In August 2021, Choopa had the most reliable hosting company site: it responded to all of Netcraft’s requests, with an average connection time of 3ms. Choopa has appeared in the top 10 table five times in 2021 so far, also coming top in February and April of this year. Customers can choose from a range of cloud and managed solutions as well as register domain names.
Aruba, Bigstep and CWCS Managed Hosting appear in second, third and fourth places. Aruba came close to Choopa in average connection time, averaging 5ms. Bigstep and CWCS Managed Hosting were both slower, averaging 62ms and 68ms.
In distributed systems, it can be hard to figure out where problems are. You grep through one component's logs just to discover that the source of your problem is in another component. You search there only to discover that you need to enable debug logs to figure out what really went wrong... And it goes on. The more complex the path your request takes, the harder it is to answer questions about where it went. I've personally spent many hours doing this dance with a variety of Kubernetes components. Distributed tracing is a tool which is designed to help in these situations, and the Kubernetes API Server is, perhaps, the most important Kubernetes component to be able to debug. At Kubernetes' Sig Instrumentation, our mission is to make it easier to understand what's going on in your cluster, and we are happy to announce that distributed tracing in the Kubernetes API Server reached alpha in 1.22.
Today we are looking at EndeavourOS 2021.08.27. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13, based on Arch, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 700MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at EndeavourOS 2021.08.27.
Robots have a special place in our imaginations. Writers, artists, directors and more have shown how robots can change our world—for better or far, far worse. But in the real world, robots seem a long way off. But are they? Season 8 of Command Line Heroes is all about the rise of the robots. They just may not be what you expect.
We meet the first industrial robot, take a journey through the uncanny valley, and investigate a possible robot crime. Season 8 covers the robots that are in our midst—and the determined dreamers who bring them to life.
The first episode drops September 7, 2021. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates.
It's been a recent trend for some Linux youtubers to talk about cryptocurrency and there's been a few people asking me to do the same so I thought I should probably explain why that's not likely to happen.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
I like playing video games, and most games I play require a GPU that is more powerful than the integrated graphic chipset that can be found in laptop or computers. I recently found that external graphic card were a thing, and fortunately I had a few spare old graphic card for trying.
With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is a new option for further protecting the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling the option will ensure that any caller-used register contents are zeroed prior to returning from a function. While the reported performance cost is said to be small, I decided to run some benchmarks when toggling this new Kconfig hardening option.
As outlined in the aforelinked article, this new "CONFIG_ZERO_CALL_USED_REGS" option with Linux 5.15 is ultimately about building the Linux kernel with the GCC's zero-call-used-regs compiler option enabled. That zero-call-used-regs option was added to the GCC 11 compiler that debuted as stable earlier this year.
Back in the days (the late 1980s and early 1990s specifically), one of the things that Larry Wall was justly famous for was his large, intricate, and comprehensive configure scripts that made rn and Perl build on pretty much any Unix and Unix-like system that you could name. Wall's approach of configure scripts was generalized and broadened by GNU Autoconf, GNU Autotools, and so on. These tools did not automatically make your complex programs portable between different Unixes, but they gave you the tools that you could use to sort out how to achieve that, and to automatically detect various things you needed to do to adopt to the local Unix (and if you used some of them, you automatically got pointed to the right include directories and the right libraries to link with).
Part of the value of eBPF, a framework for running low-level Linux kernel programs, is that it makes it very easy to deploy programs that interact directly with the kernel.
Traditional methods for executing low-level programs in Linux are for creating and loading custom kernel modules or modifying the kernel itself. But developers can use eBPF to load and run software quickly and with little configuration overhead.
If you need a reliable office suite for online editing and collaboration within your sync & share platform, you can try ONLYOFFICE Docs. In this tutorial, we learn how to install it on your Fedora Linux with Podman and discover the ONLYOFFICE-Nextcloud integration.
phpMyAdmin is a free, open-source, and web-based application used for managing MySQL and MariaDB databases from the web interface. Creating and managing a database from the command-line interface is very difficult for beginner users. phpMyAdmin provides an easier way to manage MySQL databases, user accounts, and privileges, execute SQL statements, import and export data through the web browser. In this post, we will show you how to install and secure phpMyAdmin database administration tool on Debian 11.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distro designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. This great OS is maintained and funded by Offensive Security. With it comes approximately 600 pre-installed penetration-testing programs formerly known as tools.
It was developed by Mati Aharoni and Devon Kearns of Offensive Security through the rewrite of BackTrack. BackTrack was their previous information security testing Linux distribution based on Knoppix.
The system supports both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. As such, you need not worry about whether your system will be compatible or not. You only need to download the correct ISO image, and you will be good to go.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was a widely used protocol to transfer files or data remotely in an unencrypted format which is not a secure way to communicate.
As we all know that File Transfer Protocol is not at all secure because all transmissions happen in clear text and the data can be readable by anyone during sniffing the packets on the network.
The ip command is a new networking command-line utility that is used to assign an IP address to a network interface or configure/update useful network variables on a Linux system.
It is a part of the iproute2 package and offers several network administration tasks such as bringing up or down network interfaces, assign and remove IP addresses and routes, manage ARP cache, and much more.
The ip command is much similar to the old ifconfig command, but it is greatly more powerful with more functions and capabilities added to it.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MicroK8s on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MicroK8s is a small, fast, single-package Kubernetes for developers, IoT, and edge. One command installs a single-node K8s cluster with carefully selected add-ons on Linux, Windows, and macOS. MicroK8s requires no configuration, supports automatic updates and GPU acceleration. Use it for offline development, prototyping, testing, to build your CI/CD pipeline or your IoT apps.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the MicroK8s on a CentOS 8.
WordPress continuous and growing worldwide popularity has made it the go-to content management system. It is now the center of the universe for all individuals that want to create, edit, and publish their contemplated ideas. However, all the attention that WordPress has brought on itself comes at a price. Malicious web traffics are always trying, and on some occasions, manage to bring down targeted WordPress sites.
Such attacks can have dire effects on the health of a running website and even render the MySQL service unresponsive because of depleted system resources. Under such circumstances, a WordPress administrator cannot escape from erroneous messages like Out of Memory and Error connecting to the database. Such error messages are related to XML-RPC attacks and this article guide is going to show us how to deal with them.
User accounts on a Linux system that are no longer being used should be removed. This is better for security, and you don’t want your computer or server convoluted with unused accounts.
In this guide, we’ll go over the step by step instructions to delete a user via Linux command line.
Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage services available for Linux and other operating systems.
In fact, Dropbox is one of the earliest services to provide a native Linux application. It still supports 32-bit Linux systems that is also a commendable job.
In this beginner’s tutorial, I’ll show the steps for installing Dropbox on Ubuntu. The steps are really simple but some websites make it unnecessarily complicated.
qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qBittorrent on Linux Mint 20.
Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is quite popular for people to test out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers.
WordPress is a powerful and feature-rich opensource content management system (CMS) that allows users to create powerful and stunningly beautiful websites. It’s written in PHP and powered by MariaDB or MySQL database server at the backend. WordPress is hugely popular and commands a market share of nearly 40% of all the websites hosted online.
Want to install WordPress on Rocky Linux? You’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we will demonstrate how to install WordPress on Rocky Linux 8.
Apache HTTP web server is one of the widely used web servers especially on Linux distributions which is a free, cross-platform used by a vast number of websites on the internet. Apache webserver uses HTTP to process the request and entertain web information. Apache has tons of useful features and its functionality can be enhanced with extra modules. It also allows programmers to publish their work on the internet.
When it comes to using the MySQL/MariaDB Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), not all of us are nerds of the Linux terminal environment. Okay, we could all be command-line environment nerds, however, the feeling of knowing more than one way of achieving something on a Linux environment is a supreme upgrade.
phpMyAdmin is a problem solver for Linux users that want both flexibility and an alternative to interacting with their MySQL/MariaDB databases. You only need a functioning and updated web browser to accommodate the use of phpMyAdmin.
This article guide takes you through safely installing and securing phpMyAdmin as an ideal MySQL/MariaDB database manager in Linux.
Apache, also known as Apache HTTP server, is one of the most widely used web server applications globally for the past few decades. By default, Apache is installed, and on Debian 11 Bullseye repository; however, with Debian, stable versions do not change for the most part except for security or urgent bug updates to keep the title “stable,” which they are known. Due to this, Apache can miss out on new features and improvements, and non-security-related bug fixes especially given the time delay between stable Debian releases being a few years in between.
ost modern Linux Desktop systems come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
Today we are looking at how to install MyPaint 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.
For those of you blessed with OCD, come closer. Say you're using the Plasma desktop, as you should, and then, unfortunately something goes a-wonk. You need to restart your Plasma shell, which is a relatively simple thing to do. Upon the shell restart, you realize that your system tray icons have rearranged themselves almost randomly, and the expected order of things is gone. Chaos!
I encountered this on a Kubuntu 18.04 box just recently. I then also realized that there isn't a way to pin icons to specific location in the system tray, as in Wireless always to the right, then Volume, then Vaults, etc. So if you expect things to be mega-cushty and consistent, you sure don't want them to change should you ever restart your Plasma shell. In this little guide, I'd like to show you a relatively simple trick of getting icons placed just as you like them. Follow me.
What type of Gamer are you? Can you game in Linux? This video breaks down everything you need to know about Gaming in Linux vs Windows.
Well this is a shame but in many ways to be expected. Take-Two Interactive Software, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has filed a lawsuit against the developers of the reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City code.
This is a bit of an ongoing saga, as Take-Two first got the GitHub repositories taken down, which were later restored when the developer of a fork submitted a counter-notice which wasn't argued so they all went back up. The repositories are still live on GitHub right now. The notice mentions this with Take-Two saying the counter notices were "were made in bad faith, and knowingly and deliberately misrepresented to GitHub the contents".
Plenty more is argued as well of course. In the notice it complains how the code now runs on platforms it was never released for where the "Defendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two", it argues against new cheats enabled in the source code which "are strictly prohibited under Take-Two’s terms of service". It goes further, complaining about modding which Take-Two say "encouraging users to further infringe the original Games and to violate their agreements with Take-Two that prohibit such activities".
StreamLabs Tip: http://brodierobertson.xyz/streamlabs STK: https://supertuxkart.net/Main_Page I promised we'd do a follow up SuperTuxKart stream at an earlier time and I expect that there will be as much mayhem as last time but this time I'll make sure I spec up the server before we get started to stop the lag.
4 years of blogging, 4 years of Obarunning, (more than 6 for Obarun starting from Openbox and Runit) and we are all still here. So what is there new for Obarun to talk about?
66 development, OUR instead of AUR (Obarun Community/Users Repository) is reality, new images published, and a new XMPP chatting board with room for more rooms, on Obarun’s own server.With the exception of prohibiting systemd/elogind dependencies and packages in the Obarun ecosystem, there is no police enforcement to make your life miserable as in other similar repositories.
Linux From Scratch has released version 11.0 of its DIY Linux guide. The biggest innovation in the online manual is that LFS will no longer rely on the “split-user” system: As is usual with most modern distributions, the path / bin will in future be a symbolic link to / usr / bin. The same applies to the / lib and / sbin directories.
Again News from Co-Lead Bruce Dubbs can be seen, the project has also included updates for the GNU Compiler Collection gcc-11.2.0, the GNU C Library glibc-2.34, and the programming tools collection binutils-2.37. A total of 40 of the packages used have been brought up to date and also updated to Linux Kernel 5.13.12.
Job Snijders (job@) imported the timeout(1) utility from NetBSD: [...]
Change is difficult – no matter the size of your company or the strength of your leadership. This is especially true in IT organizations that are beholden to legacy tech or processes. You and your team members are already taking small risks every day. By delegating tasks, prioritizing one project over another, or bringing on a new client, you are gambling that the choice you made will benefit you and your company at the end of the day.
Risk-takers are catalysts for positive change. They are responsible for innovation and advancement far more often than they are responsible for outcomes that hurt the bottom line. I encourage my team to push the boundaries because most executives would agree that not taking any risks is more detrimental to your business strategy than taking the biggest risk you can imagine.
Through the years, several of my close friends and colleagues have entered the journey to that dark place of confusion and despair known as burnout. Some faced a harder fall than others, which meant that the road back to a healthy state of mind was substantially longer and more challenging to navigate.
Stamina and the ability to ignore the body's warning signs seem to be the most direct route to severe burnout. In comparison, if you learn how to identify and react to early warning signs and act to change your situation, you have a much better chance of staying clear of a threatening burnout.
In this article, I will share my personal burnout experience, the components that led to this catastrophic system failure, and, more importantly, how I learned to identify the early warning signs that allow me to take corrective or evasive action.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.11.1 and Istio 1.11.2.
Geniatech XPI-iMX8MM is a new member of the company’s XPI SBC family following Raspberry Pi 3 form factor and equipped with the 14nm NXP i.MX 8M Mini quad-core Cortex-A53 processor.
The new board follows XPI-S905X (Amlogic S905X), XPI-3128 (Rockchip RK3128), and XPI-3288 (Rockchip RK3288) single board computer introduced over the last three years with many of the same features including HDMI output, four USB ports, Ethernet, and so on.
OpenRemote claims to be a 100% open-source IoT platform suitable for DIYs as well as OEMs. The asset management platform can help with the tracking of vehicle fleets, energy systems, or crowds, help to build smart cities, smart buildings, smart airports, and more.
While most cloud IoT platforms rely on open-source tools, the software hosted on the providers’ servers is usually closed-source as we’ve seen in our comparison between Microsoft Azure IoT, Balena, and Particle, but OpenRemote is different will the full stack being released under an AGPLv3 open source license.
Maker Kevin Wu has created a fascinating solution to a problem we didn’t even know we had with this sleek, Raspberry Pi-powered weather clock. Not only does it show the time of day with analog hands but it also provides weather data for each given hour.
The GCC compiler when using the default "-O2" optimization level is likely to be slightly faster with next year's GCC 12 release as the developers are looking at enabling the vectorizer options by default.
Python’s dependency on external files is a crucial aspect, it's wise to pay heed to the base/source files before executing any code. Before running a particular program, you need to ensure your source files exist at the specified location.
Every developer understands the need to create fall back codes, which can save a prorgram from failing in the case that a condition isn't met. In Python, there are several ways to check if a file exists; here are the top methods you should know about.
Checking if a string contains a word is a common task in any programming language. In JavaScript there are several ways to check whether a string contains a word or a substring.
A recent and surprisingly unpleasant professional encounter found me thinking again about an experience I had in the late 90s during my earlier career as a web developer before I went to law school. I'd gotten involved with a group that put on monthly meetings on topics of interest to the local community of Internet professionals. After the meetings a bunch of us would typically go out for dinner to chat and catch up. I did know some women from the organization, but I think most of the time the friends I went out with afterwards were men. It has never really bothered me to be in situations where I am outnumbered by men, so long as I'm treated with the respect of an equal. And I had no quarrel with my male friends on that front. But that evening drove home a reason why it was not good for women not to be better represented in technology in general.
Chuck created a music that was powerfully virile. Think upon the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones, three groups he sired. Then dote upon his children’s children, amongst whom are Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bruce Springsteen, and the Sex Pistols. There’s more of course. His influence on others can become subtle to detect (Nirvana, Black Keys, or Jack White anyone?). Call it the Six Degrees of Chuck Berry, if you will. The fact is that Chuck’s riffy guitar picking and genius songwriting had as great an influence in rock ‘n’ roll as anyone. Once upon a time, kiddies, rock ‘n’ roll was the leading cultural form of expression in America. Since Chuck was one of the originators’ his sway was even greater. None of this should be revelatory in the least to even the most carefree of connoisseurs.
Partly an overdue epitaph, this piece is also heartfelt homage. Chuck’s music moved me. It moved millions. It was that good. Still, I wonder. 60 plus years after Chuck got it motorvating can there be a future where folks will listen to his mighty music? Or will his 4/4 oeuvre only find its way to the listening populace through a television ad or a stray one-off on someone’s shuffle list? And might the only response to hearing a Chuck Berry tune be akin to that of seeing your dad’s great uncle at a family reunion? Even as Al Jolson’s fame has withered over a century, will Chuck’s songs fail to exist in the collective consciousness in as little forward time as 50, let alone 100, years? I calculate that I will not be around in person to find this answer out. Nor, will many of you, my dear readers.
Some may recall that in 2001 the US demanded the Taliban hand over Osama Bin Laden without any extradition treaty, any evidence of his culpability in the 9/11 bombings, and without considering alternative Taliban suggestions such as adjudication by the International Court at the Hague.
When the Taliban quite reasonably demurred, the US attack began.
The scene on the main street of this town is pretty amazing. Readers can picture the early 20th-century storefronts, some older, and the tall white church steeple with the backdrop of the Green Mountains all around. Ninety-nine percent of those on the street and going in and out of the shops are white and well fed. The uniformity of those on the street is fairly remarkable: Mostly couples with young children and a few people my age. Most people park along the street and exit their vehicles. I count 9 out of 11 cars as SUVs from where I sit. People’s clothes are also of a laid-back upper-middle class kind, nothing flashy and the kids appear well taken care of. One person sports long hair.
In an article in an International Socialist League publication, Ashley Smith, a Vermont resident and writer, notes that€ a quarter of the population experiences food insecurity€ (November 20, 2020). Even a casual observer would never know the latter from people passing by on this hot Vermont street.
Arm is widely regarded as the most important semiconductor IP firm. Their IP ships in billions of new chips every year from phones, cars, microcontrollers, Amazon servers, and even Intel's latest IPU. Originally it was a British owned and headquartered company, but SoftBank acquired the firm in 2016. They proceeded to plow money into Arm Limited to develop deep pushes into the internet of things, automotive, and server. Part of their push was also to go hard into China and become the dominant CPU supplier in all segments of the market.
As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Limited, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to distribute Arm’s IP within China. Within 2 years, the venture went rogue. Technically it has always been legally independent, but Arm still maintained control. Recently, Arm China gave a presentation to the industry about rebranding their own IP, extending it by developing more, and emphasizing that they are striking their own independently operated path.
I grew up in a loving family—financially poor, but spiritually rich. My family was blessed with the abundance of having my two strong grandmothers who helped us make it out of poverty.
As our second pandemic Labor Day approaches, Black worker leaders are determined to never again bear the brunt of a national crisis as they have under Covid.
In 2020, the U.S. life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years from 78.8 to 77.3 years, which is facially attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the backstory points to a previously bursting food pandemic that covertly joined forces with the invading virus. For example, the Covid-19 patients with type-2 diabetes, a food disease, have been much more vulnerable to severe effects of the virus. With the number of deaths exceeding 616,000, the food plus virus pandemics have hit the U.S. hard. Even if the virus goes away, the food pandemic will continue to exact harm in the foreseeable future. Sadly, the pandemics deniers remain bountifully ignorant.
Public health is much more complicated than the mere availability of low-cost food. Food pandemics hit nations where food scarcity is infrequent, food production is high, distributions systems are efficient, but a massive amount of affordable food is pathogenic. Nutritional ignorance, overeating, Information perplexity, and food industry-sponsored smokescreens extend the reach and duration of the pandemic.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Thursday that the House will vote on a bill to guarantee abortion rights nationwide after the chamber returns from recess later this month, a legislative effort aimed at countering the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to greenlight Texas' unprecedented assault on reproductive freedoms.
"The Supreme Court's cowardly, dark-of-night decision to uphold a flagrantly unconstitutional assault on women's rights and health is staggering."—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
It’s a dangerous law set that took effect on€ September 1, and which€ rewards people who block a Texan from getting an abortion.
Like many abortion activists in Texas, Amanda Beatriz Williams stayed up most of the night on Tuesday and awoke to a terrifying silence.
The conservative U.S. Supreme Court issued an unsigned order in the dead of night Wednesday leaving Texas' draconian abortion ban in place, a move that effectively overturns Roe v. Wade and imperils reproductive rights across much of the United States.
The high court's decision—against which Justices Sonia Sotomayor,€ Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and John Roberts dissented—lets stand the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, an unprecedented law that deputizes private individuals to sue anyone who performs an abortion or "aids and abets" one after around six weeks of a pregnancy.
"There's not a second to lose, and it's€ high time Democrats do what they promised they would do if voters handed them the reins: Protect our fundamental rights, and restore balance to our government."—Christina Harvey, Stand Up America
No matter what fresh lawlessness Republicans commit, or what their legal enablers on the Supreme Court do to support that agenda, you can count on some Democrat or liberal-adjacent person saying, “But what can the Democrats do?” Never mind that Democrats control both chambers of Congress and the entire Executive Branch. They walk around every day like a defeated minority unable to stop Republicans—who lost—from having their way with our country.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to let stand a new anti-abortion law in Texas, which bans all abortions in the state after six weeks — before most people even realize they are pregnant — and allows for private citizens to sue anyone who “aids and abets” a person in getting an abortion. Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, says, “It is clearly an unconstitutional law” that must be reversed. “It’s absolutely an abomination,” says Northup, who urges Congress to pass new legislation protecting reproductive rights as legal challenges to the Texas law continue.
The law creates a cadre of bounty hunters who can use the courts to punish and silence anyone whose online advocacy, education, and other speech about abortion draws their ire. It will undoubtedly lead to a torrent of private lawsuits against online speakers who publish information about abortion rights and access in Texas, with little regard for the merits of those lawsuits or the First Amendment protections accorded to the speech. Individuals and organizations providing basic educational resources, sharing information, identifying locations of clinics, arranging rides and escorts, fundraising to support reproductive rights, or simply encouraging women to consider all their options—now have to consider the risk that they might be sued for merely speaking. The result will be a chilling effect on speech and a litigation cudgel that will be used to silence those who seek to give women truthful information about their reproductive options.€
We will quickly see the emergence of anti-choice trolls: lawyers and plaintiffs dedicated to using the courts to extort money from a wide variety of speakers supporting reproductive rights.
SB8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, encourages private persons to file lawsuits against anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” It doesn’t matter whether that person “knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of the law,” that is, the law’s new and broadly expansive definition of illegal abortion. And you can be liable even if you simply intend to help, regardless, apparently, of whether an illegal abortion actually resulted from your assistance.€ €
In a 2018 speech announcing her decisive vote in favor of confirming right-wing judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine insisted—despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary—that he would value legal precedent and not support efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade.
"This is Susan Collins' court and her legacy."—Marie Follayttar, Mainers for Accountable Leadership
Under the draconian law, physicians, clinic nurses, abortion fund workers, domestic violence and rape crisis counselors, or even a family member who offers a car ride to the clinic could now face a lawsuit from anyone, encouraging a type of vigilante justice. Individuals who file the suits are not required to show any connection to those they are suing, and are entitled to a minimum of $10,000 in damages, plus attorney fees, if they win in court.
The project is part of a three-month trial by the Belgian capital to rebuild mental health and relieve stress caused by the pandemic.
A deadline is quickly approaching for connecting Outlook for Windows to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 services. After November 1, 2021, older versions of Outlook will no longer be able to connect to these services. Only Outlook 2013 Service Pack 1 and later will be able to connect to Microsoft 365.
"Space is an invaluable domain, but it is also increasingly crowded and particularly susceptible to a range of cyber vulnerabilities and threats."
That's not an overblown sci-fi movie strapline, but rather the chilling words of Gina Galasso, managing director of The Aerospace Corporation UK, a member of the international collaborative organisation, Space ISAC (the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center.) And she's not wrong on either count.
America's National Security Agency has published an FAQ about quantum cryptography, saying it does not know "when or even if" a quantum computer will ever exist to "exploit" public-key cryptography.
In the document, titled Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography, the NSA said it "has to produce requirements today for systems that will be used for many decades in the future." With that in mind, the agency came up with some predictions [PDF] for the near future of quantum computing and their impact on encryption.
[...]
What the super-surveillance agency seems to be saying is that it's not a given that a CRQC capable of breaking today's public-key algorithms will ever emerge, though it wouldn't be a bad idea to consider coming up with and using new techniques that could defeat a future CRQC, should one be built.
It's almost like the NSA is dropping a not-so-subtle hint, though why it would is debatable. If it has a CRQC, or is on the path to one, it might want to warn allies, vendors, and citizens to think about using quantum-resistant technologies in case bad people develop a CRQC too. But why would the spies tip their hand so? It's all very curious.
Judging by the comments and views we get on crypto-currency articles and social media intelligence, Zimbabwe does have a very thriving and vibrant cryptocurrency community. A lot of these people use various wallets to store their digital assets and most of these wallets are provided and managed by so-called exchanges.
Written in async Rust, this tool prioritizes simplicity of use, memory safety, reliability, and speed. It has also been compiled to a number of architectures and platforms, including Android’s armv7 and aarch64 platforms to download apps directly from an Android device using Termux. It is available right now for you to use.
In the future, we hope to expand apkeep’s functionality by adding support for the Amazon Appstore, allowing downloads of older app versions, and adding additional architectures.
We are proud to give back to the pool of tools that the application security community has created and that we use every day. We hope our own contribution will provide a useful addition to the toolbox.
Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email inboxes per day, and apparently does little else with this access except siphon gift card and customer loyalty program data€ that can be resold online.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (qemu), Fedora (condor, grilo, libopenmpt, opencryptoki, and php), openSUSE (xen), and SUSE (ffmpeg, file, php72, rubygem-addressable, and xen).
“SpyFone is a brazen brand name for a surveillance business that helped stalkers steal private information,” Samuel Levine, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement Wednesday. “The stalkerware was hidden from device owners, but was fully exposed to [crackers] who exploited the company’s slipshod security.”
There’s no timeline for some of the changes, and the archive option, in particular, is in the “concept phase,” according to Bloomberg. But Twitter reportedly plans to start letting people remove themselves from conversations by the end of the year and to let people remove followers (as opposed to soft blocking them) starting this month.
It also underscores that quantum computers could not only “break current encryption standards,” but also make it possible “to develop new ways of encrypting communications for illicit purposes, making them impenetrable to interception.”
In response, the Commission aims to fund projects that will develop “better, modern and validated tools and training curricula to anticipate and cope with new and emerging technologies” and establish “common approaches” for authorities across Europe.
WhatsApp on Thursday was fined roughly $267 million by Ireland’s privacy watchdog due to alleged violations of the European Union’s data privacy rules, the largest penalty issued yet by the group since the strict 2018 regulations took effect.
The Data Protection Commission (DPC) said in a statement that it had concluded its investigation into WhatsApp’s privacy practices, which it first launched in December 2018.
Authorities are investigating after a map claiming to show the addresses of thousands of firearms owners in the UK was published online.
Gun-selling site Guntrader announced a data breach affecting more than 100,000 customers in July.
For twenty years, two dominant narratives have shaped our view of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and neither one of these narratives would readily accept the use of such terms as 'illegal', 'invasion' and 'occupation.'
Amid rising fears of the threat posed by the GOP's mobilization of out-and-out fascists and its intensifying assault on democracy, lawmakers and intelligence officials are voicing concerns about a September 18 U.S. Capitol rally that far-right extremists organized to demand "justice" for those facing charges over their role in the violent insurrection on January 6 of this year.
Citing unnamed people familiar with federal intelligence, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that "extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are planning to attend" the rally, which "comes as a jittery Washington has seen a series of troubling one-off incidents—including, most recently, a man who parked a pickup truck near the Library of Congress and said he had a bomb and detonator."
If you've spent any real time digging into Trump GOP era tech policies, you've probably noticed they're a jumbled mess of contradictions and inconsistencies, cloaked in a lot of performative propaganda. The same party that thought net neutrality (the FCC holding telecom giants vaguely accountable) was a government hellscape, pivoted on a dime to try and force the FCC into regulating social media companies. The same GOP that whines incessantly about "big tech" via performative populism, routinely runs for the hills any time somebody actually tries to rein in corporate power or implement genuine antitrust reform.
American armed forces entered Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago, bringing with them weapons, vehicles, and a vast amount of war tech. After 20 years, we're finally out of Afghanistan, but much of what the US military brought to the country has been left behind.
"Ten members of one family—including seven children—are dead after a US drone strike targeting a vehicle in a residential neighborhood of Kabul . . .
While racial justice advocates welcomed Wednesday's indictment of five Colorado police officers and paramedics for allegedly killing unarmed Black man Elijah McClain in 2019, many movement voices echoed the familiar refrain that true justice would mean that the victim were still alive, and that such killings would stop.
"Elijah McClain should be alive today. That would be justice. But this is a step toward some accountability."—Jumaane Williams, New York City Public Advocate
Three police officers and two paramedics in Colorado have been criminally charged in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was tackled by police, placed in a chokehold and later injected with a large amount of the powerful sedative ketamine. McClain, who was not suspected of any crime, suffered a cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital and died several days later. His death sparked nationwide protests and led to new police accountability legislation being passed in Colorado. “This case has made sweeping changes,” says Colorado state Representative Leslie Herod. “But I’ve got to tell you: It would not have happened if it weren’t for the protests.”
"I can't breathe. I can't breathe please. I can't breathe, please." These words were recorded by the body cameras of Aurora, Colorado police as they assaulted a slight, 23-year-old African American man who was on the short walk home from his corner store after buying iced tea. It was 10:43 pm on August 24th, 2019. Aurora dispatchers had received a 911 call "describing a suspicious black male wearing a ski mask, 'acting weird.'" An officer approached McClain, saying, "Stop, I have a right to stop you since you're being suspicious." Within ten seconds officers tackle him to the ground. "My name is Elijah McClain…I'm an introvert and I'm different. [Sobbing] I'm just different, that's all."
But now I’ve had a chilling life-and-death health scare, and it made me realize that before I die I should finally confess to the American People about being a secret controlled demolitions special operative for 911. Everything you have secretly believed, and could never let on about, is true. Here is my story.
In the 1980s I was working on the secret Orbiting Space Laser Weapons Platform (OSLWP) project for the US Government. Believe me, they’re up there now; they’re just not telling you, it is TOP SECRET. The HARP Project was just a low level test run experiment during the development of the OSLWP.
President Joe Biden promised swift retribution. “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone who wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.” American “interests and our people” would be defended “with every measure at my command.”
In his sights was ISIS-K. “I’ve also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.” A response “with force and precision” would take place “at our time, at the place we choose and a moment of our choosing.”
These terms have specific meanings, and not all of them necessarily suggest conspiratorial thinking. For example, “gain-of-function” is a widely recognized term among medical researchers relating to the creation of novel genotypes and arrangements of nucleic acids in scientific research – and has received increased attention as of late via allegations that Covid-19 may have been genetically engineered. The National Institutes of Health provide this context for understanding gain-of-function:
It is with virus-related research that “gain-of-function” becomes more salient to recent political discourse, pertaining to the exchange between Republican Senator Rand Paul and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s Anthony Fauci, in which Paul implied that the U.S. government-funded gain-of-function research through the National Institutes of Health and a federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance (a U.S.-based non-profit health research organization), funneled through the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). As Paul clearly insinuated in a tense back-and-forth with Fauci in July of this year before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, this research allegedly led to the creation of Covid-19 as a “gain-of-function” genetically modified experiment, which he implied was then somehow released from WIV into the world. The response from Fauci was swift, as he summarized of the WIV-related research funded by the U.S.: “If you look at the viruses, judged by qualified virologists and evolutionary biologists, that were used in the experiments that were given in the annual reports that were published in the literature, it is molecularly impossible to result in Sars-Covid-2.”
As revealed in the article, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in an undamaged part of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld held a meeting with his colleagues in which he said, “best info fast. Judge whether good enough to hit S.H. [Sadam Hussein] at the same time – not only UBL [Usama Bin Laden]… Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
So, only hours after the 9/11 attacks, military leaders were engaged in using the “Pearl Harbor moment” to justify wars on a global scale.
Even as UN agencies warn of an impending humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, the U.S. Treasury has frozen nearly all of the Afghan Central Bank’s $9.4 billion in foreign currency reserves, depriving the new government of funds that it will desperately need in the coming months to feed its people and provide basic services.
Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund decided not to release $450 million in funds that were scheduled to be sent to Afghanistan to help the country cope with the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks with a military mobilization of unprecedented cost. Over the past 20 years, the US military has spent or requested about $5.8 trillion in today’s dollars. Add in medical expenses and disability payments for veterans, which according to research by Harvard’s Linda Bilmes will likely exceed $2.2 trillion by 2050, and the total cost of two decades of war is more than $8 trillion. Included in these numbers are the $704 million in “death gratuities” that have been paid to the survivors of the 7,052 service members who were killed as well as payments to civilians who were injured and the families of civilians who were killed.
Every country goes to war believing that it can win and that it will do everything it can to protect its own soldiers and the lives of noncombatants. But when things go awry, increments of force are often added—or surged—on the theory that a few more troops will make the difference. The war continues, and the costs in blood and treasure go up.
The day the Taliban seized control of Kabul, they lobbed a grenade into A’s yard, and he promptly left home to seek refuge. A lower-limb amputee and prominent disability-rights activist, he’s at risk due to his disability-rights organization’s association with the United States.
Check out all installments in the OppArt series. €
For twenty years, two dominant narratives have shaped our view of the illegal US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, and neither one of these narratives would readily accept the use of such terms as ‘illegal’, ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation.’
Mahbouba Seraj, president of the Afghan Women’s Network and a longtime advocate for women’s rights, says the Taliban have already restricted women’s freedoms since taking over the country, despite their assurances that they have shifted their views since the last time they were in power. “If they continue like this, … Afghanistan will go back another 200 years,” says Seraj. “One cannot just disregard the women of Afghanistan and say they don’t exist. This doesn’t work.”
With the official end of the War in Afghanistan, we speak with Rafia Zakaria, author of “Against White Feminism,” about how U.S. officials used the plight of the women in the country to justify the 2001 invasion and subsequent occupation. “Feminism has been delegitimized in Afghanistan because it is associated with an occupying force,” says Zakaria. “Now Afghan women are left to pick up the pieces and deal with the Taliban.”
Both are capitalising on a recent history of access to the Taliban. Both eye opportunities. But both are taking a gamble too - which could even stoke old rivalries further afield, in the Middle East.
Even before the January 6 insurrection by supporters of former President Donald Trump, Senator Ron Johnson was pushing the Big Lie that Trump was somehow cheated out of a second term.
On January 6, a mob including white supremacists and far-right militants stormed into the Capitol as lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden's election victory. The attack followed mass shootings by white supremacists—like in El Paso in 2019 and a Pittsburgh synagogue the year before—and relatively unpoliced public violence by far-right militants at rallies across the country since Donald Trump's election.
But when court officers paid an unannounced visit to his Iowa home 30 days after he was released, they discovered Jensen was “alone” in his garage and streaming “news from Rumble,” a right-wing news outlet, on a cell phone. When he was caught, Jensen first said the phone belonged to his daughter, but his daughter told an officer she had gotten a new phone weeks earlier. Then he claimed that his wife left the news on for him when she went to work. Finally, he admitted to a court officer that he had “spent two days watching Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium regarding the recount of the presidential election.”
Prosecutors argued in court on Thursday that because Jensen violated the terms of his bond, he should be sent back to jail. “Two weeks after swearing to this court, he would obey its order, he was back to [his] habits,” Assistant United States Attorney Hava Mirell said. “His violations were swift and blatant.”
The Noble Globetrotter II’s lower marine riser package and “several” riser joints detached as the ship was out in the Gulf of Mexico during Hurricane Ida, Noble Corp. confirmed in a press release on Thursday, Sept. 2.
“Initial findings from the ship’s ongoing condition assessment confirm that several riser joints and the lower marine riser package separated from the rig during the storm and sank to the seabed,” Noble wrote.
"We need to keep connecting the dots back to the corporations that are fueling this crisis."—Jamie Henn, Fossil Free Media
Stressing that every stage of gas production pollutes the Earth's air and water, a coalition of climate and social justice groups on Wednesday launched an initiative aimed at strengthening a proposed federal energy policy by ensuring that it excludes the fossil fuel.
"The science is clear: There is nothing clean about gas."—Lauren Maunus, Sunrise Movement
While young people around the world have gained attention in recent years with global protests calling for ambitious and immediate action from policymakers to tackle the climate emergency, an older crowd is launching a new organization with that same demand.
"What us elders do with these last decades of ours has never in history been as important. We're needed. Our children need us. The future needs us."—Jane Fonda, actor and activist
The Fridays for Future campaign is urging safe passage from Afghanistan for fellow climate strikers and their families.
As Louisiana residents and officials begin the recovery process in the wake of Hurricane Ida, environmental campaigners responded Thursday to reporting of a suspected oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by saying such scenes "are reminders that when we drill, we spill."
"We are continuing to urge the Biden administration to consider the true cost of offshore drilling, and end the practice for good."—Kelsey Lamp, Environment America
As many parts of the Northeastern United States reeled Thursday following deadly flooding, tornadoes, and other damage caused by the remnants of Hurricane Ida, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined other progressive voices in linking the climate emergency to the nation's growing inequality, and calling for urgent action to address both crises.
NBC News reports at least 43 people were killed as Ida—now a post-tropical cyclone—battered the Tri-State Area with flooding caused by record rainfall, as well as tornadic winds, over the past 24 hours.
The oil industry has embarked on a lobbying blitz in an effort to derail any attempts by Congress to repeal fossil fuel subsidies as part of a much broader assault by corporate interests on the $3.5 trillion budget package that Democrats are currently drafting.
In particular, the oil industry is worried about the potential loss of one specific subsidy that they receive: the intangible drilling cost (IDC) deduction. This allows companies to deduct from their taxes the costs of drilling new wells.
The UK government has appointed a law firm with a history of defending fossil fuel companies over environmental disasters to provide legal services for the upcoming COP26 climate summit.
DLA Piper, whose clients have included oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and BP, was announced on Wednesday as the summit’s “Provider of Legal Services,” meaning the company will “provide general commercial support to COP26 including in respect of sponsorship agreements”. The firm says it is doing the work pro bono.
UK government lawyers have argued that greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning oil are “not relevant” to granting a North Sea drilling permit, in a landmark case being heard this week, less than two months before the COP26 UN climate conference.
A lawyer representing the government also argued that assessing these emissions would be “unachievable” because they “can’t be properly measured”.
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When someone wants to talk to me about my car, invariably the first question is some variation on “How far can you go on a charge?” The next is “How long does it take to charge?” Ladies, gentlemen, and other flavors, please take note. These questions are wrong. I’m here today to explain why, and suggest what the right ones are.
This we know: Musk has goals (some of them risible, some of them much more pragmatic), and within the limits of his world-view—I'm pretty sure he grew up reading the same right-wing near-future American SF yarns as me—he's fairly predictable. Reportedly he sat down some time around 2000 and made a list of the challenges facing humanity within his anticipated lifetime: roll out solar power, get cars off gasoline, colonize Mars, it's all there. Emperor of Mars is merely his most-publicized, most outrageous end goal. Everything then feeds into achieving the means to get there. But there are lots of sunk costs to pay for: getting to Mars ain't cheap, and he can't count on a government paying his bills (well, not every time). So each step needs to cover its costs.
Hiking areas in Finland and Estonia are very similar. They can be utilised for outdoor activities, excursions, and trips in a versatile manner, as well as for forestry, hunting, and fishing, a joint press release reads.
All sites have extensive hiking services with marked routes, campfire sites, and dry toilets. All sites selected for the network are nature tourism destinations which appeal to visitors in their own charming way.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez issued a€ final opinion and order€ directing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to immediately undertake new measures at dams in the Willamette basin to prevent the extinction of threatened Upper Willamette River€ wild€ spring Chinook salmon and winter steelhead.
In the final order, Judge Hernandez found that these measures were necessary because, “[a]s evinced by the listed species’ continuing decline, the Corps’ failure to provide adequate fish passage and mitigate water quality issues is causing substantial, irreparable harm to the salmonids.”
In an effort to "help everyday Americans increase their impact in the fight for economic justice," the advocacy group Patriotic Millionaires on Thursday launched a new website, TaxTheRich.com, dedicated to ensuring that "millionaires, billionaires, and corporations pay all of the cost to rebuild the country."
The new site will "help educate, train, and mobilize activists and everyday Americans" concerned about tax justice, the group explained in a statement.
With dozens dead across the Eastern United States in the wake of Hurricane Ida this week, Sen. Joe Manchin on Thursday drew the ire of progressives by opposing Democrats' plan to quickly pass a $3.5 trillion package that would improve social programs and tackle the climate emergency.
The youth-led Sunrise Movement delivered a concise response to Manchin's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which the West Virginia Democrat outlined a position that jeopardizes not only the $3.5 trillion package his party aims to advance using the budget reconciliation process—due to the threat of a GOP filibuster in the Senate—but also a smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Translated out of Orwellian Doublethink, the “crackdown on private enterprise” means cutting back on what the classical economists called rent-seeking and unearned income. As for its supposed “drag on the economy,” Mr. Soros means the economy’s polarization concentrating wealth and income in the hands of the richest One Percent.
Soros lays out his plan for how U.S. retaliation may punish China by withholding U.S. funding of its companies (as if China cannot create its own credit) until China capitulates and imposes the kind of deregulation and de-taxation that Russia did after 1991. He warns that China will suffer depression by saving its economy along socialist lines and resisting U.S.-style privatization and its associated debt deflation.
The reasons for all this are not hard to find: everywhere the government is building hospitals, affordable homes, roads and schools and the country’s much prized safety has returned. Nicaragua’s economy was the least affected in Latin America by the pandemic and Covid-19 has been well handled by the country’s community-based health system.
It’s hardly surprising that Nicaragua’s right-wing critics would ignore these achievements, but why are they ignored by the left? Rather than acclaiming a country that is lifting itself out of poverty, it is apparently much more important to judge it against hypocritical Western standards about “democracy” and “human rights” while disregarding the government’s need to defend the country’s gains against attacks from Washington and elsewhere.
Former Chicago mayor and noted profanity enthusiast Rahm Emanuel has been nominated by President Joe Biden to be the next ambassador to Japan.
Much to the surprise of everyone, on August 15, 2021 Afghanistan’s Ghani government had collapsed, and the Taliban took over control of Kabul. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban was expected, albeit much later. David Smith,in his article “‘Biden’s worst nightmare’: how Afghanistan shook a president”, The Guardian, August 28, 2021, said that:
The unforeseen catastrophe has diminished his standing at home and America’s stature abroad. America’s allies, who assumed that the defeat of Donald Trump would at least Make America Competent Again, felt blindsided. The US struck an uneasy truce with the Taliban and undertook what may prove the biggest airlift in history.
One of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results was Steve Bannon. “We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.” The next morning, as thousands massed on the National Mall for a rally that turned into an attack on the Capitol, Bannon fired up his listeners: “It’s them against us. Who can impose their will on the other side?”
When the insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means. On his “War Room” podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out. “This is your call to action,” Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
“One of the world’s most expensive roads,” the New York Times informs us, has reached “its destination: a muddy field outside a hamlet with a few dozen houses, many of them empty.” [1] It is an image meant to invite contempt. Never mind that this is the endpoint of one stage of the project, and the plan is to continue construction of the highway; it is better to repeat as a mantra, “the highway to nowhere.” Like a steady drumbeat, Western ridicule is relentless and unvarying: Montenegro has launched a “megalomaniac project” that serves no useful purpose, taking on debt of monstrous proportions in the process.
Western officials warn that China has captured Montenegro in a “debt trap” that will allow it to wield undue influence over Montenegro’s policies and seize control of territory or infrastructure. Moreover, it is argued that the debt to the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China is unsustainable. The New York Times reports that Montenegro “is now saddled with debts to China that total more than a third of the government’s annual budget.” [2] The impression given is one of unsustainable excess, and that would be so were the entire debt due to be repaid in a single year. A closer look at the details of the loan shows how misleading the Times article is.
If the United Nations’ 2021 climate report is any indication, the entire planet is in for a whirlwind future. Though it’s still feasible to prevent the planet from becoming completely uninhabitable, saying it’s crunch time is a massive understatement. What is unavoidable is a climate future that stands to send more unprecedented emergencies, inconsistency, and destruction our way. Klein and Villanueva agree that means the conditions that give rise to disaster capitalism could develop even more frequently.
Reddit's move to hire advisers for its IPO was previously unreported. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Chief Executive Steve Huffman had said the company was planning to go public but had not decided on the timing.
Rogan’s promotion of ivermectin is part and parcel with him using his platform to spread Covid-19 misinformation by featuring guests such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as well as publicly dismissing the importance of getting a vaccine back in April. “If you’re, like, 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go ‘No,'” he said in the episode. (He later attempted to clarify his comments, calling himself “not an anti-vaxx person” and a “fucking moron.”) As Carusone sees it, the fact that he uses his guests to espouse these views while oftentimes refraining from promoting them himself, lends him sufficient cover to avoid being branded as a purveyor of misinformation, says Carusone. Promoting ivermectin as a treatment for his own case of COVID-19 helps to reinforce the narrative that it’s an effective medication in treating the virus, and that there’s no harm in people trying it. “His audience is huge and they’re engaged,” he says. “And they’re already so hopped up on alpha brain that this is the kind of stuff they love.”
It's always astounding to me how little most policymakers consider how many of the policies they push for contradict one another. On Wednesday, the Texas Senate easily approved its version of HB20, the blatantly unconstitutional bill that tries to prevent social media websites from moderating content that Texas Republicans want kept up -- explicitly saying that Facebook must leave up vaccine misinformation, terrorist content, and Holocaust denialism. While the bill does include some language to suggest that some content can be moderated, it puts a ton of hurdles up to block that process. Indeed, as the bill makes clear, it does not want Facebook to moderate anything.
Individuals in dictatorships need more freedom not less. Syrians have for years been unable to work remotely or pay for remote services, even educational ones. Do we want to do the same now to Afghans, who are already in fear of the Taliban? Examining in detail the experiences of Syrians, can maybe lead us to a better solution.
Over the past three years, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), the misnamed and feeble “press regulator” created by the billionaire-owned corporate media, has found the paper to have breached its code of practice on at least 28 occasions. The weekly has also lost, or been forced to settle, at least four libel cases over the same period.
According to Brian Cathcart, a professor of journalism at Kingston University in London, that means one in every four or five editions of the Chronicle has broken either the law or the IPSO code. He€ describes€ that, rather generously, as a “collapse of journalistic standards” at the paper.
Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech.
The answer to what really happened at Gulf Bank, though, would be left aside as the aftermath of the incident soon became very personal. Gulf Bank executives, who had tried to keep information about the incident tightly held, would file a complaint against Aldoub under Kuwait’s cybercrime and telecommunications laws — and the public prosecutor would take up a criminal investigation.
Aldoub would go on to delete the messages, but the bank seemed bent on proving that he had smeared its reputation by posting about the incident. Under Kuwait’s cybercrime law, plaintiffs can bring charges against those who “disclose secrets that would harm the reputation of persons, or their worth, or their commercial names.”
The tweets could have landed Aldoub in jail for a year, according to independent legal experts.
According to the report by MediaNama, the committee recommended permanently blocking VPN services in the country with “the help of internet service providers” across India. ““The Committee notes with anxiety the technological challenge posed by VPN services and Dark Web, that can bypass cyber security walls and allow criminals to remain anonymous online. As of date, VPN can easily be downloaded, as many websites are providing such facilities and advertising them. The Committee, therefore, recommends that the Ministry of Home Affairs should coordinate with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to identify and permanently block such VPNs with the help of internet service providers.”
Recently, on 12th August 2021, general elections were held in Zambia, during which access to popular online social media platforms was reportedly blocked.
In this report, we share relevant OONI data on the blocking of WhatsApp, Twitter, and Facebook amid Zambia’s 2021 general election.
At least 100 people have been arrested under the law, including media tycoon Jimmy Lai and at least six executives and journalists from his Apple Daily. The company was forced to close in June after its assets were frozen.
Other journalists have spoken of a chilling effect from the law, and some have said the regulation is impacting RTHK.
The Covid-19 pandemic has served as a grave reminder of who suffers first, and worst, when the labor market falters. Our most marginalized workers are consistently the last ones hired and the first ones fired—a reality only made worse when crises strike. Nearly 2.4 million women have exited the workforce over the past year of the pandemic. That staggering number is disproportionately made up of Black and brown women. For these women in particular, recovering from this financial setback could take years.
In May, the Miami Beach city council passed an ordinance that basically made it illegal to come within 20 feet of cops.
It’s easy to conclude that it’s not. In 1915, as national governments produced the shocking carnage of World War I, Ralph Chaplin, an activist in the Industrial Workers of the World, wrote his stirring song, “Solidarity Forever.” Taken up by unions around the globe, it proclaimed that there was “no power greater anywhere beneath the sun” than international working class solidarity. But, today, despite Chaplin’s dream of bringing to birth “a new world from the ashes of the old,” the world remains sharply divided by national boundaries—boundaries that are usually quite rigid, policed by armed guards, and ultimately enforced through that traditional national standby, war.
Even so, over the course of modern history, social movements have managed, to a remarkable degree, to form global networks of activists who have transcended nationalism in their ideas and actions. Starting in the late nineteenth century, there was a remarkable efflorescence of these movements: the international aid movement; the labor movement; the socialist movement; the peace movement; and the women’s rights movement, among others. In recent decades, other global movements have emerged, preaching and embodying the same kind of human solidarity—from the environmental movement, to the nuclear disarmament movement, to the campaign against corporate globalization, to the racial justice movement.
The biggest digital policy surprise of the platform must surely be the decision to avoid the wireless and Internet cost and competition issue altogether. There are references to rural broadband and spectrum use, but communications costs and the state of Canadian wireless has been a major consumer issue for years. In 2019, it emerged as an election issue with all parties making commitments to address the issue.€ To simply abandon wireless affordability is remarkable, sending an unmistakable signal that the Liberals have sided with the Big 3 telecom providers over the interests of Canadian consumers and the introduction of greater competition.
It has now been over six years since Valve finally put in a refund policy for video games purchased on its Steam platform. At the time of its announcement, I was very much in favor of this move by Valve, given how previously the prospect of buying games on the platform was laughably tilted in favor of publishers and developers. On top of that, a whole bunch of the outcry from publishers and developers over the policy seemed to mostly center around it existing at all, meaning such concerns were mostly just requests to go back to the one-sided policies that favored them. Some developers even saw large numbers of refunds as a good thing, arguing that those refunds were likely largely from people that never would have tried their games out if a potential refund weren't in place.
The effects of economies of scale in technology markets, such as storage media, digital preservation and cryptocurrencies, is a topic on which I have written many times, drawing heavily on W. Brian Arthur's 1994 book Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Below the fold I discuss Waldman's classification of them.
Brian Arthur's analysis focuses on the effects of economies of scale, where Waldman's focuses on their causes.
"There is a clear and compelling need for Congress and the antitrust enforcement agencies to take action that restores competition, improves innovation, and safeguards our democracy."—House Judiciary Committee
Artificial intelligence is growing rapidly and exponentially. As technology advances, there are many new concerns legally, ethically and socially. Many wonder how patent offices will handle new AI generating inventions, or even how AI lethal weapons will be regulated. As countries are trying to catch up legally to the latest AI technology, the European Union is taking the lead with a new risk-based approach to regulating AI technology. Joining me is Siraj Husain, who gives great perspective into the world of artificial intelligence with his expert insight.
Siraj Husain is a partner in the Intellectual Property Group of Sheppard Mullin’s Palo Alto office. He graduated from University of California Riverside with an undergraduate degree in computer science. He obtained his law degree from Loyola Law School, where he wrote for their law review. Siraj advises on IP strategies with a focus on artificial intelligence. He has specialized experience in many fields such as machine learning, deep learning, cloud computing technology, cryptography, and many computer hardware and software technologies. Siraj has also served as board member and pro bono committee co-chair for The South Asian Bar Association of Northern California.
In a sign of the times, the Federal Court of Australia ("FCA") has recently considered whether an artificial intelligence machine is capable of being an "inventor" for the purposes of the Australian Patents Act 1990 (Cth) ("Act") and corresponding Regulations.
On 30 July 2021 in the decision of Thaler v Commissioner of Patents1, the FCA overturned a finding by the Deputy Commissioner of Patents of the Australian Patents Office (IP Australia) that the inventor on a patent application must be human and that the artificial intelligence system referred to could not be an inventor2.
Instead, the FCA held that an artificial intelligence system called "DABUS" which was developed by Dr Stephen Thaler, and was described as being a "....device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience" could be named as an inventor on a patent application for the purposes of the Act.
A study published in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's working paper series shows that online software piracy increases innovation. The authors conclude that piracy motivates software companies to spend more resources on research and development, to stay ahead of the piracy threat and protect their revenue streams.
A mysterious group called the 'Video Industry Association of America' is trying to wipe the homepages of dozens of reputable sites from Google search. The targets, which stand accused of violating the DMCA's anti-circumvention policy, include Verizon, Pinterest, and Engadget. Google says that it's aware of these fraudulent notices but, thus far, they are not without damage.
