bicameral legislation, entitled the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act, is co-led by by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and came amid growing calls to overhaul policing in the nation.
Backed by a coalition of dozens of human rights organizations, Democratic lawmakers on Friday reintroduced legislation to do away with the constitutional loophole which has allowed forced labor to persist in the United States for more than 150 years—the 13th Amendment.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) led two dozen of their colleagues in introducing the Abolition Amendment, which would strike the "slavery clause" from the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Adopted in January 1865, the amendment bans enslavement in the U.S., except as a form of punishment for criminal activity.
Unfortunately, they’re still very much alive today. The Reagan “vision” for America, with its disproportionately negative impact on the female half, is now firmly embedded in Republican dogma.
The 40th president was indeed a clear-eyed visionary. He envisioned a world where women would never be granted equality under the U.S. constitution, where abortion was illegal, and where equal employment laws would be history.
Nixon — and many presidents since — promised the War on Drugs would save lives. Trillions of dollars later, incarceration and preventable overdose deaths have skyrocketed and continue to rise.
After generations of broken lives, broken families, and broken dreams, we must end it now.
Why is this a point worth making? The Trump era saw the ascendance of what economist Thomas Piketty calls the Brahmin Left, or the PMC (professional managerial class). Its critique of Donald Trump and Trumpism was intended to separate him from American history in order to sell its own nationalistic, militaristic version of liberalism. The social levers it used were the residual Cold War fears of Russiagate and the faux class-blind claim that transhistorical racism is ascendant. The SPLC data contradicts this latter claim.
Graph: since the rise of militia groups in the 1990s, there has been a robust debate over the origins of organized right-wing resistance. When the stock market bubble of the late 1990s lowered the unemployment rate, the militia groups largely disappeared. The 2000s saw the decimation of the manufacturing economy and with it, a rise in racist organizing. And while unemployment rose dramatically in 2020, the Federal response through the CARES Act prevented the widespread economic desperation of earlier epochs from arising. Sources: St. Louis Federal Reserve; SPLC.
We look at another significant June 19 in the history of slavery in the United States: June 19, 1838, when Jesuit priests who ran what is now Georgetown University sold 272 enslaved people to pay off the school’s debts. In 2016, Georgetown University announced it would give preferential admissions treatment to descendants of the Africans it enslaved and sold. “Ours, as Americans, is an uninterrupted line of inheritance that many of us refuse to believe that we are descendants of,” says Mélisande Short-Colomb, who is one of the first two Georgetown University students to benefit from legacy admission for direct descendants and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Georgetown Memory Project.
As President Biden signs legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday to mark the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, we speak to the writer and poet Clint Smith about Juneteenth and his new book, “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” “When I think of Juneteenth, part of what I think about is the both-endedness of it,” Smith says, “that it is this moment in which we mourn the fact that freedom was kept from hundreds of thousands of enslaved people for years and for months after it had been attained by them, and then, at the same time, celebrating the end of one of the most egregious things that this country has ever done.” Smith says he recognizes the federal holiday marking Juneteenth as a symbol, “but it is clearly not enough.”
A young man accused of taking part in anti-government riots when he was a teenager has been executed in Saudi Arabia, despite a moratorium on the death penalty for minors.
Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish, 26, was beheaded yesterday amid worldwide appeals for a reprieve. Among those called on to intervene were Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, who visited Saudi Arabia last week.
He and other young people were involved in these protests, which were not violent pro-democracy protests. And he and others were arrested when he was still a child, 17 years old. Why was he arrested? We can only surmise that this is part of a wider political crackdown by the Saudi Arabian regime.
However, Reprieve said Saudi Arabia had now executed the same number of people in the first half of 2021 as it did in the whole of 2020.
Britain-based campaign group Reprieve said authorities had not informed Darwish's family about his execution and they found out "by reading the news online."
Reprieve, which said Darwish was placed in solitary confinement and tortured in detention, claimed that he was 17 at the time of his alleged offense.
During the summer of 2020, in the midst of heightened media awareness of the continued racial brutality BIPOC people face across North America, the Anti-Racism Coalition of Vancouver (ARC) banded together. Family members Steve, Dehara, and Xhalida September, and friend Regina Abernathy came together to organize an effort to combat the racism they were seeing and experiencing in Vancouver. The Anti-Racism Coalition of Vancouver has since been making active changes for racialized communities in the city, with hopes to expand throughout Canada. Upon an analysis of anti-racism organizations in British Columbia, the ARC realized they could act as a cohesive force to work with other bodies and facilitate more changes both systematically and socially.
As we've noted a few times, SpaceX's Starlink service will be a massive improvement for the up to 42 million Americans that lack access to broadband. The ongoing 10,000 user beta is delivering speeds between 50 and 150 Mbps at low latencies, something that's much better than the expensive, slow, high-latency, usage-capped traditional satellite broadband service most people hate.
In the wake of Australia getting its ridiculous, anti-open internet link tax passed into law, the push to create similar such laws everywhere else has gone into overdrive. In the US, the main driver of this effort (which has been pushed by legacy newspaper giants) has been an antitrust exemption that would allow the newspapers to collude, in order to put up (what they think is) a joint effort to demand that Google and Facebook pay them for links. The supposed "antitrust" wing of the Democratic party, David Cicilline in the House and Amy Klobuchar in the Senate, have decided that this is a good idea and introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) (here's the House version). Leaving aside the oddity of thinking that the best way to deal with what you believe are dominant firms is to allow other firms to collude and avoid antitrust laws, the entire proposal is silly, and potentially destructive to the open internet.
Huawei Technologies Co. can’t subsidize the sale of its 5G telecom technology with federal funds earmarked for U.S. broadband development because the Federal Communications Commission properly determined the company is a national security threat, a U.S. appeals court ruled.
Since the start of the Mageia.Org project we have used several IRC channels as discussion rooms. The main advantage of this technology is that anyone can get in contact with us without any registration beforehand. Those channels were hosted on the Freenode network until recently. After various events, we decided to change to the new libera.chat irc server.
[...]
t still remains to update default server on most of our IRC clients and it may be possible that references to the Freenode network remain in few parts of our documentation. We will try and have the remaining references cleared up quickly.
A few weeks back 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. You know, just because.
Imagine this: a limited liability company (LLC) is formed, for the sole purpose of acquiring patents, including what are likely to be low-quality patents of suspect validity. Patents in hand, the LLC starts approaching high-tech companies and demanding licensing fees. If they don’t get paid, the company will use contingency-fee lawyers and a litigation finance firm to make sure the licensing campaign doesn’t have much in the way of up-front costs.€ This helps give them leverage to extract settlements from companies that don’t want to pay to defend the matter in court, even if a court might ultimately invalidate the patent if it reached the issue.
But, on appeal, Hepp’s legal campaign became provocative enough to capture the attention of SAG-AFTRA, which warned in an amicus brief that the rights of all performers could be on the line.
Hepp v. Facebook is now exploring the boundaries of the tech industry’s favorite legal shield and the nature of intellectual [sic] property [sic] — with appellate judges like Thomas Hardiman at the 3rd Circuit throwing out all sorts of challenging and somewhat humorous questions like the one he asked at a June 2 hearing in the case: “People can make a lot of money as a hand model, or so I hear. Is that intellectual [sic] property [sic] — the shape of your hand?”
People who thought that uploading the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight to YouTube was a good idea are now having their opinions changed by Triller. As the list of targets expands, Triller has filed a new lawsuit targeting the operator of the YourEXTRA YouTube channel, demanding what could stretch to millions in damages for breaches of copyright law and the Federal Communications Act.
A new type of recently discovered malware actively targets pirates. Instead of heavily compromising the computers of victims, its main goal is to block hundreds of pirate sites. Sophos found several variations of the malware, which itself is disguised as pirated software. While the impact can be great, fixing the problem is relatively easy.
