This week we’ve been playing Subnautica Below Zero, going to the pub and teaching celebrities how to D&D. We have a retrospective on our FOSS Talk Live one-button challenge.
There's the next chapter to the unfortunately rather sad state of the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub (SFH) driver support under Linux.
Since 2018 with AMD Ryzen laptops there has been the Sensor Fusion Hub for various accelerometer/gyroscopic sensor functionality, among other uses and akin to Intel's Sensor Hub. It wasn't though until January 2020 that AMD published their SFH driver for Linux.
Simon Ser has released Sway 1.6.1 as the newest version of this popular i3-inspired Wayland compositor.
Sway 1.6 came back in April with better Flatpak/Snap application integration, smoother move/resize operations, X11 clipboard handling improvements, and many other improvements for this popular "indie" Wayland compositor.
Following the announcement this week that AMD is dropping pre-Polaris GPU support (or pre-Raven Ridge support for APUs) from their mainline Radeon Software driver on Windows, the AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver has also now similarly discontinued that older GPU support.
AMDVLK 2021.Q2.6 was released today as their official open-source AMD Vulkan driver. With AMDVLK sharing sources to their proprietary Vulkan driver on Linux and Windows, to little surprise this driver is doing away with the pre-Polaris dGPU and pre-Raven APU support. So moving forward only the newer Radeon graphics are supported by this Vulkan driver, aligned with what is supported by Radeon Software on Windows.
This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. There’s a complete list of the tools in this series in the Summary section.
The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way of interacting with your computer. To harness all the power of Linux, it’s highly recommended mastering the interface. It’s true the CLI is often perceived as a barrier for users migrating to Linux, particularly if they’re grown up using GUI software exclusively. While Linux rarely forces anyone to use the CLI, some tasks are better suited to this method of interaction, offering inducements like superior scripting opportunities, remote access, and being far more frugal with a computer’s resources.
duf is a simple disk usage utility that offers a more attractive representation than the classic df utility. It’s written in Go.
SWAP is a partition or a disk space that can take some load for RAM and can be used as a memory space on Ubuntu systems. Normally, while installing a new Linux-based operating system, it will offer you to create a new SWAP partition. The file partition has a SWAP flag, and usually, the size of a SWAP space is 2GB on average. When the system memory is full, the Linux kernel automatically moves some unused files into the SWAP area instead of stopping them. As we know, in Linux, everything is either a file, SWAP can handle files pretty well. So, if you’re using a Ubuntu system on a virtual machine, you definitely should try adding SWAP space to your machine.
Automatic screen lock is a feature provided by all widely used desktop operating systems. There is a default period of inactivity set in your system settings, after which your screen is automatically locked and you have to reactivate it by either clicking somewhere or entering your login password. This feature is best for scenarios when you need to stay away from your computer for some time and you have some critical data stored on your system. In the meantime, while you were away from your system, any intruder can break into the system and steal your critical data. For this reason, an automatic screen lock is very helpful to ensure the security of your data.
Automatic screen lock is enabled by default on most operating systems. On the other hand, if you are physically present near your computer and simply doing other tasks at the same time, then this automatic screen lock feature may prove to be annoying as you have to enter your password again and again after a few minutes of inactivity. In this situation, you can consider disabling your system’s screen lock feature for some time and then re-enabling it once you are done with your work. Today we will show you how to disable/enable the automatic screen lock via the Linux Mint 20 CLI.
Swift is a general purpose, compiled and high-performing programming language with a focus on safety. It was developed by Apple as a replacement for the older Objective-C language. It is very useful for those who want to develop applications for macOS or iOS from Linux. It is a intuitive and friendly programming language to new programmers. It is is optimized for development and performance without compromising on either.
In this post, we will show you how to install the Swift programming language on Ubuntu 20.04.
Deluge is a cross-platform BitTorrent client with all the features you need to download torrent files.
It has features common to BitTorrent clients, such as Protocol Encryption, DHT, LSD (Local Peer Discovery), Peer Exchange (PEX), UPnP, NAT-PMP, proxy support, Web seeds, global speed limits and by torrent.
Sometimes, a program needs enough parameters that putting them all as command-line arguments or environment variables is not pleasant nor feasible. In those cases, you will want to use a configuration file.
The other day I needed to burn a disc. Yeah, I know, some of you might be wondering, “A disc? What’s that?” Others might ask, “Are you really using that archaic media?”
Well, yes I am. I feel there is still something charming about physical things that digital media cannot replace.
I needed to burn a very old game that was comprised of a cue file, some audio tracks in cda format, and a bin file which stored all the binary content that was indexed by the cue file.
First I tried to use Brasero. Yeah I know, it’s old but it does the job generally and it fits with the rest of the system, so it’s my choice generally. Unfortunately, this time it was not up to the task. It stated that it had some problems reading the cue file. Then I tried Xfburn and K3b. But neither of those worked either. They both detected the bin file but not the cda files.
Setting up internet or network is super easy in minimal server installations. In this guide we will explain how you can setup internet or network in CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux minimal install.
Man in the middle attack is the most popular and dangerous attack in Local Area Network. With the help of this attack, A hacker can capture the data including username and password traveling over the network. He/she is not only captured data from the network he/she can alter data as well.
For example, if you send a letter to your friend the hacker can capture the letter before reaching the destination, and can edit and then send to your friend a modified letter.
But a good thing is this attack only can be performed in a local area network it means one of the victims must be in the same network of the attacker.
May be possible you have heard that using a public Wi-Fi network is not as secure as your home network the only reason is a man in the middle attack.
Google Chrome is a web browser, most used widely in the world. It is fast, simple, and easy to use and secure browser built for the modern web.
Neither Google Chrome comes with Ubuntu default, nor included in the Ubuntu repositories. But here, I am telling about another open-source web browser. It is available in the default Ubuntu repositories.
If you don’t want to install chromium and looking only for chrome, this article will help you.
Tilix is an open-source advanced Linux terminal emulator that uses GTK+ 3 and offers a lot of features that are not part of the default terminal that ships with Linux distributions.
NetBeans is an open-source integrated development environment for the application development on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. It offers excellent debugging capabilities, coding, plugins, and extensions with multiple out-of-the-box features. The NetBeans is widely used by the PHP and Java application developers.
A shell script is provided by the official team for easier installation of Netbeans on Linux systems. However, we can have also use the Snap package to install the latest NetBeans IDE on the Fedora system quickly.
This tutorial will help you to install NetBeans IDE on a Fedora system using the Snap package manager.
I use NGINX a lot. I recently deployed a Node.js web application with NGINX as a reverse proxy server for it. One of the key features of the application is support for data imports using excel templates. However, it didn’t take long before users uploading bulky files started getting a 504 Gateway Timeout error from NGINX.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Next.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Next.js is a Javascript framework built on React.js, which allows developers to build static and dynamic websites and web applications.
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 the step-by-step installation of the Next.js open-source Javascript framework on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
This tutorial explains the installation of AlmaLinux Desktop to computer. This begins with where to grab the OS itself, make a bootable medium of it, boot the computer with it, then starts the installation and partitioning until finished. The final result will be a fully functional computer with AlmaLinux GNOME.
Rcracki_mt is a tool used to crack hashes and found in kali linux by default. It is used rainbow tables to crack the password. Some other tools generate rainbow tables. You can download Rainbow table https://www.freerainbowtables.com/tables2/ if you don’t want to download rainbow table you can create you own by Using winrtgen in window and rtgen in Kali Linux
With the hulking, massive cash cow that Epic Games is, it seems inevitable that they’re gaining a stronger and stronger hold on the PC gaming market. They offered Sony $200 million to make their first-party games exclusive to the Epic Games Store. Just keeping Borderlands 3 as a timed exclusive cost them $115 million. But, spending all that cash apparently doesn’t hurt them at all.
Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos, the modern reimagining of the classic roguelike from Assemble Entertainment version 0.9.0 is up as the "Combat Update" and it's set to leave Early Access on August 25.
Quite surprising really since it's only been in Early Access since February but they've put up some pretty big updates for the game over that time. The latest brings in a number of changes based on community feedback, along with a bunch of new content and lots of tweaks to combat. The skill trees for example have been streamlined, which allow for a bit more freedom and no longer locking you into certain weapons. They say combat has bee n "spiced up a lot" to make it overall more challenging.
Little Red Dog Games developer of Precipice, Deep Sixed and Rogue State Revolution spoke in an interview with Linux hardware vendor System76 about developing games on and for Linux. It's quite an interesting interview that goes over details about how they make their games, their use of Godot Engine and why they think it's a good idea to develop for Linux.
Starting off as hobby developers making point and click adventures, Little Red Dog Games are now a full-time studio with multiple games out on various stores. Their lead programmer, Denis Comtesse, is a Linux user and so using the likes of Godot makes it all relatively easy for them since it has great cross-platform support.
With the purpose-built software you can remap any of the keys, tweak the lighting and plenty more. Best of all though? Their software supports Linux too. They even have an SDK up on GitHub.
Celebrating 10 years since the first public version of Kerbal Space Program became available, version 1.12 "On Final Approach" is out now to finish it off. This is the last major update for the game, which ended up becoming ridiculously popular. From gamers trying to launch their first rocket, to teaming up with various space agencies to help educate people.
Developer Squad says it's also their "most ambitious free update ever" as it's packed with new content, along with many features and quality of life improvements based on feedback from players and an upgrade of the Unity version used.
Volcanoids is like a dream game for steampunk base-building fans that blends in survival shooter game mechanics and now there's a whole lot more to do in it.
It's quite a unique survival game too. You have a race against time to gather materials, explore and upgrade before having to run back to your drillship to dive below ground when a volcano erupts. Before you would just come back up and everything was normal but now there's going to be a big dust cloud that lingers around a little so it's a smidgen more realistic. On top of that the customization has been greatly expanded with new colours, drill heads, decals and more. There's also new weapons like the melee Saw Gauntlet allowing you to rip and tear through the robotic enemies.
Kathy Rain: Director's Cut is looking really slick and with the release coming later this year, we now know you will pay quite a bit less if you owned the original. This brand new version will not only revamp the whole thing with a new game engine (Unity), it will also be supporting Linux unlike the original.
Announced this week was that owners of the original will get a 50% discount on the Director's Cut, and that discount will never go away as they're not setting an expiration date on it. That discount will be on top of any other discount too through a launch sale, and any other seasonal sales.
On one mid-July’s day in 2014 Plasma 5.0 was released. The release marked a significant departure in the design department as Plasma moved on from the detailed and skeuomorphic Oxygen theme towards the flat and minimalist Breeze. Now, almost 7 years later, we are slowly approaching the sunset of the 5 series.
This time around though, the consensus is that the sun won’t stop shining for the series’ default theme. Breeze is set to live not just another day, but to remain alive throughout the lifespan of the 6 series in what could possibly end up being an admirably long 15 year career. While stability that comes with such longevity is a positive thing, staying with the same theme also means stymied opportunities for major changes. Even though Breeze has been and is going to keep on being updated, 7 years is a lot in design, and 15 years is quite a lot.
Ultimately, Breeze is a safe theme: it works pretty well and evokes familiarity. A breeze might not sweep you off your feet, but it’s pleasant and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with strong negative feelings towards it. The premise behind why it shouldn’t be canned in favor of trend chasing is as follows: history of design is an never ending dance between ornamentalism and minimalism. Instead of playing the game of chasing trends, the idea behind Breeze is “let’s go the middle route and try to make timeless design”. On the flip side, you can argue that almost none of the names written in the histories of art are of the people who were constantly “in between two waves”. Usually these artists were, if not the pioneers of trends, then masters of them.
Picking up where I left off…
In the last post, I mentioned that I will be working on Implementing active resource management in GNOME. In this post I’ll be walking you through what I’ve done so far, things I have learned and what I’ll be working on next.
What I’ve done so far
My first task was to track the active or currently open window in gnome-shell and allocate more CPU weight to it. After discussing with my mentors we decided that building an extension for this will be easier so I built an extension which on getting notified when the focus-window has changed calls a DBus method provided by systemd to set the unit’s properties.
By observability, we mean the ability to observe what is happening on a live system, and in many cases, to alter the behavior of that system in real-time. While there is a myriad of performance analysis tools available for purchase, you cannot understate the value of tools that are specifically built for and with an operating system: tools which understand and are built into the operating system’s kernel structures.
Pretty much everything a FreeBSD system does, right down to the system-call level, is tracked. Each utility on the system gathers what it needs from this pool of information: for example, this information is queried when you run ifconfig or zpool status. You too can gather the information you need in order to get the most out of your system, determine your operational baselines, and find and resolve performance bottlenecks.
Linux Mint is arguably one of the easiest and most user-friendly Linux-based operating systems to come by in the Linux world, and while it might be second to Ubuntu in popularity, it remains the favorite of a large majority of Linux users around the globe.
Why? It’s easy; Linux Mint is essential “Ubuntu done right”. While the latter might not be bad in its own right, it is no news that the stability and flexibility the former offers are unmatched by Ubuntu.
Linux Mint developers have taken the Ubuntu code, refined and made it into what is one of the world’s most reliable systems. And with every new iteration of Linux Mint is a much more refined software that continues to trump over Ubuntu.
Yesterday when I was using the tool diff to compare the changes from my current minimal custom kernel configuration to the new kernel configuration that came with the latest kernel in Gentoo, I thought to myself: “Is this really worth it?”.
I don’t gain any performance, and no resource or disk space improvements, so why should I be bothered using my own custom kernel when it takes a considerable amount of time maintaining it? I’ve only been rolling my own custom kernel because it’s fun and a good learning experience.
Wait. I said what now? No disk space improvements? Well. Relativity speaking, my custom kernel is a lot smaller than the binary kernel that Gentoo provides. Technically speaking, I save about 75 MB by only including the absolute bare minimum required for my computer.
The little disk space I gained there, is actually lost to the fact that I always have to keep a copy of the source for the current kernel. The source for the kernel takes up about 52 MB in its compressed state, and about 150 MB uncompressed. Is it really worth all the time and effort for saving 23 MB?
The reason I used to use my own custom kernel to beging with, was for the simple fact that it was fun! It’s a fun learning experience and it’s a fun challenge. That’s it.
Starting with SLES 12 SP4 the xfs mount option “nobarrier” becomes deprecated. But before xfs completely removed these option, there was an initial period of several years where the option was being still recognized but ignored. This means that it was still possible to set the option but without any impact.
SUSE One Partner, Hammerspace, now has an offering live in the SUSE Rancher Apps and Marketplace and we’ve invited Hammerspace to author a guest blog so you can learn more about their data orchestration platform. ~ Bret
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Kubernetes has freed applications from the limitations of underlying server technologies, starting a revolution in the way applications are created, tested, and delivered to end-users. Kubernetes accelerates the production pipeline drastically improving time to market and is the perfect fit for a world increasingly dependent on agile development. Consequently, these higher demands are also putting pressure on IT departments to adopt similarly agile operating procedures. This marriage of agile development practices and IT operations is aptly named DevOps. If you are familiar with David Kim’s book, The Phoenix Project, you are already aware that DevOps is the adoption of Kanban process engineering practices, a key part of agile software development. DevOps shifts the primary focus away from managing the minutiae of technology towards managing optimal business outcomes, such as a smoothly running CI/CD pipeline. The outcome is higher efficiency, productivity and profitability.
For some small percentage of the Hackaday crowd, our world got turned upside down at the end of last year, when Red Hat announced changes to CentOS. That distro is the official repackage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, providing a free, de-branded version of RHEL. The big problem was that CentOS 8 support has been cut way short, ending at the end of 2021 instead of the expected 2029. This caused no shortage of consternation in the community, and a few people and companies stepped forward to provide their own CentOS alternative, with AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux being the two most promising. AlmaLinux minted their first release in March, but the Rocky project made the decision to take things a bit slower. The wait is over, and the Rocky Linux 8.4 release is ready.
A while ago, I released a new version of InvoicePrinter, my little library for generating PDF invoices. Here’s what’s new.
InvoicePrinter 2.2.0 brings a new free-form breakdown field, which can break down individual items in the table.
Modern enterprises are moving applications into the cloud, often using a microservices architecture. This presents a challenge for legacy applications that were designed for standalone, on-premises servers. These applications must be able to interact with other services that are tailored to the cloud along the lines of the twelve-factor app rules. Your applications should offer tracing, monitoring, and metrics to ensure availability and good performance. If you move Java applications to the cloud, you are likely to find their size and memory footprint burdensome, because instances have to be uploaded quickly and run on lean systems.
Luckily, several tools exist to ease the transition of enterprise Java applications to the cloud. This four-part series takes you through the steps to make a Java application cloud-ready. All the tools are free and open source, and we'll run them on Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Very little Java code needs to be added to the application; we will accomplish nearly everything through tooling and configuration files.
Out-of-bounds memory accesses such as buffer overflow bugs remain among the most dangerous software weaknesses in 2021 (see 2020 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses). In fact, out-of-bounds write (CWE-787) jumped from the twelfth position in 2019 to second in 2020, while out-of-bounds read (CWE-125) moved from the fifth to the fourth position.
Recognizing the importance of detecting coding bugs early in the development cycle, recent GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) releases have significantly improved the compiler's ability to diagnose these dangerous bugs by using warnings such as -Warray-bounds, -Wformat-overflow, -Wstringop-overflow, and (most recently in GCC 11) -Wstringop-overread. However, a common limitation shared by all these warnings is that they can only analyze code in a single function at a time. With the exception of calls to a small set of intrinsic functions like memcpy() built into the compiler, the warnings stop at the function call boundary. That means that when a buffer allocated in one function overflows in a function called from it, the problem is not detected unless the called function is inlined into the caller.
We’ve been working hard for the last months to improve GNOME Software both in Fedora Workstation and Silverblue, especially its reliability. One thing we identified as a problem is a long feedback loop. I took months before bug reporters and designers could easily test changes made based on their feedback.
That’s why Milan Crha, the new GNOME Software maintainer, created a Copr repository that includes the latest development version of GNOME Software. If you want to help us with testing, install GNOME Software from the Copr repository and report issues. They won’t be overlooked. Milan is a very responsive maintainer.
For most companies, enabling employees to work from home has become a necessity. With some studies showing that 70 percent of the workforce will be remote by 2025, advanced technologies such as cloud networks are critical. And while the pandemic has shown us how resilient our technology can be, we must also consider ways to safeguard it.
Data has the potential to be weaponized as criminals use it to target the personal and financial health of individuals and organizations alike. With data privacy increasingly being called the “new corporate social responsibility” and data the “new oil,” organizations must treat personal data with the utmost care.
The group’s primary objectives are to raise wider awareness and understanding that Ceph is capable of being deployed in enterprise settings, and not just in developer orientated circles where it currently sees significant uptake (for example, according to the 2020 Openstack User Survey 74% of deployments are using Ceph for their block storage needs). The wider storage market is awash of options, both traditional hardware and more modern software-defined solutions. The desire of the group is to ensure that Ceph makes it into storage decision makers’ minds as a production-proven open-source powered alternative to typical proprietary options.
Over the coming months, the Market Development Group will lead various educational efforts such as the publication of vendor-agnostic case studies, and use case analysis on the refreshed ceph.io website, as well as the creation of a speakers bureau, where requests can be made for Ceph community experts to share their experiences, and also by providing greater visibility at future in-person and virtual events.
JingOS is a Linux-based operating system currently being developed by developers from China. This operating system is used on smartphones, tablets and desktop. If you look at the previous year. Many Linux distribution developers are developing it for Mobile devices.
One of the famous is Ubuntu Touch which has been discontinued by Canonical. However, Ubuntu Touch is developed by the community. In addition there are other linux operating systems such as Postmarket OS, Librem5, Mobian, Manjaro, etc. Many developers develop it with privacy and security purposes.
JingOS is also an Operating System developed for mobile devices. They developed a Linux-based operating system for their tablet, the JingPad A1. You can see the specifications here.
Pimoroni Pico Wireless Pack is an add-on board for Raspberry Pi Pico adding a MicroSD card socket and ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth module to the popular MCU board.
While it’s a nice idea to add wireless connectivity to Raspberry Pi Pico, ESP32 is a dual-core Xtensa LX6 processor clocked at 160 to 240 MHz with WiFi, Bluetooth, and plenty of I/Os that should be able to handle most tasks better than Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ processor clocked at 48 MHz by default, although we’ve also seen it overclocked up to 252 MHz.
Way back in the 13th century, an order of monks known as the Cistercians created a unique numbering system that used a series figures and rotations to represent numbers up to 9,999 in just a single character. Because these numerals are so great in compact displays, using them in a dot matrix to display the current date and time was a no-brainer for danjovic.
Danjovic combined a DS3231 real-time clock with an Arduino Nano to keep track of the current time, plus a large 4ââ¬Â³ 5Ãâ7 LED matrix. All of these components were placed onto a custom PCB, along with two buttons that cycle between various modes and the time, day, month, and year. Finally, he made a wooden base that props up the PCB vertically and provides a convenient path to run the USB cable.
Node-RED is a popular flow-based, visual programming development tool originally developed by IBM for wiring together hardware devices, APIs, and online services as part of the Internet of Things.
But despite being designed for the IoT, I’ve seldom seen Node-RED support for LoRaWAN hardware, the only exception being the Axon platform, a tiny WiFi & LoRaWAN board. But there’s at least one more option with Milestone IoT’s UG65 LoRaWAN gateway, launched late last year, getting a firmware update that adds Node-RED support.
As a longtime volunteer and mentor (and current board member) at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and vice president of the Apache Incubator, I'm proud to offer my insights into the unique processes and values with which the ASF operates.
Centered upon the permissive and pragmatic open source Apache License, the ASF conducts itself differently from many other foundations simply because it is a charitable organization constructed for the public good. For example, the ASF board is elected by members. No one can buy a seat on the board, and the ASF's affiliations are with individuals, not companies. Generally, the corporate affiliation of any individual involved with ASF goes unstated, and it doesn't matter. As an outcome, the ASF has fostered a vendor-neutral environment where companies can comfortably collaborate on building valuable projects.
Let's take a look at how the ASF selects its projects, the state of open source licensing today, and what you can expect from the ASF heading into the future.
Google photos app is available for the iPhone and tablets like the iPad for Apple devices, and it's also available in android devices actually on android here is the default app for photos called google photos.
You could always access it too on the huge benefits of using google photos, so let me say what those are first, and then we'll talk about 13 Open-source self-hosted alternatives for Google Photos.
But all good things come to an end, Google Photos ends up its free unlimited storage by June 1st 2021. So, it is time to find the open-source alternative.
Mozilla teams up with Princeton University researchers to enable crowdsourced science for public good; collaborates with research groups at Princeton, Stanford on upcoming studies.
Your data is valuable. But for too long, online services have pilfered, swapped, and exploited your data without your awareness. Privacy violations and filter bubbles are all consequences of a surveillance data economy. But what if, instead of companies taking your data without giving you a say, you could select who gets access to your data and put it to work for public good?
Today, we’re announcing the Mozilla Rally platform. Built for the browser with privacy and transparency at its core, Rally puts users in control of their data and empowers them to contribute their browsing data to crowdfund projects for a better Internet and a better society. At Mozilla, we’re working on building a better internet, one that puts people first, respects their privacy and gives them power over their online experience. We’ve been a leader in privacy features that help you control your data by blocking trackers. But, being “data-empowered” also requires the ability to choose who you want to access your data.
During the past few years, the UX team has been working on qualitatively improving the entire Tor Browser user journey: from discovering to finding, downloading, installing, starting, and browsing; we released a seamless and familiar experience for our largest user base. Tor Browser 9.5 was an entire reshaping of the experience for users reaching onion sites, Tor Browser 9.0 and 8.0 shipped an improved experience for core legacy issues, and Tor Browser 8.5 was a rebranded release. However, users continue to report that launching Tor Browser for the first time is an abrasive experience.
Our user research program in the Global South has shed light on how users experiment when confronted with pain points while connecting to Tor. Censored users have also explicitly mentioned how confusing they find the process of copying a bridge address from a webpage and then pasting that address into the browser interface. During our interviews in late 2020, a journalist living in Hong Kong said, “Using bridges is a very manual process.”
Joining a large and established project like LibreOffice can be daunting for many. The software has a large codebase, and its sub-projects use a wide array of tools. In recent years, we’ve made efforts to simplify the onboarding process by linking more services together with SSO (single sign-on), thereby reducing some of the complexity. In addition, we’ve created Easy Hacks and similar “bite size” projects in other areas, so that newcomers can get involved quickly and achieve something – without months of work.
Currently, we have two websites that function as starting points for new contributors: What Can I Do For LibreOffice and Get Involved. The former was set up by LibreOffice’s Albanian community, and lets users click through topics of interest, until they find something they want to do. The latter is a regular page, with a list of sub-projects inside LibreOffice, and quick steps to make initial contact.
In our fourth birthday publication we are interviewing Torsten Grote, who explored Free Software alternatives on smartphones for the FSFE as early as 2012. We reminisce about the emergence of our Free Your Android campaign and discuss with Torsten which options are available for liberating our phones today.
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Torsten Grote is a Free Software developer and long time volunteer in the FSFE. He started his journey of engagement in the local group in Berlin, later joined the FSFE country team Germany and finally became a GA member in 2009. In the FSFE, Torsten is best known for being the creator of our Free Your Android-campaign, the campaign about regaining control of your Android device and your data.
For many years now, Torsten has lived in Brazil and has worked for different Free Software projects from Tor to Briar to CalyxOS. He is an expert in the field of phone liberation and creator of "Blitzmail" and "Transportr", both available in F-Droid.
[...]
If you already have a phone that you want to install an alternative Android version on, then LineageOS is a good start since they support many devices. However, they do so by including the same proprietary drivers and firmware that is already on the device anyway.
If you don't have a device yet, but plan to buy one, I suggest to choose an Android version first and then buy a device that is supported by it. Only Replicant is using 100% Free Software here and thus supports only old devices.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of a single website that presents and recommends various Android ROMs. Since the situation changes frequently, this is hard to maintain. For example, besides those mentioned already, there's now also CalyxOS gaining popularity.
'If you already have a phone that you want to install an alternative Android version on, then LineageOS is a good start since they support many devices.'
Among the many projects under the GNU umbrella, the GNU Health official project has been about working on the libre digital health ecosystem and their most recent effort is on MyGNUHealth as an effort around libre personal health records.
The GNU developers involved announced MyGNUHealth 1.0 on Thursday as their effort around personal health records via a free/libre application. MyGNUHealth is privacy-minded and focuses on health and activity tracking, records, and social factors as well.
When I first started using DOS, I enjoyed writing games and other interesting programs using BASIC, which DOS included. Much later, I learned the C programming language.
I immediately loved working in C! It was a straightforward programming language that gave me a ton of flexibility for writing useful programs. In fact, much of the FreeDOS core utilities are written in C and Assembly.
Toward the end of a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Ornette Coleman in 1997, the philosopher and the musician compare their experiences of estrangement from a “language of origin.” Coleman introduces the term to explain that, as a Black man from Fort Worth, Tex., whose first ancestors in America were slaves, he never knew the language his people originally spoke. Derrida offers in response that, as a son of French-speaking Algerian Jews, he maintains no connection to the language of his own ancestors. Both men now somewhat disarmed, Coleman pries, “Do you ever ask yourself if the language that you speak now interferes with your actual thoughts?”
Shortly after her statement, the court recessed, and after its return, the transmission was stopped.
Wednesday’s hearing came after years of near-silence on the issue from the singer, although the New York Times published a report earlier this week citing private legal documents that state she has been trying to end the conservatorship for several years, citing mismanagement by her father and the extreme legal costs involved.
A lightly edited transcript of Britney Spears’ statement follows. It includes run-on sentences and unclear statements, but the context seems relevant: [...]
IN 2003 AN investigation into Eric Poehlman, an expert on ageing and obesity, found that he had faked data. He was imprisoned for using made-up results to win grants. Journals duly withdrew his work.
This should have ended his impact on academia. It didn’t. One of his articles, on the composition of women’s bodies, has been cited 400 times since it was retracted.
Such wrongdoing is rare: around one in 2,500 studies is retracted. Yet papers that do get retracted often have long afterlives.
While the brands lining the shelves of giant retail outlets seem vast, a handful of food companies own these brands which, in turn, rely on a relatively narrow range of produce for ingredients. At the same time, this illusion of choice often comes at the expense of food security in poorer countries that were compelled to restructure their agriculture to facilitate agro-exports courtesy of the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and global agribusiness interests.
In Mexico, transnational food retail and processing companies have taken over food distribution channels, replacing local foods with cheap processed items, often with the direct support of the government. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and the consequences for public health have been catastrophic.
As the avid historian of China’s insulated dynastic past knows, the Century of Humiliation, from 1839-1939, had as its centerpiece the Opium Wars fought by the Qing dynasty against the British to prevent its subjects going from casual opium users to full-blown addicts. When the Chinese began destroying opium caches, like Bostonians destroyed tea chests in protest just before the Revolutionary War, the Brits opened fire, razed palaces, raped women and looted priceless imperial treasures, and, ultimately, chased the Emperor out of town. Other Europeans and Americans exploited the opening to force China to “trade” with the West: for centuries, Europeans had lusted for Chinese goods, but had nothing much the Chinese wanted. Hong Kong was seized by the Brits as compensation for winning the Opium Wars they forced. Even the name “China” is derived externally, through the Portuguese, from Sanskrit. Internally, they called it Zhà Ângguó (Middle Kingdom).
Just yesterday, I was reading in Stat+ magazine that the infamous Sackler family is trying to sell off their Chinese branch of Mundipharma (read: world pusher) for more than a billion dollars.€ Back in 2019, the family was forced to fess up their criminal misrepresentation of Oxycontin’s addictive qualities over the years, leading to a settlement in the billions of dollars, and driving Purdue Pharma, the drug’s manufacturer, into bankruptcy. Rather than feeling remorse or empathy for the addictions they caused and hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, Sackler began an extension of their pain “relief” empire overseas, including entry into the Chinese pharma market through their worldwide tentacles embodied by Mundipharma — using the same tactics that had got them in trouble in America.
It is homework time at Ashley Grant’s house on a tidy, tree-lined street here. Grant places six crayons on a countertop. Her daughter, Brooklyn, still wearing her red school polo, sits in her wheelchair. She looks directly at a video camera and smiles.
“Four plus one is five,” says Kyle Stromquist, Grant’s boyfriend. “What about four plus two? How many is that?”
According to the analysis of government data from May, released on Thursday, out of the 18,000 Covid-19 deaths during the month, approximately 150 were fully vaccinated people. That comes out to 0.8 percent, or an average of five deaths per day out of more than 200 average daily deaths. At the height of the pandemic in January of this year, average daily deaths were above 3,400 per day. Additionally, fully vaccinated people accounted for fewer than 1,200 of more than 853,000 hospitalized with the virus (0.1 percent).
The question is how, and none of the choices are very good.
You could require the immediate disclosure of ransoms. You could ban paying ransoms outright. You could ban cryptocurrency, which is how most ransoms are paid. You could increase regulation around cryptocurrency and perhaps ban certain kinds of exchanges or transactions. You could try being better friends with Vladimir Putin, in the hopes that he might sacrifice some threat actors. Your Department of Defense has also probably come up with some separate terrible ideas, which I am frightened even to contemplate.
Every choice here hurts, at least in the short term. But let’s go through them.
After President Joe Biden and U.S. lawmakers on Thursday announced a bipartisan deal on infrastructure that Democrats say they will only support alongside a reconciliation bill, progressives doubled down on concerns about the compromise proposal's financing plans.
"Privatization is nothing more than an outrageously expensive way to borrow funds, with the ultimate bill paid back by households and local businesses in the form of higher rates."—Mary Grant, Food & Water Watch
But if you could take a cross-section of the average city block, you would see the ways that the built environment of surveillance—its physical presence in, over, and under our cities—makes this an entwined problem that must be combatted through entwined solutions.
Thus, we decided to create a graphic to show how—from overhead to underground—these technologies and legal authorities overlap, how they disproportionately impact the lives of marginalized communities, and the tools we have at our disposal to halt or mitigate their harms.
Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a campaign that will easily allow you to contact your elected federal officials and tell them to co-sponsor the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.
Take action
TELL congress: END federal use of face surveillance
“We know that many people access Instagram from their computer,” said Facebook spokeswoman Christine Pai. “To improve that experience, we’re now testing the ability to create a Feed post on Instagram with their desktop browser.”
Instagram, founded in 2010, long resisted building a web version of its product because it was intended to be used as people were out taking pictures of their lives with their phones. Now, more of the people posting on Instagram are professionals or influencers, putting up highly edited or produced images and videos, sometimes hours or days after the moment happens. They’ve been using third-party tools to upload content to Instagram via desktop, and will be “very happy” if Instagram expands its test, said Matt Navarra, a social media consultant who was one of the first to spot the change.
The pre-positioning of the BBC correspondent on HMS Defender shatters the pretence that the BBC is something different to a state propaganda broadcaster. It also makes plain that this propaganda exercise to provoke the Russian military was calculated and deliberate. Indeed that was confirmed by that BBC correspondent’s TV news report last night when he broadcast that the Defender’s route “had been approved at the very highest levels of the British government.”
The movie’s sanitized scenes of violence perpetrated and egged on by white law enforcement personnel and politicians € (including a semi-literate, bible thumping, € full-of-hate rural white citizens) on Black Americans were merely the tip of the iceberg of the vast panorama of bigotry, racism, lynchings, violence, and brutality perpetrated on American citizens whose ancestors were forcibly bought and brought, in chains, holding pens, and cages to help make America the economic power of the 19th€ and 20th€ centuries, and the world bully since the 1950s.
On August 6, 1965, a reluctant President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act which “closely followed the language of the 15th€ amendment [and] applied a nationwide prohibition against the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.”
Groton and New London, Connecticut, are home to about 65,000 people, three colleges, the Coast Guard Academy, 15 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines capable of destroying the world many times over, and General Dynamics' Electric Boat, a multi-billion-dollar private corporation that offers stock options to its shareholders and mega-salaries to its top executives as it pockets taxpayer dollars and manufactures yet more of those stealthy, potentially world-ending machines. Whew!€ That was a long sentence!
After a brief lull€ in political spending following the January 6 insurrection, military contractors are ramping up PAC€ donations to members of Congress on committees with influence over the distribution of Pentagon funds, including dozens of GOP lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
In the wake of former President Donald Trump's failed coup attempt, "nearly every major defense firm paused political contributions... and many expressed disgust at the sight of rioters storming the Capitol," The Hill reported Thursday.
When will we as a nation admit it? Barbara Lee was right.
President Joe Biden has vowed to crack down on illegal gun dealers and to boost funding for police departments as part of an effort to combat a spike in gun violence across the country. Rejecting calls by activists to defund the police, Biden said cities could expand their police forces by diverting federal money allocated for the pandemic. He also pledged to strengthen enforcement of existing gun laws. The rise in gun violence can be traced back to “a lack of resources” in many communities, says Erica Ford, a longtime anti-violence activist in New York City and CEO and founder of LIFE Camp, Inc. “There’s no job opportunities. There’s no education opportunities,” Ford says. “These preconditions that we face in our community help the disease of violence rise to a level that is unaddressable at the time because we don’t have the tools and resources to address them.”
The 1-800-LAW-FIRM/Excolo Law losing streak continues. The lawyers at those firms have been preying on the victims of terrorist attacks for a few years now, presumably promising them some form of justice that can only be obtained by filing futile, flawed, completely doomed lawsuits that attempt to hold social media companies directly responsible for the criminal acts of terrorists.
The following was published as part of The Dissenter Newsletter, which is a project of Shadowproof. Become a subscriber here.Pentagon whistleblower Franz Gayl has been part of the United States Marine Corps for over four decades. He spent the last months trying to warn U.S. government officials and the public of the threat of becoming entangled in a war with China over Taiwan.Yet instead of seriously considering his perspective, Gayl faces a counterintelligence investigation into articles he wrote and early retirement.He published an open letter to President Joe Biden on LinkedIn on June 22 in a last-ditch effort to reach the White House and communicate his concerns over the increased potential for an “ill-advised foreign war.”Gayl warned, “Taiwan’s own watershed ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ event is only a matter of time, probably through an accident or miscalculation. Sensing the urgency, I submitted numerous op-eds to U.S. newspaper and electronic media outlets, but each was rejected.”“As a last resort, I contacted the [People’s Republic of China’s] own Global Times, which published my op-eds in April and May.”The publications spurred an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). His security clearances were revoked on June 1, and the retaliation convinced Gayl to email the Global Times and inform the state-funded media outlet that he could no longer submit articles (though he might be able to contribute after his resignation or retirement).Gayl described this response as “predictable” and noted it was “also no surprise that well-coordinated payrolled journalists and online commentators have suggested that I am a Beijing mouthpiece, a Communist, and a traitor.”“Since 2005, I have researched, written, and on several occasions published [on] the dangers of America’s separate relationship with Taiwan,” Gayl continued. “As a Marine of over 40 years, I do not want to see fellow Marines and American patriots harmed for another cause that lacks both justification and a path to victory. I am also fulfilling a condition of my federal employment by reporting policy corruptions that threaten our nation with grievous harm.”
The two columns by Gayl were published under the headlines, “Why US will lose a war with China over Taiwan island,” and “US ‘othering’ of Chinese could be prelude to Taiwan conflict.” € One insisted the “prosperous Taiwan people will make every effort to wag the American dog. But Taiwan’s fate poses no existential threat to the U.S., and the U.S. should not fall into the trap of paying for their hubris with American blood.”Gayl maintained that “an ill-advised foreign war” would “accelerate America’s decline.” He acknowledged the reality of the United States’ “smug sense of military invincibility.” Believing the country would not pay a price for “violating another nation’s sovereignty,” and with “Taiwan being a core Chinese priority,” it would be a “fatal miscalculation.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the creation of a House select committee to investigate the deadly January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.
Pelosi said Thursday that the House was moving forward with an investigation after holding out hope that Senate Republicans, who blocked a bill that would have created a bipartisan independent 9/11-style commission weeks ago, would come around and support an investigation.
But Mr Ghazali's boxes secretly belonged to Jemaah Islamiah (JI) - the notorious network behind Indonesia's deadliest terror attack, the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.
"People can't tell the difference between these and other charity boxes," said Mr Ghazali, 56, who now runs an Islamic boarding school and tries to deradicalise former extremists.
"The money collected is usually used to pay for terrorism."
One of Haiti's most powerful gang leaders warned this week he was launching a revolution against the country's business and political elites, signaling a likely further escalation of violence in the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Violence has spiked in Haiti's capital in recent weeks to what the United Nations has called "unprecedented levels" as rival groups battle with one another or the police for control of the streets, displacing thousands and worsening the country's humanitarian crisis.
Led by a coalition of immigrant rights, labor, and climate justice groups, thousands of people marched on Washington Thursday to demand that Congress pass far-reaching pandemic recovery legislation for the entire country, particularly those hit by poverty, unemployment, and economic hardship.
"It's a beautiful day for us to remind everyone in Congress that the real power in Washington comes from the people." —Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren made clear late Wednesday that she will not go along with a newly announced bipartisan infrastructure framework unless the Democratic leadership simultaneously presses ahead with a legislative package that includes child care, major investments in green energy, and other progressive priorities that are excluded from the emerging deal with Republicans.
"They may be voted separately, but it is one infrastructure deal," Warren said in an appearance on MSNBC. "I can't vote for some small subset that, you know—the infrastructure train leaves the station and child care gets left on the platform, green energy gets left on the platform."
For decades now fisheries biologists and conservationists have been giving our policymakers the same message—the flows are too low, the water is too warm, climate change is exacerbating the problem, and we have to take action or lose our native species and coldwater fisheries. As Fish, Wildlife and Parks fishery management chief Eric Roberts€ recently told reporters:€ “Just from what our bios and folks on the ground are saying, there appears to be larger forces at work here than just fishing pressure and angling mortality—probably more flow or temperature drive, those sorts of factors.”
We could throw up our hands, as Gov. Ted Schwinden did in 1985, and exclaim, “I can’t make it rain.” Or, we could use the tools we already have available to keep survivable levels of water in our world-famous rivers and streams.
Indigenous and environmental activists fighting against the Line 3 tar sands pipeline were outraged Thursday after the Biden administration filed a legal brief backing the federal government's 2020 approval of the project under former President Donald Trump.
"This, quite simply, is pure cowardice."—Generation Green New Deal
Climate activists and elected officials working to make ExxonMobil and other fossil fuels companies pay for decades sowing public doubt about climate science while causing a global emergency are celebrating a Massachusetts court's refusal to dismiss a case against the oil giant.
"This ruling shows that it won't be easy for Exxon to escape justice in the growing number of lawsuits seeking to hold the company accountable for lying about climate change," said Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), in a statement Thursday.
As recently as 2019, the global market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) looked bright. Analysts saw demand for LNG in Asia rising in both a steady and unrelenting fashion, expanding for years or even decades into the future. The industry gave the greenlight to 71 billion tonnes per annum (mtpa) of new LNG capacity in 2019, an all-time record.
But a lot has changed in the past two years, with “business conditions drastically diminished,” and even “the basic rationale of an industry built around a relatively small number of massive but highly vulnerable facilities” now called into question, according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor.
Companies and individuals involved in North Sea oil and gas donated a total of €£419,900 to the Conservatives ahead of and during the government’s recent review into the future of the sector, a DeSmog analysis shows.
Most of the donations, dating from July 2020 onwards, were made this year in the run-up to the publication of the government’s North Sea Transition Deal, launched at the end of March. The policy has been billed as a “transformative” partnership designed to put the industry on a net zero pathway, including a 50 percent cut in operational emissions by 2030, but has been criticised by campaigners for leaving the door open to further fossil fuel exploration.
Leaking methane from oil and gas infrastructure is widespread across the European continent, reveals an investigation of more than 150 sites in seven countries. More than 60 percent of the sites analyzed by researchers using state-of-the-art technology were releasing large volumes of methane – a powerful greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere.
This is the first large investigation of methane leakage from oil and gas sites in Europe.
The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, is urged by advisers to step up and tell people the facts on climate.
The revised de-commissioning schedule will see the power plant be on reserve duty for the heating period of 2022–2023, until the commissioning of a bio-based heat plant under construction in Vuosaari, a north-eastern district of the Finnish capital.
Vapaavuori commended the city-owned energy company for its determined effort to find alternative energy solutions to satisfy the energy needs of the local population without the coal-powered facility.
As opposition to logging in British Columbia's endangered old-growth forests continues to gain steam, more than 270 people have been arrested while resisting deforestation, The Guardian reported Thursday.
The Guardian described recent protests against the ongoing destruction€ of ancient and enormous trees in Canada's€ westernmost province—some of which are over 1,000 years old and stand€ 250 feet tall—as€ one of the country's "largest logging blockades since the 1993 'war in the woods,'€ when roughly 1,000 people were arrested for blocking logging roads to stop clear-cutting in nearby Clayoquot Sound."
Well, unless it doesn’t.
As marine fish stocks experience widespread decline, Big Aqua is rushing to fill the void with all manner of manufactured frankenfish. Nary a week passes without a new industry scheme for “growing” fish on land or in marine waters. Environmentalists have rightfully laid siege to Big Aqua for years, causing each new fish “farm” design to promise the world new, intoxicating environmental heights never before imagined.
Beekeepers this year in the United States reported the second highest annual loss of managed honey bee colonies since records began in 2006, according to results of a nationwide survey released Wednesday.€
The non-profit Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) said in its preliminary analysis that beekeepers—ranging from small backyard keepers to commercial operations—lost 45.5% of their colonies between April 2020 and April 2021. The results are based on a survey of over 3,300 U.S. beekeepers managing a combined 192,384 colonies.
Maybe the problem is less that there are too few kids than that there are more kids than adults can take care of, some in war zones and refugee camps and slums. Millions of poor children are essentially thrown away, along with their mothers, by their societies—illiterate or barely literate, with zero prospects, suffering from all kinds of illness and trauma, and doomed to the lowest kind of work, if any. Imagine if they were seen as demographic treasures to be nurtured and cherished, and raised to live happy, useful lives.
The world population is still rising, but demographic decline probably can’t be reversed. In some ways, that’s sad—children bring joy and hope and purpose to life. Young people bring new ideas and energy. But from the point of view of the planet, it’s a good thing. And probably from the point of view of women and children, too.
Recently leaked data revealed that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and several other U.S. billionaires have paid zero federal income taxes in some past years.
More than 60 lawmakers from the House and Senate on Wednesday demanded that President Joe Biden immediately extend a soon-to-expire pause on federal student loan payments and interest accumulation—while also working toward cancellation of the debt that is saddling tens of millions of people across the United States.
"President Biden can and must cancel student debt with the stroke of a pen. We urgently call on him to act," Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a statement. "In the interim, extending this payment pause will provide a crucial additional layer of relief for millions of borrowers. We can't turn our backs on these families as we work toward an equitable economic recovery."
Progressive lawmakers and tenant advocates on Thursday said that while the Biden administration's 30-day extension of the Covid-19 eviction moratorium would provide brief but welcome relief for millions of people facing imminent eviction, U.S. leaders must work to find a permanent solution to the nation's housing crisis.
"If we don't make policy to solve for root causes... an eviction disaster is inevitable. Millions will never recover."—Tara Raghuveer, KC Tenants
From Smith to Yellen the existence of these three fundamentals was never threatened. Yet the relationship between the three has altered somewhat in recent years. This is the argument of Belgian economist Jan Eeckhout.
One might begin the journey into capital, profits and wages with a helpdesk worker called Erin. Erich was, despite having numerous degrees, squeezed into an open-plan office until the Coronavirus pandemic hit her workplace. Erin works around forty hours a week, thus making $480.- a week, or $23,000 a year. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median personal income at $35,977 in 2019.
Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.
As part of the SPAC transaction, BuzzFeed plans to acquire Complex Networks, a global youth content network targeting millennials and Gen Z jointly owned by Verizon and Hearst, for $300 million. The price tag will comprise $200 million in cash and $100 million of equity in BuzzFeed. The Complex Networks deal will be completed simultaneously with the closing of BuzzFeed’s merger with 890 Fifth Avenue Partners.
In response, Biden answered:
He concluded, “It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a major world power.”
After all, the modern use of the filibuster first emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to civil rights and anti-lynching legislation. In 1949, senator and southern Democrat Richard Russell, then a chief defender of the filibuster, unabashedly explained that “nobody mentions any other legislation in connection with it.”
Manchin’s apathy toward democracy actively harms millions of West Virginians in a state where 40% of the population is poor or low-income and voter turn-out rates remain dismally low. Indeed, that filibuster potentially stands directly in the way of billions of dollars in infrastructure and job-development funding that would buoy the Mountaineer State, as well as many other states across the country. At the same time,the protection and expansion of voting€ rights would benefit poor and low-income West Virginians significantly.
“Our story, and that of the salmon, is one of perseverance and resilience and thriving,” said Dr. Sammy Matsaw, a Shoshone-Bannock tribal member, veteran and co-founder of the nonprofit River Newe. “We’re still here and we’re still strong. This is about who we are and who we want to be.”
Migrations are common among many species, but the journey that the salmon make is one of the most amazing. Salmon hatch from eggs laid in the gravel of clear, cold mountain streams. After hatching, the young salmon ride swift river currents downstream to the ocean. Their bodies undergo amazing physiological changes as they transition from living in freshwater to saltwater. And then they eventually go back to freshwater: After a couple of years in the ocean, the adult salmon find their way back to the same spawning beds in the same rivers where they were born.
Democratic lawmakers and educators nationwide are expressing alarm€ over legislation signed€ this week by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis which is ostensibly aimed at ensuring college students and educators in the state feel permitted to express a variety of political views—and which critics say could end up punishing professors whose opinions don't line up with those of the state's right-wing leaders.
DeSantis on Tuesday signed House Bill 233 into law, requiring more than three dozen public colleges and universities in Florida to conduct yearly surveys of their students' and faculty members' beliefs to determine the institutions' levels of "intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity."
When Hillary Clinton endorsed Nina Turner's main opponent last week, it was much more than just an attempt to boost a corporate Democrat. Clinton's praise for candidate Shontel Brown was almost beside the point. Like other power brokers and the big-money PACs now trying to sway the special election for a vacant congressional seat in northeast Ohio, Clinton is doing what she can to keep the deeply progressive Turner out of Congress.
President Joe Biden announced in front of the White House on Thursday that he reached a deal with a group Republican and Democratic senators on an infrastructure framework that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in spending on roads, bridges, water systems, and broadband over the next half-decade.
The package, which Biden characterized as the product of "serious compromises on both ends," will be far smaller than the president's original American Jobs Plan, which proposed roughly $2.2 trillion in new infrastructure spending over the next eight years.
What was missing from that smiling group of senators gathered with President Biden to announce their $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill (including $579 billion in new spending) Thursday afternoon? Two main things. The five more GOP senators needed to avoid a Republican filibuster, to start. There are allegedly six other Republicans in the group that’s been negotiating, but were they not enthusiastic enough to stand for essentially a photo-op? Too busy?
Pressure is growing on Democrats to abolish the Senate filibuster in order to pass a major voting rights bill and other legislation. Republicans this week used the filibuster to prevent debate on the For the People Act, which would restore the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act gutted by the Supreme Court eight years ago. Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, who is a lead sponsor of the For the People Act and self-described “Chief Filibuster Antagonist,” says Republicans have broken the Senate’s “social contract” of bipartisan cooperation in favor of total obstruction of all Democratic priorities. “The majority makes the decision, not the minority,” he adds. Meanwhile, as much of the Pacific Northwest faces record-shattering temperatures, 30 degrees or more above average, including Merkley’s home state of Oregon, lawmakers in Washington continue to negotiate over an infrastructure bill Democrats say needs to include major new funding to address the climate crisis. Merkley explains why he said, “If there’s no climate, there’s no deal.”
Of course, there have been no shortage of the secular variety: overpopulation, the Andromeda strain, Y2K. Sometimes such visions, rather than spelling the end of Homo sapiens as a whole, are confined only to certain places. New York has always stirred the imagination of doomsayers. The city has been totaled by every means literature and Hollywood has been able to conjure up. There has always been the huge anti-urban strain of American culture, which as the largest city in the country New York has the served as the most obvious target.
In what was perhaps the most memorable moment of his forgettable 2016 presidential campaign, during a debate in the Republican primaries, Ted Cruz uttered the phrase “New York values” as a smear to New Yorker Donald Trump’s conservative credibility. Even before his explanation of, “I think most people know exactly what New York values are, everybody understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal, pro-abortion, or pro-gay marriage, focus around money and the media,” it was probably apparent to most what Cruz meant. Trump, while not specifically targeting New York, would get into a similar act himself painting Hillary Clinton (and Cruz’s wife) as tools of Goldman Sachs, and the finance industry in general, by way of her enormous speaker fees – this of course before Trump promptly appointed numerous Goldman Sachs alums to his administration. Then there was Trump’s inauguration speech featuring the imagery of “American Carnage,” meaning in his vernacular, cities overrun by violence and illegal immigrants. By the end of Trump’s term, his Justice Department was targeting ‘anarchist jurisdictions.’
When former US President Barack Obama used an old cliché to denigrate his political opponent, the late US Senator, John McCain, he triggered a political controversy lasting several days.€
Comforts, once gained, become necessities. And if enough of those comforts become necessities, you eventually peel yourself away from any kind of common feeling with the rest of humanity.
I tell you all this not to defend myself; that’s between me and my conscience. I am telling you this because human nature is a mighty force, and fighting it requires understanding it.
What has caused me to question my indoctrination has been ethics. Goddamn ethics. For many people, especially those most deeply embedded in the culture of having and getting money, ethics are a wispy and ineffectual nuisance—an abstract set of principles that can’t possibly stand up to the rigors of life lived fast, business conducted efficiently, and competitors devoured and cast aside.
In a major decision that is likely to end the menace of impersonation on social media in India, the government has mandated that top companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have to remove accounts with fake profile pictures of known personalities and businesses, and even the general subscriber, within 24 hours of being notified of the same by the user or someone on his/her behalf.
The government has said this mandate comes in as part of the new IT rules and thus social media giants will need to act immediately after receiving a complaint to this effect.
This is a breaking story and may be updated.
A New York court on Thursday suspended Rudy Giuliani's license to practice law in the state, citing "demonstrably false and misleading" claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and conduct that "threatens the public interest."
The court, for its part, ruled that Giuliani's actions threatened "the public interest and [warrant] interim suspension from the practice of law."
"We conclude that there is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump's failed effort at re-election in 2020," it argued.
It's no secret that we've dinged streaming giant Twitch over and over again these past months. Frankly, it was done with good reason, as the Amazon-owned company continues to respond to crisis after crises, conflict after conflict, with pure confusion and callous behavior. While some of those conflicts were Twitch-specific, the company is also dealing with the more common problem of attempting to have a coherent content policy when it comes to what is appropriate to stream and what is not. For instance, Twitch recently found itself in the headlines yet again first by yanking advertising revenue from so-called "hot tub meta" streamers, where streamers live-stream in bathing suits from hot tubs or kiddie pools. Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa was one of the more prominent names impacted by this move, which again came with no warning. As a result of the public backlash over Twitch choosing not to communicate with its own creative community, the platform announced a "hot tub channel" category, as though that solved anything.
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. I will keep repeating this point forever if I must. Now, I recognize that when you're on the receiving end of a content moderation decision that you disagree with, it's natural to feel (1) angry and (2) that it's a personal affront to you or a personal attack on your view of the world. This is a natural reaction. It's also almost certainly wrong. The trust and safety teams working on content moderation are not targeting you. They have policies they are trying to follow. And they need to make a lot of subjective calls. And sometime they're wrong. Or sometimes you just have a different view of what happened.
Summary: Three professors, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, wrote a book about culture on Instagram and how it developed. The book, entitled Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, was released in February of 2020. Along with the book, the authors set up social media accounts to both promote the book and to continue the discussion about how Instagram culture has developed. Not surprisingly, one of the social media accounts they set up was on Instagram itself.
A high school student's quest to say "fuck cheer" in a semi-crowded convenience store has reached its end. The origin of this journey -- which began all the way back in 2017 -- was nothing more than a high school student doing high school stuff.
The ruling, which is not final and can be appealed, comes after the pair were acquitted in January in another case on charges of “violating family values and principles.”
Sharia is the law that governs Islamic life. It disallows any sleight against the religion or its prophet. It calls for the subjugation of all non-Muslims to live as inferiors under Muslim rule. It demands unstunned slaughter of animals. It sees women as objects to be used for entertainment or breeding and requires female obedience. It applies the death penalty for criticism or objection. In England, and across Europe, we live in de facto sharia states. It’s an unspoken reality; unspoken because to speak it is to risk smear and slander. The poisonous press has facilitated all of this by a means of both cover-up and mischaracterisation. No doubt it will continue to.
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said that failure to pass voting rights protections is not an option. Indivisible, The Poor Peoples Campaign, and other progressive organizations are planning mass mobilizations over the next several weeks. Yet there doesn’t seem to be a clear strategy among either the Senate Democratic leadership nor the activist movement to change the outcome of Tuesday's unanimous vote by all 50 Republicans to block even debating voting rights.
In a ruling handed down Wednesday in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, the Supreme Court decided that agricultural workers do not have a right to meet with union organizers at their place of work. The surprise of the opinion was less in the outcome itself, coming as it did from the most anti-labor Supreme Court in modern memory, than in the stunning rationale provided by the Court. In short, the decision further expands the Court's protection of near-absolute property rights for employers in an opinion that threatens to undermine not only labor union regulations like the one at issue here, but any government regulation that impacts the right of an owner to exclude someone from their property. The potential consequences of this decision are enormous.
On the surface, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid is just another union-busting decision from Chief Justice John Roberts, who has presided over the most anti-labor court since the New Deal. The state of California had a rule requiring corporate farm owners to provide union organizers access to the farms to talk to their workers. In a 6-3 ruling that broke neatly along party lines, Roberts ruled that the regulation was unconstitutional. It’s a terrible decision, but a result that is not all that surprising, as the court’s conservatives have done everything they can think of to de-unionize America in service of mega-corporate interests.
A federal agency is closing a legal loophole that allowed U.S.-based blood plasma companies to harvest plasma from thousands of Mexicans a day, who were lured by bonus payments and hefty cash rewards, as a 2019 ProPublica and ARD German TV investigation showed.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced on June 15 that effective immediately, it would no longer permit Mexican citizens to cross into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma. A statement provided to ProPublica and ARD said that donating plasma is now considered “labor for hire,” which is illegal under the visitor visa most border residents use to cross into the United States to make donations.
The stories were horrible.
Local NGOs speak out against this terrible practice. Growing poverty is behind the rise in child marriages. A victim, who can no longer go to school, tells her story. Bangladesh is one of the top 10 countries in the world for child marriage.
Chauvin was convicted April 20 of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in Floyd's death. The former police officer, who has been in jail since his conviction, also faces separate federal civil rights charges in Floyd's death.
According to Katie Augspurger, a student researcher at UC San Francisco, UC students have not started bargaining because the university system has not officially recognized their union. In the meantime, members of Student Researchers United-UAW have put together a few basic demands: “We’re asking for higher pay, protections against harassment and discrimination, and protections for international students, among other things,” says Augspurger. Teen Vogue has reached out to UC San Fransisco for comment.
We've noted for a very long time that despite a lot of lip service about broadband, the U.S. government still doesn't have a very good idea of where broadband is or isn't available. There's a long line of reasons for this, including political pressure by regional monopolies that very much don't want a lack of competition and high prices to be apparent (somebody might get the crazy idea to try and fix the problem!). The FCC has also long been criticized for methodology that declares a census block (which can be hundreds of square miles) "served" with broadband if just one home can theoretically get service from an ISP.
Over the years, we've had many, many concerns about the US government seizing websites as it generally raises 1st Amendment issues (it's not unlike seizing a printing press). Of course, non-US citizens outside the US are not protected by the 1st Amendment, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned when the US government seizes news websites tied to foreign governments, even those with hostile interests to the US, like Iran. But that's exactly what happened.
But Biden said he will not sign it unless a separate Democrat-led reconciliation legislation, which passed the House earlier this year and is before the Senate, can get through the upper chamber. That reconciliation legislation includes an additional $7 billion for broadband by way of the Emergency Connectivity Fund.
Biden and top congressional Democrats - House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer - had long signaled their plan to link the bipartisan deal with another bill including spending on home health care and child care.
The second measure would be passed through a Senate maneuver called reconciliation, which would allow it to take effect without Republican votes.
Amazon Music is getting more serious about its podcast endeavors. Today, the company announced that it’s acquiring Art19, a major podcast hosting and monetization platform for an undisclosed sum. This means Amazon will now have a hand in hosting podcasters’ shows as well as selling ads against them because Art19 operates an ad marketplace that targets and inserts ads into programming. An Amazon Music spokesperson says nothing will immediately change on the Art19 platform.
The hardware should have a TPM chip, which may not be the case for some PC builds or laptops. Fortunately, it is not all bad, you may just need to enable it from your BIOS settings including the Secure Boot support, to make your PC eligible. There’s a guide on PCGamer to help you with that.
Technically, processors older than Intel 8th gen and Ryzen 3000 series are not officially supported as per Microsoft’s official documentations (AMD | Intel).
However, there are a sound number of systems that may not have the support for it. So, what do you do?
Easy, switch to Linux in 2021 before Windows 10 no longer receives updates. This year, it makes more sense than ever for you to try Linux for your personal computer!
Early this morning, the House Judiciary Committee approved a slew of antitrust bills aimed at reining in the power of Big Tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. If the bills are passed into law, it would mark the biggest expansion of antitrust power in decades.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Axios tech reporter Margaret Harding McGill about the proposals. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. [...]
After reporting last week on Apple and Intel's response to Fortress Investment's motion to dismiss their second amended antitrust complaint in the Northern District of California, I noted on Twitter that "[t]his is that (nowadays quite rare) case in which Apple is an antitrust plaintiff, not defendant." Since then, Apple has had another antitrust investigation to add to the list of cases in which it's being investigated: the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office) is looking into the App Store's gatekeeper position.
A first-instance court decision that second medical use patents granted before 13 December 2007 are not patentable is waiting to be evaluated...
Lest we forget, there are two other interferences proceeding before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, one of which (Interference No. 106,127) names ToolGen as Senior Party and as Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC"). In March, the PTAB granted leave for the parties to file Preliminary Motions and on May 20th, ToolGen filed its Substantive Motion No. 1 for benefit of priority.
SCOTUS's preservation of the PTAB came as a relief to many counsel, but its fix has raised concerns about political lobbying and the procedure for final review
Biotech companies explain what they need besides patents to help them invest in antimicrobial resistance research
Semiconductor fabrication in the United States has been on the wane for years. This resulted in the current microchip shortage. Nonetheless, as legislation is being debated to add incentives for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, several companies have already begun to increase their efforts. Intel recently announced in March that it would build two chip plants in Arizona, and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) also announced it is opening a plant there as well. Reportedly totalling USD $32 Billion, these projects are at least in part an attempt to address the ever growing chip shortage that is affecting many industries.
In accordance with the Spanish Patent Law, the first application for a patent made in Spain must be filed at the Spanish Patents and Trademarks Office and penalties can be imposed in the event of the breach of this requirement. This is why it is important to be able to justify the registration of the patent in another territory, if it is not initially registered in Spain.
For some time now, many globally active Spanish companies have been initiating the strategy to protect their innovations by filing patent applications in foreign countries, especially the United States. Many of them also prefer to file their initial applications as international applications or European applications at the European Patent Office in Munich (EPO), instead of filing a Spanish application at the Spanish Patents and Trademarks Office (SPTO).
U.S. lawmakers joined an array of public health campaigners on Thursday at a demonstration outside the European Union's Washington, D.C. delegation headquarters to demand powerful E.U. nations like Germany end their opposition to an emergency waiver of World Trade Organization patent protections to speed manufacture and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments for the global population.
"Europe still has a lot to do to make up for the injustices of the previous century. They need to start now, by getting people access to the vaccine."—Rep. Ro Khanna
A district court’s dismissal of infringement actions accusing Apple and Samsung of infringing a patent for digital cameras with multiple lenses was upheld by a divided Federal Circuit panel, based on its finding that the patent-in-suit merely claimed the abstract idea of a digital camera with basic digital camera parts, performing their basic functions to enhance photos. The patent owners did not add any inventive concept sufficient to transform the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. Circuit Judge Newman filed a dissention opinion to express her view that the patent described a patent-eligible mechanical and electronic device of defined structure and mechanism (Yu v. Apple Inc., June 11, 2021, Prost, S.).
Japan will cooperate with the United States, most European nations, China and South Korea to improve application and examination procedures for patents related to artificial intelligence and new technologies, sources close to the matter said.
The move, which involves patent offices of the five parties, aims to encourage inventors to protect their intellectual property rights in a field where demand is growing.
According to the Japan Patent Office, applications filed in the five economies accounted for around 85 percent of the roughly 3.22 million patent applications filed worldwide in 2019.
The UK beef industry is hopeful the UK’s trade deal with Australia will make it easier to protect products in future negotiations – but dairy is less optimistic
YouTube has asked a Florida federal court to dismiss the piracy lawsuit filed by movie tycoon Carlos Vasallo earlier this year. The movie mogul sued YouTube for failing to prevent widespread copyright infringement. According to YouTube, the statute of limitations has already expired on several claims.
The Pirate Bay surprised friend and foe last month by promoting its own cryptocurrency, the Pirate Token. The timing and execution of the launch were far from perfect and, thus far, interest has been underwhelming. The token's market cap has been decimated and all references to the coin have disappeared from the official site.
