On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’re going to cover one the most important, if not the most important, project related to this show, the Linux Kernel with the release of Linux 5.13. Then we’ll check out the latest release of Pipewire as well as the latest release of Darktable, Ardour, Tux Paint, and NeoVim. Plus we’ve got a ton of Distro News this week with PopOS 21.04, CentOS, Deepin Linux, ChimeraOS. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Startx is a great application but someone decided it wasn't minimal enough and made another application to start up your X server called sx, this is basically as minimal as you can actually get when starting up your display server
Recently, I've made videos on command line utilities like 'awk' and 'sed'. In this video, I cover two powerful command line utilities--'cut' and 'tr'. The 'cut' command removes sections from each line of a file.
The GNU Debugger ( **gdb** ) from the **d** series of Slackware Linux.
Friday afternoon, the OpenZFS project released version 2.1.0 of our perennial favorite "it's complicated but worth it" filesystem. The new release is compatible with FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE and up and Linux kernels 3.10-5.13. This release offers several general performance improvements, as well as a few entirely new features—mostly targeting enterprise and other extremely advanced use cases.
Today, we're going to focus on arguably the biggest feature OpenZFS 2.1.0 adds—the dRAID vdev topology. dRAID has been under active development since at least 2015 and reached beta status when merged into OpenZFS master in November 2020. Since then, it's been heavily tested in several major OpenZFS development shops—meaning today's release is "new" to production status, not "new" as in untested.
The EXT4 file-system updates have been sent in for the ongoing Linux 5.14 merge window.
Besides routine fixes and code improvements for this mature Linux file-system, EXT4 this cycle brings a noteworthy feature addition: support for triggering journal checkpoints from user-space in the name of extra privacy/security. The new EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT ioctl allows the journal to be checkpointed, truncated and discard or zeroed out.
To run commands to install packages and system update in Alamalinux using a non-root user, we need to make it a part of the sudo or wheel group. Here are the steps to do that.
After installing the Rocky Linux, your non-root user wouldn’t be a part of sudo group, thus you won’t be able to install software and run the update command. For that, we manually need to add our user to sudo means Super User Do group. The steps are given here will also work for Almalinux and CentOS 8.
What do we need to perform given steps in this tutorial?
Rocky Linux is one of the latest alternatives available to replace the CentOS 8 operating system from Servers. The project started by the CentOS founder to provide a free and open-source solution equal to RHEL with long-term support.
If you are an existing user of CentOS 8 then you can use the Rocky Linux conversion or migration script. Well, if you are not yet prepared for it then try out Rocky Linux on Vmware Virtual machine whereas the user of Virtualbox can see our other guide- Download Rocky Linux 8 ISO to install on Virtualbox.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Monit on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Monit is an open-source process tracking tool for Linux OS that helps you to monitor the processes by the system. It automatically does the maintenance and repair of the particular process and ensures it is brought back online. Monit also can be used for handling and monitoring of packages, files, directories, filesystems, TCP/IP network exams, protocol assessments, and can make use of SSL for such tests.
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 Monit monitoring system on a CentOS 8.
Signal is a free and cross-platform messaging service that employs end-to-end encryption to facilitate a secure platform for exchanging encrypted text, media, and calls.
If you're a Signal user or want to try the app, you should install Signal Desktop on your computer to access conversations from the Signal app on your smartphone or go back and forth between them on your smartphone and desktop as the need be.
But what exactly is Signal Desktop, what features does it offer, and how you can install and set it up on Linux? Here's a guide addressing the same.
If you look at the Linux filesystem, you may have noticed a /proc directory with many weird numbers and other files inside it. What does this directory do? It actually contains a lot of useful information associated with your Linux system and the running processes.
This article will discuss the proc filesystem in detail, along with a brief guide on how to get system-related information using procfs.
A MySQL lock refers to a lock flag connected to a table. The main use of MySQL locks is in user sessions to prevent other user sessions from accessing the table during an active session. A specific MySQL session can only access its locks and not locks associated with other clients. Once a table is locked in a particular session, other sessions cannot read or write to the table unless the lock from the session is released. Therefore, all other sessions are in waiting mode until the lock is released.
This short guide will show you how to show available locks using the show process list command.
EPEL or Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux is a free, open-source community-driven repository project created by Fedora Linux for major Linux distributions. The EPEL project provides high-quality add-ons and software packages for Linux distributions, including those in the REHL family such as CentOS, RedHat, etc.
This guide will show you how to install and enable the EPEL repository and access its packages in CentOS 8.x.
Linux comes with many pre-installed tools. The wc command is one of them. The term “wc” is an abbreviation of “word count”. As the name suggests, the wc command is for counting various values of a file. These counts can come in handy in various situations. In this guide, check out using the wc command with examples.
This tutorial explains how to change the grub boot order in Debian from the command line in a few easy steps. The steps described in this article are useful for other Debian-based Linux distributions, including Ubuntu.
GRUB is a boot loader that allows users to boot multiple operating systems and kernel configurations. After reading this tutorial, you’ll know how to define a different OS or kernel to boot by default and how to customize some boot options.
SSH is a popular and effective way to connect to remote Linux machines in the command line. In most Linux distributions, SSH functionality is available from OpenSSH utilities.
In this tutorial, we will take a look at the SSH configuration administered by the sshd_config file. Modifying the sshd_config file permits us to modify how SSH connections play out on the server.
This tutorial shows the step-by-step process of how to create a persistent storage for Debian or Ubuntu live USB.
Sometimes we need to remove the content of a file without deleting the file; for that Linux operating system offers a command called “truncate”. It is used to extend or reduce the file size. Truncating a file is much quicker and simpler without modifying the permissions and ownership of the file.
The truncated size depends on the original size of the file; the extra data will be lost if the file size is greater than the specified size.
Let’s start with different examples to see how we can truncate the file size.
In Linux, Ubuntu is a well-known distribution system because it has many modern tools that help to develop a variety of software applications.
For web and frontend development, there is a tool that is called “Brackets”. It is a lightweight and powerful text editor created by Adobe systems using web-based technologies. Brackets is a multi-platform application that runs on macOS, Windows, and the majority of Linux distributions.
Being a Linux user, you spend most of your time in front of the terminal screen. So, if you are tired of the same terminal screen, then there are multiple ways to change the look of it. One of them is having a separate standalone application called “terminal emulator”. Linux offers many terminal emulator tools that are used to make your terminal more beautiful and extensible. The most stable, lightweight, and customizable application is “Hyper Terminal”. It is an open-source command-line interface written in Html, CSS, and JavaScript with electrons that lets you install a variety of themes and plugins to make your terminal more powerful.
This article will cover a guide on installing and using Ksnip image and screenshot annotation utility available for Linux. Developed in C++ and Qt, this application can be used as a replacement for another similar Linux app called “Shutter”, whose development picked up again after a long time. In fact, it has some useful features that are not present in Shutter and it supports Wayland protocol as well. Ksnip works on all Linux distributions, regardless of the desktop environment you use. It is a cross-platform application and it can also be used on macOS and Windows.
This article will cover a guide on backing up Android application data using a Linux computer. By backing up application data, you can restore it later to revert back to an old state or you can use the backups to restore data after you format or wipe your Android device. Note that this guide doesn’t cover backing up user files like images and videos located in internal or external drives available in your Android device. This guide mainly explains backing up application data that is usually hidden from users and can only be viewed on Android devices having root access.
EndeavourOS is an Arch-based Linux distribution that provides its users a user-friendly installer and an attractive Xfce environment that allows you to install online and offline editions. While installing the online edition, you would get multiple customizations to look at. Well, these are the exciting features of the Endeavour Linux system that we will discuss later. Firstly, we should know the history of this fantastic addition in Arch-based Linux distributions.
History:
In May 2019, it was decided to discontinue the Antergos operating system due to some troubles. However, if we talk about EndeavourOS, it was the successor of Antergos as one of its moderators, “Bryan Poerwoatmodjo” introduced an idea in a conference to develop a new system community create a system that can replace Antergos.
Within a week, the plan was shared at the community level, and the development work began with the help of other developers, including Johannes Kamprad, Fernando Omiechuk Frozi, and Manuel. The initial purpose was to build a user-friendly system using the Antergos net-installer Cnchi, so they started to work on it. But after some time, they realized the Antergos installer Cnchi couldn’t work correctly due to technical issues; they searched for its replacement and found the Calamares (system installer for Linux distributions) that have the same GUI support.
Then the team offered a new plan to develop a user-friendly and easy-to-maintain Linux distribution close to Arch Linux with GUI installer convenience. And in July 2019, the developers released Endeavour distribution’s first ISO that was admired by the community more than expected, and they received positive feedback. After that, they started working on a net installer to give users various desktop environments. Moreover, users can also choose driver packages while installing the operating system.
Endeavour is Arch-based Linux distribution, and the purpose of its development was to keep Antergos alive. The Antergos is also an Arch-based Linux distribution that was stopped in 2019. When developers decided to discontinue the Antergos OS, an Antergos moderator named “Bryan Poerwoatmodjo” moved towards the new idea that helps maintain a community into another environment. When he announced the idea, it got support, and within a week, the plan was shared among the community and started working on. Fernando Omiechuk, the developer of Antergos derivatives that were offline installers, offered a desktop-based Xfce environment for this project.
Their initial plan was to develop the replacement of Antergos distribution containing Antergos net-installer Cnchi. But after some time, when they failed to proceed, the final decision was made to create a separate Linux distribution with the Calamares (system-installer tool) that supports net-installer. They developed a user-friendly and easily maintainable, near to Arch Linux experience with the GUI installer.
Its feature is quite interesting such as Xfce (default and offline Edition), Gnome, powerful and flexible environment, graphical installer, Cinnamon and many more.
He was expected to bring Red Hat's open organization culture to the old-guard corporate giant.
The executive widely seen as heir apparent at IBM has stepped down in a broad management shake-up, as the US computer maker’s board threw its backing behind current chief executive Arvind Krishna to complete an attempted overhaul.
Jim Whitehurst, the former chief executive of Red Hat, had been put in pole position to take the top job after IBM agreed to pay $37bn for the open source software company in 2017. He was later named IBM’s president, a title the company usually reserves for its next CEO.
The news of his departure wiped 4 per cent from IBM’s stock price on Friday. However, Krishna, who had been seen by many on Wall Street as a transitional chief executive, painted the move as a doubling-down on IBM’s current path under his leadership.
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IBM is making a rare senior hire from outside the company, on Friday announcing the appointment of former Hewlett Packard Enterprise executive Ric Lewis as head of IBM’s systems division, including its mainframe operations.
IBM executives who are on the rise as part of the reshuffle include Rob Thomas, head of cloud and data platform operations, who takes over as the company’s top sales and marketing executive. Tom Rosamilia, previously head of systems, was named to run the company’s cloud and cognitive systems division, which plays a central role in the effort to carve out a position for IBM in artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
The management revamp announced on Friday was designed to make the company “much more execution focused and much more technology focused,” Krishna said.
He added that Whitehurst had agreed to continue as an adviser and was not leaving to take a job at another company. “He’s being very gracious. He’s not going anywhere right now,” Krishna said.
Here is a look at how IBM partners are reacting to the sudden exit of former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst as president of IBM.
IBM President Jim Whitehurst is stepping down from the No. 2 leadership position at the company less than three years after IBM acquired his former company, in just one of several leadership changes announced Friday.Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of global markets, will also leave...
When we last checked in on the WiFiWart, an ambitious project to scratch-build a Linux powered penetration testing drop box small enough to be disguised as a standard phone charger, [Walker] was still in the early planning phases. In fact, it was little more than an idea. But we had a hunch that he was tenacious enough see the project through to reality, and now less than two months later, we’re happy to report that not only have the first prototype PCBs been assembled, but a community of like minded individuals is being built up around this exciting open source project.
Film history is full of cute robots, but for our money, none are more charming than WALL-E. His vocabulary may be limited, but that doesn’t stop him from showing the full range of emotions through body language. Like Baby Yoda, WALL-E was an instant fan-favorite and a plethora of toys were made in his honor. If you can get your hands on one, Kevr102 has an Instructables tutorial that will walk you through how to bring that toy to life with the help of an Arduino.
To complete this project exactly as Kevr102 describes, you will need a specific 7ââ¬Â³ tall plastic WALL-E toy. That toy has motors for the tracks, arm movement, and head movement. Starting with that will save you the trouble of mechanical design and 3D printing work. But you will replace all of the motors to make them easier to control. In total, you will need two 360 degree servo motors, three heavy duty servo motors, and two micro servo motors.
The Raspberry Pi has been capturing the hearts and hands of open source enthusiasts for nearly a decade. There are endless options with what you can do with a Raspberry Pi, whether it's monitoring your garden, setting parental controls (especially handy on those long summer days), or even tracking aircraft from your own backyard. If any of these cool projects perked your interest but your Raspberry Pi is still collecting dust, then you need to download our guide to nudge you to get started. Before you know it, you'll be working with so many Raspberry Pis, you'll need to learn how to manage them all!
In my experience however, Jitsi has much better performance than Zoom's WebRTC client. For instance, I've never been able to use Zoom successfully on a Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB), but Jitsi works quite well. If you have a say in the choice of conference platform, go with Jitsi instead.
Originally a product by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice has been around for over 20 years and is today maintained by The Apache Software Foundation. The office suite has a word processor application for your text documents, a spreadsheet tool for your data tables, and a slide and presentation application. The suite also offers additional tools to create Math equations using a graphical user interface and another front-end application to manage databases.
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An offshoot of the OpenOffice project, which The Document Foundation maintains, LibreOffice comprises a complete suite of applications for editing all types of documents. The suite includes Writer - a word processing and desktop publishing application, Calc - a spreadsheet creator and editor application, Impress - an application to create and edit slides for presentations, along with a few other productivity tools.
It is a mathematical operator that uses the modulus operator. The remainder is determined by it. The % sign is used to represent it. The leftover could be zero in some situations, indicating that the integer is entirely divided by a divisor. The modulo operator is used in conjunction with arithmetic operators. Among two operands, the modulo operator operates. The modulo operator determines the residual of the integer by dividing the numerator utilizing a denominator. The leftover has always been an integer number. When there is no residual, it returns 0(zero) as that of the result.
Let’s get started by logging in from the Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system and opening the terminal shell via the activity bar or a shortcut key Ctrl+Alt+T. Make sure that your system must have GCC compiler configured on it before going further. If not, install it via the below query. After that, you are good to go with the examples of Modulo operator in C language.
One of the remarkable things about the Date-Manip package is its flexibility in the matter of input. If I mean "tomorrow noon," I do not have to think of what today is, I simply specify "tomorrow noon," or its equivalent in any of sixteen other languages.
One day, I thought: what about "tomorrow sunrise?" And thus was born Date-ManipX-Almanac.
In principal, there can be support for any almanac event from any astronomical body in the Astro::Coord::ECI ecosystem. In practice at least most of them are covered, though I have not audited for 100% coverage. This includes the bodies in the Astro-Coord-ECI-VSOP87D distribution, should you want planets through Neptune. Pluto was not covered by the VSOP models -- its exclusion is not a political statement, at least not by me. Satellites are not supported, and currently there are no plans for them.
Happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction . . . requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.— George Washington,€ Letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, 1790
University-level science and engineering courses were modified during the pandemic year, and it is unlikely they will ever fully return to what they were before the events of 2020.
At Purdue University, campus leaders saw an opportunity not only to prepare for the 2020-21 academic year, but also to update and improve higher education for the next generation of students.
"All of us, in both our personal and professional lives, had to learn new ways to be flexible," said Purdue Provost Jay Akridge. "That was certainly true here at Purdue, where we developed new tools that allow us to achieve that. These new tools won’t replace our residential learning experience but will enhance it and expand access to it. And I think that flexibility in higher education is something that is going to endure past the time of COVID-19 and will benefit students for many years to come."
Memory-maker Micron intends to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in its fabrication plants by 2024.
Designed to keep Moore's Law alive by allowing the fabrication of ever-smaller chip features, extreme ultraviolet lithography is still relatively unusual in the semiconductor industry - helped by the high cost of the required equipment. Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) both have EUV fabs online, and they're going to be joined by Micron - but only starting in 2024.
"We had always said that we monitor EUV progress. We have actually engaged in EUV evaluation. We have had EUV tool in the past," said Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron president and chief executive, during the company's Q3 fiscal '21 earnings call.
All the variants are more transmissible to some extent. Laboratory tests on human airway cells in Petri dishes have shown that Delta replicates more avidly in them than do earlier variants. That would seem to suggest that a smaller initial dose is needed for an infection to take hold. It also means that the amount of virus lurking in people’s airways is probably higher.
The researchers found that they could get into a Cloud OS 3 device by remotely updating it with modified firmware. The firmware update functionality is meant to be accessible only to authenticated users, but they were able to get around that because the NAS seemingly has a user on it with a blank password, which they were able to use to authenticate in some cases.
One of Sweden's biggest supermarket chains said Saturday it had to temporarily close around 800 stores nationwide after a cyberattack blocked access to its checkouts.
"One of our subcontractors was hit by a digital attack, and that's why our checkouts aren't working any more," Coop Sweden, which accounts for around 20 percent of the sector, said in a statement.
Coop Sweden says it closed more than half of its 800 stores on Friday after point-of-sale tills and self-service checkouts stopped working.
The supermarket was not itself targeted by [cr]ackers - but is one of a growing number of organisations affected by an attack on a large software supplier the company uses indirectly.
“What a pleasant day it is today,” you said with your eyes filled with fervour and hoping to make a great outcome. You set out for your work at your computer desk, waiting cozily to log in to the system, but you noticed it took more time than usual. You now open your Twitter page to see your regular feeds, but you see some strange posts in your name that you were not aware of. You realized something mischievous has gone with your account.
You rushed to check your Paypal account; unfortunately, it was too late, your account showed a balance of $0.0. The transaction history revealed several strange transfers. Soon after logging in, you saw your mouse lagging drastically, and the system resources meter indicates CPU overload and RAM heavily exhausting. “Ok, that is a normal system demand for refreshment” you used your tech wit and attempted a system reboot. To your surprise, your system was now taking too long to shut down.
Somehow, you managed to log in again, update the system, and emailed Paypal and twitter about your account activity. In the meantime, you observed that the previous logged-in problem was still persisting and intensifying.
You started frantically looking for a solution on internet forums and contacted several security experts. You were explained about something known as “bots” and “botnet activity ” on your system.
If you have experienced a similar story, you might have become a victim of a botnet attack. In this post, we will explain to you what is a Botnet problem and why you should care about it.
An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used for the purpose of detecting malicious network traffic and system misusage that otherwise conventional firewalls cannot detect. Thus, IDS detects network-based attacks on vulnerable services and applications, attacks based on hosts, like privilege escalation, unauthorized login activity and access to confidential documents, and malware infection (trojan horses, viruses, etc.). It has proven to be a fundamental need for the successful operation of a network.
The key difference between an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and the IDS is that while IDS only passively monitors and reports the network state, IPS goes beyond, it actively stops the intruders from carrying out malicious activities.
This guide will explore different types of IDS, their components, and the types of detection techniques used in IDS.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are the most prevalent and challenging attacks of this era. The first-ever DDoS attack was witnessed in 1999 when a computer at the University of Minnesota started receiving superfluous data packets from other computers [1]. Soon after this attack, attackers have targeted many big firms like Amazon, CNN, GitHub, etc.
Deep in the Biden administration’s executive order on cybersecurity is the idea of software bills of material (SBOMs). The order gave the Commerce Department the task of issuing guidelines for software supply chain security. One detail asked industry to provide comments to the National Telecom and Information Administration regarding SBOM. What is it and what’s it got to do with secure software? For some answers, Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to the open source Linux Foundation. Kate Stewart is the foundation’s vice president of dependable embedded systems, and David Wheeler is the foundation’s director of open source supply chain security.
Netgear has patched serious security vulnerabilities in its DGN2200v1 network router, following the discovery of "very odd behaviour" by a Microsoft security research team - a somewhat understated way of saying that attackers can gain "complete control over the router."
Unveiled by the company at the Consumer Electronics Show back in 2010, Netgear's DGN2200 is an ADSL modem-router combo box with, the company promised at the time, security features including "live parental controls, firewall protection, denial-of-service (DoS) attack prevention, [and] intrusion detection and prevention (IDS)."
Ports are essential for computers to communicate with other computers or for applications to communicate with their corresponding services over the internet. These ports have assigned numbers dedicated to specific services and are used by hackers to try and break into them, using the vulnerabilities of the hardware and software that use these ports. Below are some common port numbers and their uses.
SecurityWeek says cybersecurity vendors are “scrambling” to understand the Executive Order (EO) on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity software bill of materials (SBOM) directive for Federal contractors. (SBOMs have been roughly compared to ingredients lists.) Amid “countless” industry meetings, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released a handful of resources, including SBOM at a Glance, FAQs, and Explainer videos. Linux Foundation added to the wealth of research and tools with a free Generating an SBOM course and an SBOM Generator. Some experts expect the mandate to improve supply chain transparency and security to the benefit of buyers; others fear SBOMs will be difficult to implement and won’t reduce overall vulnerability.
On the night of 7-3 (CET), the DIVD CSIRT did a mass scan for online exposed Kaseya VSA instances due to an alarming statement from Kaseya. Kaseya turned off their SaaS services and advised all on-premise customers to turn off Kaseya VSA because it was being used to spread ransomware to various MSPs.
We were able to react very swiftly because we were already running a broad investigation into backup and system administration tooling and their vulnerabilities. One of the products we have been investigating is Kaseya VSA. We discovered severe vulnerabilities in Kaseya VSA and reported them to Kaseya, with whom we have been in regular contact since then. Additionally, we have, in confidence, also reported these vulnerabilities to our trusted partners.
A court in Amsterdam ruled that privacy litigation against Facebook in the Netherlands can proceed, rejecting the social network’s bid to have the lawsuit from two non-profit groups thrown out.
As TechCrunch reported, the Amsterdam-based Data Privacy Foundation and Dutch consumer advocacy organization Consumentenbond are suing Facebook on behalf of users over what they claim are violations of European Union privacy law. The lawsuit says Facebook has not provided enough details about the information it gathers from users, including what it does with the data, and therefore doesn’t have a legal basis to process the information.
Additionally, prosecutors said in court documents that the alleged Oath Keepers member and Navy veteran Thomas Caldwell between Jan. 6 and Jan. 16 “did corruptly alter, destroy, mutilate, and conceal a record, document, and other object, and attempted to do so, with the intent to impair its integrity and availability for use in an official proceeding.”
Prosecutors said Caldwell sent and then unsent a video from the [insurrection] and deleted photographs from his Facebook account that apparently “documented his participation in the attack.”
An Associated Press review of court records has found that at least 49 defendants are accused of trying to erase incriminating photos, videos and texts from phones or social media accounts documenting their conduct as a pro-Donald Trump mob stormed Congress and briefly interrupted the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory.
Experts say the efforts to scrub the social media accounts reveal a desperate willingness to manipulate evidence once these people realized they were in hot water. And, they say, it can serve as powerful proof of people’s consciousness of guilt and can make it harder to negotiate plea deals and seek leniency at sentencing.
It’s a sad fact that your online presence constantly exposes you to cyberattacks. Hackers, scammers and other bad actors want your login credentials, personal information, financial data and more.
Ransomware attacks are particularly vicious. These operators steal files and personal data and hold them hostage in exchange for payment. Ransomware attacks are up, particularly in the past year. Tap or click here for more information on these attacks.
You can’t be immune to attack, but you can take steps to protect yourself. Read on to learn about tools that can beef up your online privacy.
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The very browser you use can affect your online security. Big Tech browsers are not the most discrete when it comes to privacy and data collection. Tap or click here for our rundown of the most popular browsers.
Google Chrome is banning cross-site trafficking, but this doesn’t mean the tech giant won’t track you on its own. Firefox’s default settings include tracker blocking, and the browser offers adjustable global protection levels for its users.
Edge has default tracking prevention and adjustable levels of protection, similar to Firefox. Microsoft has recently been accused of collecting users’ IP addresses.
Safari blocks cross-site trafficking out of the box. Safari uses Google as its default search engine, blocks malicious websites and pop-ups, and protects users from malware and phishing scams.
Brave blocks malware, phishing scams, advertisements, trackers and plug-ins. The company does not store your browsing data. Tap or click here to see the best browsers for privacy ranked.
Press freedom advocates on Saturday were encouraged by news that the U.S. Department of Justice has begun making arrests related to attacks on journalists at the Capitol on January 6, when hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump violently breached security measures to try to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election results.
In addition to attacking some members of the Capitol Police—including one who later died of his injuries—and stalking lawmakers, some of those who attempted the insurrection targeted members of the media by damaging their equipment, assaulting them, and trying to chase them away from the Capitol.€
Multiple Afghan sources said Saturday the Taliban had pressured pro-government forces to retreat from at least a dozen districts in northeastern Badakhshan and Takhar border provinces in the past 24 hours. Pro-government forces in many areas are said to be surrendering and abandoning territory without offering any resistance to the Taliban.
The lives we should be grieving, however, are those of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghans who died as a consequence of the push for war that Rumsfeld, aided by many fellow officials in President George W. Bush's administration, made following Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. As an Iraqi, these deaths, several of them friends and family members, continue to haunt me. Without Rumsfeld’s war, many of them would still be with us.
Earlier this year, I spent a month covering the trial for a dispute between Apple and Epic. The case was one of the biggest antitrust suits in recent memory, and it brought to light revelations about both companies and the larger tech industry, often in the form of legal filings. I (and other reporters) try to pick out the most relevant details from these filings for readers. But sometimes, the documents are worth checking out in their own right. A site called CourtListener makes that easier than it might sound — if you know how to look.
US federal court documents are supposed to be publicly available through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. But as somebody who frequently uses PACER, I can confirm it’s a really frustrating system. Signing up is a hassle, it costs 10 cents to run a search or retrieve a single page of a document, and all those charges add up quickly if you’re hunting down information about a case. PACER is basically a video game loot box mechanic for the legal system.
The family of Julian Assange was joined by supporters on Saturday in Parliament Square, London, where they marked Assange's 50th birthday—the third he's spent in the city's Belmarsh Prison as he awaits possible extradition to the U.S.—and to demand his release days after a key witness in the case against him admitted his testimony was false.
Assange's partner, Stella Moris, was in attendance€ with the couple's young children at the gathering, which took place two days after Assange's father and brother€ wrapped up a tour of the U.S. aimed at building€ pressure on President Joe Biden to drop all charges against him under the Espionage Act.
On July 3,€ 2020, Julian Assange will turn 50 years old, spending his third birthday behind bars. The WikiLeaks publisher has been held without any formal charges alongside criminals and terrorists inside London's high-security prison for exposing the U.S. government’s war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A vagabond in his childhood, a hacker in his teens and always living on the edge, Julian Assange, co-founder of WikiLeaks, is the controversial man who people love and governments hate. This Australian publisher, journalist and editor-in-chief of the whistle-blower website, has stuck to his belief, that publishing improves transparency and better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies. Today, on July 3, this multi-talented-hacker-publisher is celebrating his 50th birthday, but it’s difficult to say where and how!
Climate tipping points are the phenomenon by which small increases in temperature can trigger self-perpetuating loops in the natural world, "tipping" them towards dramatic and widespread change after a certain temperature threshold is crossed — sometimes leading to even more emissions and warming. Examples of tipping points include the feedback between rising temperatures and permafrost melt; as the Arctic warms, frozen soils rich in organic carbon known as permafrost start to thaw, releasing the stores of ancient carbon locked inside. Other examples include the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the collapse of coral reef ecosystems, and the potential transition of the Amazon rainforest into a more savanna-like ecosystem. The draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, details at least 12 potential tipping points, according to Agence France-Presse.
The recent record-breaking heat wave on the West Coast, among other extreme weather events, has underscored the urgency of addressing the global climate crisis. Such efforts will require significant action from the federal government, including policies to reduce carbon emissions and adaptation measures to prepare communities for rising sea levels and extreme weather. Too often, however, the U.S. political system interferes with the government's ability to carry out the significant action required to address the climate crisis.
In what can only be described as both shocking and unsurprising at the same time, yesterday Greenpeace’s investigative journalism outfit, Unearthed, released video of two high-ranking ExxonMobil lobbyists (one current, one recently left the company) saying the quiet part out loud about Exxon’s ruthless political efforts to stall progress on the climate crisis and protect its own bottom line.
A fire that raged for hours in the Gulf of Mexico Friday offered the latest illustration of the climate emergency and the urgent€ need to end fossil fuel extraction and invest instead in burgeoning renewable energy industries.
An underwater gas pipeline controlled by Mexico's state-owned oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos, also known as€ Pemex, burst in the early morning hours, sending flames "resembling molten lava" to the water's surface.
When we rise
It’s abundantly clear that the power grid in the United States is not ready for the effects of climate change, including the extreme weather events that come with it. After all, climate change isn’t just increasing the demand for energy to keep people cool or warm amid heat waves and winter storms. It’s also damaging the grid itself. The country is now in a race against time to shift its energy supply toward renewable sources, like wind and solar, while also needing more and more electricity to do everything from powering more air conditioning to boosting the number of EVs on the road.
Biden needs to stop construction of the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands crude oil pipeline that threatens the headwaters of the Mississippi as well as Lake Superior and other valued waters in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ojibwe treaty rights, and our planet’s health.
But the site is more than just a local news outlet. It's part of the Star News Network — an expanding network of pro-Trump sites seeking to influence local politics with conservative opinion by mimicking the look and feel of local newspaper sites. The group operates eight state-focused news sites, including in key Electoral College states such as Michigan, Arizona, Ohio and Florida.
"Slavery is a state of war."
--John BrownOn July 3, 1859, Brown arrived in Harpers Ferry, accompanied by his sons, Oliver and Owen, and Jeremiah Anderson. In the preceding months, he had raised money from other abolitionists and ordered weapons — pikes and guns — to be used in his war against slavery. Using the alias Isaac Smith, Brown rented the Kennedy Farm about five miles from Harpers Ferry, on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. Throughout the summer Brown's Army gathered at the farmhouse. Numbering twenty-one at the time of the raid, these men stayed hidden in the attic by day, reading, writing letters, polishing their rifles and playing checkers. To avoid being seen by curious neighbors, they could only come out at night. To keep up the appearance of a normal household, Brown sent for his daughter, fifiteen year old Annie, and Oliver's wife, seventeen year old Martha. The girls prepared meals, washed clothes and kept nosy neighbors at a distance. Brown studied maps and conferred with John Cook, hid advance man in Harpers Ferry, about the town, armory operations, train schedules and any other information deemed valuable to his plan. On September 30, Brown sent Martha and Annie home to New York. The time was near. On Sunday, October 16, Brown called his men together. Following a prayer, he outlined his battle plans and instructed them, "Men get on your arms; we will proceed to the Ferry."
“Body cameras are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only way to see the unbiased facts surrounding a police and civilian encounter resulting in injury and/or death," the attorneys said in a statement. “When officers turn their body cameras off, they turn off their intent to be transparent along with it."
As the trans-Atlantic slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa to the Americas flourished in the 1500s, there was another slave trade that operate on an even larger scale. It was the capture of Europeans by north-African Muslims. Barbary Pirates enslaved an estimated 1 million Europeans in the period from 1500 to 1800.
Enslavement was a real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland. For example, in 1632, pirates captured the Irish city of Baltimore. They and others were snatched from their homes, taken in chains to the slave markets of Algiers and sold to the highest bidder. Some spent the rest of their lives rowing galleys. Others toiled in quarries or on farms. Attractive women were sent to harems and became a pasha’s concubine.
A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.
In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.
Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Last-minute changes to major antitrust legislation working its way through the House appears to exempt several Big Tech companies from being affected by its regulations.
The legislation, which has been months in the making and was crafted to take on Big Tech monopolies, targets a handful of companies while excluding others that also have massive market power, a leading expert told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Existing federal and state antitrust law already prohibits a wide range of anticompetitive business activity across all industries like unlawful mergers and monopolization.
“Antitrust law is generally applicable,” Berin Szoka, president of technology policy think tank TechFreedom, told the DCNF in an interview. “That is its chief virtue, which means that it doesn’t pick winners and losers.”
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A service must also fall under the specific definition of what the legislation defines as an “online platform.”
However, between the time Democrats released the bills on June 11 and the time the committee held a markup hearing for the legislation on June 23, the MAU criteria and definition of an “online platform” had been altered. The MAU had been changed from 500,000 to 50 million while the definition of online platform was changed from “operating system” to “mobile operating system.”
Szoka said the last-minute changes were made to ensure that the vast majority of tech services outside of those produced by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple wouldn’t be affected. He noted that the changed bills favored Microsoft, a tech company with enormous market power, since its massive operating software Windows isn’t a “mobile operating system” and its gaming service Xbox Live doesn’t have more than 50 million U.S.-based MAU.
The FTC is expected to file a new complaint against Facebook, Reuters reported.
The letter cited Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp as examples of anticompetitive practices, along with the tech company’s alleged practice of preventing competitors from interoperating with its software.
The lawmakers expressed support for supplying the FTC with additional resources to regulate large tech companies, and called attention to antitrust legislation each of the lawmakers had proposed.
A federal judge had dismissed a December complaint brought by 46 states and the FTC against Facebook earlier this week, ruling that it was “legally insufficient” and that evidence for the tech company’s status as a monopoly was inadequate.
“The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims — namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote in the ruling.
Chemistry laureate George Smith argues a publicly funded system would more than pay for itself by ending monopoly pricing in pharmaceuticals
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The vast bulk of the underlying research that leads to new treatments is already funded publicly, he said.
A case in point were the mRNA vaccines that are so effective against the pandemic. “That technology has depended on hundreds of major discoveries in immunology over at least a century in many dozens of countries, and it of course stands on the shoulders of modern molecular biology and virology,” he said. “The overwhelming majority of this work was done in academic labs with public funding.”
On 4 March 2021 the EU Commission announced it has launched a formal investigation into possible anti-competitive conduct by pharmaceutical company Teva in relation to its blockbuster drug Copaxone, which is used in the treatment of multiple sclerosis.
The patent for the active ingredient in the drug, glatiramer acetate, expired in 2015, making it possible for generic versions of the drug to enter the market and compete with Teva’s drug Copaxone. The Commission is investigating whether certain conduct by Teva – strategic filing and withdrawing of divisional patents and accompanying litigation as well as a communications campaign against competing products – has resulted in delaying market entry and uptake of competing generic drugs and therefore amounts to an abuse of dominant position under Article 102 TFEU.
On 01 July 1961, sixty years ago to the day, the Bundespatentgericht (also known as the BPatG or in English the German Federal Patent Court or FPC) commenced its work. The court is a supreme federal court and falls within the remit of the Bundesministerium der Justiz and für Verbraucherschutz (German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection).
To mark the German Federal Patent Court’s 60th anniversary, D Young & Co partner Hanns-Juergen Grosse, a European, Chartered (UK) and German qualified patent attorney, provides a brief history of the court, its components and responsibilities.
The Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation has approved a new data protection framework for the European Patent Office during its 167th meeting on 29 and 30 June 2021.
With the new data protection rules and introduction of the concept of data protection in the Office's Service Regulations, the EPO is aligning itself with the highest international standards and best practices, and with the EU data protection legislation. The same standards of personal data protection will apply to all activities carried out by the EPO and involving processing of personal data of any individual, thus reinforcing the Office's mission and values to treat any individual with respect and duty of care.
The Data Protection Rules (DPR) will also support the Office in its ongoing digitalisation and ensure that the organisation keeps pace with technological developments in a flexible but secure manner.
The Galaxy Z Fold 3 respects the same rules of engagement. A large number of leaks told us all of the phone’s secrets, including a feature we’ve been waiting for years to see on smartphones. The new foldable is expected to be Samsung’s first phone with an Under Panel Camera (UPC), which means the lens is under an active part of the screen that displays content when the camera is not in use. Now, a new discovery indicates that Samsung has given UPC tech a lot of thought, and we might see it in all sorts of devices down the road — including Samsung’s first phones with rollable screens.
A rule that lets the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refuse to consider a patent challenge—to avoid duplicating proceedings—has sparked lawsuits, complaints, and even a request for Congress to investigate.
Inventors say the NHK-Fintiv rule helps patent owners avoid fighting attacks on multiple fronts.
But tech heavyweights such as Apple Inc. and Google LLC say it’s unraveling Congress’ attempt to rein in abusive patent legislation—and are suing over it. Patient groups fear it will slow generic drugs from coming to market.
“The Annual Review 2020 shows that demand for European patents remained nearly on a par with last year. The Office received a total of 180 250 European patent applications, 0.7% fewer than in 2019. To meet this demand during the pandemic, the EPO accelerated the digitalisation of the patent grant process and extended teleworking to almost all staff, introducing changes that were originally due by 2023 in a matter of months.
The output of our patent examiners reached 401 996 search, examination and opposition products. Further, the EPO published 133 715 European patents in 2020, -3% compared with 2019, but well above its target of 120 000. While there was a slight increase in the mean time taken for search, the timeliness of the Office’s examination and opposition work continued to improve.”
The European Patent Office writes this in an press report on the occasion of the publication of the Annual Review 2020 last Tuesday. The review includes no less than seven reports, covering quality, social affairs, the environment, IT, data protection, communication and engagement. Below, a selection of quotes from all seven.
On 27 April 2021, the European Union Intellectual Property Office ("EUIPO") announced the launch of Europe's first ever blockchain platform for secure delivery in real time of IP rights documentation ("Platform").
The Platform makes available in real time, up-to-date documentation on 62 million trademark registrations and 17 million design registrations, all accessible via TMview and DesignView.
It's no secret that I don't care for the way that Nintendo treats its biggest fans when it comes to allowing them to view and use its IP in order to express their fandom. I have been known, after all, to create entire genres of posts with "Nintendo Hates You" in the title. And, so, when I noticed headlines about how YouTube videos for let's-plays featuring the classic SNES game Earthbound were being demonitized or taken down over copyright claims, I was sure I would be writing yet another of those headlines.
Ever since the US Government shut down his Gears IPTV service and seized millions in cash and a fleet of supercars, YouTuber OMI IN A HELLCAT has insisted his platform was legal. Documents filed as part of a seizure process against his assets indicate that the US Government strongly believes that serious crimes were committed.
