A few of our tech-savvy readers (thanks @Cooe, @Locuza_, and others!) have written in to let us know about a big detail we missed when first talked about the AMD dGPU Chromebook in the works: the Vega 12 being tested for it does exist. In fact, it has already been shipped in the older MacBook Pros from 2018 as the AMD Radeon Pro Vega 16 and 20.
When you upgrade from Istio 1.10.0 to Istio 1.11.0, you need to consider the changes on this page. These notes detail the changes which purposefully break backwards compatibility with Istio 1.10.0. The notes also mention changes which preserve backwards compatibility while introducing new behavior. Changes are only included if the new behavior would be unexpected to a user of Istio 1.10.0.
Zorin OS 16 releases SOON, and it's bringing a new PRO version that includes technical support and a lot more!
The MSM DRM kernel updates to this open-source Qualcomm Adreno driver have been sent in to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.15 merge window.
There are a variety of updates and fixes to this drm-msm-next update but most notable is new Adreno 600 series support. Qualcomm's Adreno 680 is now supported as well as the 7c3.
The 7c3 is the Adreno 7c Gen 3 GPU found within their new Snapdragon compute platform. The 7c3 is similar to an Adreno 660 GPU but with some driver programming changes.
With AMD RDNA2 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 6000 series there is hardware support for AV1 decoding while the Linux support has been slow to materialize. Fortunately, that's now changing.
Going back to last year there has been kernel patches around AV1 video decoding for the AMDGPU kernel driver with Navi 2 / VCN 3.0 hardware. But to user-space it's been lacking for exposing the AV1 accelerated video decode.
Opened this week is now a merge request for introducing AV1 video decode support to the Video Acceleration API (VA-API).
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
Planning on taking elementary OS 6 for a spin this weekend? If so, there's a handy third-party tool I want you to keep in mind. See, some Linux distros
Finally, the wait is over! The much-awaited Elementary OS 6.0 “Odin” is now available for download. Elementary OS enthusiasts have been waiting patiently for more than a year now after the release “Hera”, Elementary OS 5.1 in December 2019.
Elementary OS 6.0 is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and comes packed with a lot of new and exciting features, UI improvements, performance updates along with some new apps too.Without any further wait, let’s look at all the new features along with detailed installation guide with screenshots.
Webmin is a web-based tool meant to install on a Linux server to manage it using a graphical user interface. It is open source and can be installed on popular Linux distros using few commands. It is used to administer Linux systems running without a graphical user interface (GUI) via the network, e.g. servers. This type of access is also sometimes referred to as “headless”.
The mechanism of a computer user accessing different directory files on different hard disk partitions is comparatively similar to how SSH is used to access remote machines existing under a common or different network.
An experienced Linux user knows exactly what kind of a nuisance blank lines can be in a processable file. These empty/blank lines not only get in the way of correctly processing such files but also make it difficult for a running program to read and write the file.
On a Linux operating system environment, it is possible to implement several text manipulation expressions to get rid of these empty/blank lines from a file. In this article, empty/blank lines refer to the whitespace characters.
A couple of weeks ago, the good folks at Linux Mint released version 20.2 of their open source operating system. The installer built into the live ISO is excellent and only requires a few clicks to install the OS. You even have a built-in partitioner if you want to customize your partitions.
The installer is mainly focused on a simple install—define your partitions and install into them. For those wanting a more flexible setup—logical volume manager (LVM) is the way to go—you benefit from setting up volume groups and define your logical volumes within them.
LVM is a hard drive management system that allows you to create storage space across multiple physical drives. In other words, you could "tether" a few small drives together so your OS treats them as if they were one drive. Beyond that, it has the advantages of live resizing, file system snapshots, and much more. This article isn't a tutorial on LVM (the web is full of good information on that already.) Instead, I aim to keep this page on topic and focus solely on getting Linux Mint 20.2 working with LVM.
JSON is a data representation format that is used to store and transfer data between different layers of an application; it stores data in key: value pairs.
The syntax of JSON was derived from JavaScript but it itself is language independent. It is compatible with many programming languages; these languages include code that can be used to integrate JSON into the program; but unfortunately, we cannot work with JSON directly in Linux shell as it cannot interpret it. To work with JSON in the Linux shell we use a mixture of tools such as JQ and sed.
In this post, we will learn to use the JQ command to manipulate and work with JSON data in a Linux shell.
If you are adding PPA repo in Linux mint 20.02 and getting an error Cannot add PPA: ”This PPA does not support focal”. Then follow the simple command given in the article that will solve this error.
PPA stands for “Personal Package Archive” offered by developers and package maintainers on a service called Launchpad. The developers can upload Debian source packages into a PPA that is used by Launchpad automatically to build binary packages for different architectures and Ubuntu versions that can be used on Linux Mint as well.
It helps beginners to installing various programs in an easy way without compiling them manually from the source code that is not included in the official package sources or only in an older version.
SteamOS is a Linux distribution from the game distribution platform Steam. It is not a generic desktop operating system like Debian, Linux Mint or Ubuntu though you could use the desktop features. By default, SteamOS gives you a console like interface because SteamOS is intended to be the operating system on Steam devices like Steam Machine (discontinued) and Steam Deck.
For years, organizations and their managers have dictated where work should be done. COVID-19 changed that. We now know that productive work is possible outside an office, and many employees are now able to demand greater choice when it comes to working arrangements.
While some senior managers remain skeptical, those who resist embracing the opportunities that hybrid work offers may lose key people who are looking for greater workplace autonomy.
Even before the pandemic, the concept of being more agile – i.e., able to adapt quickly to changes in the market – had been gaining serious traction in the business community. Since the term “agile” was coined about 20 years ago by people sympathetic to the need for an alternative to documentation-driven, heavyweight software development processes, people all over the world have been intrigued by the concept. Hundreds of businesses of various sizes and across a variety of verticals and countries have adopted agile frameworks like scrum in hopes of creating products and services that delight customers, speeding up their teams’ response times, creating a more collaborative work environment, increasing transparency, and much more.
And while the road to a complete agile transformation is often paved with good intentions, implementing agility within an organization is no simple task. It requires changes that cannot be magically generated by any plug-and-play package or achieved in a few simple steps. A true lasting transformation requires time, patience, and full buy-in across the enterprise.
One of the big decisions IBM made in creating the original IBM PC was choosing to use the Intel 8088 processor as its central processing unit (CPU). This turned out to be hugely influential in establishing the Intel architecture—often called the x86 architecture—as the standard for the vast majority of the personal computer industry. But there are many stories around how the decision was made.
It is always an exciting time when Big Blue is rolling out a new processor generation – well, with the exception of the Power6+, which IBM did not really talk about at all and tried to pass off as a Power6 until I figured that out. And I have to admit, IBM used the Power6+ architectural tweak and a refinement of the 65 nanometer chip manufacturing process (as opposed to an expected 45 nanometer process shrink) to still cram two whole processors into a dual chip module to radically expanding the throughput performance per socket, and it was impressive at the time.
Bringing chips to market is always tough. Always. There are always design issues and there are always manufacturing issues, and the fact that these ever-increasingly complex and ever-shrinking devices come to market at all is a bit of a miracle. A CPU socket is what we would have called an entire system (minus its main memory and storage) two decades ago. It’s amazing, and we owe the engineers of all chip designers and chip manufacturers some applause for the hard work they do and the engineering feats they pull off, always against the odds.
August ISO refresh is available for download. It contain all the updates as of 8/12/2021 and a bunch of small improvements and fixes.
The Debian Project has lost several members of its community in the last year.
In June 2020, Robert Lemmen passed away after a serious illness. Robert had been regularly attending the Debian Munich meetups since the early 00s and helped with local booths. He had been a Debian Developer since 2007. Among other contributions, he packaged modules for Raku (Perl6 at that time) and helped other contributors to get involved in the Raku Team. He also put effort into tracking down circular dependencies in Debian.
Karl Rammer passed away in June 2020, after complications due to metastatic colon cancer. He had been a Debian Developer since 2001 and packaged several components of MIT's Project Athena. He was passionate about technology and Debian, and always interested in helping others to find and promote their passions.
MiTAC has unveiled three industrial thin mini-ITX motherboards based on Elkhart Lake and Comet Lake processors with respectively MiTAC PD10EHI with a choice of low-power Intel Atom, Celeron and Pentium Elkhart Lake processors, and two more powerful motherboards with MiTAC PH11CMI & PH12CMI based on up to an Intel Core i9 Comet Lake processor, and which are virtually identical except for a different chipset allowing vPro features and RAID support.
Roboticists often look to nature for inspiration. That makes sense, because animals are very efficient machines, thanks to millions of years of evolution. Even our most sophisticated technology doesn’t come close to matching a common housefly. But we can get closer to mimicking nature at larger scales, as with this robot created by researchers at EPFL that does a great job of swimming like a lamprey.
The newest stable release of Thunderbird, version 91, is available for download on our website now. Existing Thunderbird users will be updated to the newest version in the coming weeks.
Thunderbird 91 is our biggest release in years with a ton of new features, bug fixes and polish across the app. This past year had its challenges for the Thunderbird team, our community and our users. But in the midst of a global pandemic, the important role that email plays in our lives became even more obvious. Our team was blown away by the support we received in terms of donations and open source contributions and we extend a big thanks to everyone who helped out Thunderbird in the lead up to this release.
There are a ton of changes in the new Thunderbird, you can see them all in the release notes. In this post we’ll focus on the most notable and visible ones.
Like most Office alternatives, OnlyOffice hews to the Microsoft ribbon interface. The tabbed toolbars are uniform across all three editors. Home is where you’ll find editing and formatting tools; Insert allows you to add images, shapes, and other elements to your document/spreadsheet/presentation; Layout tools controls page margins, orientation, and size; and so on. Each editor also includes tool tabs specific to its document type—the document editor’s References toolbar includes options for adding a table of contents, footnotes, hyperlinks, and image captions, while the spreadsheet editor has tabs dedicated to formulas, data, and pivot tables.
Most authors—especially indie authors—don’t do their writing with a large group of co-workers. They may still collaborate with others, though, but on a much smaller scale. That could be worked out without having to pay for upgraded levels of Microsoft 365.
Read on to see why I believe LibreOffice is a viable alternative for Microsoft 365 for most indie authors.
C is a high-level language with close-to-the-metal features that make it seem, at times, more like a portable assembly language than a sibling of Java or Python. Among these features is memory management, which covers an executing program's safe and efficient use of memory. This article goes into the details of memory safety and efficiency through code examples in C and a code segment from the assembly language that a modern C compiler generates.
Although the code examples are in C, the guidelines for safe and efficient memory management are the same for C++. The two languages differ in various details (e.g., C++ has object-oriented features and generics that C lacks), but these languages share the very same challenges with respect to memory management.
gRoulette is a simplified Roulette game online. Win enough and you’ll get the flag. The source code is provided, and the entire thing is run over a WebSocket connection to the server.
0x0G is Google’s annual “Hacker Summer Camp” event. Normally this would be in Las Vegas during the week of DEF CON and Black Hat, but well, pandemic rules apply. I’m one of the organizers for the CTF we run during the event, and I thought I’d write up solutions to some of my challenges here.
The first such challenge is authme, a web/crypto challenge. The description just wants to know if you can auth as admin and directs you to a website. On the website, we find a link to the source code, to an RSA public key, and a login form.
I thought that using a context menu like this to present a list of sessions to switch to would be fun and teach me more about the display-menu command. Basically I just wanted to have the menu display the sessions I had, and when I’d selected one, switch me to it. So, this is what I did.
When you enter a command into your terminal, whether it's to launch a GUI app or just a terminal app, there are often options (sometimes called switches or flags) you can use to modify how the application runs. This is a standard set by the POSIX specification, so it's useful for a Java programmer to know how to detect and parse options.
These particular legal troubles began when Paul was filmed in and around a mall in Scottsdale, AZ, which was being looted in the wake of police brutality protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. Paul denied participating in the looting (and wasn’t seen doing so in the videos that circulated on social media), but was still charged with criminal trespassing and unlawful assembly by the Scottsdale Police Department.
Mars rover Perseverance failed in its first attempt to collect a sample of rock from the Red Planet because the material crumbled to dust, NASA scientists have said.
Last week, the nuke-powered science lab extended its robotic arm to bore 7cm into the seemingly hard surface, gather a core of material, and bottle it in a sample tube. Although its equipment appeared to be working fine, Perseverance came up empty handed.
After two decades of failure and endless jokes, the Intel Itanium is officially no more. Intel has finally stopped shipping its doomed-from-the-start 64-bit processor, two years after saying it would cease shipments.
Really, the end came some time ago. The last Itaniums were the 9000 series “Kittson,” which shipped in 2017. It’s a bane of technology firms to support technologies they would much rather ditch but can't due to customer investment, and for years Intel was obligated to support the paltry market that existed for Itanium.
[...]
The project was dubbed “Itanic” for the amount of cash being spent on it, its ambition, and the disaster that followed.
Russia’s coronavirus headquarters reported 808 deaths over the past day on the morning of August 12, marking a pandemic record.
When I log in to Zoom on a Thursday night in mid-July, the three dozen other participants are talking about honeymoons. Kevin, one of the people on the call, recently got married and is planning his. Their ages and races run the gamut; some are sitting on couches, a few with dogs next to them, while others sit in home office chairs.
And the least secret agent of all . . . Agent Orange!
A one-time 99% tax on billionaires' massive pandemic wealth gains would raise enough revenue to pay for coronavirus vaccines for every adult on Earth—and provide each of the hundreds of millions of unemployed workers around the world with a $20,000 cash grant.
"Governments need to tax the rich for us to stand any chance of reversing the inequality crisis we're in."—Njoki Njehu, Fight Inequality Alliance
Sixteen months after Congress'€ 45-day reporting deadline, Sen. Rand Paul on Wednesday disclosed that his wife€ bought stock in the pharmaceutical company that makes€ remdesivir, an antiviral drug used to treat Covid-19, on February 26, 2020—weeks after the Trump administration briefed the Senate Health Committee, of which the Kentucky Republican is a member,€ on the coronavirus but before the public had been made fully aware of its danger.
A spokesperson for Paul told the Washington Post that "the senator attended no briefings on Covid-19... [and] completed a reporting form for his wife's investment last year but learned only recently, while preparing an annual disclosure, that the form had not been transmitted."
My second grader’s almond-shaped brown eyes widened over the doubled-up N95 and cloth masks I’d instructed her and her older sister to wear that day. There, in the foyer of her school, stood her unmasked principal, greeting the hundreds of families who were flocking to a July 29 open house.
We passed by the front office staff, also mostly unmasked. In the crowds we observed, there were as many unmasked parents and children as masked ones.
More than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, over 3.5 million people have died around the world, including nearly 500,000 in the United States. Historian and writer John Barry says the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus was a predictable development based on how previous pandemics have developed. “This is not unusual, what we’re going through,” he says. “The question is whether the next variant is going to be even more transmissible and possibly more virulent, or whether it’s going to be toned down.” He says it’s likely that people will continue to need booster shots of COVID-19 vaccines in the months and years to come.
As the World Health Organization warns over 100 million more people will be infected with COVID-19 by early next year as the Delta variant continues to rapidly spread, we look at Indonesia, which has become the epicenter of the pandemic in Asia. Over the past 28 days, Indonesia has recorded 43,000 deaths, more than anywhere else in the world. More than half of the deaths have occurred in the past two months as the Delta variant overwhelmed hospitals across the country. Sana Jaffrey, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta, says the public debate is largely focused on whether to protect public health or allow economic activity to continue. “It is unfair that we are still stuck in this discussion when, in Western countries, people are getting vaccinated or choosing not to get vaccinated,” Jaffrey says. “Indonesia is not able to break out of this trap of these two options because there just isn’t enough supply of vaccines in the country.” We also speak with Dr. Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist, who says it’s important to combine vaccination with other measures such as testing, tracing and isolation. “We have to combine the strategies,” he says.
The official COVID-19 death toll in India is reported to be around 429,000, but many researchers believe it is at least five times higher. India experienced a devastating wave of infections in April and May, and less than 10% of the population has been fully vaccinated. “When we watch what’s happening in the U.S. … it is astounding that people who have access to vaccines are choosing not to get jabbed,” says Barkha Dutt, an award-winning Indian television journalist and author. “It’s anti-science. It’s self-indulgent. It’s a very First World white privilege.”
The study, of 6,400 people, from eight days old up to age 95, in 29 countries, suggests the metabolism remains "rock solid" throughout mid-life.
It peaks at the age of one, is stable from 20 to 60 and then inexorably declines.
Researchers found that metabolism peaks around age 1, when babies burn calories 50 percent faster than adults, and then gradually declines roughly 3 percent a year until around age 20. From there, metabolism plateaus until about age 60, when it starts to slowly decline again, by less than 1 percent annually, according to findings published Thursday in the journal Science.
Amazon has delayed staff returning to its offices around the world from September this year to January 2022, as the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus continues to spread.
“As we continue to closely watch local conditions related to COVID-19, we are adjusting our guidance for corporate employees in the U.S. and other countries where we had previously anticipated that employees would begin coming in regularly the week of Sept. 7,” the online bazaar said on Thursday. “We are now extending this date to Jan. 3, 2022. Our return-to-office timeline will vary globally in accordance with local conditions.”
Whatever the case, during the 1980s and 1990s, it was very common for many online networks to rely on the unpaid services of their users to help onboard or support others within their communities, a role that would later be taken on instead by paid individuals.
Barracuda, a cloud-enabled security solutions provider, in its latest Threat Spotlight, analysed 121 ransomware incidents between August 2020 and July 2021.
They found many attacks are being led by a handful of high-profile ransomware gangs.
More than 3 years ago now, Scott Helme and I launched a little project called Why No HTTPS? It listed the world's largest websites that didn't properly redirect insecure requests to secure ones. We updated it December before last and pleasingly, noted that more websites than ever were doing the right thing and forcing browsers down the secure path. That's the good news, the bad news is that there are still some really wacky, unexplainable anti-HTTPS views out there, but those voices are increasingly less relevant as the browsers march forward: [...]
That’s what Upbound, the company behind the open source Crossplane project (now donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in full) thinks.
Until February this year, Amazon Route53's DNS service offered largely unappreciated network eavesdropping capabilities. And this undocumented spying option was also available at Google Cloud DNS and at least one other DNS-as-a-service provider.
After a year off due to a certain virus, the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences returned to Las Vegas last week, just in time for the US government's attempts to foster more collaboration across the infosec industry.
The newly appointed Security Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency Jen Easterly took to the virtual Black Hat stage last week (although there was a limited and well-spaced physical conference this year) and announced the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC), which she claimed would be a true public/private partnership to try to lock down security incidents by sharing data and skills.
A critical vulnerability has been disclosed in hardware random number generators used in billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices whereby it fails to properly generate random numbers, thus undermining their security and putting them at risk of attacks.
Command injection vulnerabilities are probably one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities that can happen in an application.
For example, take-out apps such as GrubHub and UberEats have grown into a hundred-billion-dollar industry over the past decade, and received a further boost as many sit-down restaurants converted to only take-out during the pandemic. Small businesses are upset, in part, that these companies are collecting and monetizing data about their customers.
Likewise, ride-sharing services have decimated the highly-regulated taxi industry, replacing it with a larger, more nebulous fleet of personal vehicles carrying passengers around major cities. This makes them harder to regulate and plan around than traditional taxis. Alarmed municipal transportation agencies feel that they do not have the tools they need to monitor and manage ride-sharing.
A common thread runs through these emerging industries: massive volumes of sensitive personal data. Yelp, Grubhub, Uber, Lyft, and many more new companies have inserted themselves in between customers and older, smaller businesses, or have replaced those businesses entirely. The new generation of tech companies collect more data about their users than traditional businesses ever did. A restaurant might know its regular customers, or keep track of its best-selling dishes, but Grubhub can track each user’s searches, devices, and meals at restaurants across the city. Likewise, while traditional taxi services may have logged trip times, origins, and destinations, Uber and Lyft can link each trip to a user’s real-world identity and track supply and demand in real time.
The Fourth Amendment requires authorities to target search warrants at particular places or things—like a home, a bank deposit box, or a cell phone—and only when there is reason to believe that evidence of a crime will be found there. The Constitution’s drafters put in place these essential limits on government power after suffering under British searches called “general warrants” that gave authorities unlimited discretion to search nearly everyone and everything for evidence of a crime.
Yet today, Google is facilitating the digital equivalent of those colonial-era general warrants. Through the use of geofence warrants (also known as reverse location warrants), federal and state law enforcement officers are routinely requesting that Google search users’ accounts to determine who was in a certain geographic area at a particular time—and then to track individuals outside of that initially specific area and time period.
These warrants are anathema to the Fourth Amendment’s core guarantee largely because, by design, they sweep up people wholly unconnected to the crime under investigation.
In six weeks, more than 12,000 people signed up to the joint legal actions, which were submitted on 28 May 2018 against Facebook, Google (separate actions for Gmail, YouTube, and Google Search), Apple, Amazon and LinkedIn (hyperlinks to the full legal documents can be found at the bottom of this LQDN post). As LQDN explained, because of the way that the GDPR works, the French data protection authority CNIL would pass on the joint complaints to the relevant authorities. LQDN expected most of them would go to the Irish Data Protection Commission, while the one against Amazon would end up with the authorities in Luxembourg, which is where the company has its European headquarters. In fact, CNIL imposed directly a fine of 50 million euros (about $57 million) on Google in January 2019, as this blog reported. At the time, this was the highest penalty imposed under the still-new GDPR, but LQDN wrote that it hoped this was just the start of a series of even larger fines:
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has postponed by at least six months its move to introduce compulsory registration for its online iview service from 1 July onwards.
An ABC spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday that the company, which is a fully taxpayer-funded entity, had intended to introduce the mandatory registration during July and August.
"[We] decided to slow things down to ensure our audiences understand the benefits they will receive from creating an ABC account and the ways we manage and protect their personal information," the spokesperson added.
Apple infamously refuses to talk to The Register, so asking it to comment on this is a fruitless exercise.
A group of anti-war activists blockaded the entrances to a Raytheon facility in Portsmouth, Rhode Island on Thursday morning to protest the role the weapons-maker plays in the killing of civilians in Yemen, the occupied Palestinian territories, and elsewhere around the world.
The demonstration was organized and live-streamed on Facebook by€ Resist and Abolish the Military Industrial Complex (RAM INC) and The FANG Collective, a direct-action organization based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Watch the stream here.
The Taliban captured a provincial capital near Kabul on Thursday, the 10th the insurgents have taken over a weeklong blitz across Afghanistan as the US and NATO prepare to withdraw entirely from the country after decades of war.
Rapidly spreading violence in Mali is threatening the State’s very survival, the UN independent expert on the human rights situation in the country said on Friday.
At the end of an 11-day official visit, Alioune Tine recounted stories of increasing extrajudicial executions, civilian kidnappings and gang rapes, saying that the “serious and continuing deterioration of the security situation has exceeded a critical threshold”.
ABC News is showing its extensive audience that growth in gross domestic product (GDP) currently ranks third in the world. The ABC knows this is false. Yet this “news” is still visible on the ABC’s website. Alan Austin reports on another case of politically compromised data.
"He wanted a book that captured the effects of pollution on ecosystems and I would say it was really ahead of its time," says anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Nathaniel Dominy, who teaches at Dartmouth. "The different species disappear from the narrative in succession," he notes. "The Bar-ba-loots leave because they run out of food. The Swomee-Swans leave because the air is polluted. The humming fish leave because the water's polluted. He's describing what we would now call a 'trophic cascade,' and for me, as a scientist, I just find that genius that he anticipated that concept by a decade or more."
While it might be a children's book, The Lorax's ominous message of what happens when you harvest nature to death made it an icon of the environmental movement, spawning movie and stage adaptations not to mention a gazillion school projects.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
Maybe ancient sea level rises were not so dramatic. But they’d still have been pretty frightening.
By Tracy Keeling
Developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) capacity is a key feature of the UK’s strategy to reduce emissions and hit its climate targets. And as the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted, emissions pathways that limit global warming to 2€°C or below generally assume that some form of carbon dioxide removal, such as CCS, is necessary, alongside reducing emissions.
Stay up to date with DeSmog news and alerts
Admittedly, I hadn't been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it's more or less gone, though they survived. The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already "blackened" 504 square miles of Northern California in what was still essentially the (old) pre-fire season. It would soon become the second-largest wildfire in the state's history. When it swept through Greenville, much of downtown, along with more than 100 homes, were left in ashes as the 1,000 residents of that Gold Rush-era town fled.
As wildfires swept through the Italian island of Sicily, fueled€ by an extreme heatwave,€ officials in one city recorded a Wednesday recorded what is€ believed to€ be the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe.
Local meteorologists in Siracusa€ reported that temperatures reached 48.8€ºC or 119.8€ºF,€ breaking the continent's previous record of 118.4€ºF, which was set in 1977 in Athens.€
Is it possible to build a society where people have enough to live well and also feel that they have enough? Or are we doomed as a species to stay on the hedonic treadmill that keeps us wanting more consumer goods, even as we destroy the natural world to get those things? Are we doomed to make ourselves miserable trying to make ourselves happy?€
Following decades of protests and demands over the damage done, Royal Dutch Shell on Wednesday finally agreed to pay $111 million for oil spills that have polluted Nigerian communities for more than a half-century.
"They ran out of tricks and decided to come to terms."—Lucius Nwosa, lawyer for Ejama-Ebubu community
An oil spill off Russia’s Black Sea coast has contaminated an area at least 400 times bigger than initially estimated, scientists say. The spill took place on Saturday, August 7, at a Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) oil terminal near the port city of Novorossiysk. The CPC, which pumps in oil from Kazakhstan, addressed the spill two days later, claiming that an equipment breakdown caused 12 cubic meters of oil (12,000 liters) to spread over 200 square meters (2,153 square feet). Though the consortium claimed that the situation was “normalized” as of August 8, Russian scientists later reported that on that same day, the oil spill covered an area of 80 square kilometers (31 miles). Russia’s natural resources regulator is currently working at the site of the accident to establish just how much oil spilled into the sea. Russian investigators also opened a felony case for environmental damage.
Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn has purchased a chip plant for $90.8m from its compatriot, Macronix International.
"Macronix is pleased to see the subject 6-inch wafer fab continue to make its contribution to Taiwan as Foxconn commits to have the fab be used as an important base for Foxconn to reinforce its semiconductor development plan and to meet the demand of electric vehicles," said Miin Wu, chairman and CEO of Macronix, in a canned statement on Foxconn's website.
We cannot continue on the way we are right now.
With globalization under increasing scrutiny, national governments are poised to exert more power over markets.
A Democratic Texas state senator on Thursday morning ended a 15-hour filibuster to oppose and delay what she called a "voter suppression" bill put forth by Republicans in the state.
State Sen. Carol Alvarado (D-Houston) began the filibuster just before 6:00 pm local time Wednesday and stopped talking just before 9:00 am Thursday. The measure then promptly passed the measure in an 18-11 vote.
A spokesperson for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar warned Wednesday that AIPAC is endangering the Minnesota Democrat's life by running a fresh round of ads falsely accusing her of sympathizing with terrorist organizations, a claim the pro-Israel lobbying group has made and amplified repeatedly in recent years.
"Congressional leaders must condemn AIPAC for continuing to incite Islamophobic hatred against Rep. Omar and Muslim women."—Jaylani Hussein, Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota
The inspector general for the Federal Election Commission is calling on the agency to review its ethics policies and internal controls after a ProPublica investigation last year revealed that a senior manager openly supported Donald Trump and maintained a close relationship with a Republican attorney who went on to serve as the 2016 Trump campaign’s top lawyer.
The report by ProPublica raised questions about the impartiality of the FEC official, Debbie Chacona, a civil servant who oversees the unit responsible for keeping unlawful contributions out of U.S. political campaigns. The division’s staffers are supposed to adhere to a strict ethics code and forgo any public partisan activities because such actions could imply preferential treatment for a candidate or party and jeopardize the commission’s credibility.
WhatsApp and other apps are reportedly blocked in Zambia during ongoing general elections being held in the country Thursday, according to digital rights organization Access Now and [Internet] monitor NetBlocks. The block, affecting state-owned [Internet] providers and other private networks, could be cutting off voters from a vital form of communication during a contentious election.
And as the insurgents flood social media with images of surrendering Afghan soldiers and snap selfies with locals, the young general is also using Twitter and Facebook as a slick public relations tool in the fight against the hardline Islamists.
He and the 20,000 men under his command in the Maiwand 215th Corps have garnered thousands of followers, with their Twitter accounts awash with images of the general among the troops, posing for selfies with young civilians and meeting local shopkeepers.
Taken as a whole, Facebook’s sordid war on Ad Observer and accountability is a perfect illustration of how the company warps the narrative around user rights. Facebook is framing the conflict as one between transparency and privacy, implying that a user’s choice to share information about their own experience on the platform is an unacceptable security risk. This is disingenuous and wrong.
This story is a parable about the need for data autonomy, protection, and transparency—and how Competitive Compatibility (AKA “comcom” or “adversarial interoperability”) should play a role in securing them.
At ALEC, a national conservative organization that’s been criticized for matchmaking state and local policymakers with corporate interests, you will find a few speciality government software providers staffing tables, but mostly people are there to sell ideas. Legislation. From opponents of human trafficking to proponents of legalizing sex trade, leading conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and fresh local upstarts such as Utah’s own libertarian Libertas Institute.
A missing person's report was filed Sunday, and officers asked her to use Apple's Find My iPhone feature to see whether she could find Coleman, the complaint said. The program showed Coleman's last known location in Rosarito, Mexico, it said.
Coleman was detained at the border checkpoint, where during an interview with an FBI agent "he explained that he was enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife, A.C., possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children," according to the affidavit.
Or, as Logically explains: "If you give everyone in the U.S. a lollipop and then publish data about how many of them die within 24 hours, you may create the false impression that lollipops are dangerous. The key thing to remember is that correlation does not mean causation, and until a link has been proven, such assumptions can be dangerous."
Instead of providing this critical context, OpenVAERS emphasizes raw numbers of reports. The homepage blares at readers that over 12,000 people have died after receiving a COVID vaccine. There is no evidence those deaths were directly caused by the vaccine, and the site does not also show that 350 million doses of the vaccine have been administered across the nation.
The government has admitted that it may shut down the [Internet] if Zambians fail to correctly use cyberspace during this year’s election. Lusaka Times last week exclusively revealed that the government has resolved to shut down the [Internet] from Thursday, the voting day until Sunday, a day after vote-counting is are expected to be concluded
Government through Information and Broadcasting Services Permanent Secretary Amos Malupenga immediately issued a statement dismissing the report and described it as malicious.
The legal status of planned or potential election-period [Internet] restrictions in Zambia is disputed. A week prior to the elections, word spread of potential government plans to shut down [Internet] service during the elections. Authorities initially rejected the claims.
China will create a "blacklist" of karaoke songs, banning those that contain "harmful content" from entertainment venues.
According to interim rules outlined by the country's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, karaoke must not endanger national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, incite ethnic hatred or undermine ethnic unity, promote cults or superstition or violate the state's religious policies.
Songs must also not encourage obscenity, gambling, violence, drug-related activities or crime, nor should they insult or slander others, the ministry said
I sat in Court 4 in the Royal Courts of Justice in London yesterday with Stella Moris, Julian Assange’s partner. I have known Stella for as long as I have known Julian. She, too, is a voice of freedom, coming from a family that fought the fascism of Apartheid. Today, her name was uttered in court by a barrister and a judge, forgettable people were it not for the power of their endowed privilege.
The United States was, however, blocked from appealing the judge’s conclusions based on the medical evidence presented at trial. Specifically, the United States wanted to argue that evidence from a defense witness should have been deemed inadmissible or granted little weight, and that the judge erred when assessing Assange’s risk of suicide. After today’s ruling, prosecutors will be able to raise those issues as well. An appeal hearing is scheduled for October 27 and is set to take two days.
Thanks to the 2003 US-UK extradition treaty, the United States is represented by UK prosecutors, with the British people footing the bill. This is in addition to the millions the UK spent surveilling the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange sought refuge for seven years.
At the heart of Adam Serwer’s The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America is a sustained attempt to pinpoint the ideological and social currents that brought Trump to the White House. There are, of course, conflicting interpretations of what constitutes the essential appeal of Trumpism. Some prioritize economic factors, like white working-class reactions to expanding income inequality. Others look to geopolitics and see a decade-long global disillusionment with democracy that has given rise to the election of right-wing nationalist leaders around the world. Still others point to philosophical explanations, such as the rise of the “post-truth society,” in which propaganda, social media, and rampant conspiracy have replaced research, expertise, and objective truth when it comes to explaining the election of Trump in 2016. Although Serwer is mindful of some of the explanations, his book—which is primarily composed of essays he wrote covering the Trump presidency as a staff writer at The Atlantic—offers a historical and cultural explanation for Trumpism. In particular, he defends a “backlash thesis” in which Trumpism must be seen as the white supremacist reaction to a segment of society’s cultural and political decline.1
For the past year and€ a half, a large part of the schism between left and right in US politics has been on the question of policing. The Black Lives Matter protests that erupted last year after the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd affirmed the idea that a radical overhaul of policing was a central platform of the anti-racist left. Solidarity with police, summed up in the phrase “blue lives matter,” has become a rallying call for the right against rising left-wing criticism of police (Boston Globe, 11/1/20), particularly the movement to “defund police” by transferring resources to agencies that are better suited to meet community needs.
The Open App Markets Act sets out a platform competition policy that embodies a few basic ideas: the owner of an app store should not be allowed to control the prices that app developers can set on other platforms, or to prevent independent developers from communicating with their customers about discounts and other incentives. App store owners should not be able to require developers to use the store owner’s own in-app payment systems. And app store owners who also control the operating system they run on won't be allowed to restrict customers from using alternative app stores.
Importantly, the bill would cover app stores with 50 million or more US users, which includes not just the Apple and Google app stores but also the largest online game stores.
The high-profile case of Epic Games vs Apple has drawn attention to practices such as Apple’s 30% commission on app sales and in-app purchases and its gag rule on advertising lower prices out of the App Store, but Apple is not alone here. Valve, the owners of the Steam platform for PC gaming, has been accused of similar practices in an ongoing antitrust lawsuit by Wolfire Games and a group of Steam users.
To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit of industrial policy, but woven into the new order is a revolutionary idea that has rocked the antitrust world to its very foundations.
US antitrust law has three pillars: the Sherman Act (1890), the Clayton Act (1914), and the FTC Act (1914). Beyond their legal text, these laws have a rich context, including the transcripts of the debates that the bills’ sponsors participated in, explaining why the bills were written. They arose as a response to the industrial conglomerates of the Gilded Age, and their “robber baron” leaders, whose control over huge segments of the economy gave them a frightening amount of power.
Despite this clarity of intent, the True Purpose of Antitrust has been hotly contested in US history. For much of that history, including the seminal breakup of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1911, the ruling antitrust theory was “harmful dominance.” That’s the idea that companies that dominate an industry are potentially dangerous merely because they are dominant. With dominance comes the ability to impose corporate will on workers, suppliers, other industries, people who live near factories, even politicians and regulators.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the nation's State Council have sketched out a direction for new regulation of its technology industry – and indeed the entire nation.
An Implementation Outline for the Construction of a Government under the Rule of Law, published in full in State-controlled organ Xinhua offers the formulation by which the Communist Party of China intends to govern between now and 2025.
This here is a follow-up to both yesterday's post on VLSI Technology inching closer to a final (though appealable) judgment against Intel and earlier reports on VoiceAge EVS v. Apple. Both VLSI Technology and VoiceAge EVS are funded by Fortress Investment.
The Mannheim Regional Court confirmed to me today that VoiceAge EVS won a case against HMD (which makes phones and has a license to the Nokia trademark for that purpose) on July 23 over EP2707687 on a "transform-domain codeblock in a CELP coder and decoder" (case no. 7 O 116/19; the Presiding Judge of the Seventh Civil Chamber in Mannheim is Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann).
On July 23, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,292,852, owned by AuthWallet, LLC, an NPE and subsidiary of Dynamic IP Deals. The '852 generally relates to transaction processing services. It is currently being asserted against CitiGroup, Square, and American Express.
A newly formed patent troll is looking for big money from small business websites, just for using free, off-the-shelf login verification tools.€
Over the years, Creative Commons has built a diverse and globally representative Summit audience by dedicating resources to increasing diversity and accessibility. This year being virtual is no different – we are pleased to offer the Summit Access Fund to tackle accessibility issues in the virtual space.€
A court in the United States has dismissed Triller's original lawsuit that targeted a site alleged to have pirated the Jake Paul vs Ben Askren fight. In another lawsuit, Triller failed to inform a court that an investigation was underway and faces a case dismissal. In another, Triller faces dismissal due to lack of prosecution.
ThePirateBay.com has been listed for sale this week. The domain was bought at an auction last year after The Pirate Bay team accidentally let it expire. The buyer initially planned to turn it into a legal download portal but that never got off the ground. They're now willing to let it go for $38,000, but interested parties can rent it too.
