Du is a useful command for disk analysis on Linux and today we're looking at a rewrite of this application in Rust that adds in a bunch of really interesting an useful features.
Today we are looking at Voyager Live 11. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, based on Debian 11, Gnome 3.38, and uses about 1.3GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Voyager Live 11. Enjoy!
The Linux kernel is turning 30 this year! If you're like us, that's a big deal and we are celebrating Linux this week with a couple of special posts.
Today we start with a roundup of responses from around the community answering "What Linux kernel module can you not live without? And, why?" Let's hear what these 10 enthusiasts have to say.
For freelancers and employees who regularly work from home, remote communication is one of the many things that need to be taken care of. Video conferencing has now replaced in-office meetings for many of us. Tools like Zoom and Skype have seen a massive increase in growth.
Luckily, there isn't any shortage of quality video conferencing software for Linux. This guide covers some of the best Linux video conferencing apps to help developers and employees stay on top of their work goals.
PipeWire, for managing audio/video streams on Linux and proving itself to be a viable replacement to PulseAudio and JACK, is out with a new update.
Just three weeks after PipeWire 0.3.33, the PipeWire 0.3.34 release occurred today with bug fixes and other improvements. PipeWire 0.3.34 fixes some "critical issues" in the prior release around some devices not showing up and default devices being lost. PipeWire 0.3.34 also now handles consumer driver streams to ensure the producer v-sync to the consumer monitor for headless setups, improved stream routing, Bluetooth battery status handling improvements, the ability to configure the internal latency of ALSA devices, and a fast convolver added to implement virtual surround sinks or reverbs.
This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
The Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way of interacting with your computer. To harness all the power of Linux, it’s highly recommended mastering the interface. It’s true the CLI is often perceived as a barrier for users migrating to Linux, particularly if they’re grown up using GUI software exclusively. While Linux rarely forces anyone to use the CLI, some tasks are better suited to this method of interaction, offering inducements like superior scripting opportunities, remote access, and being far more frugal with a computer’s resources.
The part of the operating system responsible for managing files and directories is called the file system. It organizes our data into files, which hold information, and directories (also called ‘folders’), which hold files or other directories.
One of the commands that help visualize your file system is tree, a command that list contents of directories in a tree-like format. One of the issues with tree is that the output is unwieldy with large directories. Step forward broot, a utility that gives an overview of a directory, and much much more.
However, some things never stick in my head, nor my fingers, and I have to google them every time. jq is one of these.
I know it’s a powerful tool, but I always end up back at Google and then copying and pasting a solution from somewhere. So I solve my problem but never learn the tool.
It’s time to fix that. In this article, I’m going to go over the basics building blocks of jq in enough depth that you will be able to understand how jq works. Of course, you still might occasionally need to head to google to find a function name or check your syntax, but at least you’ll have a firm grounding in the basics.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InfluxDB on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, InfluxDB is a time-series database (TSDB) that is designed to handle high write and query loads, InfluxDB is developed by InfluxData and written in Go.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of InfluxDB on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
Today we are looking at how to install Mixxx on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
You may have noticed that sometimes your system consumes too much of memory, which makes your application’s slow or unresponsive.
In such a scenario, what do you think would be the best approach to identify the processes that are consuming more memory in a Linux machine?
This can be easily identified using the top command and the ps command and we will explain how to use these two commands to identify which processes are eating all the resources on your system.
Earlier last year, Google had released Debian Buster for Chromebooks, which brought many improvements to Linux. That includes stability, better GUI support, graphics acceleration, and more. Now, with the new Debian release called Bullseye (also called Debian 11), Google has started incorporating new changes to the Linux container. You can now update your Chromebook to Debian Bullseye and check out the improvements brought to the Linux container. And no, you don’t need to move to the highly buggy Canary channel. So without further ado, let’s find out how to install Debian Bullseye on a Chromebook.
Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. The Chromium codebase is widely used. Microsoft Edge, Opera, and many other browsers are based on the code.
In the following guide, you will know how to install Chromium Web Browser on your Debian 11 Bullseye operating system. The same principle will work for the older stable version Debian 10, Buster.
VirtualBox is an open-sourced, cross-platform virtualization manager application. It is owned by Oracle allows running multiple guest operating systems(OS) at the same time. VirtualBox supports guest operating systems such as Windows, Debian, Fedora, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, and more.
Your hardware should support and enabled hardware virtualization technology to run VirtualBox.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install VirtualBox 6 on Debian 11.
How gaming companies treat their modding communities that spring up around their games is something of a fault line in the industry. Game studios tend to be either pro-modding or not, with very little space in between. Nintendo, for instance, is notoriously anti-modding of its games. Bethesda, on the other hand, has traditionally been quite open-minded when it comes to the modding communities that have sprung up around its games. We've made the point for a long, long time that embracing modding communities is typically a massive boon to gaming companies and the restrictive attitude companies like Nintendo take makes little sense. Mods extend the shelf life and interest of games, driving attention and elongating the sales cycle and windows for those games. Giving up a little control for more sales seems to only make sense.
CONSCRIPT from Catchweight Studio is an upcoming survival horror where you're a lone French soldier in the trenches, as you set off to try and find your brother during the Battle of Verdun.
"CONSCRIPT is an upcoming survival horror game inspired by classics of the genre - set in 1916 during the Great War. CONSCRIPT will blend all the punishing mechanics of older horror games into a cohesive, tense, and unique experience.
In CONSCRIPT, you play as a French soldier searching for his missing-in-action brother during the Battle of Verdun. Will you be able to search twisted trenches, navigate overrun forts, and cross no-mans-land to find him, and ensure a home goes unbroken?"
Want to care for the bees? The upcoming casual sim APICO from TNgineers is opening up a Steam Playtest that starts on August 30 for anyone to give it a try.
"APICO is a laid-back beekeeping sim game about breeding, collecting, & conserving bees! Leave your boring city job behind to return to your family home in Port APICO and get back to your beekeeping roots.
Set in a series of lush environments, APICO uniquely combines resource gathering, biology, and beekeeping minigames, taking ideas from a mix of real-life and fantasy apiculture & floriculture."
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, a silly single-player adventure that reviewed well and one I personally enjoyed has decided to drop Linux support.
Snoozy Kazoo and Graffiti Games recently put out a big free update for the game, which is not coming to Linux.
Another coming out of Gamescom 2021 is a brand new short trailer for Jupiter Moons: Mecha, a deck-builder that puts you in the pilot seat of a big powerful mech unit.
It combines many of my favourite things: replayable gameplay, deck-building and big customizable mechs. What's not to love about that? The new trailer that appeared during Gamescom isn't particularly long, more of a teaser but it does show plenty of neon-soaked visuals, lots of lasers and plenty more to be excited about.
Interested in the early history of coding games? Coding History: 3D from Mode7 to DOOM from indie game developer Eniko (founder of Kitsune Games) will walk you through it, while also providing open source code you can use and learn from.
Coding History: 3D from Mode7 to DOOM will be done as a video series across many episodes with voice over commentary to explain it all. Each episode will explore the concepts behind various parts of the history and the developer will be providing MIT licensed code for each episode project too. It's all going to be cross-platform with various parts like graphics, sound and input done with the FNA library.
I bet you are. Finding cool new Linux software to play with is a major reason why people read blogs like this one (and we write about GTK apps often, so consider bookmarking us).
Chances are you’re already familiar with GNOME’s core apps like Nautilus and Calculator as they (usually) come preinstalled in Linux distros that make use of GNOME.
But there’s a more diverse ecosystem of software out there — and GNOME wants more people to know about it.
Enter the new “Apps For GNOME” website.
Haiku, Inc. is proud to announce that we have hired existing contributor waddlesplash to work on general Haiku improvement full-time. The contract was signed on Monday, August 23, 2021 and waddlesplash plans to start work tomorrow.
LibreELEC 10 is here to bring Kodi 19 “Matrix” to LibreELEC users and comes with better support for Raspberry Pi 4 devices, supporting HDMI output up to 4Kp30, HDR output (HDR10 and HLG), HD audio passthrough (Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD), as well as H264 and H265 hardware decoding.
However, there are still many blockers that might not let you enjoy a perfect LibreELEC experience on the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. For example, there’s no deinterlacing with the hardware video decoders, 10-bit and 12-bit video output isn’t implemented, and the Hyperion add-on no longer works as it doesn’t support the new graphics driver stack.
We mostly just use them as portals to the internet where we access the real tools we need. It is therefore in that spirit I am pleased to say the latest version of Ubuntu LTS-Ubuntu 20.04.3 is finally out after a few weeks of delays.
A brief guide to Ubuntu versions
If you are mildly familiar with Ubuntu then you know that they use the name-month scheme to name their releases. This means that Ubuntu 20.04 was released in April of last year. This is why it might confuse you to learn that I am talking about it in August of 2021. Let me explain.
The development of the operating systems for smartphones has been on for a very long time. For those who started reading about smartphones a few years ago, there are many mobile systems that they never knew existed. The mobile phone system business has since become a two-horse race between Android and iOS. However, this was not always the case. Most recently, Huawei’s HarmonyOS is coming up with millions of smartphones right now. However, a long time ago, there were many other mobile systems like Ubuntu. Unfortunately, these systems all disappeared in the waves of history.
The third point release - Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is now available. Here's how to download/upgrade.
While Ubuntu 21.10 isn't being released for another two months, the release schedule for Ubuntu 22.04 has been published that is rather notable in being the next bi-annual long-term support (LTS) release.
The release schedule published today puts the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release as 21 April 2022. That release date isn't really surprising and basically jives with the rhythm and normal release time we've come to expect from Canonical over the better part of the past two decades.
We’ve already covered plenty of NXP i.MX 8M Plus systems-on-module and carrier boards, but here’s another solution with Forlinx OKMX8MP-C SBC single board computer based on FETMX8MP-C SoM with 4GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC flash.
The feature-packed board also offers dual Gigabit Ethernet, 4G and 5G cellular connectivity support via mPCIe and M.2 sockets, multiple display and camera interfaces, RS485 and CAN Bus connector, USB interfaces, various expansion headers, and more…
AAEON FWS-2280 is a Linux network appliance based on an Intel Elkhart Lake Atom x6000E, Celeron, or Pentium processor, with up to 32GB RAM, with 5 wired interfaces, supports for wireless expansion.
The system is designed to power network applications including UTM (Unified threat management ), firewall, SD-WAN (Software-defined Wide Area Network), VPN, and more.
So, off the bat, it seems that while GPS has the capabilites to track a disc, the footprint is too large to make much sense. I suppose that means we should look at other means of technology to find a better method...perhaps an RFID sticker that could be attached to the disc to ensure it doesn't affect the game? Or maybe an Airtag that's lightweight and can be integrated into the Apple ecosystem? We'll try those out next time, so stay tuned, and if you have ideas, feel free to help us save some experimentation time in the comments!
LibreOffice 7.2 Community updates improvements to interoperability with legacy DOC files, and DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX documents.
Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by the ISO in April 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they embed a large amount of hidden artificial complexity. This causes handling issues with LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the OpenDocument Format).
LibreOffice says its developers are tackling these issues.
Teachers of mathematics often need a parabola in their instructions or exercises. Creating a parabola by using a chart is cumbersome. Therefore I have generated some parabolas as custom shape for anyone to use. You can get them in this LibreOffice Writer document.
The parabola-shapes are contained in a document. You can cop and paste a shape from there to your document or you can drag the shapes into your Gallery. The document contains in addition some explanations how the shapes were generated. You can download the document from the wiki.
At harvest, the whole town of Sebastopol, where I lived for nearly 40 years, smelled of riple apples and stank of the waste product of the apples when they were turned into juice and sauce. The railroad brought apples from orchards to processing plants. The tracks once went down the center of Main Street. Then progress, suburbanization and gentrification arrived, the tracks were ripped up and Main Street became one-way.
Orchards were subdivided, houses, some of them McMansions were built and sold, and vineyards soon spread across the whole landscape. Grapes are now the monocrop; everywhere one turns it looks nearly the same, with rows and rows of grapes running uphill and downhill and across valleys in military fashion. It’s a similar story elsewhere around the world, though the crop differs.
That link between age and wisdom—is it just a joke?
August 9th the local daily reported (inside the paper, but above the fold) that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had issued its most recent and most dire warning about “unequivocal” and “human-caused” global heating.
The United Nations characterized it as “code red for humanity.” But …. I dunno.
Recently, following our announcement that we have removed all Google ads and tracking code from Techdirt, a reader reached out to us with a novel (and greatly appreciated!) proposal for supporting the change and our ongoing reporting while also helping out a good cause: buying an ad — not for their own benefit, but for that of a public interest campaign that aligns perfectly with our own values. That's why you see a new banner in the sidebar on the site, encouraging our readers to sign an open letter put together by FSFE calling on the EU to pass a law requiring all publicly financed software to be made available under a free and open source license.
We've noted for years that the FCC's purported "war on robocalls" has been predominantly empty. Just a few years ago, for example, the FCC patted itself on the back for some minor rule changes that simply let wireless carriers offer robocall blocking tech by default. And quite often, the "record" fines the FCC announces to punish robocallers are never actually collected. Making matters worse, the US government usually only targets smaller scam robocallers, and not any of the major "legit" industries (like debt collectors) that utilize the same tactics as robocall scammers to harass struggling Americans they know can't pay anyway.
A few years ago, while doing some freelance summer copywriting for the catalog of a high end brand of crystals, I found myself sifting through poems about dreams. To frame the glittering artwork within the catalog (and thus, ultimately, to further enhance the crystals for sale), I was instructed to pull quotes from Surrealist texts. Fragments of dream imagery from the work of Breton and Césaire were reduced to graphic design elements that were placed stylishly around brand copy and images of expensive things.
I’m Karim, an audience editor here at ProPublica. That means I spend many of my working hours reading about pain and suffering and working with reporters whose job it is to bear witness to the most traumatic moments of people’s lives. It’s something I’ve thought about and struggled with a lot during my time at ProPublica, and it’s been exacerbated by living through the pandemic news cycle of constant misfortune and death.
Last week, in partnership with The Texas Tribune and NBC Universal, we published a story about a family poisoned by carbon monoxide fumes in Houston during the severe winter storms and power failures in February. The reporters, Perla Trevizo, Lexi Churchill, Suzy Khimm and Mike Hixenbaugh, show how a team of first responders visited Shalemu Bekele and Etenesh Mersha’s home following a 911 call reporting that the family had fainted; after knocking on the door, the emergency responders left before making contact with those inside.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. is building Polaris, which will be supercharged with 2,240 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs squeezed into 560 total nodes when it’s deployed in early 2022. That will enable it to achieve almost 1.4 exaflops of theoretical artificial intelligence performance, Nvidia said, and up to 44 petaflops, or quadrillion FLOPS of peak double-precision performance.
President Joe Biden vowed to make the U.S. the world's€ vaccine "arsenal," but of the more than $16 billion that Congress appropriated to strengthen the response to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has spent less than 0.01% of it to expand€ global vaccine manufacturing, even as experts emphasize that doing so is necessary to defeat the coronavirus.
"Unequal access to vaccines threatens lives everywhere. So long as Covid-19 spreads worldwide, even worse variants than Delta will emerge."—James Krellenstein, PrEP4All
One of my favorite professors in grad school—an expert in cost-effectiveness analysis—when asked about the worth of individual medical interventions, would respond, “Compared to what?” You always need to have a benchmark. Economic analysis of a drug is relative to the other choices available to you—even if that choice is nothing at all. Upon graduation, one of my fellow PhD students gave him a trophy for best professor, but with a specially engraved question on the pedestal—you guessed it—“Compared to what?”
Although it is the sort of thing that we’ve come to expect because our unique-in-the-world, for-profit health insurance system leaves Americans financially vulnerable to sickness but offers huge profits to companies and CEOs in the system.
Some cynical people are suggesting that the reason Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is forcing teachers and children to sit for hours every day in classrooms with unmasked children is because he wants them all to get infected with Covid…to make money for a friend of his.
The hardest hit states, like Louisiana and Mississippi are seeing daily infection numbers that far exceed the worst days of the winter. Intensive care units are filled to capacity, which not only prevents many people infected with Covid from receiving adequate care, but also victims of car crashes and others in need of immediate care. This is quite a turnaround from where we were a month and half ago.
But we can tell a better story about future prospects. We know that our vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant in preventing infections, but they still seem to be quite effective in preventing serious illness and death. This story is well-demonstrated by the situation in Denmark.
In the race to get Americans vaccinated, two groups are commanding a lot of attention: Republicans and white evangelicals. Both are less likely to have been vaccinated already and more likely to refuse vaccination altogether.
But it’s the overlap between white Republicans and white evangelicals that is especially telling, as white evangelical Republicans are among the most likely groups in the U.S. to refuse vaccination. According to a June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, where I’m the research director, and the Interfaith Youth Core, white evangelical Republicans were considerably less likely to say they were vaccinated or planning to get vaccinated as soon as possible (53 percent) than Republicans who were not white evangelicals (62 percent). Moreover, white evangelical Republicans were the most likely of any large subgroup we surveyed to say they were refusing to get vaccinated (26 percent).
The vulnerability allows outsiders to access keys that control entry to databases that are held by thousands of customers. The keys can only be changed by the customers.
The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure's flagship Cosmos DB database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft's Cloud Security Group.
Because Microsoft cannot change those keys by itself, it emailed the customers Thursday telling them to create new ones. Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz.
By the way: If you want a fully native productivity suite that does run locally on your Chromebook, there are other options. I wrote up documentation on how to install LibreOffice in Linux on your Chromebook right here. It’s not as painful as it looks and LibreOffice is fairly comparable to Microsoft’s Office suite.
Trend Micro released a research on the state of Linux security in the first half of 2021. The report gives valuable insight into how Linux operating systems are being targeted as organizations increase their digital footprint in the cloud and the pervasive threats that make up the Linux threat landscape.
Digital rights advocates reacted harshly Thursday to a new internal U.S. government report detailing how ten federal agencies have plans to greatly expand their reliance on facial recognition in the years ahead.
EFFECTOR 33.05 -€ Apple's Plan to "Think Different" about Encryption opens a backdoor to your private life
Make sure you never miss an issue by signing up by email to receive EFFector as soon as it's posted! Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and now listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression.€
If you still find Facebook useful and the tradeoffs worth it then good luck to you. But my recent conversations suggest that many people don’t. Maybe you think that Facebook doesn’t censor bad people enough. Maybe you think they censor them too much. Maybe you want back the minutes or hours per day that you spend scrolling through your newsfeed. Maybe you don’t like who you are on Facebook, or who other people are. Maybe you’ve had enough of Facebook’s data-purloining and anti-privacy shenanigans. Or maybe you don’t have any particularly strong feelings either way but your friends don’t use Facebook any more and you’re up for spending a few minutes cleaning up your digital footprint.
If so, I recommend it.
As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the consequences.
Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.
Now that you know how to send arbitrary requests to the Bumble API from a script you can start testing out a trilateration attack. Kate spoofs an API request to put Wilson in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s Jenna’s task to re-locate him.
Remember, Bumble only show you the approximate distance between you and other users. However, your hypothesis is that they calculate each approximate distance by calculating the exact distance and then rounding it. If you can find the point at which a distance to a victim flips from (say) 3 miles to 4, you can infer that this is the point at which the victim is exactly 3.5 miles away. If you can find 3 such flipping points then you can use trilateration to precisely locate the victim.
Many of the military generals who directed the war in Afghanistan over the last two decades have taken up lucrative jobs as members of the boards of directors of major military contractors that take in billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon every year.
As the United States has begun the final phase of evacuations of U.S. citizens and Afghan allies from the Kabul airport, we speak with Obaidullah Baheer, an Afghan academic who has decided to stay in Kabul despite the risks. Baheer’s grandfather, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is a former mujahideen fighter once nicknamed the “Butcher of Kabul,” now among the senior political figures in the country attempting to shape a post-U.S. government with the Taliban. “This country needs more educated people,” says Baheer. “They’re not going to have enough technocrats for a functioning government to be in place. That’s why some of us have to stay behind.”
The Stop the War coalition on Thursday invited former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—whom they called "one of the architects of the war on terror"—to a public debate on the impacts of the U.K.'s wars over the past two decades, framing such a dialogue as necessary "to help guide the foreign policy of the future."
The challenge (pdf) from the antiwar group followed an over 2,700-word essay Blair posted Saturday on his website in which he slammed U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as "tragic, dangerous, unnecessary," and an act merely "in obedience to an imbecilic political slogan about ending 'the forever wars,' as if our engagement in 2021 was remotely comparable to our commitment 20 or even 10 years ago."
This is a developing news story... Check back for possible updates...
Children, adult civilians, and U.S. military personnel were among those reportedly killed or wounded Thursday in a pair of explosions near Kabul's international airport, the site of a chaotic evacuation effort that the Biden administration is aiming to complete by early next week.
Deep Throat had it right way back in the 1970s when he told Woodward and Bernstein to “Follow the money” during the criminal Watergate conspiracy of the Nixon administration. Since then it’s been all downhill in the US. The ruling elite of US empire and imperialism wanted the kinder, gentler Joe Biden over the crass, alleged rapist Donald Trump, but they’d accept Trump and much worse if they needed their profits to keep rolling in and their power to remain intact. Here’s “The Newspaper of Record” priming the pumps of bizarre discontent for€ the Biden administration’s bumbling of the exodus from Afghanistan. This kind of malarkey could lead in a direct path to installing a fascist in power. Maybe one of those cheering on Trump’s “very fine people” in Charlottesville could become a new leader? There are many actors waiting in the wings to step up and serve the interests of the power elite and empire. There are well-paying jobs to be had.
Joe Biden is not a total loss for the military-industrial-financial complex.€ Here’s Biden speaking about the pullout in Afghanistan€ (Katie Halper, August 22, 2021) with assurances that the War on Terror is alive and well. Who can predict upon whose necks the boot of empire and militarism will fall next?: It’s already in Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Iran, along with Russia and China in the crosshairs€ of empire. There are many, many targets and much money to be made. Recall the US support for the repressive Diem regime (until that regime fell out of favor with the US) in South Vietnam, or its more recent attempt to weaken the former Soviet Union through its support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan that gave rise to the Taliban. Or regime change in Chile, Guatemala, Iran, and a whole host of other nations. When the US opts for sanctions, either before war or through dirty clandestine wars, then the people of places like Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Nicaragua will be made to scream. No matter that€ a declaration of war requires a direct threat to the well-being of a people. The people of those nations are noncombatants and it’s illegal and immoral to make them suffer, but few care when it’s the empire that calls the tune. So much for bringing democracy to the larger world when it does not exist here. “Don’t Worry Baby” was meant for the 60s’ generation, but in less romantic and adolescent pop culture circumstances, it’s also excellent advice for the war-makers and warmongers. Your profits are safe and will continue to grow! Those profits may be even bigger than those made in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq since Russia and China are bigger adversaries and bigger adversaries mean bigger weapons and more weapons. And we all will be made to dance around the specter of nuclear annihilation.
After America’s CIA under President Reagan helped brutal Muslim tribal warlords drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, victorious warlords fell into conflict with each other. That’s when the Taliban, a movement of armed Islamic students, swept through the mountain nation.
The Puritanical Taliban, like most Muslim extremists, were notorious for their hatred of sex. They ordered all women to wear shroud-like burkas outdoors because “the face of a woman is a source of corruption” for men. Females couldn’t be educated beyond age eight, and before that could study only the Quran. Those who secretly attended underground schools were executed, along with their teachers. Girls’ schools were burned. Females weren’t allowed to work or go outdoors without a family male escort. They couldn’t wear high heels under their burkas because clicking heels might excite lustful men. Apartment windows were painted over. Wearing form-fitting clothes was a capital offense. Public stonings or other executions of women occurred. Eighty percent of brides were forced into marriage.
Gunshot detection tech provider ShotSpotter is fighting a PR battle on multiple fronts after more news surfaced that its analysts may alter detection records to fit police narratives and investigators' theories. Communications and court documents obtained by the Associated Press confirmed ShotSpotter allows law enforcement officers to request modifications to detection records. And the company apparently used to allow police officers to modify the data themselves.
As the situation in Afghanistan becomes increasingly dire, the Taliban has announced that it would not extend the August 31 deadline for evacuation, and insisted that foreign entities leave the country. Among those attempting to flee are many from the athletic community. Restrictions are about to be imposed by the Taliban upon Afghan musicians, activists, and, yes, athletes. Women, for example, will not be permitted to play in any of the leagues or sports that had been carefully established over the past 10 years.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota sent a letter Thursday calling on President Joe Biden to grant a full pardon to former Air Force intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, who was sentenced to nearly four years in prison last month for leaking classified documents that helped expose the horrors inflicted by the U.S. drone assassination program.
"I believe that the decision to prosecute Mr. Hale was motivated, at least in part, as a threat to other would-be whistleblowers."—Rep. Ilhan Omar
We get reaction to the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan from British member of Parliament and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, one of the leading critics of the Afghan War in Britain. He says critics who warned against invading Afghanistan, and later Iraq, have been vindicated, and calls for an official inquiry into the war. “It’s horrible to read back to 2001 and 2003 and say all the worst predictions that any of us ever made have all come to pass,” Corbyn tells Democracy Now!
As the U.S. proceeds with evacuating people from Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover of the country, we speak with author and former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes, who covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001, then lived in Kandahar until 2009, where she ran a soap factory, and went on to become a special adviser to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Mike Mullen in Kabul. She says it was apparent shortly after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan that the country was an “afterthought” for the Bush administration, which was “hellbent” on invading Iraq. “Well into 2002, there was basically no one home at the U.S. Embassy,” says Chayes. “It wasn’t until later that I realized that by early 2002, personnel were all pivoting already to Iraq.”
Now, Republicans in the House are 100 percent opposed, and Republicans in the Senate are using the filibuster—the favored tool of Southern segregationists like Democrat turned Republican Strom Thurmond—to prevent voting rights protections from even being considered. Where progressive Democrats and mainstream Republicans worked together to prevent filibusters on democracy issues, no Democrat should be so unrealistic as to imagine that a sufficient number of contemporary Republicans will do the right thing. Tuesday’s House vote confirms that the days of responsible Republicanism are long gone.
In the chaotic minutes before he shot and killed Ashli Babbitt during the Capitol [insurrection] on Jan. 6, Lt. Michael Byrd focused his attention on the glass doors leading into the lobby of the House of Representatives chamber.
About 60 to 80 House members and staffers were holed up inside, and it was Byrd’s job to protect them.
As [insurrectionists] rampaged through the Capitol, Byrd and a few other officers of the U.S. Capitol Police set up a wall of furniture outside the doors.
After gearing up for the culmination of WildEarth Guardians’ nearly two-year long€ court battle€ to secure federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections for the imperiled Joshua tree—an August 2 hearing before Judge Otis D. Wright, II of the Central District of California—my brain is teeming with factoids about these beloved plants and the perils so many Mojave Desert dwellers face.
The combined threats of climate change, invasive grass-fueled wildfires, human expansion, and habitat degradation have already reduced the richness of the region’s biodiversity by about fifty percent over the last century. Striking losses of bird communities are increasingly evident. Recent studies describe mass die-offs of other regionally endemic plants from prolonged droughts. Records from Twentynine Palms weather station show that not only have average daytime temperatures€ already€ increased 2€° F over the last 40 years, but nighttime lows in the area are nearly 8€° above average—so even if precipitation levels don’t decline (though they already have) the evaporation rate is much higher so less water actually reaches the desert floor to get soaked up by native plants. Graveyards of charred Joshua trees now blanket the Mojave National Preserve after€ 2020’s Dome fire€ swept through and destroyed an estimated 1.3 million of these majestic desert icons. And for the past two consecutive years, summertime temps have reached a mind-numbing 130€° F.
In a case brought by bushfire survivors against an Australian state's environmental regulator, a court found Thursday that the government agency must take action to address the climate emergency—a first-of-its kind and potentially precedent-setting ruling for the fire-ravaged nation.
"This is a great day for environmental justice."—Chris Gambian,€ Nature Conservation Council
Brazil’s Grain Railway will cut right through the Amazon forest. Indigenous people and ecologists are aghast at the plan.
Disheartened by the smaller size of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, advocates participating in the #SealTheDeal day of action — which include members from organizations like the Sunrise Movement, Indivisible, and the Movement for Black Lives — are committed to holding members of Congress accountable to their promises of building a more sustainable and equitable future for all.
The preliminary outline of the recovery package, which Democrats plan on passing through the budget reconciliation process without Republican votes, makes historic investments in clean energy, tuition-free community college, childcare, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. The package would also create thousands of sustainable jobs by investing in the care economy and a Civilian Climate Corps.
When you think of the New Deal, what comes to mind? For many Americans, the era has an enduring physical legacy in our parks, tree lines, and trails.
With Enbridge on the verge of completing its multibillion-dollar Line 3 pipeline, thousands of Indigenous leaders and environmentalists brought their protests against the sprawling tar sands project to the grounds of the Minnesota state capitol building on Wednesday to demand that lawmakers intervene before the dirty oil starts flowing.
Roughly 2,000 demonstrators—including Indigenous leaders who marched over 250 miles along the pipeline's route—rallied at the capitol Wednesday afternoon and hundreds stayed through the night as Minnesota police officers guarded the building's perimeter, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence installed in anticipation of the protest.
Progressive advocates are rebuking the Biden administration after it said this week that federal officials will soon resume selling new leases for oil and gas drilling on public lands and waters.
"While the administration's appeal is pending, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland should use her discretion under the law to authorize the least amount of leasing required to comply with the court's order."—Robert Weissman, Public Citizen
For years, it was assumed the world wouldn't start seriously tackling climate change until we were directly confronted with its horrors—thereby revealing how truly reckless humans are.
The kids are mad as hell—and so are teachers who want their California teacher pension fund, CalSTRS, to join 1,000 other institutions collectively divesting $14.5 trillion from the fossil fuel industry that threatens climate catastrophe. The retirement fund divestment fight, led by retired teachers in€ Fossil Free CA€ and students from€ Youth vs Apocalypse€ and€ Earth Guardians, estimates€ CalSTRS' portfolio€ investments in fossil fuels at $16 billion, mostly in oil and gas delivery systems, but $6 billion in direct investments in oil behemoths, with $400 million in Exxon-Mobil, $350 million in Chevron, $250 million in BP and $108 million in€ Enbridge Inc. This is the same€ corporation sending attack dogs to maul water protectors€ protesting drilling at river crossings on indigenous land, where Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline will send sludgy tar sands through Minnesota. The estimated pollution from the pipeline is€ equivalent€ to 50 coal powered plants running for 50 years.
In recent months, Washington has had a lot to say about China’s ever-expanding air, naval, and missile power. But when Pentagon officials address the topic, they generally speak less about that country’s current capabilities, which remain vastly inferior to those of the United States, than the world they foresee in the 2030s and 2040s, when Beijing is expected to have acquired far more sophisticated weaponry.
Anticipating a clash with conservative Democrats over the price tag of the party's emerging reconciliation package, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday laid down a clear marker: the $3.5 trillion in spending outlined in a newly approved budget resolution is already the compromise, and anything less won't cut it.
"I already negotiated. The truth is we need more," Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee and chief€ architect of the reconciliation blueprint, told Politico in an interview published Thursday.
"Today we have a coward's filibuster—used by politicians who are too scared to make their case or know they can't make their case to stop legislation that the Chamber of Commerce and corporate interests don't like."—Rev. Dr. William J.€ Barber II
Borrowers and their allies renewed calls for the Biden administration to wipe out all federal student debt on Thursday after the U.S. Department of Education announced $1.1 billion in loan forgiveness for 115,000 people who left the now-defunct ITT Technical Institute chain before graduating.
Alexis Goldstein, Open Markets Institute's director of financial policy, called the development "a great step," tweeting that "it's a relief that many scammed former students of ITT Tech will be getting long overdue relief."
Well folks, it seems OnlyFans has nobly decided that losing pretty much all of their patrons and screwing over the sex workers keeping their platform afloat may not be the smartest business decision, after all. Following a significant backlash to a proposed policy banning ‘sexually explicit' content – a move basically akin to if Hot Dog On A Stick stopped selling hot dogs and told their entire staff to go to Hell – the site has seemingly come to their senses, revoking their highly-controversial decision.
The Constitution of Virginia bars a sitting governor from serving consecutive terms, so McAuliffe had to make way for the election of another governor, who happened to be his fellow corporate Democrat Ralph Northam.
Youngkin has never sought any kind of political office before.
The official said the Afghans will have 180-day humanitarian visas that can be extended at the end of that period.
The following piece is adapted from the authors’ new book, Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media and 20 Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela, published by Monthly Review Press.
In July, YouTube said it had removed videos from Bolsonaro's channel for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak, becoming the latest tech giant to pull his pandemic pronouncements.
While there's been a lot of attention on how social media needs to do more to police itself, little has been written about whether digital personal assistants like Cortana provide accurate information about how vaccines and masks can protect against the virus.
I’ve just finished researching whether Cortana does that. The answer is dispiriting. Microsoft’s digital assistant doesn’t provide even the barebones basics about protecting against COVID-19. Want to know whether getting vaccinated will protect you? Cortana won’t give an answer. Will masks help? Don’t bother asking Cortana. Even more astonishing, if you want the truth about some of the outlandish lies about the COVID-19 vaccine — such as whether it will implant a microchip in you — don't look to Cortana for help. Microsoft’s digital assistant simply refuses to answer the question.
There’s no evidence that ivermectin is safe or effective to treat Covid-19, and its manufacturer, Merck, has even come forward discouraging people from using it as a treatment for the novel coronavirus; the FDA has also issued a statement based on “multiple reports” of people being admitted to the hospital after taking large doses of ivermectin, saying the drug can be “highly toxic” to humans. Yet such statements have only served to fuel the narrative that large regulatory agencies are suppressing evidence of ivermectin’s efficacy in treating Covid-19 and the Delta variant, largely because they cannot directly profit off its use as they can with vaccines. Pundits like Joe Rogan, who has more than 11 million viewers per show on Spotify, have only served to fuel such conspiracy theories, providing platforms to physicians like Dr. Bret Weinstein who have stoked controversy by peddling ivermectin.
I remain confused at why so many people endorse Macarthur Genius award winner, Prof. Danielle Citron's views on Section 230. Over and over again people say that her ideas for reforming Section 230 are sensible. Except that they are not. She has falsely insisted that companies have no incentives to moderate and that their incentives are to push the most extreme content. This has been debunked over and over again. If it were true, then every website would turn into 8kun. But that doesn't happen, because most websites realize that when your website is full of garbage people, it drives away other users (including those more likely to support you or your advertisers) and it drives away advertisers.
Remember Gettr? That's the Trumpist social network run by former Trump spokesperson (and vexatious lawsuit filer) Jason Miller that promised to be supportive of "free speech." As we point out what happens with every new social network that jumps into the space with promises to "support free speech!" and "not censor!" before long they will begin to realize content moderation is required to keep your site running -- and soon they discover that content moderation will involve difficult choices. And, sometimes, it involves making mistakes.
The letter goes on to say, “Not satisfied with this illegal ‘political censorship’ the superintendent scans/saves letters we write to family, friends and correspondence to advocates (which amounts to breach of privileged communication). We believed that some if not all are being shared with the police and prosecution. All this in addition causes inordinate delay in dispatch of letters to their destination.”
We all know how lousy civil asset forfeiture is. In lieu of actual criminal charges, cops (and feds) just seize any property they can get their hands on, turning other people's money into pure profit for law enforcement agencies. Money they can often spend with little to no oversight.
First, the fanfare.€ The skull of one Marcus Venerius Secundio was praised as “the best-preserved human remains ever discovered in Pompeii”. € They were found in an ancient tomb in the necropolis of Porta Sarno.€ The marble slab found at the pediment of his tomb had an inscription that sent the news outlets into states of excitement.
The Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, was so enthusiastic as to be insufferable.€ “Pompeii never ceases to amaze, and has confirmed her place as a story of redemption, as an international role model, and a place where research and new archaeological excavations are taking place once more, thanks to the many professionals in the field of cultural heritage, who with their work never cease to produce extraordinary results for the world which are a source of pride for Italy.”
Senate Republicans have just reaffirmed their shameless resistance to protecting voting rights through the use of the filibuster. This time, they are preventing the Senate from moving forward on any measure to enhance voting rights, including the For the People Act, whose voting rights and democracy-strengthening provisions are supported by bipartisan majorities of the American people. It is time for presidential leadership.
In the 1860s, the labor shortage was a matter of desperation to the capitalists known as the Big Four, who were striving to drive the Central Pacific line through the unforgiving terrain of the Sierras, so it could reach the basin land of Nevada and Utah and slap down track (and claim land grants) in competition with the Union Pacific railroad racing over the Midwest flatlands.
As usual, California was short of labor, at least white labor.
Back in 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access broadband networks (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service in numerous locations worldwide. Of course when the Obama FCC released its "National Broadband Plan" back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector's limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Both parties ignored the data and instead doubled down on our existing national telecom policy plan: letting AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast do pretty much whatever they'd like. Something, of course, taken to ridiculous new heights during the Trump era.
Netflix may end 2021 with 2.61 million streaming subscribers in Africa and more than double that to 5.84 million by 2026, business intelligence company Digital TV Research projected on Thursday.
That would make the global streamer the leader in the space on the African continent. Digital TV Research forecast that subscription video-on-demand users in Africa would, by 2026, number 15.06 million, triple the 5.11 million expected at the end of 2021.
Congress is concerned with Big Tech and has a number of bills aimed at keeping those companies in check. But just focusing on Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft won’t fix the problem we find ourselves in. Monopoly is at the heart of today’s business model. For everything.
In tech startups, companies run in the red for years, seeking to flood the zone, undercut the prices of their competitors, and buy up newcomers, until they are the last ones standing. For years, one of Uber's main goals was the destruction of Lyft. A series of leaks and PR disasters kept Uber from succeeding, but it is not the only company pursuing this tactic. Think about how many food delivery apps there used to be. And now think about how many have been bought up and merged with each other.
For internet service providers (ISPs), being a local monopoly is the goal. When Frontier went bankrupt, the public filings revealed that the ISP saw its monopoly territory as a bankable asset. That’s because, as internet access becomes a necessity for everyday life, a monopoly can guarantee a profit. They can also gouge us on prices, deliver worse service for more money, and avoid upgrading their services since there is no better option for consumers to choose.
The European Patent Office (EPO) announced that a European patent will be granted to protect the company's tolerogenic cell therapy.
In previous articles, we addressed the questions of whether applying for a patent is appropriate, and if so, when this should be done. This article addresses questions around the process for filing a patent.
Q: Could I file the application myself, and then ask a patent attorney for help if I get stuck later?
A: Although this is possible, it may be the case that by the time you ask for help, there is little that can be done to resolve any problems. In the example in the previous article, even if the inventor could demonstrate (or successfully argue) that their invention worked, the patent office would have refused the application because it did not explain how the invention could be made to work, and it is not permitted to add information to an application once it has been filed.
That said, patent attorneys spend a large portion of their time responding to objections raised by the patent office after the application is filed and will be able to give valuable advice on how to proceed based on their experience. Their advice may be based on legal, technical and/or commercial considerations. For example, it may be that the patent office has identified earlier documents such that, although a patent could be granted, it would not provide a meaningful deterrent to competitors, and the commercial value of the patent may be very low.
It's an all too familiar story. A company with some of the best-paying jobs around and a vital anchor for the community decides to engage in "restructuring" to "maximize long-term value creation."
Internet provider TekSavvy is taking the legal battle over Canada's first pirate site blocking order to the Supreme Court. The company has no sympathy for pirate sites but feels that it's obligated to defend the neutral role of ISPs and prevent freedom of speech from being violated.
One of the most popular Usenet indexing sites has closed down citing legal action by anti-piracy group BREIN as one of the main factors. Newzbin, which is especially popular among Dutch Usenet users, has been running for almost eight years but according to its operators, contributors have become increasingly wary of the consequences of linking to copyrighted material.
