While last week was the main "char/misc" pull request for the Linux 5.15 merge window, the Habana Labs driver changes were previously reverted from there due to opposition from the upstream kernel developers in the Direct Rendering Manager space. The concerning patches around DMA-BUF have now been removed and a new pull request submitted with updates to this AI driver for Linux 5.15.
The original Habana Labs AI driver code for Linux 5.15 was strongly objected by DRM kernel developers as it was trying to push through DMA-BUF changes without the approval of the DRM developers and at the time also lacking any open-source user-space software.
Paragon Software's NTFS driver has been included in the 5.15 release of the Linux kernel, bringing reliable read and write functionality for this filesystem to the kernel.
The driver was merged by Linux creator Linus Torvalds earlier this month, after Paragon's Konstantin Komarov requested that a branch containing code for the ntfs3 driver be included.
Torvalds had some gripes about the way the patch was submitted but it was incorporated in the kernel.
Linux distributions should soon support the Windows NTFS file system better out of the box. This is thanks to a new NTFS kernel driver called “NTFS3”, which will be included in Linux 5.15, which is expected at the beginning of November. NTFS3 offers functions that have so far been lacking in the approach mostly used for NTFS support. At the same time, the new kernel code promises better performance. How significant the difference will actually be remains to be seen, however. Because the new driver has also released new energy for the developers of the driver commonly used up to now. For their part, they are working on a new version.
There is a huge range of open source free audio software available for Linux which is both mature and feature-laden. Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world. Linux is a superior platform for professional audio production: rock solid, efficient, and you don’t get fleeced for software licenses. Software that creates music can often be expensive.
Linux also sports a wide range of useful audio tools. This article examines audio analyzers. This type of software lets you visualize audio spectrum for real-time signals. Some of the programs also lets you analyze amplitude and phase spectrum as well. Also, you can visualize audio spectrum in FFT spectrum, 2D spectrogram, Octave spectrum, etc. modes.
Please check out the latest release of OpenShot! Lots of bugs and regressions fixed, and vastly improved language support (including 11 fully translated languages)!
RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
When Michael asked what the leading P and PT entries in front of some times in named configuration options are, I recognized them from working with OpenDNSSEC: they are ISO 8601 duration and time period specifications.
The time has come: welcome to our exclusive guide on how you can use Vulkan in Crostini! This unlocks the full gaming power of Chromebooks by allowing more modern games to work. More importantly, it also allows Steam’s Proton compatibility layer to work at its full potential, which means the majority of Windows games will now run on Chromebooks. How cool is that?!
Some quick tips to guide you to find out about the Graphics card installed and driver in-use in your Linux system.
When working with large amounts of media and documents, it's quite common to accumulate multiple copies of the same file on your computer. Inevitably, what follows is a cluttered storage space filled with redundant files, provoking periodic checks for duplicate files on your system.
To this end, you'll find various programs to identify and delete duplicate files. And fdupes happens to be one such program for Linux. So follow along as we discuss fdupes and guide you through the steps to find and delete duplicate files on Linux.
The history of Linux is traced back to 1991 and Linux Torvalds, who upon the creation of the OS was a student at the University of Helsinki. He focused on creating an OS as a free alternative to Minix (another clone of Unix). At first, he wanted to name it Freax but then was recommended to approach it in a more personalized way. Thus, Linux is named after the creator.
The LAMP stack is a popular software bundle using open source components to build and deliver web applications.
Developers know LAMP because it has been a basis for web development since the late 1990s. With open-source tools for an operating system (Linux), web server (Apache), database server (MySQL), and programming language (PHP), the LAMP stack is an efficient and flexible method that enables competition with commercial software developers. Today, estimates show up to 80% of the internet uses open-source programming and software.
This article looks at what LAMP stack is, the stack architecture, how it works, and the benefits of using LAMP to develop web applications.
Although there is no need to upgrade your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (focal fossa) to 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) if you want a Long term supported version for your applications, however those who want to try out the latest changes can go for it. By following the steps given in this article.
Well, for those who don’t know about their Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Desktop- it is a long-term support release that will receive regular updates for 5 years whereas the latest Ubuntu 21.04 only for 9 months. It is because this non-LTS release is meant to receive the latest updates & package versions, hence if you would like to experience them then opt for it.
Today we are looking at how to install LibreCAD 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.
The Wine development release 6.17 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - WineCfg program converted to PE. - Better high-DPI support in builtin applications. - More preparation work for the GDI syscall interface. - Improved debugger support in Wow64 mode. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.17.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.17.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Wine 6.17 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release as we move closer towards the Wine 7.0 release around the start of the new year.
With Wine 6.17 most notable is better HiDPI support for Wine's built-in applications. Two weeks back with Wine 6.16 it brought better HiDPI theming support with enhancing Wine's High-DPI support appearing to be a recent focus for CodeWeavers and others.
Here we are again time to stop and re-wine. Another development release of the Wine compatibility layer has become available with Wine 6.17 having the bottle popped open today.
For newer readers and Linux users here's a refresher - Wine is a compatibility layer built for operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD. The idea is to allow other platforms to run games and applications only built and supported for Windows. It's also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
Don't Starve Together has a new face roaming the lands. In the latest major update to the popular survival game, Klei has introduced us to Wanda with a new fancy animated short. This update follows on from Don't Starve Together: Waterlogged that launched in August, which added more content to explore.
Like some other characters introduced, Wanda is not actually free. While you can opt to pay for Wanda directly in a special Chest or a new Starter Pack, you can also "weave" (craft) Wanda using the in-game Spool currency which is reasonably easy to get over a few weeks.
"Wanda has been trying to outrun her future for longer than she can remember - but after a split-second decision left her tangled up in the Constant's timestream, it might be her past that's finally catching up to her..."
Bit of a short list this week, but there’s much more still happening, with merge requests aplenty going through review! Plasma 5.23 is now in “soft feature freeze” and we are working hard to stabilize it for the release next month.
Keep in mind that this blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! Tons of KDE apps whose development I don’t have time to follow aren’t represented here, and I also don’t mention backend refactoring, improved test coverage, and other changes that are generally not user-facing. If you’re hungry for more, check out https://planet.kde.org/, where you can find blog posts by other KDE contributors detailing the work they’re doing.
KDE Frameworks 5.86 is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session, this time for NVIDIA GPU users who encountered content update failures on window resize or KRunner not display search results. It also fixes two crtical memory leaks that may affect the KDE Plasma desktop environment and Plasma widgets.
Among the improvements, this release brings back currency conversions in KRunner and the Kickoff application menu, adds support for editing the icons for all installed apps through Kickoff’s “Edit Application…” menu, displays applications launched from a global shortcut in System Monitor’s “Applications” page, and improves the shadows for Plasma pop-ups, dialogs, OSDs, and notifications to be more consistent with the shadows for app windows.
In my last BorgBackup post I described my new setup using BorgBackup for the backup of my private data.
After two weeks of use, I have now first experiences on the way the incremental backups perform and some additional information how I apply this to backup a virtual FreeBSD server hosting some of my stuff.
Void Linux is one of my favourite distributions, but since it employs a rolling release model, I never really get the opportunity to highlight it. So, I’m picking this random day to talk about it.
If you’re fairly proficient in “install and go” Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Manjaro, etc., and want to get a better insight into a Linux system without going overboard, Void is a great choice. It’s easy to install, easy to grasp and manage manually because it eschews systemd in favour of runit, it has an excellent community, and the package repository is far, far larger than you’d expect. Void also offers both GNU libc and musl versions.
Void is a bit more hands-on than e.g. Ubuntu, but not over the top like some other distributions. Setting up a Void Linux system will teach you quite a bit about how a Linux system works, but the no-nonsense, logical layout of it all means you’re not going to be overwhelmed. It also happens to be one of the few distributions that take ppc64le seriously thanks to a dedicated community, so it’s my system of choice there.
The developers of GhostBSD have released version 09/21/06 of the free Unix derivative. In addition to minor bug fixes, there is a central change: the return to the rc init system. Because while FreeBSD (and OpenBSD) consistently used the classic rc init, GhostBSD used the modern OpenRC for a while, which is also used by Gentoo, Alpine Linux and (optionally) Devuan GNU / Linux. OpenRC works on a dependency basis, but is based on the classic SysVInit and can also start services in parallel if required.
Extended support will give CentOS 8 users time to determine which of the many CentOS clones will work best for them.
With official support for a stable CentOS 8 Linux operating system set to end Dec. 31 from Red Hat, dedicated, long-time enterprise users of the OS have been scrambling to determine what to do to keep their critical IT infrastructures up and running safely after the deadline passes.
For enterprise users that are not yet ready to switch operating systems by then, CentOS alternative CloudLinux recently offered an answer to the conundrum – the company is now offering paid professional support to CentOS 8 users to take up the slack and keep their OS requirements on track.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Proxmox is unquestionably popular – but how do the Viennese manage to compete against virtualization heavyweights such as VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat? The regular and reliable updates – after all, the new Virtual Environment (VE) 7.0 appeared just two months after version 6.4 – are only part of the answer. Rather, the attractiveness of the package is to be sought in its flexibility.
Proxmox Virtual Environment, Proxmox VE for short, is a cluster and HA (high availability) platform for the simultaneous provision of kernel-based VMs via KVM / QEMU and containers via LXC. The entire administration – even entire clusters – takes place via a central web interface or the command line. The new version 7.0 offers all storage options that are also available under Debian GNU / Linux. LVM groups, ZFS pools or simple directories on any file system can be used locally, iSCSI targets or LUNs, CIFS / SMB or NFS shares, but also GlusterFS or Ceph can be used in the network. All virtual machines and containers can be created and used on local and network-based storage devices.
When it comes to Raspberry Pi projects, Dr2mod is no stranger. We previously covered his PS4 controller-operated robotic arm and SDR airplane monitor but today we’re monitoring things even farther away than airplanes. This Raspberry Pi Pico project displays the current position of planets in our solar system, a digital version of the classic mechanical orrery used to predict the position of planets in our solar system.
Do you know a good dog in need of treats? This clever Raspberry Pi project from Milunova will make sure they’re consistently compensated for things outside of their control. Every time Milunova gets a follower on Instagram, a Pi dispenses a treat for their foster puppy.
SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 92 and 93 Nightly release cycles.
Nowadays, regularly, more operating systems are dropping support for older architectures to only focus on amd64. This is understandable, volunteer work is limited and it's important to focus on the hardware found in most of the users computers. But then, by doing so they are making old hardware obsolete which is not acceptable.
I understand this is a huge dilemma and I have no solution, maybe we should need less operating systems to gather the volunteers to maintain older but still relevant architectures. It is not possible obviously, volunteers work on what they want because they like it, you can't assign contributors to some task against their will.
The issue is at a higher scale and every person working in the IT field is part of the problem.
Hello! I was talking to a friend yesterday who was studying for a programming interview and trying to learn some algorithms basics.
The topic of quadratic-time vs linear-time algorithms came up, I thought this would be fun to write about here because avoiding quadratic-time algorithms isn’t just important in interviews – it’s sometimes good to know about in real life too! I’ll explain what a “quadratic-time algorithm is” in a minute :)
[...]
The weird thing about quadratic time algorithms is that when you run them on a small number of elements (like 1000), it doesn’t seem so bad! It’s not that slow! But then if you throw 1,000,000 elements at it, it can really take hours to run.
So I think it’s worth being broadly aware of them, so you can avoid writing them by accident. Especially if there’s an easy way to write a linear-time algorithm instead (like using a hashmap).
This short memoir, devoted to the memory of an extraordinary man, begins nearly sixty years ago, in the spring of 1963. That was when my life-companion-to-be Ingeborg and I met Mikis, already widely known throughout Greece by his first name, at his family home.
It was a fine April day in Crete. The snow-capped peaks of the White Mountains loomed over Chania, a graceful city that still bore the imprint of the Venetians, who had ruled over Crete for several centuries before surrendering to the Ottomans, only becoming a part of Greece in 1912.
If he hadn’t died, of no unnatural causes, I never would have stumble-bungled across his 2017 book in my Alexandrianesque library I’ve nicknamed Abbie. In memory of the Yippie Pentagon-lifter. (“Not too high, okay, Abs?” Pentagon officials pleaded, in a punking, that would make Borat proud.) Written with Ed Weinberger, a comedy writer and former colleague on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the book, The Grouchy Historian: An Old-Time Lefty Defends Our Constitution Against Right-Wing Hypocrites and Nutjobs. It was just the tonic I needed to detox some of the excess bile that’s been building up since the ‘80s on account of what the Right has done to a perfectly€ tolerable world — politics, economics and culture grown stale, febrile, corrupted and our keen exceptionalism fallen into its own footprints.
It turns out that Ed has a succinct series of reasons for all that mess and proceeds to enumerate and counterpunch with the best of them.
“It put a smile on my face when I saw June Jordan’s name there,” Angela Davis said on a Zoom event to commemorate the 50th€ anniversary of the death of the celebrated, notorious author of€ Soledad Brother€ and€ Blood in My Eye€ and co-founder of the Black Guerrilla Family who had been behind bars in California every since 1961 when he was 20 years old.
Davis was talking about the list of books that the authorities at San Quentin typed 13 days after George Jackson was shot and killed August 21, 1971. Not surprisingly,€ Davis took a keen political and personal interest in the list of 99 books that were removed from the cell of prisoner A-63837.
The continent’s comparatively slow handling of containers has long been a source of supply chain pain and a leading cause of empty container shortages in Asia, but never to the extent recorded today.
Before the pandemic North America was structurally responsible for 40-45% of the empty imbalance needed in Asia, according to analysis from Sea-Intelligence. Following the early pandemic volatility this changed sharply, so that North America is now structurally responsible for 55-60% of the imbalance in Asia.
Social media influencers who receive money from companies to promote products must clearly label such posts as advertisements, a top German court ruled on Thursday.
If the influencers are not paid, they can show products without the advertising label, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in the cases of three influencers on Facebook's (FB.O) social media site Instagram.
In a statement, Yahoo said it will leverage Lanzone’s “deep media experience to drive the next generation of innovation across its world-class content and advertising platforms.”
Lanzone will succeed Guru Gowrappan, who was named senior adviser to Apollo Global Management’s private equity business. Lanzone will begin his new role on Sept. 27.
Novitsky and Dubrov are scheduled to carry out a six-hour-long space walk on Thursday to continue integrating the Russian-built Nauka science lab that docked with the space station in July. Shortly after docking, the lab briefly knocked the orbital outpost out of position by accidentally firing its engines — an incident Russian space officials blamed on a software failure.
"Have at it."
That's how President Joe Biden responded€ Friday when asked about Republican governors' threats to fight his administration's new Covid-19 vaccination requirements in court. Biden rejected GOP accusations of federal overreach as the latest example of right-wing opposition to public health measures amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
While applauding the Biden Justice Department for quickly suing Texas over its draconian abortion ban, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is stressing that legal action must be accompanied by a legislative push to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law if there's to be any hope of stopping the GOP's nationwide assault on reproductive rights.
"We're calling on the Senate to abolish the filibuster so we can send this urgent bill to the president's desk."—Rep. Pramila Jayapal
A study published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that people across the U.S. who were not fully vaccinated this spring and summer were 11 times more likely to die of Covid-19—and over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized—than those who were fully inoculated.
"During April 4-July 17, a total of 569,142 (92%) Covid-19 cases, 34,972 (92%) hospitalizations, and 6,132 (91%) Covid-19-associated deaths were reported among persons not fully vaccinated, and 46,312 (8%) cases, 2,976 (8%) hospitalizations, and 616 (9%) deaths were reported among fully vaccinated persons" in the 13 states examined as part of the new study, according to the CDC.
Twenty years ago, the United States sustained the first substantial attacks on the mainland since the War of 1812. It was a collective shock to all Americans who believed their country to be impregnable. The Cold War had produced the existential dread of a nuclear attack, but that always lurked in the realm of the maybe. On a day-to-day basis, Americans enjoyed the exceptional privilege of national security. No one would dare attack us for fear of massive retaliation.
Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Rick Claypool about OxyContin immunity for the September 3, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
For the first time ever, researchers have documented a link between noise from traffic and an increased risk of dementia.
Researchers sourced data from 2 million Danes from 2004-17 to discover that you have a 27 percent higher risk of getting Alzheimer’s and an 18 percent higher chance of developing dementia when subjected to over 55 decibels of traffic noise over long periods of time.
In an interview on Hill.TV’s “Rising,” Moore argued that while human beings “are wired to be most concerned with our own,” some people are putting their own family members at risk by taking the attitude of, “I don’t care. I’m not going to get vaccinated, either for political reasons or I’m afraid to get vaccinated and I don’t believe the government anymore.”
On Thursday evening, KrebsOnSecurity was the subject of a rather massive (and mercifully brief) distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. The assault came from “Meris,” the same new botnet behind record-shattering attacks against Russian search giant Yandex this week and internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare earlier this summer.
There are no warnings of computer attacks via cell broadcast, but here: Attackers are currently targeting prepared Microsoft Office documents in circulation after opening Infect Windows computers with malicious code. According to a warning from Microsoft, it was classified as “high” security breach concerns the HTML rendering engine MSHTML of Windows. Protective measures should take effect by default, but care should be taken with prepared Office documents, as they are misused to attack Windows.
The screen is now very much in English but, according to Register reader Alex, it once served a useful purpose for the locals before Windows did its thing - the classic out of box experience (OOBE).
"At the Dutch Lidl branches," Alex explained, "a system was placed last winter to count the number of shoppers for COVID restriction purposes."
The screen also previously featured Dutch comedian Thomas van Luyn exhorting customers to shop responsibly and maintain their distance while perusing the discounted goods on offer.
Gjøvik has raised concerns that her office is in an Apple building located on a superfund site, meaning it requires special oversight due to historical waste contamination. She also says that she faced harassment and bullying from her manager and members of her team. More recently, she’s begun raising privacy concerns related to Apple’s policies on how it can search and surveil employees’ work phones.
All travellers will soon have to submit fingerprints and facial images at the EU’s external borders. For this, large sums of money await companies offering such technologies in each member state. In an ââ¬Å¾Interoperability Package“, the European Union is spending more money on the systems.
You've likely heard by now that Facebook has launched their own version of sunglasses with a built-in camera, in partnership with Ray Ban, called "Ray Ban Stories" (because, seriously, which brand is cooler right now? Facebook? Or Ray Ban?). Lots of people are comparing it to the failed disaster that was Google Glass (which gave rise to the term "Glassholes") or SnapChat's similar product, and lots of people are calling out the potential privacy issues associated with these snoopervision glasses. To be honest, personally I feel like at least some of those concerns are typical moral panics, akin to people freaking out when the camera itself was invented, such as this story about early Kodak cameras:
Historian Heather Cox Richardson provides the background:[2] Abortion has been a part of American history since its inception. States began to criminalize it the 1870s, with the result that by the 1960s there were hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions a year endangering women. Based on sound medical practice, states began to de-criminalize pregnancy terminations, leaving the matter to the woman and her doctor.€ By 1972, (the year Roe v. Wade was handed down) 64% of Americans (59% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans) agreed with this medical model.
The politicization of the medical model began before Roe, however.€ In 1972, Richard Nixon was up for re-election and he and his advisors were paranoid about his chances of winning—fearful that Democrats and traditional Republicans would take power. Nixon formerly had no problem with the medical model (he directed military hospitals to perform abortions regardless of state law). However, in 1971, seeking to woo Catholic/Democrat and Evangelical voters and split the party’s votes, Nixon reversed course and adopted the Catholic “sanctity of human life” doctrine.€ € Ronald Reagan followed suit.
In recent years, though, prison reform advocates and the families of people who are incarcerated, sick of dumping their savings into the maws of these phone providers, have worked to tip this cash cow. They made enough noise that the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) set a cap on per-minute charges on interstate phone calls.€
So two of the largest providers of prison communications have initiated new ways of mining inmates for income.
Prisoners know their calls while in-custody are generally being monitored. Prisoners may also be aware that they’re being recorded (both legally and not so legally). Still, it may shock prisoners that Securus and GTL are working to monetize their ability to eavesdrop on and catalogue thousands of voices traversing the phone lines of penal facilities in nearly every state every day.
ProtonMail has long advertised itself as a particularly privacy-conscious email service. The free end-to-end encrypted email service promises more privacy and security than many of its competitors. But there are limits. ProtonMail operates out of Switzerland, making it subject to that country's laws (which, to be fair, are hardly draconian). It also (at least temporarily) retains a certain amount of information about users' emails -- metadata that can be used to verify accounts in the case of a lost password.
Amends: the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 and Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 to: introduce data disruption warrants to enable the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) to disrupt data by modifying, adding, copying or deleting data in order to frustrate the commission of serious offences online; and make minor technical corrections; the Surveillance Devices Act 2004 to introduce network activity warrants to enable the AFP and ACIC to collect intelligence on serious criminal activity by permitting access to the devices and networks used to facilitate criminal activity; the Crimes Act 1914 to: introduce account takeover warrants to enable the AFP and ACIC to take over a person's online account for the purposes of gathering evidence to further a criminal investigation; and make minor amendments to the controlled operations regime to ensure controlled operations can be conducted effectively in the online environment; and 10 Acts to make consequential amendments.
“The lawsuit filed by SpaceNet AG will stop the retention of information on all contacts and movements in Germany, which is an infringement on fundamental rights. Reintroducing the blanket collection of metadata leaves us, and our personal lives exposed. Indiscriminately collecting sensitive information about the social and business interactions, movements and the private lives (e.g. contacts with physicians, lawyers, workers councils, psychologists, helplines, etc.) of millions of citizens that are not suspected of any wrongdoing is a radical and unacceptable measure of mass surveillance.
A Tor relay’s ContactInfo is an arbitrary string which can be freely choosen by the relay operator, unfortunatelly this allows also malicious entities to impersonate other relay operators by using their ContactInfo. This is being exploited in the wild. The following relay operators did make an effort to allow for automated verification of the domain provided in their ContactInfo using the ContactInfo Information Sharing Specification version 2. Since this is a two way link (domain to relay and relay to domain), this can no longer be spoofed easily by an attacker anymore.
Thanks to a commit by Damien Miller (djm@), scp(1) (in -current) now defaults to using the SFTP protocol: [...]
In fact, the shock and awe(fulness) in Kabul and Washington over these last weeks shouldn’t have been surprising, given our history. After all, we were the ones who prepared the ground and dug the grave for the previous interment in that very cemetery.
That, of course, took place between 1979 and 1989 when Washington had no hesitation about using the most extreme Islamists — arming, funding, training, and advising them — to ensure that one more imperial carcass, that of the Soviet Union, would be buried there. When, on February 15, 1989, the Red Army finally left Afghanistan, crossing the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, Soviet commander General Boris Gromov, the last man out, said, “That’s it. Not one Soviet soldier or officer is behind my back.” It was his way of saying so long, farewell, good riddance to the endless war that the leader of the Soviet Union had by then taken to calling “the bleeding wound.” Yet, in its own strange fashion, that “graveyard” would come home with them. After all, they returned to a bankrupt land, sucked dry by that failed war against those American- and Saudi-backed Islamist extremists.
The U.S. Department of Energy current budget for nuclear weapons is already double it Cold War budget. The NPR will lay out the course for future expansion of the nuclear arsenal—or its reduction.
The Biden Nuclear Posture review is the fifth iteration of nuclear weapons planning since the first in 1994.
For a learned perspective on what has been unfolding in Afghanistan, I turned to interview Dr. Anatol Lieven.€ Lieven€ is a senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the€ Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. From 1985 to 1998, Lieven worked as a British journalist in South Asia, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and covered the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and the southern Caucasus.
James W. Carden:€ Let’s begin with the people who launched the suicide€ attack€ on the airport on August 26. Who are the Islamic State in the Khorasan Province, or ISKP?
We had to do something. That was and remains the generic explanation for what we did in response to 9/11—invading Afghanistan and Iraq, directing the CIA to covertly overthrow the governments of Haiti, Venezuela, Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and a bunch of other countries, lamely legalizing torture, kidnapping via extraordinary rendition to Guantánamo and other concentration camps, building a drone armada and sparking a drone arms race.
Acting purely on speculation, news media was reporting as early as the afternoon of September 11 that Al Qaeda was responsible. That same day, Vice President Dick Cheney argued for invading Iraq. We began bombing Afghanistan October 7, less than a month later, without evidence that Afghanistan was guilty. A week later, the Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden; Bush refused. Before you act, you think. We didn’t.
Biden’s decision to pull the American troops from Afghanistan put a bitter end to his honeymoon with the liberal press. But only because the mainstream press seems to be pulling the rug from under the President’s feet doesn’t mean that he is your friend.
On August 15, on the verge of Kabul’s fall, Declan Walsh, a chief correspondent of New York Times tweeted: “For those who lamented ‘forever wars’ — is the phrase anything more than a comforting cop-out for epic failures of policy and the imagination? — here’s what the end looks like.”
Some readers believe this story is entirely true, and confirms suspicions they “have always known to be true” about 9-11 being “an inside job.” Other readers believe this story is a hoax, something like the Piltdown Man fake fossil of 1912 that was only definitively refuted in 1953. And a third group of readers vacillate maddeningly with their uncertainties between these poles of true belief and complete non-belief. The present article is my reflection on all of this.
FIRST, about me
In reality, the writings of Chomsky and Herman on Cambodia under KR rule had significantly more nuanced arguments than those attributed to them by their fevered right wing and sometimes liberal critics. In a June 1977 article in The Nation and their 1979 book After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they did not deny the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. For example, in The Nation article they wrote that Father Francois Ponchaud’s widely publicized book on Khmer Rouge terror was “serious and worth reading…He gives a grisly account of what refugees have reported to him about the barbarity of their treatment at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.” In After the Cataclysm, Chomsky and Herman noted that in response to their extensive criticisms of many aspects of Ponchaud’s documentation of Khmer Rouge atrocities, the introduction to the American edition of Ponchaud’s book featured praise from Ponchaud of Chomsky for correcting the former’s mistakes. However, in the book’s British edition, Ponchaud referred to Chomsky somewhat tartly and falsely claimed that the latter and Herman denied that the Khmer Rouge committed any massacres.
Chomsky and Herman were not concerned about endorsing a particular estimate of how many Cambodians died under KR rule. They referenced US media coverage of the latter as part of their effort to show how the US media and political system covered up the war crimes and human rights violations of the US and the right wing third world dictatorships with which it allied while playing up the often real but sometimes exaggerated or fabricated crimes of official US government enemies—like the Soviet Union, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and similar states. However, because, like most Americans, Chomsky’s and Herman’s critics are indoctrinated with childish patriotic beliefs about America’s noble role in the world, they are unwilling to seriously consider the substantial evidence that Chomsky, Herman and other left-wing critics have gathered over the decades about the nefarious US role in the world. They have no interest in accepting the evidence that the US committed massive war crimes in Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere–while backing genocidal third world dictatorships like the Suharto regime in Indonesia, the Stroessner regime in Paraguay and working through various means, including death squads, to prevent third world peasants from lifting themselves out of extreme poverty. Their reflexive childish reaction to such evidence is to call people like Chomsky Communist apologists.
Like most New Yorkers, my life changed forever on Sept. 11, 2001. I was just 8 years old when two planes crashed into the twin towers on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning. At school in Astoria, teachers looked frantic, and we were just confused kids until an older student told us to look through the bathroom window. All I could see was smoke.
It's rare enough to see a law enforcement officer convicted of murder. It's even rarer to see it happen twice in one year.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs across from the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged against Iraq through the imposition of U.N. sanctions. Each Friday of our fast, we approached the entrance to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations carrying lentils and rice, asking the U.S. officials to break our fast with us, asking them to hear our reports, gathered after visiting destitute Iraqi hospitals and homes. On four successive Friday afternoons, New York police handcuffed us and took us to jail.
A fateful day
In those first harrowing hours after planes were turned into bombs on September 11, 2001, people across the country were paralyzed with fear. Few people alive 20 years ago had experienced an attack on American soil anything close to this magnitude.
Little did we imagine that someone would attack us in order to precipitate massive retaliation.
Osama bin Laden understood that American power was vulnerable when overextended. He knew that the greatest military power in the history of the world, deranged by a desire for vengeance, could be lured into taking a cakewalk into a quagmire. With the attacks of 9/11, al-Qaeda turned ordinary American airplanes into weapons to attack American targets. In the larger sense, bin Laden used the entire American army to destroy the foundations of American empire.
We have been told that the criminal attacks of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” But what really changed everything was the U.S. government’s disastrous response to them.
That response was not preordained or inevitable, but the result of decisions and choices made by politicians, bureaucrats and generals who fueled and exploited our fears, unleashed wars of reprehensible vengeance and built a secretive security state, all thinly disguised behind Orwellian myths of American greatness.
“We must never forget” 9/11, when “America was attacked” (when, as cannot be said without sounding “controversial,” the United States Middle East policy blew back on the nation’s financial and political capitals).
You must always remember that atrocity, good Americans: sear it in your minds forever. Never forget. Never stop caring. Never stop honoring the 9/11 victims and the “brave soldiers” who fought, died, and killed halfway across the world – causing massively more casualties than they suffered – in its wake. Never stop mourning (and avenging) that holy day of inherently “good” and “exceptional” America’s unjust martyrdom: 9/11/2001.
US news outlets have reported stories about civilian casualties in Afghanistan with caution, often noting that claims from the Taliban had not been independently verified. But many outlets showed no inclination to be equally careful when evaluating the Pentagon's line on casualties.
The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.
The radio guy found a station reporting the news. He left it there for people in the crowd to listen to. Although confusion reigned at the radio station, the story filtering in was that the two planes appeared to be part of a terrorist incident. Thousands of workers were trapped in the Twin Towers, thousands were fleeing and attempting to flee, and first responders were flooding into the blocks around the buildings. My friend worked near the Towers at an art supply store not far from The Knitting Factory—a music venue where we had drunk a few beers the night before. I headed back to her apartment and began calling her workplace. I needed to make sure she was okay before I left town. At first, there was no answer. When I did get through, a recording told me that the store was closed due to the events occurring in lower Manhattan. I called the airline I was flying out on next. All flights were canceled. My purpose became clear. I had to find my friend. I left the apartment and headed south towards Greenwich Village. On the way, I stopped at a Radio Shack store and bought a pocket radio. While I was paying the cashier, we watched the second tower fall. Fascinating in the way a tragedy can be, neither of us said a thing. I took my change from the guy and wished him luck. He responded in kind.
I turned on the radio and began my trek towards Washington Square Park. People were out on the sidewalks. Bars and restaurants were open. Many of them had a television sitting in a window or on an outside table broadcasting the news as it unfolded. Most of the commentary was confused and uncertain at first. By the time I got closer to the Village, that confusion was slowly being replaced by government officials telling people how they should react, various generals talking about how the US should respond, and the face of Rudy Giuliani. America’s freaking mayor was clearly taking advantage of the slaughter for his own venal purposes. It did make the scandal around his wife and his mistress playing out in Gracie Mansion second-page news. Seeing his face on every television screen from 24th Street to Washington Square Park is a memory from that day that won’t go away.
“A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime,” read The Washington Post’s headline on the recent unrest on the Caribbean island. “Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government,” wrote NPR. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal went with “Cuba’s Black Communities Bear the Brunt of Regime’s Crackdown” as a title.
Twenty years after 9/11, America is less safe, a deeply troubled country, ravaged by COVID, racism, inequality, extreme weather from global warming and political strife. Its political leaders have embraced an Orwellian approach to the truth in which war is peace and large segments of our society are polarized by widely divergent concepts of reality.
As the United States prepares to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Saturday, the women-led peace group CodePink is set to launch a new campaign this weekend featuring a webinar and White House rally "to reflect on the lessons of 9/11" and the so-called War on Terror that followed—and continues to this day.
On Saturday at 3:00 pm ET, CodePink and Massachusetts Peace Action will host "Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20-Year War on Terror," a webinar examining how "9/11 fundamentally altered the culture of the United States and its relationship with the rest of the world."
A new report just ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks offers a scathing analysis of how Big Tech corporations are "complicit in" and have "profited from" the so-called war on terror by at least $44 billion since 2001.
"When the U.S. chooses war over aid, Big Tech profits," the publication, Big Tech Sells War, states.€
It’s been twenty years of a global forever war on any strain of Islam that resists western subjugation, from the Islamic Courts of Somalia to the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan. It’s been twenty years of disastrous regime change and colonialist nation-building experiments. It’s been twenty years of sacrificing every civil liberty a plebian has ever managed to get their grubby hands on in this country on the alter of national security and law and order. It’s been twenty years of warrantless wiretaps, extraordinary rendition, and militarized police forces patrolling the inner cities in armored vehicles. It’s been a twenty-year news cycle of breathless round-the-clock fear-mongering and chest-thumping jingoism. Twenty years of being screamed at by tiny men in expensive suits about the moral priority of chasing Arab boogeymen who never quite materialize. It’s been twenty goddamn years of being held hostage by a single day in September 2001, and what have we learned?
We’ve learned that there is no tragedy too tender for a politician to exploit for profit. We’ve learned that the same men who pounced on our terror from that day like bloodthirsty jackals were also in the perfect position to prevent it from even happening in the first place and either failed or chose to fail to do so. We’ve learned that there is no such thing as a peace party in this country and that both Democrats and Republicans are equally willing to do the bidding of the same war machine that gives our ‘indispensable’ nation its only true purpose. We’ve learned that Saudi Arabia is definitely not our friend and is at least as willing as their neocon cheerleaders to stoke the flames of Islamic extremism to line their own pockets. We’ve learned, once again, that the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan will never be tamed by white men and their tedious experiments with what they refer to as progress. And we’ve learned that terrorism has a funny habit of creeping up like vines anywhere a foreign boot meets the sacred soil of a conquered land.
The events of September 11 shook this nation to its core. They stunned the citizenry, exposed our country’s vulnerabilities, and captured every headline. The events portended our nation’s deepest divide.
“But victimhood is not—for all that we would wish otherwise—a conveniently moral condition. This is something that those who have lived in intimate proximity to loss and mourning know or have to learn.”
Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep. Lee spoke with Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman about her fateful vote in 2001 and how her worst fears about “forever wars” came true. “All it said was the president can use force forever, as long as that nation, individual or organization was connected to 9/11. I mean, it was just a total abdication of our responsibilities as members of Congress,” Rep. Lee says.
Militants from al-Shabaab (or ISIS-Mozambique, as the U.S. State Department prefers to call it) did not fight to the last man; they disappeared across the border into Tanzania or into their villages in the hinterland. The energy companies will, meanwhile, soon start to recoup their investments and profit handsomely, thanks in large part to the Rwandan military intervention.
Why did Rwanda intervene in Mozambique in July 2021 to defend, essentially, two major energy companies? The answer lies in a very peculiar set of events that took place in the months before the troops left Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.
On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we revisit a conversation we hosted in January of 2002 between Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American woman who lost 19 members of her family in a U.S. air raid, and Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who lost her brother in the World Trade Center attack. Lasar would become an active member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Masuda later wrote the memoir, “My War at Home.”
It is commonly known that epileptic incidences have a high correlation to chronic malnutrition. She was not the only one who suffered from these bouts in Abricots. Dahline’s life and death, like so many others andeyò, literally “outside,” in the provinces, was never acknowledged. What was considered “normal” never should have been; it was a crisis that preceded the current disaster. Dahline was another casualty of the norm in Haiti machinated by a postcolonial State in service to foreign powers still trying to accumulate wealth and maintain resources through exploitation and neglect of the majority of its population, especially those in or once living in the countryside.
In the days that followed the 2010 earthquake, Abricots’ population increased by 8,314 people (about a 25% increase) seeking safe havens with their family and friends from the earthquake. Family members opened their homes and whatever resources they had to support each other. One lakou (traditional family compound) grew from 5 to 41 people. Although the growth of many lakou was not quite as dramatic, resources were stretched thin as those fleeing Port-au-Prince were welcomed, affectionately called names like dekonm (rubble), reskape (rescue), and even depòte (deported). Nationwide, 630,000 people left Port-au-Prince to the different areas of the countryside.
Immediately, however, Biden slapped sanctions on Afghanistan. The country now joins a very big club, including Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and others, of those the U.S. aims to starve into regime change. How’s that going? Well might you ask. It appears to be utterly ineffective at anything aside from tormenting ordinary people. In the face of sanctions, leaders clutch at power more ferociously than ever, because they see themselves endangered, while cancer patients can’t buy chemo.€ In short, these sanctions will break Afghanistan financially, probably cause famine and will doubtless engender huge emigration, while serving no purpose besides random cruelty, because sanctions are war by economic means. The analogy is a medieval siege. Sanctions prove that Washington isn’t done with Afghanistan, just as the bloodshed on the eve of departure did.
When ISIS-K bombed an airport gate, the media went berserk. CNN was particularly egregious, chortling over how Americans had lost faith in Biden, thus egging him on to do something abysmal. (He obliged.) You would have thought suicide bombing was new to Afghanistan, brought there by Biden’s supposedly lily-livered retreat. Well, hello? Soldiers and Afghans died in droves from all sorts of bombs during the reigns of Trump, Obama and Bush, without this media feeding frenzy. What was different this time was that corporate media was shocked by Biden’s unyielding retreat, while the world saw that the U.S. lost, was withdrawing and, while departing, was attacked.
The onslaughts on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are being likened to Pearl Harbor and the comparison is just. From the point of view of the assailants the attacks were near miracles of logistical calculation, timing, courage in execution and devastation inflicted upon the targets.
The Pearl Harbor base containing America’s naval might was thought to be invulnerable, yet in half an hour 2000 were dead, and the cream of the fleet destroyed. This week, within an hour on the morning of September 11, security at three different airports was successfully breached, the crews of four large passenger jets efficiently overpowered, the cockpits commandeered, navigation coordinates reset.
Isoluminance is our word for the day. Don't know what that means? Don't feel bad; neither does anyone running the armed forces of nations around the world. Can we blame the fall of Afghanistan on bad camo? No, but the old camouflage uniforms used by the United States during the height of the "War on Terror" years suck all the same. The price tag is bad enough; however, the fact that men and women potentially lost their lives because of shoddy camo should be an outrage. It isn't. For whatever reason, everyone (not in the military) still seems to love it. Within a few short years, it had become the fashion du jour for patriotic Americans, millions achieving an erection every time they saw the iconic earth-tone, blocky motif.
Among the many television specials marking the 20th anniversary of 9/11, one that stood out was this week’s two-hour edition of public television’s Frontline, "America After 9/11."
With the UN Glasgow climate talks starting next month, three Christian leaders say they will decide the planet’s future.
The United States just experienced the hottest summer ever, breaking the record set in 1936 when the Dust Bowl Era took hold amid extreme heat, drought, crop failures that upended the country.
According to data and new analysis released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
But greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise, and exactly 16 years after Katrina, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana as a Category 4 storm with winds of 150 miles per hour and up to 10 inches of rain, leaving more than 1 million households in Louisiana without power. The remnants of the storm traveled up the East Coast with flash floods killing at least 15 people in New York and damaging homes and public transport infrastructure.
While some media coverage celebrated the fact that the post-Katrina levees around New Orleans remained intact, the real story is that Ida’s behavior fits the profile of storms fueled by a rapidly changing climate, and no levees will be strong enough to provide enough protection against such relentless hurricanes year after year.
On of the main streets that divides Detroit from its southwestern neighbor, Dearborn, doesn’t shift elevation or air pressure. A rain gauge on either side of Tireman Road wouldn’t register much difference in precipitation, and the trees that straddle its northern and southern curbs can claim no ecological advantage over their counterparts. And yet, in the age of climate crisis, streets like Tireman are where the objective science of climate change meets the subjective machinery of American urban policy to produce rifts as profound as the greatest continental divides.
Roughly 400 anthracite coal miners ( the vast majority of them foreign born eastern Europeans) had had enough of the darkened servitude imposed on them by the Calvin Pardee Company. The miners worked 60 hours a week underground. They were forced to live in company homes and buy what they needed to live from the company store. They had to buy their own kegs of blasting powder from the company store, which were marked up to 300% beyond what the Calvin Pardee Company paid for them. It was profiteering on top of servitude. It was inhumane. It was unjust. It was intolerable.
So the miners organized a march to close down the Calvin Pardee Company mine operations in Lattimer, demanding a shorter work week, better wages, and an end to the three cent per day tax effectively levied against foreign born miners through passage of the Campbell Act, which discriminated against non-naturalized citizens.
Nearly a decade of tireless grassroots activism led by students, alumni, and faculty members culminated in Harvard University's announcement Thursday that it is ending its investments in planet-warming fossil fuels, a decision campaigners celebrated as a major victory for the climate movement.
In an open letter posted to the university's website, Harvard President Lawrence Bacow wrote that the Harvard Management Company (HMC) "has no direct investments in companies that explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels" and "does not intend to make such investments in the future."
Unfortunately, mainstream climate visions have strayed far from confronting the existential necessity to banish fossil fuels. They simply assume that the buildup of renewable energy will automatically chase fossil fuels out of our lives and fully replace them, watt for watt and Btu for Btu. These visions hold out the promise of a world in which a pristine, Sun-powered economy fulfills any and all of our material desires far into the future—a delicious, guilt-free cornucopia. But the green-growth promise is a mirage, and the realities of a high-production, wind- and solar-powered world will be much less tasty.
Any industrial installation, including solar and wind farms, profoundly disrupts the landscape on which it sits. If it were possible to fully satisfy the bloated energy appetites of affluent nation by covering hundreds of millions or billions of acres of the Earth’s surface with power-harvesting hardware, the result would be irreparable ecological damage.
As the oil and gas industry achieves success in pushing the world towards widespread adoption of methane-based blue hydrogen, some unexpected voices are calling out the industry on its deception of selling blue hydrogen as an affordable and clean source of energy.€
In August, Chris Jackson resigned as head of the UK Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association, calling blue hydrogen an “expensive distraction.”€
Policymakers have been meeting with fossil fuel and biomass producers nine times as often as with their renewable energy counterparts, DeSmog can reveal, raising fresh concerns over the depth of the government’s commitments to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Analysis of the government’s latest transparency data shows ministers at the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) held 130 one-on-one meetings with energy producers between July 22, 2019 and March 31, 2021, of which nearly half (63) were with producers of high carbon energy.
The UK’s Business Department and the country’s leading oil and gas industry body have both been accused of citing the Climate Change Committee “out of context” in a bid to justify new developments in the North Sea.
Campaigners say the industry is “twisting the words” of the government’s independent climate advisers in a “shameless” attempt to promote its growth plans.€
One key reason why the CO2 emissions per Bitcoin transaction can be so extreme is that the underlying blockchain isn’t just built on an energy-demanding algorithm, but it’s also extremely limited in terms of transaction processing capacity. A block for Bitcoin’s blockchain can contain 1 megabyte of data. As a new block will be generated only once every 10 minutes on average, this data limit prevents the network from handling more than 7 transactions per second. In the most optimistic scenario Bitcoin could therefore theoretically handle around 220 million transactions annually. Meanwhile, the global financial system is handling more than 700 billion digital payments per year (and a payment provider like VISA can handle over 65,000 per second if needed). Bitcoin’s maximum transaction capacity represents only 0.03% of this (rapidly growing) number. This is less than the total number of electronic payments processed in a country like Hungary (more than 300 million per year), not even considering that cash still makes up for two thirds of all payment transactions here. With such an incredibly low limit, Bitcoin is simply incapable of achieving any form of mainstream adoption as a global currency and/or payment system. Unlike the network’s transaction limit, the energy consumption of the network isn’t capped. The price of Bitcoin is the main driver of the network’s environmental impact, and there’s no limit to how high this can go. Because of this, the Bitcoin network can consume several times as much electrical energy as the entire country of Hungary (which consumes 43 TWh annually).
Every Salvadoran has been gifted $30 in bitcoin (the US dollar is the nation’s other official currency) and can now shop or pay their taxes with it. Companies must accept it by law, but are permitted to instantly swap all bitcoin to dollars once received. A Panamanian congressman has now proposed legislation that would see the country follow in El Salvador’s footsteps.
"Member countries of the ISA, including France which hosted this Congress, need to wake up and act on behalf of civil society and the environment now, and take action in support of a moratorium."—Matthew Gianni, Deep Sea Conservation Coalition
"A.B. 701 is how we start winning our power and safety back."—Athena
We've noted a few times that the Space X, Starlink satellite broadband service isn't going to be quite as disruptive to telecom as many people might think.
The technologists who once overhauled the federal government’s HealthCare.gov website after the disastrous rollout of Obamacare are now being deployed to help modernize and streamline the nation’s aging unemployment insurance system, which buckled under a pandemic-driven wave of legitimate and fraudulent claims.
The U.S. Digital Service, an arm of the White House that works across the federal government to tackle big technological challenges, has embarked on a reconstruction that will cover the entire UI system, from initial claim filing to benefit appeals, according to a memo and presentation obtained by ProPublica through a public records request. “We envision a future in which the federal government provides software that states may use to fully administer their UI program,” the agency said in the June memo to state UI systems.
Just last week, news broke that Tesla had purchased $1.5-billion in Bitcoin to 'maximize returns on cash,' and somewhat unsurprisingly, eyebrows are being raised. As reported by Markets Insider, Economist Nouriel Roubini is accusing Elon Musk of market manipulation and stating that the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) should investigate.
The accession of bitcoin to the status of a legal currency in El Salvador was viewed by many cryptocurrency investors as a watershed moment, but the rocky rollout of the country’s digital wallet and growing concern over President Nayib Bukele’s tactical approach to the bitcoinization of his country’s economy has caused some supporters to warn that the episode will prove to be a major setback.
The recent passage of Texas bill SR 1, and its peremptory validation by the Supreme Court's far-right conservative majority, has generated widespread and justified horror and outrage. As many have€ explained€ much better than I could ever do, the law is doubly despicable. It institutes a "fetal heartbeat" limit on abortion that virtually abolishes all legal abortion in the state and that radically overthrows approximately fifty years of settled jurisprudence following the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. And it cynically seeks to get around jurisprudential constraints by empowering private citizens rather than state officials to enforce the criminal law, and establishing draconian civil penalties to be paid to these vigilant citizens upon criminal convictions of "offenders" in court.
With U.S. Covid-19 deaths rising and over a quarter of the eligible population still unvaccinated, President Joe Biden's sweeping new rules aimed at boosting vaccination rates have provoked predictable backlash from Republican lawmakers, right-wing voices, and anti-vaccine commentators but also widespread applause from public health experts and medical professionals.
"Your freedom stops when you're impacting other people's freedoms and rights."—Dr. Aaron Glatt, Mount Sinai South Nassau
According to the statute’s definition, Bush also committed a crime of aggression when he decided to illegally invade Iraq. As president of the United States and commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, Bush was certainly in a position to “direct the political or military action” of the country when he and other high-level officials “plann[ed], prepar[ed], initiat[ed], and execut[ed]” a war of aggression.
Bush holds responsibility for the torture and inhumane treatment of detained people, willfully causing great suffering and serious injury. According to Bush himself, he authorized the use of several “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, which the U.N. has declared a form of torture. Furthermore, he facilitated enforced disappearances. The Open Society Justice Initiative reported that, after 9/11, Bush authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to establish a secret detention program under which people were held in CIA prisons (“black sites”) outside the U.S., where torture was carried out. The report adds that Bush granted the CIA the authority to engage in “extraordinary rendition,” defined as the transfer of a detained person — without legal process — to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation. The operations involved brutal torture.
Social media's innate tendency to balkanize users into discrete political and social groups led to a profoundly different media consumption during the pandemic. Of course, Instagram wasn't around in 2001; nor was Twitter, or Facebook. Can you imagine how 9/11 would have unfolded differently had it occurred twenty years later?
Ah, great. Just after Australia made it clear that media organizations are liable for comments on social media (demonstrating one aspect of a world without intermediary liability protections), Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro has announced new social media rules that effectively force social media sites to keep all content online (demonstrating the flipside to a world without intermediary liability protections). The two most important things that Section 230 does -- limiting liability for 3rd party intermediaries and freeing websites of liability for moderation choices -- each going away completely in two separate countries in the same week.
Geofence warrants require companies to provide information on every electronic device in a geographical area during a given time period. ATF used at least 12 geofence warrants issued to Google—the only company known to provide data in response to these warrants—to collect people’s location data during the Kenosha protests. The center of each geographic area was a suspected arson incident. However, the warrants reach broadly and require location data for long periods of time. One of the warrants encompassed a third of a major public park for a two-hour window during the protests. The ATF effectively threw a surveillance dragnet over many protesters, using “general warrants” that violate the Fourth Amendment and threaten the First Amendment right to protest free from government spying.
Police can use geofence warrants to collect information on and movements of innocent people at protests. This can include device information, account information, email addresses, phone numbers, and information on Google services used by the device owner, and the data can come from both Android and Apple devices. Someone who goes to a protest and happens to be nearby when a crime occurs may get caught up in a police investigation. Police in Minneapolis, for example, used a geofence warrant during the protests over the killing of George Floyd. The public only learned about it because the dragnet, centered around a property damage incident, caught an innocent bystander filming the protests, and Google notified him (which it doesn’t always do). The police can also use this data to create dossiers on activists and organizers.
In this way, geofence warrants also eliminate anonymity that people may rely on in order to protest or otherwise freely associate in public spaces. Law enforcement’s ability to catalogue the location of peaceful protestors will chill their exercise of their First Amendment rights. This is especially problematic when, as with the August 2020 protests in Kenosha, people are taking to the streets to hold the police themselves accountable.
John: Thank you, Dennis, very good to be back
Dennis: Yes, indeed.€ Well can we start in Afghanistan?€ Can I get you to respond to the bloody and disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan after€ 20-years of a bloody, senseless and illegal occupation?
According to a statement issued by the ALJP, the prime minister said he was well aware of the issues regarding access to information for members of the press. Some civil servants and public administration workers whose job it is to provide information to respective press officers have occasionally misinterpreted the so-called "Bettel circular" newsletter.
Susan Collins recognizes that the Texas law banning abortion after the first six weeks of a pregnancy, even in cases of rape and incest, is “extreme.” The senior senator from Maine admits that the US Supreme Court’s refusal to strike down the law—which encourages bounty hunters to sue anyone who helps a pregnant person to exercise control over their body for $10,000—is “harmful.” On Thursday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Texas, challenging the law’s constitutionality.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice have filed a complaint against the state of Texas in an attempt to stop enforcement of the state’s anti-abortion law, which empowers bounty hunters to deprive women and pregnant people of their constitutional rights.
Unite Here is a union representing some 270,000 US and Canadian workers in what’s called “the hospitality industry.” Its members are mostly women and people of color.
Bon Appetit is a for-profit company based in Minneapolis that provides “full food-service management to corporations, universities, and specialty venues.” The Giants contract with them to run the concession stands at Oracle Park.
Civil liberties and racial justice advocates are celebrating after a federal judge ruled Thursday that Florida's anti-protest law is unconstitutional and therefore unenforceable.
In his 90-page decision€ (pdf) granting civil rights groups' request€ for a preliminary injunction, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker said the law—passed by Florida's GOP-controlled House and Senate and signed€ in April by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in response to demonstrations against police violence and racial injustice—violates rights to free speech and peaceful assembly as well as due process protections.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, the state is now unleashing another wave of newly minted bounty hunters — this time on women.
The Supreme Court has let stand the Lone Star State’s latest attack on women — a law that criminalizes abortion after six weeks, before most women realize they are pregnant, with no exceptions for rape or incest.
To know I am somebody is identity based not upon social or economic identifiers but on an ontological recognition of one’s valid being, one’s inclusion in the interdependent whole. It is revolutionary: it affirms self-worth against the identity provided illegitimately by the top-down system. And it is subversive in its refusal to accept the authority of that system that excludes our in-commonness. Instead, the authority for “somebodyhood” is inclusive, the larger Being contacted via the soul.
Whiteness & Endangered humanity
With all eyes on Texas Thursday as the U.S. Justice Department sued the Lone Star State over its new abortion ban, Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt held a ceremonial bill signing for nine so-called "pro-life" measures he approved during this year's legislative session—highlighting the need for Congress to protect reproductive rights at the federal level.
Stitt, who was flanked by anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser and GOP state lawmakers for the event, said that "I promised Oklahomans I would sign every piece of pro-life legislation that came across my desk and I am proud to keep that promise."
But the sacrifices of these Black heroes will receive no recognition during the commemorations around America for the 20th Anniversary of what is considered the most tragic terrorist attack ever conducted on America soil.
These heroes, William Parker and his colleagues, confronted terrorists on 9/11 in defense of freedom and liberty – professed pillars of democracy in America.
The public centerpiece of our effort to increase government surveillance in response to the attacks was the passage of the Patriot Act, which will have its own 20th anniversary on October 26. But much more happened, and far too much of it was not revealed until years later.€ Our government developed€ a huge and expensive set of secret spying operations that eviscerated the line between domestic and foreign surveillance and swept up millions of non-suspect Americans' communications and records. With some small but critical exceptions, Congress almost completely abdicated its responsibility to check the power of the Executive. Later, the secret FISA court shifted from merely approving specific warrants to a quasi-agency charged with reviewing entire huge secret programs without either the knowledge or the authority to provide meaningful oversight. All of these are a critical part of the legacy of September 11.
Yet even after all of these years, there’s no clear evidence that you can surveil yourself to safety.
Of course, we did not invent national security or domestic surveillance overreach 20 years ago. Since the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the early twentieth century, and the creation of the National Security Agency in 1952, the federal government has been reprimanded and reformed for overreaching and violating constitutionally protected rights. Even before 9/11, the NSA’s program FAIRVIEW forged agreements between the government agency and telecom companies in order to monitor phone calls going in and out of the country. But 9/11 gave the NSA the inciting incident it needed to take what it€ has long wanted: a shift to a collect-it-all strategy inside the U.S. to match, in many ways, the one it had already developed outside the U.S., and the secret governmental support to try to make it happen. As for those of us in the general public, we were told in the abstract that giving up our privacy would make us more secure even as we were kept in the dark about what that actually meant, especially for the Muslims and other Americans unfairly targeted.€
The Miami Beach Police Department is so full of what we colloquially call "bad actors" that it can't even make its way through a criminal trial of one of its employees without implicating even more employees. Proper evidence handling? Chain of custody? These are things the Miami Beach PD can't be bothered to concern itself with.
When I first started Tedium six years and nine months ago, I wanted to see how far I could get with it before I reached the point where I forgot that I had written about something previously. I feel like I’m finally at that point, where there are probably things that I’ve written about that I likely will not remember unless I look them up, like this Charlie Sheen-inspired piece about alternative medicine, or this piece on bottle deposits. I have been at this long enough that there are pieces in my archives that I first wrote in 2015 that I wish I could completely rewrite knowing what I know now. (Example: I totally burned through numbers stations less than a month after the first issue, which I’m still kicking myself about.) There’s always a risk of getting meta when it comes to Tedium, but for today’s issue I wanted to explain how I actually go about researching the things I choose to write about, in hopes that it might help someone who needs some editorial inspiration or who wants to become a better researcher. Maybe you might get better at writing after reading this. — Ernie @ Tedium
And then there are questions about ViacomCBS’s own future in the firmament of media companies. Shari Redstone has said that the company her family built has the resources it needs to compete with the entertainment leviathans that cast a shadow over the entertainment world. However, many observers believe that she’ll have no choice to sell the company to an Apple, Amazon or another tech giant upending the way that movies are made and distributed.
“I don’t think she’ll have much choice but to sell in two or three years,” says Vogel. “There’s tremendous competition out there and with Netflix and Disney and Apple and Amazon out there, it’s hard to find a niche.”
If there's something that's been made clear over the last year or so in the world of antitrust it's that just because some people don't like big companies and their practices, that doesn't mean it's an antitrust violation. It rarely is. In the well, rather epic lawsuit that Epic brought against Apple, we initially described it as a contract negotiation by lawsuit and predicted that it didn't seem likely to actually meet the bar for an antitrust violation. It seems that District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with us, rejecting the antitrust claims entirely. As the judge wrote:
In a ruling Friday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said the company must give developers the option of bypassing its commission on in-app purchases -- a cut that runs as high as 30%. That includes letting iOS apps use “buttons, external links or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing methods” other than Apple’s payment system.
A court in Oakland, California, has ruled that Apple cannot stop app developers directing users to third-party payment options.
Apple had argued that all apps should use Apple's own in-app payment options.
In a high profile trial, Epic Games had challenged the up-to-30% cut Apple takes from purchases - and argued that the App Store was monopolistic.
The ruling says that Apple cannot bar developers from providing buttons or links in their apps that direct customers to other ways to pay outside of Apple’s own in-app purchase system, which charges developers commissions of up to 30 percent. The ruling also said that Apple cannot ban developers from communicating with customers via contact information that the developers obtained when customers signed up within the app.
Specifically, the court said that “Apple is engaging in anticompetitive conduct,” and that “Apple’s anti-steering provisions hide critical information from consumers and illegally stifle consumer choice.”
To fix that, the court issued the following permanent injunction barring Apple from having rules against other payment systems. I’ve bolded the most relevant bit: [...]
In short, iOS apps must be allowed to direct users to payment options beyond those offered by Apple. The injunction is scheduled to take effect in 90 days — on December 9th — unless it is enjoined by a higher court.
Absolute deadline for filing corresponding UK Applications expires on 30 September 2021
If you are the owner of an EU Trade Mark Application or Registration that was pending on 1 January 2021, and if the UK is a territory of interest to you, then please sit up and take note.
The deadline to take action and to file corresponding UK Applications will expire on 30 September 2021. This deadline is absolute. If you don't take action, your EU Mark will no longer have effect in the UK.
On May 20th, ToolGen filed its Substantive Motion No. 1 for benefit of priority in Interference No. 106,126, which names ToolGen as Senior Party and as Junior Party The Broad Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the President and Fellows of Harvard College (collectively, "Broad"). On August 6th, Broad filed its Opposition to this Motion.
As set forth in ToolGen's motion, the Board had granted ToolGen the benefit of its U.S. provisional application, Serial No. 61/717,324, filed October 23, 2012 ("P1"), resulting in ToolGen having an earlier priority date than Broad. ToolGen submitted this motion to be accorded benefit of priority to two later-filed, related applications: U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/837,481, filed June 20, 2013 ("P3" or "ToolGen 5 P3"), or alternatively, International Application No. PCT/KR2013/009488, filed Oct. 23, 2013 ("PCT"). In its motion, ToolGen explains that it is submitting this motion contingent on the Board granting CVC's Substantive Motion No. 2, which attacks ToolGen's entitlement to priority to the P1 priority document in Interference No. 106,127. The brief sets out graphically the relationship of these priority documents:
In a nonprecedential decision, the Federal Circuit gave a mixture of success and failure to the parties in four separate inter partes review decisions by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, in C.R. Bard, Inc. v. Medline Industries, Inc.
The case arose in IPRs instituted in response to a challenge by Bard involving three Medline Patents: U.S. Patent No. 9,745,088 (wherein claims 1, 2, 6–10, 16–19, 25–58, 60–74, 76–90, and 92 were challenged); U.S. Patent No. 9,808,596 (claims 7–16 and 21–22 challenged); and U.S. Patent No. 9,795,761 (claims 1–19 and 22–25 challenged). The claims are directed to trays designed to store urinary catheterization tools, which include a lubricant syringe, an inflation syringe, and a fluid receptable.
Parus Holdings, Inc., a pioneer in voice-enabled technologies, is pleased to announce today that it has won an important victory against Apple in a patent dispute over its voice-user interface technologies for retrieving information. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected in its entirety Apple's attempt to invalidate key Parus patents.
As the 1 October deadline draws nearer, time is running out to nominate an inventor for the 2022 edition of the European Inventor Award. Each year, the Award casts a spotlight on the individuals who are driving change that benefits society and next year will include the new sustainability-focused Young Inventors prize for early career innovators By submitting a nomination, you will help identify and celebrate these inspiring inventors.
A recent judgment, overturning the high threshold standard for sufficiency set out in a High Court decision, is good news for owners of patents in the UK claiming large numbers of compounds...
The company has secured an advantageous position in the global in-vitro diagnostic market with the current registration and patents obtained in the U.S., Japan, and China.
JW Bioscience, a subsidiary of JW Life Science, plans to continue filing a patent in European countries and complete the final registration.
The company is preparing a clinical trial with Severance Hospital to develop a diagnostic device using WRS to receive approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety and plans to apply for authorization by the end of 2021.
A month ago, we wrote about a perplexing (and dangerous) decision down in Australia ruling that an AI can be listed as the inventor of a patent. As we had explained, there was a concerted effort by a small group patent lawyers and this one dude, Stephen Thaler, to seek out patents for "inventions" that an AI created by Thaler called Dabus ("device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience"). As we explained in that and earlier posts, the entire point of the patent system is to provide incentives to humans to invent. An AI does not need such incentives. As we've highlighted in the past, the USPTO and the EU patent office have both rejected AI-generated patents. Australia's patent office had done the same, but a judge there rejected that and said an AI could be listed as an inventor.
On September 9, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,115,067, owned by Consumeron, LLC, an NPE. The '067 patent relates to a method for remote acquisition and delivery of goods involving a server in communication with a customer’s computer through a user interface via the Internet. The patent has been asserted against MapleBear Inc. d/b/a Instacart.
Hosting company Quadranet has asked a Florida federal court to dismiss the "VPN piracy" lawsuit that was filed by several independent film companies. The hosting company argues that it can't be held liable for the pirating activities of LiquidVPN subscribers, simply because the VPN provider happens to lease servers at Quadranet.
A former student who sold pirated digital copies of textbooks has been sentenced by a court in Denmark. Over a 21-month period the woman sold access to 38 different copyrighted books used in the social worker sector. An anti-piracy group referred her crimes to the country's State Prosecutor for Serious Economic and International Crime and yesterday a court determined her fate.
In anticipation of the Summit, we’re doing something a little different in this episode. Pack your bags and prepare for a short (audio) tour around the world, join CC’s Ony Anukem as she speaks to three of our wonderful Summit keynote speakers. First up in Nairobi, Kenya, where we sit down with Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director at Ushahidi. Ushahidi is a global non-profit technology company that builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering barriers for individuals to raise their voices. Angela was also recently appointed to the Creative Commons Board of Directors. Next, we’ll arrive in Bangalore, India, where you’ll hear from Shuttleworth Fellow and Coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, Achal Prabhala. AccessIBSA is a project set up to expand access and speed up the discovery of new drugs in India, Brazil and South Africa. Our final stop on the tour will be in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where we will catch up with Cecília Olliveira, Executive Director of Fogo Cruzado. Fogo Cruzado aims to expand a community-driven open data platform and reduce the impact of armed violence to build a more just society. She is also a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Based in: London, ON – Canada
For some reason, it seems that there is an industry issue heating up among video game developers and publishers over their modding communities. We've begun to see a flurry of stories on the topic lately and perhaps the most impressive thing about those stories is how wildly binary they are. Nintendo tends to Nintendo, for instance, where control is valued over building a community of fans. Other publishers, like CD Projekt Red and Bethesda go the completely opposite direction and not only embrace the modding communities for their games, but also sometimes simply hire talented modders directly to their payroll.
