You ended up here probably because you are looking to level up your command line skills. And that’s fine, it is the exact same reason I am writing this blog post. Since I began learning how to program, I’ve been a terminal dweller, and it’s been great. I always feel at home when I log into my shell. Today, our terminal experience will feel even better. We will level up our knowledge and our toolbelt with a great tool called tmux.
You have installed Shiny and/or RStudio server in your home computer and it works great as long as you are connected to your local network, however, you can’t access it from other locations, What can you do?
The solution is to expose your server to the public internet by forwarding incoming traffic to the corresponding port in your server. Now, I’m not going to lie to you telling you that this article is going to give you detailed instructions on how to do it with your specific router because it would be virtually impossible, each router brand (an even model) has a different management interface, I can only give you the required steps along with an example using the router I have at home, although, generally speaking, the procedure involves the same steps regardless of the specific router model you have, so with a little effort on your part you should be able to figure out how to make it work with your own router.
After a puzzle game to relax with this weekend? You should go and check out B.i.t.Lock. Not only is it free and good but it also just got a huge free upgrade too.
B.i.t.Lock has you pushing around blocks however the classic idea was spiced-up with how you change the entire shape. Pushing parts of the block into an object with shift one part of it around, so you need to use clever positioning on the grid to get into the correct shape and position. Simple idea but brilliantly executed.
Over the past year, everyone in the PC gaming community has been talking about DLSS and FidelityFX. However, it seems that Linux gamers have been missing out, with DLSS only working through Proton when combined with a beta Nvidia driver and FidelityFX leaving much to be desired in terms of graphics.
Fortunately, Intel appears to want to change that with their new XeSS frame rate boosting technology. Launching alongside their upcoming Alchemist range of GPUs, it promises the ease of implementation of FidelityFX while competing in terms of image quality with DLSS.
Punk Labs emailed to announce that they've released Raster Prime [REMIX], a spacial memory sci-fi puzzle adventure. Created with Godot Engine, it's actually a re-release from their mobile game with it upgraded for desktop systems.
"Welcome to the TRAPPIST System. A monolith was recently discovered dotted with obelisks emitting holographic glyphs and binary controls. What could they mean? Enter the sequences to travel further into the unknown, and unearth a deeper mystery that may never be fully understood."
Any game that claims to have a "genre-first" will always raise some eyebrows and that's exactly what the developers of non - The First Warp are saying with it out now.
It's a point and click adventure that on the surface, it looks like any other. However, they claim to have a properly unique time-manipulation mechanic that's not been seen in the genre before. The story follows "ÃË Ã⢠ÃË", an alien creature stranded across the galaxy far away from home. Through time-warping and manipulation you go through "vast alien faunas in the quest to unravel the mysteries behind your own unexpected disappearance".
Hadean Tactics is an Early Access game that blends together an auto-battler with a deck-builder to give you a thoroughly great experience and there's a new content upgrade out now.
During QuakeCon the original Quake got an enhanced edition released, which Nightdive Studios worked on. It works with Steam Play Proton and you can also use the Steam Play tool Luxtorpeda to play the new content on an open source game engine.
A lot of work this week has been taking place in the background to release openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots.
Documented on the mailing list in the latest openSUSE release engineering meeting was information about some challenges Tumbleweed development had this week building images with the Open Build Service. There were some build failures, which caused some broken builds. These builds aren’t released as a snapshot since these must pass openSUSE’s openQA testing. The size of the ISO media also became too large to fit on a DVD; adjustments are made frequently when the capacity exceeds the size, so let’s get into the snapshot that was released.
The GNOME 40.4 point release comes exactly a month after the GNOME 40.3 update and it’s considered a stable bugfix release for the GNOME 40 series that fixes some critical issues, but also adds various improvements to existing functionality for a better GNOME desktop experience.
Epiphany 40.3 web browser now uses PDF.js only for GET requests and the AdGuard script to block YouTube ads. It also adds supports for manually checking adblock filter content type and comes with a fix for an UI process CPU usage issue.
I had to read this several times. WTF. Use netcat? Surely I was missing some wizardry in the FreeBSD kernel that configured a network printer as some local network target aliased to netlaser, which handled all the printing magic for me. But how? Years of arbitrarily picking from a list of similarly named print drivers in CUPS prevented my brain from accepting what was written. I was confused. After trying to decipher the other sections in the document, I decided I would go for it.
nc 192.168.1.226 9100 < file.pdf
It. Just. Prints.
With the following commit, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 7.0-beta: [...]
Lantronix Open-Q 5165RB is a tiny System-on-Module (SoM) based on the same Qualcomm QRB5165 octa-core IoT processor we’ve just seen in Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform high-end drone reference design.
The ultra-compact (50x29mm) module comes with 8GB LPDDR5, 128GB UFS flash, multiple MIPI camera and display ports, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, and various I/Os.
Lantronix Open-Q 5165RB module specifications...
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
When someone is new to contributing to open source, the best place to start is often beginner-friendly bugs and issues. But before they can do that, they have to be able to find those kinds of issues. As a member of an open source project, there's a lot you can do to help beginners find a way to contribute.
Bearing this in mind, the AnitaB.org open source community prioritizes making our community beginner-friendly. We have initiatives to ensure that we're inclusive for contributors at different levels of experience and for different types of contributions that don't only relate to coding.
Teleport, the Access Plane company, is announcing today that it has secured $30M in Series B funding. The company also released its latest version of its offering, Teleport 7.0 – introducing identity-based access for MongoDB.
This funding round is led by S28 Capital and Kleiner Perkins and follows the company’s record-breaking quarter, with net new annual recurring revenue up 5x and total annual recurring revenue up 2.5x, compared to the second quarter of 2020.
Recently, I’ve been reading through the excellent Database Internals (Alex Petrov, 2019). The first half of the book is dedicated to the implementation of database storage engines – the subsystem(s) of a DBMS that handles long-term persistence of data. A surprising amount of this section discusses the implementation and optimization of various B-Tree data structures.
Twitter’s new user experience with its Chirp font has netizens making memes, fuming about an unpleasant experience, and complaining about headaches. We speak to a few UX designers about why typography in online spaces matter
In view of the growing collaboration between social media influencers and companies for the advertisement of the latter’s products, the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) on Friday came up with a set of guidelines for advertising in the said domain. Underlining that it is ‘critical’ that consumers be able to distinguish when something is being promoted with an intention to influence their opinion or behaviour for an immediate or eventual commercial gain, the self-regulatory voluntary organization listed down the said guidelines.
Politico, the Washington news site popular with Beltway power brokers, is seeking as much as $1 billion in a potential deal with the German publishing giant Axel Springer.
Led by its owner, Robert Allbritton, Politico has been in talks with Springer about a potential investment or an outright sale, two people familiar with the matter said. Such a deal would amount to a hefty premium for Politico, which generates about $200 million a year in revenue, they said.
HOUSTON — It was 9:08 p.m. when Michael Negussie’s phone rang. Twenty minutes had passed since he called 911 asking for emergency crews to check on his cousins and their two children, fearing that they had fainted from carbon monoxide poisoning in their Houston home during a massive winter storm.
A fire captain at the dispatch center told Negussie that an emergency crew had arrived at the two-story town house. But, he said, no one was answering the door.
Facebook has frequently been criticized for a lack of initiative in removing disinformation from its social network. In recent weeks, the company has sought to crack down, including removing a Russia-based anti-vax propaganda network. Some anti-vax activists, however, are going underground, using code words to continue to spread falsehoods and evade content moderation.
In making the announcement, Monika Bickert, vice president of content policy at Facebook, pushed back against the narrative that the twelve accounts were primarily responsible for the spread of vaccine misinformation, writing that focusing on them "misses the forest for the trees."
The anti-vaccine movement (or, as it really should be known, the pro-COVID movement ) appears to be getting increasingly nasty and violent. Worse yet, the same groups of people, specifically the Proud Boys, a right-wing group who fueled the violence in D.C., are now turning their attentions towards undermining any effort to mitigate people's risks of getting sick
One might think – if the client and server are the same, why do I need the client/server exchange? The password is verified during the Authentication Service exchange, so that should be enough. This thought process sounds legit, only they forgot the first rule of fight club: Don’t deviate from the spec.
Earlier this week reports emerged that T-Mobile was investigating a massive hack of the company's internal systems, resulting in hackers gaining access to a massive trove of consumer information they were selling access to in underground forums. Initial estimates were that the personal details of 100 million customers had been accessed (aka all T-Mobile customers). After maintaining radio silence as it investigated the hack, T-Mobile has since released a statement detailing the scale of the intrusion. In short, it was smaller than initial claims, but still massive and terrible:
Security vendor BlackBerry has gone where no other firm in its space has, by providing links to ransomware leaks on the dark web, something that is studiously avoided by both infosec outfits and journalists.
In a post published last month, the company provided a link to the leak site of the Hive ransomware, another Windows-only malware group. The link provided at that time is still valid on Friday morning AEST.
The ransomware attack, detected on Aug. 15, was described by Memorial as an information technology security incident. As a result, user access to IT applications was suspended and temporary disruptions to aspects of clinical applications occurred.
Further, the hospital was forced to cancel all urgent surgical cases and radiology exams on Monday. Primary care appointments went ahead as scheduled.
Malware is rife across Africa, with various countries exhibiting strong growth in all malware types in the first half of 2021. This is a 5% increase in the region, as cybercriminals and [crackers] continue to focus on African countries considering digital transformation advancements and the increase in remote working resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, cyber security company Kaspersky has said.
In an agreement signed in January 2019, IDOT paid $49,500 for access to two years’ worth of raw location data. The dataset consisted of over 50 million “pings” per day from over 5 million monthly-active users. Each data point contained precise latitude and longitude, a timestamp, a device type, and a so-called “anonymized” device identifier.
Excerpt from agreement describing data provided by Safegraph to IDOT
Taken together, these data points can easily be used to trace the precise movements of millions of identifiable people. Although Safegraph claimed its device identifiers were “anonymized,” in practice, location data traces are trivially easy to link to real-world identities.
The US first established a programme to collect the fingerprints, iris scans and facial images of Afghan national security forces after testing prototypes of the system in 2002. The programme’s initial goal was to keep criminals and Taliban insurgents from infiltrating the army and police force. To collect and store this data, the US Department of Defense launched its Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) in 2004.
Over the years, the biometrics initiative has had both coalition and Afghan troops from multiple biometric task forces collecting fingerprint, iris and genetic biometric data from as much of the population as possible, now in the millions. In 2020, the Afghan government launched a biometric system for licensing businesses in order to improve the ease and efficiency with which licences are processed. In January, The Afghan government shared its plans to conduct biometric registration of students and staff at 5000 madrassas around the country.
Much of the pushback against the new measures has been focused on the device-scanning feature, but the civil rights and privacy groups said the plan to blur nudity in children’s iMessages could potentially put children in danger and will break iMessage’s end-to-end encryption.
“Once this backdoor feature is built in, governments could compel Apple to extend notification to other accounts, and to detect images that are objectionable for reasons other than being sexually explicit,” the letter states.
Twitter on Thursday said it’s introducing several new updates to its direct messages, which will roll out to some users in the next few weeks. The changes include the ability to send a direct message to multiple people in separate conversations because who among us has not accidentally started a group chat that way. Now, you can share a tweet in up to 20 separate DM conversations, if the goss is hot enough to share with that many individual tweeters at once.
United Nations experts on Thursday called for a halt to the sale and transfer of surveillance technology until countries introduce a regulatory framework to address the human rights impact of its abuse.
In 2016, hoping to spur advancements in facial recognition, Microsoft released the largest face database in the world. Called MS-Celeb-1M, it contained 10 million images of 100,000 celebrities’ faces. “Celebrity” was loosely defined, though.
Three years later, researchers Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace scoured the data set and found many ordinary individuals, like journalists, artists, activists, and academics, who maintain an online presence for their professional lives. None had given consent to be included, and yet their faces had found their way into the database and beyond; research using the collection of faces was conducted by companies including Facebook, IBM, Baidu, and SenseTime, one of China’s largest facial recognition giants, which sells its technology to the Chinese police.
In the initial stages, the ID Verification will be a voluntary process except in case the local law makes it mandatory. It also understands that some users might not be comfortable sharing their IDs online.
We also have the first collision: two images that hash to the same value.
The next step is to generate innocuous images that NeuralHash classifies as prohibited content.
Another name has been chiseled on the tombstone in the graveyard of empires.
The United States of America. 2001-2021.
I think the predictions of a terrible life under the Taliban are premature. In addition, they are also based on what we have been told about the Taliban. They are mostly ignorant of the region’s history, either as the British-created nation of Afghanistan or the land of various tribes/clans, with the Pashtu being perhaps the most powerful and certainly the best known in the west. Does this mean I support the Taliban’s misogyny? Of course not, but pretending like majority of the people in Afghanistan were better under the occupation is hubristic as can be. There were elements of Afghan society who fared well. Most of them were those with whom the US felt most comfortable with. The vast majority lived outside of that sphere and faced US bombing, Taliban and other militia attacks, and US Marines kicking in their doors at two in the morning, taking away the males in the family, beating them and then destroying homes if the spirit moved them. As I wrote in a 2010 piece re-published in the newsletter of the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA), “there will never be real progress toward a genuine peace in Afghanistan until the US and other members of the International Security Armed Force (ISAF) withdraw their forces.”
Now that the Taliban forces are apparently in charge, they have to lead.€ It is this transition from a warmaking entity to a governing one which will be their test.€ Like most every war, there will most likely be some instances of retribution by the victors against the vanquished.€ One hopes these are few and far between.€ If not, that retribution could easily become the rationale for another invasion of the land by another army intent on having its way there.€ Despite their portrayal as such in the Western media, the Taliban are much more than an armed militia with beards and big guns.€ Their version of Afghan nationalism and religious belief incorporates Afghans from all walks of life.€ As they move into the empty seats of power in Kabul they will be watched closely by those inside the nation, those in Islamabad, Delhi and those in Beijing.€ They will also be watched very closely by US military forces stationed a few hours away and ready to attack at any moment.
On August 27, 1984, a man named Andrés Valenzuela walked into a magazine’s offices in Santiago, Chile, and asked to speak with a journalist. The magazine, Cauce, had been founded during a brief thaw in Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, then entering its 11th year. Valenzuela surprised the journalist when he told her he was an intelligence agent in the Chilean Air Force. But he surprised her even more when he told her that he wanted to sit for an interview and talk about his role in the disappearance, torture, and murder of left-wing dissidents.
Protests have broken out against the Taliban in Kabul and other cities across Afghanistan as the militant group, at war for 20 years, now finds itself in power. Evacuation flights are continuing from Kabul, but the Taliban is preventing many Afghans from reaching the airport, with some being shot or whipped as they attempt to flee the country amid fears that the Taliban will impose draconian restrictions on everyday life as they did during their last time in power. Women especially are terrified of the future, says journalist Nasrin Nawa, who fled the capital Friday and whose sister is still in the country. “They are totally hopeless and stuck at their houses,” Nawa says.
Kabul—Today marks the 102nd anniversary of “independence” in Afghanistan.
We speak with Washington Post investigative reporter Craig Whitlock, author of the new book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” which reveals how multiple U.S. presidents deceived the public about progress in the war despite widespread skepticism among defense and diplomatic officials about the mission. “The public narrative was that the U.S. was always making progress. All these presidents said we were going to win the war, and yet, in private, these officials were extremely pessimistic,” says Whitlock. He also discusses miscalculations in the initial invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Afghan security forces and how U.S. defense contractors have benefited from the last two decades of war.
The chaotic collapse of the Afghan military in recent months made starkly clear that the $83 billion U.S. taxpayers spent to create and fund those security forces achieved little. But a new report this week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction also reveals the depths of failure of the United States’ entire 20-year, $145 billion effort to reconstruct (or construct, in some cases) Afghanistan’s civil society.
John Sopko, the special inspector general since 2012, has long chronicled the government’s miscalculations. In his latest lacerating assessment, he concluded that “the U.S. government continuously struggled to develop and implement a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve.” The U.S. effort was clumsy and ignorant, the report says, calling out the hubris of a superpower thinking it could reshape a country it didn’t understand by tossing gobs of money around.
We look at how the rights of women and ethnic minorities will be impacted by the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan with two Afghan women who fled their country. Mariam Safi, who left Kabul last month and is founding director of the Organization for Policy Research and Development Studies, says the Taliban’s rapid advance across the country surprised many people who had been hoping for a negotiated end to the war. “We had felt that there would be some space for a political settlement,” says Safi. “What has happened has certainly caught everyone by surprise.” We also speak with journalist Zahra Nader, a member of the Hazara minority who says the community risks losing its rights under Taliban rule. “There is lots of discrimination, systematic discrimination, against Hazara people in Afghanistan,” says Nader. “But now it’s going to get even worse.”
The news out of Afghanistan is distressing on many levels, and it's bizarre to think that there's a Techdirt relevant story there, but (unfortunately) it seems like every story these days has some element of content moderation questions baked in. As the Taliban took over the country, it seems that they had a bone to pick... with Facebook. Facebook has banned the Taliban for a while, and has said that it will continue to do so, even as it takes over running the country of Afghanistan. And, the Taliban seem... pretty upset about it.
The government of Venezuela is engaged in negotiations with the country’s Western-backed opposition. The preliminary talks, which took place in Mexico City, are the first of their kind since Venezuela’s diplomatic team withdrew from previous dialogues, which took place in Barbados and Norway in 2019 after U.S. sanctions were tightened.
Corporate media coverage of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s US-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination. I looked at editorials in five major US dailies following the Taliban’s retaking of Kabul: the Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. The editorial boards of these papers consistently trivialized South Asian lives, erased US responsibility for lethal violence, and made untenable assertions about Washington’s supposedly righteous motives in the war.
The Taliban are now in effective control of billions of dollars in U.S. weaponry—from thousands of grenades and machine guns to Black Hawk helicopters—American forces poured into Afghanistan over the past two decades.
The equipment amassment follows months of surrenders by U.S.-backed Afghan security forces that "failed to defend district centers," the Associated Press reported.
The headless flight of NATO troops from Afghanistan and the havoc they leave behind are only the last chapter in a devastating story that began in October 2001. At that time, the US government, supported by allies including the German administration, announced that the terror attacks of September 11 should be answered by a war in Afghanistan. None of the assassins were Afghan. And the Taliban government at the time even offered the US to extradite Osama bin Laden—an offer the US did not even respond to. Virtually no word was said about the country of origin of 15 of the 19 terrorists—Saudi Arabia. On the contrary: members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the USA in a night-and-fog operation so that they could not be interrogated. After classified parts of the 9/11 commission report were released in 2016, it emerged that high-ranking members of the Saudi embassy in Washington had been in contact with the terrorists before the attacks. Consequences? None. They are our allies.
The chilling reports coming out of Afghanistan right now are more than enough to anger any feminist. As hundreds cling to US planes, scrambling to leave the country, women and girls predict a violent backlash and LGBTIQ people fear for their lives. I can understand why you might want our world leaders to act urgently.
Iran has confirmed a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluding that the country has expanded its production of weapons-grade uranium to 60 percent purity.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said on August 18 that the actions are in response to the "non-implementation" of the nuclear agreement and U.S. sanctions.
As [insurrectionists] made their way through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, many of them livestreamed their actions and posted photos and videos on social media. That steady stream of content created an enormous record of evidence that law enforcement needed to sift through to build cases against the accused.
Now, more than 575 federal criminal complaints have been filed, and a striking pattern has emerged: Time and time again, the FBI is relying on crowdsourced tips from an ad hoc community of amateur investigators sifting through that pile of content for clues.
Many British Muslims will use Sharia law as a guidebook, informing them on every day things including family problems and financial decisions - however some countries adopt Sharia law in their courts and have the authority to punish offenders in extreme ways.
The deadly July 12 attack on Najia's home in Faryab province was a chilling preview of the threat now facing women across Afghanistan after the Taliban's takeover of the capital Kabul. CNN is using aliases for Najia and Manizha to protect their identity for safety reasons.
But a senior Muslim cleric, Halliru Maraya of the Islamic Council of Nigeria, says the position of the Hisbah on the mannequins is correct as "Islam is against carving human statues, whatever name you want to call it".
While the announcement in Kano is the first in Nigeria, there have been attempts in other mainly Muslim countries to restrict the use of mannequins.
They tell the camera to stop filming, explaining that the question "made me laugh."
It is doubtful that the videos are all authentic. Rather, the scenes seem staged, which is not unusual on TikTok. The problem is that the platform is particularly popular with children and young people who have not yet acquired sufficient media competence to be able to judge content for its authenticity.
Gorgadji is in the notorious "three-border" zone where Burkina Faso meets Mali and Niger, a focus of the jihadist violence that plagues the wider Sahel region.
Rain fell for several hours at the highest point on the Greenland ice sheet last week — the first rainfall event in recorded history at a location that rarely creeps above freezing temperatures.
Scientists confirmed Wednesday that rain was observed Saturday at Summit Station, a research facility that sits atop the Greenland ice sheet and is operated year-round by the National Science Foundation. It was the first report of rain at the normally frigid summit, and it marks only the third time in less than a decade that above-freezing temperatures were recorded at the Arctic research station, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Wildfires are devastating Greek forests in the worst heat wave in 30 years. Thanks to years of austerity and a right-wing government pushing through further privatizations under cover of the pandemic, even the basic services required to fight the fires are desperately lacking.
Finland is in a good position to succeed in climate action under the Paris Agreement, according to Sitra’s new study “Course correction – Finland towards 1.5-degree compatible measures”. But there are many obstacles to overcome. They include the uncertain long-term outlook, inadequate economic incentives and deficiencies in infrastructure.
Two thirds of the global economy, including several major Asian coal users, including Japan, South Korea and China, have announced net zero ambitions which will require material declines in the use of fossil fuels, especially coal. However, India has yet to commit to a net zero target. According to data from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), since 2010 India has cancelled or retired 590 GW of coal plants. Nevertheless, India has a coal power plant pipeline of almost 60 GW, which represents 15% of the global development pipeline.
This is uneconomic and risks shouldering Indian consumers and taxpayers with much of the financial and environmental burden further down the line by linking the grid into higher cost thermal energy and potentially leaving a swathe of unprofitable coal plants to become stranded assets.
Fundamentally “Towards a Dark Sky Standard” is a general signposting guide to introduce the mindset of dark sky protection by ensuring the right considerations are included in lighting design. It is intended to sit as a precursor to the planning phase and to direct users to more detailed design and planning policies, such as those created for managing IDA places.
I went to the upper deck of our common house yesterday evening to look at the red ball sun slowly sinking into the smoky horizon. Across Lake Union, Queen Anne Hill was veiled in haze. The lake was dotted with a multitude of sailboats and motorboats. Of course, people were escaping the heat. But it seemed incongruous, a picture of enjoyment through a dull gray filter. Another vista of our schizoid world.
How many tragic pictures do we have to see? How many announcements? Climate Code Red, say the world’s authoritative climate science group. July the hottest month in history. Shutdown of the Atlantic currents that drive the world’s climate a real prospect. Fires ravaging Southern Europe, Siberia, Western North America.
A “Red Wall” Conservative MP who said persuading Brits to cut their emissions was a “hard sell” because of inaction by China took a €£3,000 donation in 2019 from a major Brexit-backing car import business operating in the country.€
In a WhatsApp chat with fellow Tory MPs following the release of a poll that found petrol and diesel drivers are more likely to vote Tory, reported in The Sun last week, Brendan Clarke-Smith said: “It’s a hard sell asking people to make sacrifices when the rest of the world, China/Russia etc, are carrying on as usual.”
The environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR) is planning a series of protests targeting the City of London to demand an end to investments in fossil fuels around the world.€
The campaign group’s “Impossible Rebellion” is expected to see thousands from across the country travel to London’s financial district for at least two weeks of marches and occupations, starting on Monday 23 August in Trafalgar Square.€
In the news today that EU using record amounts of solar-generated power expressed as a percentage of total power used, now 10% of all power used.
The article started out celebratory but switched to a pessimistic tone, saying that we’re still lagging behind coal, which is 14% of all power used, and behind our 2030 goal, which is that solar should be 40% of all power used. “To reach that, we need to use 30 TWh solar-generated power yearly.”
That is completely cart-before-horse backwards wrong. What we need is to use less coal and other fossils. Lithosphere-originated greenhouse gasses needs to go down as an absolute number, not as a percentage of power used. We can’t outrace it.
Wall Street analysts are advising their clients to invest in Canadian tar sands companies on the expectation that the highly controversial Line 3 and Trans Mountain Expansion pipelines overcome Indigenous-led public opposition and reach completion.€
Singling out a handful of Canadian oil companies as investment ideas, Goldman Sachs wrote in a report to its clients on August 16: “We recognize, in the near-term, that the group is facing three negative equity narratives.” This includes: investor concerns about the environmental impact of Canada’s oil sands; more oil supply from OPEC, which would compete with Canadian oil; and the long-term uncertainty about oil demand amid a global shift away from fossil fuels.€
The life history and ecology of seahorses make them particularly vulnerable to overfishing and environmental disturbance, including climate change. Their exoskeleton allows them to be dried and preserved easily. Many cultures believe seahorses to hold medicinal properties, especially traditional Chinese medicine, in which their dried bodies are believed to cure or prevent skin infections, asthma, and impotence, despite no evidence to support these claims. At least 25 million are traded annually for Chinese medicine. Fisheries harvest them faster than they can replenish their populations, leading to alarming declines in seahorse numbers.
The reservoir supply cuts will mean less water – and tough allocation decisions – for agriculture, towns, and Native American tribes in the arid region, which is at risk of its 22nd year of drought.
In the months after President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in December 2017, some tax professionals grew giddy as they discovered opportunities for their clients inside a law that already slashed rates for corporations and wealthy individuals.
With both chambers of Congress in recess following a pair of key U.S. Senate votes on infrastructure legislation, activists with the Green New Deal Network coalition on Thursday hosted a "Seal the Deal" national day of action pressuring Democrats to keep fighting for a bold $3.5 trillion package.
"Members of Congress must listen to their constituents and pass an infrastructure and jobs plan that prioritizes climate justice investments, expanding the care economy, and good jobs for all."—Adrien Salazar, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance
The engineer widely recognized as the inventor of Ethereum, the world’s most-used blockchain, cast doubt on Square Inc. chief executive officer Dorsey’s plan for the company to create a new business focused on decentralized financial services that uses Bitcoin. The largest cryptocurrency, Buterin said in an interview on Bloomberg Television, doesn’t really have the functionality to do that as it was designed largely to be a “currency of the house.”
Some $100 billion in payments have been enabled by Facebook over the past year, said David Marcus, who runs the company’s financial services unit. But that’s just the start of the social network’s ambitions in the finance industry, Mr. Marcus writes in a new memo about the country’s “broken” payments system, reported in the DealBook newsletter.
At the center of Facebook’s push into payments is Novi, a digital wallet intended for users to move money around the world quickly and cheaply (free, in many cases). The company had a plan to pair it with a “stablecoin” cryptocurrency called Libra, but that was shelved amid regulatory scrutiny, and now the scaled-back project, known as Diem, is overseen by an outside nonprofit group seeking the necessary government approvals.
It seems increasingly likely that BoJo won’t seek a second term as prime minister.
The next general election is due in 2024, though many political commentators are suggesting a snap election could be called a year earlier. In that case, the Tories may want BoJo’s successor to be in place a year or so before this projected election, so this person can shape the election campaign from the outset.
Here’s the picture in retail for production and non-supervisory workers. Note that real wages were actually somewhat lower in 2018 than they had been in 2002. (These numbers are 1982-1984 dollars, so multiply by about 2.6 to get current dollars.) They did rise in 2018 and 2019, due to a tightening of the labor market, as well as minimum wage hikes at the state and local€ level. The impact of the pandemic and the recovery has been a big net positive. Real wages in the sector are roughly 4.6 percent higher than the level of two years ago, a 2.3 percent annual real wage gain.
Average Hourly Earnings for Production and non-Supervisory Workers in Retail , 1982-84 dollars
Off lately, Twitter has been accidentally adding its trust blue badge of verification on several fake accounts online -- most of which have been reportedly a part of a botnet.
While none of the social media platforms have publicly changed their policies on the Taliban, “moderation practices have come under close scrutiny, and many are shifting resources to ensure the policies are appropriately enforced”.
A report in The Washington Post raised a question whether the Taliban will be allowed to wrest control of the official Facebook and Twitter accounts for the government of Afghanistan.
YouTube said it terminates all Taliban-linked accounts based on its interpretation of US sanctions law.
Following the Taliban’s taking of Kabul and effectively gaining control of Afghanistan, social media companies are having to deal with a novel problem: Should they allow the Islamist group to post content on their platforms?
A 38-year-old artist, known as Djamel Ben Ismail, was killed by a group of people on Wednesday, after it was wrongly suspected that he had started several wildfires in the Kabyle region of Algeria.
The fires started in the mountainous Berber region of the country. A total of 47 civilians and 28 soldiers have died in the blaze, with olive groves and livestock destroyed.
Mr Ben Ismail had actually travelled to the area to help, when he was wrongly accused of having started several of the fires and swarmed by a mob, the head of the judicial police said on Sunday.
Officials at an Arkansas high school physically tore out pages from the school's published yearbook that included references to the U.S. Capitol riot, George Floyd and COVID-19, claiming "community backlash," an action the Student Press Law Center condemned as censorship.
This is an ongoing effort however, as for many years, China left its tech companies to their own devices—allowing them to compete and engage with American companies and practices as they saw fit.
Now, China is attempting to reel them in, as Lu observes: “They are trying to domesticate this wild animal,” he said. “Sometimes with a slap on the wrist, sometimes a punch to the face.”
We analyzed Apple’s filtering of product engravings in six regions, discovering 1,105 keyword filtering rules used to moderate their content. We found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied across these regions. Within mainland China, we found that Apple censors political content including broad references to Chinese leadership and China’s political system, names of dissidents and independent news organizations, and general terms relating to religions, democracy, and human rights and that part of this politically motivated censorship is applied to users in Hong Kong and Taiwan. We present evidence that Apple does not fully understand what content they censor and that, rather than each censored keyword being born of careful consideration, many seem to have been thoughtlessly reappropriated from other sources. In one case, Apple censored ten Chinese names surnamed “Zhang” with generally unclear political significance. These names appear to have been copied from a list we found also used to censor products from a Chinese company.
Among 12 caricatures of Islam’s prophet Muhammad published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on September 30, 2005, “it was Westergaard’s image that would change my life,” the paper’s cultural editor Flemming Rose wrote. As he detailed in his 2014 book, The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, Kurt Westergaard, who died July 14, ignited a firestorm over the right to criticize Islam.
The artist claimed that she’d been afraid for her safety following the incident, alleging that she’d been sent abusive death threats that were so extreme that she’d had to “go into hiding.”
Despite a public apology from Rihanna following the immediate backlash, the artist claims she was forced into hiding after receiving a barrage of death threats over the song. She claims the constant threat of being decapitated and murdered led to anxiety and depression. The artist also tweeted an apology for unknowingly including the sample in her song.
Funding challenges like this, often common for public television outlets during conservative presidential administrations, created a natural tension between television created as a public service and the commercial realities of how the bills needed to be paid. So often, public broadcasting would turn to underwriting, allowing corporations to pick up the bills in a way that wasn’t directly advertising but served much the same purpose.
In the 1997 book Made Possible By …: The Death of Public Broadcasting in the United States, author James Ledbetter makes a compelling case that this kind of underwriting threatened the very mission of the public television, because of the way that financial pressures could directly or indirectly influence what gets on the air.
“Today, corporate underwriting represents more than 16 percent of PBS’ overall budget—up from 10 percent a decade go—and 27 percent of its national programming costs,” Ledbetter wrote at the time. “Though that may appear to be far from a controlling interest, there are virtually no programs on the PBS dial that are not in some way beholden to private, commercial firms.”
OnlyFans is popular with some celebrities, adult performers and models who have used it to bolster their incomes and profiles. Adult performers, in particular, have gravitated to OnlyFans as the adult video industry has been geographically decentralized and taken over by free video sites.
In a striking change for a company best known for its sexually explicit content, OnlyFans will begin banning users from posting content containing “sexually explicit conduct” this October due to requests from banking partners and payment providers, the company said Thursday.
OnlyFans, a website known for its racy content and which gained popularity during coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, said Thursday it would ban "sexually explicit" content in a new policy starting in October.
Despite its ability to draw eyeballs, and the safer environment it provides sex workers, online porn is a hard sell for investors. Recall that as Verizon prepared to sell Tumblr to Automattic, the blogging site permanently banned adult content in 2018, a highly controversial move at the time.
Between the lines: Sex sells, based on company financials leaked to Axios, but it also scares off venture capitalists.
OnlyFans said the change had come after pressure from banking partners.
The U.K.-based company said it is making the changes “to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers,” in a statement provided to Variety.
Effective Oct. 1, 2021, “OnlyFans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct,” the company said in a statement. “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines.”
According to OnlyFans, creators will continue to be allowed to post content containing nudity “as long as it is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy.” The site’s terms currently allow nudity except in the case of content featuring public nudity recorded in or broadcast from a jurisdiction where public nudity is illegal.
Mastercard recently updated its requirements for banks that process payments for websites that sell adult content as well.
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR founder Jeff Cohen about FAIR’s beginnings for the August 13, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Solitary confinement, torture and harsh punishments are an ever-present risk for those reporting on allegations of discrimination against Iran’s Kurdish residents. Even fleeing to nearby Iraqi Kurdistan is no guarantee of safety.
In the case of Sharam Amjadian and Morteza Haq-Bayan, a court in the city of Sanandaj sentenced both to two and half years in prison and 90 lashes for spreading false news.
The conviction is related to a Telegram channel they ran that had nearly 10,000 followers.
Many Afghan journalists told CPJ they are too afraid to speak on the record. To get a picture of what’s happening on the ground, CPJ features editor Naomi Zeveloff spoke to Butler and Dhawan via video about what they have learned. Their interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Taliban’s Entry in Kabul Is a Defeat for the United States
In recent years, the United States has failed to accomplish any of the objectives of its wars. The U.S. entered Afghanistan with horrendous bombing and a lawless campaign of extraordinary rendition in October 2001 with the objective of ejecting the Taliban from the country; now, 20 years later, the Taliban is back. In 2003, two years after the U.S. unleashed a war in Afghanistan, it opened an illegal war against Iraq, which ultimately resulted in an unconditional withdrawal of the United States in 2011 after the refusal by the Iraqi parliament to allow U.S. troops extralegal protections. As the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it opened a terrible war against Libya in 2011, which resulted in the creation of chaos in the region.
After Attorney General Buttigieg presented the bill of indictment against Fenech on Wednesday, the businessman will now stand trial.
He could face life imprisonment for the murder charge and 20 to 30 years for criminal conspiracy, if convicted. A date has not yet been set for the trial.
As RSF said in a report in 2009, “The reign of the Taliban from 1996 to 2001 was a dark period in Afghanistan’s history.” All media were banned except one, Voice of Sharia, which broadcast nothing but propaganda and religious programmes.
RSF nonetheless thinks that some attention should be paid to the terms that the Taliban spokesman used in this unprecedented statement.
The final 2020 Census numbers were disseminated to the states last week, and it caused a bit of a freak-out among those pining for a white ethnostate. The absolute number of white people declined for the first time in US history, and that made white nationalist spokesperson Tucker Carlson scream into his Fox bullhorn and warn his dangerous viewers that the Democratic Party is engaged in an alleged plot to replace them. Carlson sounded the same note that inspired the Klan in Charlottesville and the mob of white insurrectionists on January 6, because rallying viewers to engage in ethnic cleansing is just standard fare for the white-wing media these days.
The Biden administration and congressional Democrats had months to figure out what to do about the eviction moratorium. The federal ban on evictions, enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September, has prevented millions of people who are unable to pay rent from losing their homes during the pandemic. But it lapsed on July 31, after the administration refused to renew it and a last-minute attempt by the House Democrats fizzled out.
I have a book about to drop called The Kaepernick Effect, in which I interview dozens upon dozens of these youth athletes. What I found is that they didn’t take a knee during the anthem to support or mimic Kaepernick and his efforts to get back into the league. They didn’t do it to follow a trend. If anything, as high school students, they were putting themselves out there to be bullied, mocked, and even threatened with losing their spot on the team, not to mention violence. But still they took that knee. They did it because they, like so many other young people across this country, are fed up with white supremacy and police violence. You cannot understand why 2020’s police murder of Floyd caused some of the largest protests in the history of the United States without understanding the righteous impatience of these young people. You can’t understand why 2021 has seen this conjoined political backlash against anti-racist teaching and Black people voting without understanding that at its root is a fear of a generation more diverse and less tolerant of intolerance than any other in US history.
Dorje, a graduate of the Machu County Middle School in Gansu province's Kanlho (Gannan) prefecture, may also have come to the attention of police by joining with students in submitting a petition opposing county government orders to give classroom instruction only in Chinese when schools reopen at the end of this year’s summer vacation, sources said.
Language rights have become a particular focus for Tibetan efforts to assert national identity in recent years, with Tibetan schools including kindergartens and elementary schools now teaching almost entirely in Chinese.
An air-conditioning technician belonging to Udupi district in Karnataka returned home Wednesday after spending 604 days in a prison in Saudi Arabia on charges of defaming the Crown Prince and a community on social media. Harish Begera, 34, faced life in prison or the death penalty, before a probe by the Udupi police found that impersonators were behind the post that landed him in jail.
A senior British army official told the reporter how his troops have been crying at night after seeing women throwing their children over the barbed wires, asking the soldiers to catch them on the other side.
“It was terrible, women were throwing their babies over the razor wire, asking the soldiers to take them, some got caught in the wire,” narrated the British soldier.
An 18-year-old Syrian Arab girl, Aida Hamoudi Saeedo, was recently executed by firing squad for refusing to marry her cousin. She lived with her parents and brother in the al-Hasaka region in northeastern Syria.
Ostensibly, she lived under her family’s protection — but the firing squad that executed her consisted of her own relatives.
By stating this, they transfer all blame to the victims and discharge themselves of any responsibility. They also accuse minorities and NGOs of making it a problem and claim it is a false allegation to enhance their own prominence.
As the Taliban took control of the Afghan capital of Kabul on Sunday, a spokesperson for the group uploaded five videos to his official YouTube page. The videos, each between two and three minutes long, showed Taliban leaders congratulating fighters on their victories.
“Now is the time to serve the nation and to give them peace and security,” Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban, said in one video in Pashtun as he sat in front of senior officials in a curtained office.
` Dozens of new pro-Taliban accounts that had sprung up on Twitter in recent days then shared the five videos. Within 24 hours, they had together racked up more than 500,000 views.
More than 100 new official or pro-Taliban accounts and pages have surfaced on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, despite a ban on the group by the sites.
The project has been named Apricot and the creation of this subsea cable is expected to connect Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia to quench the thirst for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity
In case you remember, in March this year, Facebook had announced two new transpacific subsea cables bringing Singapore, Guam, Indonesia and the US west coast together via Bifrost (developed by Facebook) and Echo (developed by Google)
The newer Apricot cable along with Echo are complementary submarine systems that, according to Google, will allow benefits with multiple paths in and out of Asia.
This includes newer routes through southern Asia, that’ll enable a considerably higher degree of resilience for Google Cloud and digital services.
DirecTV began updating AT&T TV and AT&T TV Now customers of the change on August 14th. On the welcome screens of both services’ mobile apps informing them that the change would officially take place on August 26th, a spokesperson confirmed to The Verge. DirectTV Stream rebrands AT&T’s services acquired in the TPG Capital deal, which did not include HBO Max. (WarnerMedia, home to HBO Max, is set to merge with Discovery in mid-2022.)
The new complaint makes the same central argument that Facebook has maintained a monopoly on “personal social networking” by gobbling up potential competitors and enforcing unfair agreements, while offering new evidence and analysis.
It uses Facebook’s data on daily active users to counter those concerns from Judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama-era nominee. The FTC noted that Facebook has “tens of millions” more monthly users than the next largest personal social networking provider, Snapchat.
The Federal Trade Commission filed an amended complaint against Facebook on Thursday that accused the social media giant of engaging in an illegal “buy-or-bury” scheme to beat out competition after failing to innovate on their own.
“In light of emerging evidence of a possible need for boosters for the fully vaccinated, most of whom live in high-income countries, the need for a People’s Vaccine has never been clearer. Governments must agree to waive intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights [sic] and force pharmaceutical companies to transfer technology to broaden vaccine production and effective distribution across the globe, starting now. Rich countries donating paltry amounts of left-over doses is nowhere near sufficient to end the pandemic – we need a transformational approach.
“Failing to protect high-risk populations anywhere in the world is bad public health practice, opening the door to more dangerous variants and a never-ending cycle driven by inequity.”
A couple of weeks back, we discussed 2021's thus-far dumbest controversy: Ben & Jerry's ceasing to sell ice cream in "occupied Palestinian territory". The ice cream maker is owned by Unilver and found itself in intellectual property news after a law firm in Israel seized upon Ben & Jerry's announcement to not sell its wares in a few sections of Israel to suggest that meant it was relinquishing its trademark. To that end, the firm sought to register a company it named "Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream of Judea and Samaria." This action was part of a possibly coordinated attack response on the company, which included action in the States such as Florida Man Governor Ron DeSantis suggesting this meant B&J's was "boycotting Israel" and should be scrutinized for that, and Jewish leaders indicating that B&J's ice cream may lose its kosher rating.
Charter Communications has filed a patent application for a technology that can detect and ban rogue devices on its network. This can help to block orphan and cloned modems, which connect without permission. However, the ISP notes that the same technology can also be used to ban piracy-linked devices, such as illicit streaming boxes.
Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House are asking a court to reject Internet Archive's request to access huge volumes of data regarding the sales performance of books. IA wants to counter the publishers' lawsuit by showing that its lending library did no harm but the publishers describe the request as not only "burdensome in the extreme" but also "irrelevant".
Apple has reignited a legal battle with Corelluim days after settling with the security firm over an ongoing lawsuit against the company for providing a virtual environment for security researchers that recreates its operating system.
Apple on Tuesday filed an appeal of a December ruling in which a judge dismissed an argument that Corellium had infringed Apple’s copyright by offering researchers a simulated environment that emulates Apple’s iOS software. The environment allows researchers to hunt for bugs via a controllable browser that can be rebooted, instead of jailbreaking an actual iPhone.
