Linux Kernel 5.15 RC1 is released for testing, and it brings some interesting support and updates. In this post, we round up the important features of this Kernel release.
Mesa 21.3 today landed a debug option that can help with the XWayland-based gaming performance around latency and for power management as well.
Via the vk_xwayland_wait_ready=false DRIConf option, Mesa's Vulkan windowing system integration code will wait less. Currently the Mesa Vulkan WSI code with XWayland will wait for buffers to be ready before they are submitted to XWayland when operating in Vulkan's "immediate" mode. But for some Wayland compositors that default behavior is undesirable.
This change was proposed three months ago to alter the default behavior of the Vulkan X11 WSI code but with it regressing things for some Wayland compositors, the decision was made to make it a DRIConf option so users can opt-in to avoiding the wait around fences.
PeaZip is an open source, cross-platform archive management software that offers encryption and compression functions and can open and extract over 200 archive types. It can schedule archives, create self-extracting archives and can even be used as a portable program without installation. The software is available under the open source LGPLv3 license and is free for any use – private and professional. In addition, all PeaZip packages are safe to download and contain no advertising or malicious software.
Make no mistake: I feel a lot of what makes the web great is actively being dismantled, either inadvertently or deliberately. But as I mentioned earlier, cynicism is easy. My wish for next year? That all the qualities mentioned here are still present. My New Year’s resolution? To help ensure it.
In this tutorial we will use OpenCV to combine a YOLOv3 detector with a tracking system to identify and track among 80 object classes on video. To follow along this tutorial you will need a video recording of your own. Code and further instructions are available in a dedicated repository. Lights, camera, action.
If you are familiar with diff; a Linux terminal-based tool for comparing two files in terms of contextual differences and layout, you are going to love what Meld has to offer. Think of Meld as a diff tool with graphical upgrades.
Whether you are dealing with Git repository files, directory files, or ordinary system files, the visual capability of Meld makes any file comparing task not only fun but also a walk in the park.
Therefore, sorting through data and code files no longer needs to be a struggle for developers and novice Linux users. Additionally, Meld offers a merge functionality on top of it being a graphical diff tool.
OpenLiteSpeed is a lightweight and open source web server. It is developed by LiteSpeed Technology. In this post we are going to show you the steps to install OpenLiteSpeed on Ubuntu Linux. You might not have heard much about OpenLiteSpeed but it is feature rich webserver applications that you can use without any hesitations.
There are tons of screen recorders available for Linux. But when it comes to supporting Wayland, almost all of them do not work.
This is problematic because many new distribution releases are switching to Wayland display manager by default once again. And if something as basic as a screen recorder does not work, it leaves a bad experience.
GNOME’s built-in screen recorder works but it is hidden, has no GUI and no way to configure and control the recordings. There is another tool called Kooha but it keeps on displaying a timer on the screen.
Switching between Xorg and Wayland just for screen recording is not very convenient.
Amidst all this, I was happy to learn that Wayland support landed in OBS Studio with version 27 release thanks to Pipewire. But even there, it’s not straightforward and hence I am going to show you the steps for screen recording on Wayland using OBS Studio.
Redis is a in-memory key-value store known for performance and flexibility. In this guide you are going to learn how to install and configure Redis on Debian.
This setup is tested on Google Cloud with an Debian OS, so this setup will work on any cloud services like AWS, Azure or any VPS or dedicated servers.
Thinkorswim is an online trading platform developed by TD Ameritrade to allow users to trade in various stock, options, futures, and equities. Apart from the web-based trading platform, the company also provides a dedicated desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux to trade efficiently with advanced tools, screeners, and charts.
The application is available free of cost and can be used with TD Ameritrade and few others. Well, once the installation of Thinkorswim is completed on your Linux Desktop you will have free real-time quotes, hundreds of chart studies, options risk graphs, and more.
Although the interface of this trading platform is complex and meant for advanced users still beginners or less active traders can also use it to invest.
With the upcoming Kernel Feature Freeze (September 16th) and Kernel Freeze (September 30th) development stages, it would appear that Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) is sticking with Linux kernel 5.13, which recently landed in the main archives of the distribution as the default kernel instead of the Linux 5.11 kernel used until now from the Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) release.
Linux kernel 5.13 has been released at the end of June 2021, and it introduces initial support for Apple’s M1 processor, support for the Landlock security module to create safe security sandboxes for mitigating the security impact of various flaws in user space apps, as well as the ability to handle ASN.1 trusted keys.
In the first four parts of this series on the open source software supply chain, I explored open source as a supply chain, what a product is, what product managers do, and ways to differentiate open source software products from their upstream projects. In this article, I will discuss the essential elements of a roadmap and how to determine them.
Customers, as well as the sales and marketing teams who talk to them, love a roadmap. It gives them a sense of what is realistic and what is not. The roadmap is also at the heart of a product. Maintaining an up-to-date product roadmap keeps the product team focused on the customer and aligned around delivering what they need. The roadmap communicates both the strategic direction for a product and the company's perspective on problem solving.
The technical report "Sharing and using geospatial data across borders. Spatial Data Infrastructures for the Digital Economy", illustrates how geospatial data from multiple countries can be used to develop location powered insights.
The present study through desk research, case studies, and a workshop aimed to respond the following questions: [...]
Yes, I am aware that I am interrupting our self-hosting PL/0 compiler series but I think it will be worth it. Earlier today, I got the J language system running on OpenBSD. I find it important to write these up, because it helps me preserve my own knowledge of what I did and hopefully it will help others porting languages to their favorite *BSD.
The Ghost in the Shell series were about efficient working in the shell environment but one of the feats of any sysadmin profession is the shell scripting. It is often needed to ‘glue’ various solutions and technologies to work as ‘Business’ requires or to fill the gap where any solution is not available – or at least not for free. It also serves a growing role in the automation of various tasks. Today I will try to show you the basics of writing POSIX /bin/sh compatible shell scripts.
In 1970, Robert K. Greenleaf defined a new concept, that of servant-leader. He described it thusly: “A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the ‘top of the pyramid,’ servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.”
Let’s all take a minute and look at this definition in the context of the U.S. presidency.€ A servant-leader, we are told, involves the following:
Reporting from Vienna on May Day, 1844, the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter painted a happy picture. In a feuilleton, he took readers to the Prater public park, where the “highest, high, and lowliest of Viennese society” had come for the spring festival. He marveled at the coffeehouses and beer gardens, ogled the society ladies and wealthy burghers, and was stopped in his tracks by Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elisabeth, around whom a crowd had gathered. “Here the people wave in greeting,” he idly noted. “And their rulers know that they are safe in the densest of crowds as in their palace.”
Now imagine that their histories had been reversed. Imagine that scientific knowledge had been revealed once and for all in antiquity, while religious knowledge had been open-ended. In other words, imagine early science morphing into a religion. What might that have looked like, and meant for the world?
So how do you turn science into a religion? Easy. By making a great scientist divine. And how do you make a scientist divine? Again, easy. By writing a book claiming he is divine. And how do you make the book believable? Yet again, by claiming it’s divine (or at least divinely inspired). It’s a tried and true path revealed to us in the Bible. So let’s imagine going down it with science.
A team of community scientists and researchers from the Helmholtz Centre Potsdam – GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences have developed a new mobile app called ‘Nachtlicht’ (NightLights). The app allows participants to record various light sources and their brightness, color, and emission direction in public areas. This will enable artificial light sources on the ground to be systematically recorded on a large scale for the first time.
If those protesting mandatory vaccination and masking have a familiar sounding message, it's probably because as what Carmen Miranda brands as "toxic individualism" and the misleading rants about "freedom" and "liberty," have long roots in the U.S. dating back to the first footprints of English settlers on this continent.
So it’s finally happened. During my partial hiatus from this blog last week, President Biden laid out his plans going forward to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Prominent in his six-pronged plan to address the COVID-19 pandemic is a federal vaccine mandate. Specifically, President. Biden is mandating either vaccination against COVID-19 or weekly testing for all federal workers and workers for companies on federal government contracts, as well as all employees of hospitals and other health care facilities that receive Medicare or Medicaid reimbursement for their services. In addition, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will issue a rule using emergency authority requiring employers with more than 100 employees to ensure that their workers either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested weekly. In addition, OSHA’s new Emergency Temporary Standard will also “apply to public sector state and local government workers, including educators and school staff, in the 26 states and two territories with a state OSHA plan.” This is a long-overdue federal response to the pandemic, and, predictably, the Republican Party is losing its mind over it.
With a key panel of the World Trade Organization set to convene this week to discuss a potential patent waiver for Covid-19 vaccines, rich nations are under growing pressure to stop obstructing the proposal as the coronavirus continues to ravage poor countries that have been denied access to the lifesaving inoculation.
"Access to these innovative Covid-19 medical tools remains scant in too many low- and middle-income countries."—Candice Sehoma, Médecins Sans Frontières
As public health advocates warn that Covid-19 boosters could exacerbate deadly consequences of global vaccine inequality, two leading vaccination officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were part of an international group of medical experts who said Monday that most people don't require such shots at this time.
"If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants."—Public health experts
Known for drawing from her own experiences with housing insecurity while advocating for policies that serve people in need, Congresswoman Cori Bush on Monday unveiled legislation to increase access to emergency rental assistance during the coronavirus pandemic.
"It is our duty as lawmakers to ensure the 11 million households currently at risk of eviction can safely remain in their homes for the duration of this deadly global pandemic."—Rep. Cori Bush
The moral idiocy of this transcends cruelty and indifference. We’re also killing ourselves. The idea that humanity — that life itself — is “all one” isn’t just a nice thought, an outreach of kindness, but the cornerstone of survival.
Take, for example, the concept of “vaccine apartheid” — denying developing nations, where so far 85 percent of the Covid deaths have occurred, adequate access to the vaccine.
Even so, wearing masks and staying isolated from others if you test positive or have symptoms is absolutely critical, Darnell says. He also advises getting tested if you are exposed to someone who has COVID, even if you've been vaccinated, "because you could very well get infected or ill, and you want to protect those around you, including all the children who aren't vaccinated."
To compile the charts, the CDC looked at data from 13 U.S. jurisdictions between the dates of April 4 and July 17, 2021. Researchers tabulated the number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths among the not fully vaccinated and the vaccinated—and the results are compelling indeed. The CDC’s data shows that not fully vaccinated people are over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID-19 and over 10 times more likely to die from it. Not fully vaccinated people are also five times more likely to catch COVID-19 than vaccinated people.
Basically, when I look at this list, I don’t see a tangible list of things; what I see is an ontological mess.
A cybersecurity lab found a new exploit on a Saudi dissident's phone from a well-known spyware company that has spurred Apple to push an urgent software update.
A cyber surveillance company based in Israel developed a tool to break into Apple iPhones with a never-before-seen technique that has been in use since February, internet security watchdog group Citizen Lab said Monday.
The discovery is important because of the critical nature of the vulnerability, which requires no user interaction and affects all versions of Apple's iOS, OSX, and watchOS, except for those updated Monday.
These were the 15th zero-days targeting macOS and iOS, according to the technology news site SecurityWeek.
The site, which tracks zero-day attacks, said there had been 64 attacks this year. Twenty have targeted Microsoft products.
The flaws were in the CoreGraphics and WebKit components of the two operating systems.
A woman with 5 million followers on Pinterest Inc. claimed in a lawsuit that founders of the company, Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra, used her ideas to help create the social-media platform and never compensated her.
The deal, announced in a statement Monday that confirmed an earlier Bloomberg News report, will bolster Intuit’s offerings for businesses looking for ways to reach and serve customers online. Intuit has offered QuickBooks accounting software to clients for decades, supplementing it with services such as Credit Karma, which it acquired last year.
With its current setup, LinkedIn’s cluster can scale to around 11,000 nodes before the application delay exceeds 10 minutes, which is its goal. However, if the cluster with its current applications were to grow to 12,000 nodes, the predicted delay would be close to 20 minutes, breaking its SLA. DynoYARN can also be used for predicting the impact of new applications on cluster performance.
A couple of months ago, the Government Accountability Office completed the first pass of its review of federal use of facial recognition technology. It found a lot to be concerned about, including the fact that agencies were using unproven tech (like Clearview's ethical nightmare of a product) and doing very little to ensure the tech was used responsibly.
As The Intercept was the first to report, it seems that amongst the large collection of US military hardware seized by the Taliban there are biometric devices known as HIIDE: Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment. The associated Biometric Automated Toolset System (BATS) uses fingerprints and retina scans to help the US military “tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys” in a number of countries. The Afghan biometrics program formally began in 2009, with help from the FBI. A “U.S. Army Commander’s Guide to Biometrics in Afghanistan” from 2011 is still available online. As an article from 2016 explains, the primary target of these biometric systems was insurgents:
If you’ve ever dialed an 800 number to ask or complain about something you bought or to make an inquiry about something you’re thinking of buying, there is a decent chance you were profiled — by the arrangement of your words and the tone of your voice — without knowing it. My research suggests many customer contact centers now approach and manage callers based on what they think the person’s voice or syntax reveal about the individual’s emotions, sentiments and personality, often in real time.
Businesses devoted to personalized selling — including some name brand favorites — are also preparing to link what your vocal cords supposedly reveal about your emotional state to more traditional demographic, psychographic and behavioral information.
Two days after the passenger planes attacked the World Trade Center,€ U.S. Mission to the UN officials called us and asked that we visit with them.
I had naively hoped this overture could signify empathy on the part of U.S. officials. Perhaps the 9/11 attack would engender sorrow over the suffering and pain endured by people of Iraq and other lands when the U.S. attacks them. The officials at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations wanted to know why we went to Iraq but we sensed they were mainly interested in filling out forms to comply with an order to gather more information about U.S. people going to Iraq.
With each show, interview and podium performance Wolfowitz gives, there is a sense that the hole he has dug for himself has become an oasis of reassuring delusion.€ Iraq’s despot Saddam Hussein, executed at the behest of authorities sponsored and propped by the US, gave Wolfowitz an ecstatic excuse to explain the rationale of American power: he was a threat, and worldly threat at that.€ In 2003, there was little evidence to suggest that, but neoconservatism has always been a doctrine in search of cartoonish myths.
The fact that Weapons of Mass Destruction featured prominently as the reason for overthrowing Saddam became the necessitous outcome of bureaucratic sensibility: “for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy,” he told Vanity Fair in 2003, “we settled on the one issue everyone could agree on: weapons of mass destruction”.
Today’s Republican Party, while still claiming to stand for limited government, is practicing just the opposite: government intrusion everywhere.
Last weekend, U.S. corporate media continued a 20-year repetition compulsion to evade the central role of the USA in causing vast carnage and misery due to the so-called War on Terror. But millions of Americans fervently oppose the military-industrial complex and its extremely immoral nonstop warfare.
Israel unveiled a new remote-controlled killer robot Monday at a major weapons fair in the U.K. that human rights advocates are criticizing as an event to sell "death machines" and tools of abuse.
Developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Rex MK II is a four-wheeled vehicle mounted with two machine guns to carry out remote attacks. According to a press statement from the state-owned company announcing the release, the robot has already been sold to global customers.
Up to half of the estimated $14 trillion that the Pentagon has spent in the two decades since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan has gone to private military contractors, with corporate behemoths such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics hoovering up much of the money.
"Reducing the profits of war ultimately depends on reducing the resort to war in the first place."—William Hartung, Center for International Policy
As the mainstream press spent this past weekend once again ensuring that Americans never forget the fear and anger of 9/11 which prompted 20 years of war, 10 of the latest victims of 9/11 were being wiped from historical memory. Just two weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, a U.S. drone killed the Ahmadi family, including seven children. In the US-centric writing of history, they have already been forgotten.
I grew up in New York. Long Island to be specific. But I had family and friends scattered all around the tri-state area, from Queens to Manhattan to Union City to Astoria to Flushing. My father was born in a tenement in Manhattan to poor immigrants from Greece who barely spoke English. The twin towers loomed large in my childhood memory because we went into the city at least once a week, frequently more, to go to church and to visit family and friends. They, along with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, were usually the first dominant features one would see as they approached the city.
When I was a kid I went there on a class trip. I was the only child not allowed to go on the roof because my mom, who was one of the parent chaperones, thought it was too high and too windy and that because I was so skinny I might blow off. I went back again several times over the years, not to the top, just to the plaza or to the bars around the area. New York was a different place back then. This was before Giuliani’s disneyfication crusade. It was more gritty. More dangerous. And, to be honest, more exciting.
The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don't be fooled. It couldn't be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp.
"At least one million children will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year and could die without treatment."—Henrietta Fore, UNICEF
A high-ranking EU advisor has drawn up recommendations for the Council and the Commission on how to deal with evacuees and refugees from Afghanistan. The focus is on more cooperation with secret services and NATO.
Perhaps, the most important part of the speech had to do with the future, and here Biden was unequivocal:
A major motivation for getting out of Afghanistan is to give the US a freer hand to bring down China and Russia.€ And this is not to be a peaceful “Pivot.”€ The US has surrounded both countries with military bases, and the Pivot to Asia pioneered by Obama/Hillary/Biden sees 60% of America’s naval forces ending up in China’s neighborhood.
China’s policy of shaping markets to promote overall prosperity, instead of letting the economic surplus be concentrated in the hands of corporate and foreign investors, is an existential threat to America’s neoliberal priorities, he spells out. President Xi’s “Common Prosperity” program “seeks to reduce inequality by distributing the wealth of the rich to the general population. That does not augur well for foreign investors.”[1] To neoliberals, that is heresy.
Criticizing China’s “abrupt cancellation of a new issue by Alibaba’s Ant group in November 2020,” and “banishment of U.S.-financed tutoring companies from China,” Mr. Soros singles out Blackstone’s co-founder Stephen Schwarzman and former Goldman Sachs President John L. Thornton for seeking to make financial returns for their investors instead of treating China as an enemy state and looming Cold War adversary:
I believe we will gain insights on this conundrum by thinking through the concept of neoliberal order breakdown syndrome. Neoliberal order breakdown syndrome—NOBS, for short—is a term coined by Alex Hochuli, George Hoare, and Philip Cunliffe in their recently released book, The End of the End of History. NOBS describes the fundamental inability for large sectors of the ruling class to do 3 interrelated things: (1) accept, (2) explain, or (3) respond to political change.
Using Hochuli, Hoare, and Cunliffe’s concepts, we can understand the pillars of NOBS in the following way. The inability to accept political change is seen when the ruling class refuses to accept any responsibility for creating the conditions that afflict society. The inability to explain political change is seen when the ruling class swaps out a coherent analysis with either conspiracy theories or refusal to grant agency to aggrieved citizens. Inability to respond to political change can be seen in a variety of ways, including nostalgia for the recent past, catastrophism, moralizing, and the need for repetition.
In a makeshift courtroom on the second floor of a nondescript brick building in northeastern El Salvador, Judge Jorge Guzmán has spent the last six years painstakingly gathering evidence from the survivors of one of the worst massacres in the modern history of Latin America: the slaughter of a thousand old men, women and children by the Salvadoran army during the country’s civil war.
Forty years after the massacre, former senior military officers, including the minister of defense at the time, have been facing charges ranging from kidnapping and rape to murder. The military and the Salvadoran elite have repeatedly sought to block any accountability for the massacre, and the current president, Nayib Bukele, a 40-year-old right-wing populist who is often compared to Donald Trump and reminds some of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, may have just succeeded. He has made no secret of his desire to terminate the investigation.
The people who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001, deserved whatever 20th anniversary remembrance they needed. They can mourn any way they want to, til the end of time, and if the media continues to follow their heartbreaking and often inspiring stories, that’s understandable.
The Taliban militants have allegedly killed a woman police officer in Firozkoh, the capital city of central Ghor province in Afghanistan. According to a report by BBC, family members of the officer, identified as Banu Negar, told that her face was "heavily disfigured" due to the Talibani assault.
By and large, Pipes' warning were ignored by the American mainstream, even as the United States suffered from a series of high profile jihadist terror attacks in the years leading up to 9/11, notably the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 massacre of U.S. military personnel at the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 U.S. east African embassy bombings, and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. U.S. officials responded by launching FBI investigations to investigate these crimes and prosecute those responsible. There was little sense in U.S. public statements that a common enemy was responsible for the attacks, and certainly no sense that the U.S. was at war with that enemy.
A convoy of gendarmes returning from a gold mine was attacked by unidentified armed men. Jihadists linked to al-Qaeda and the "Islamic State" (IS) often carry out violent acts in the country, displacing thousands.
That night I became a climate refugee, evacuated from my house thanks to the Dixie Fire. Since then, it’s scorched a landscape nearly the size of Delaware, destroyed 678 houses and decimated several communities in Indian Valley, where I’ve been for 46 years. One of them was Greenville, California, a town founded in the Gold Rush era of the nineteenth century, where I happen to live. I never imagined myself among the 55 million people worldwide whose lives have already been upended by climate change. Maybe no one does until it happens, even though we’re obviously the future for significant parts of humanity. Those of us who acknowledge the climate disaster — especially those who write about it — may be the last to picture ourselves fleeing the catastrophes scientists have been predicting.
Climate change should come as no surprise to any of us, even in Greenville, one of four communities in rural Plumas County tucked into the mountains of the northern Sierra Nevada range, 230 miles northeast of San Francisco. No one would call most of us progressive. We’re a social mishmash of loggers, miners, and ranchers, many of whom strongly supported Donald Trump (despite a disparate population of aging hippies living among us). We squabble over water ditches and whose insurance should cover which parade. We picked to death a solar-power project and took five years to decide on a design for a community building. The town has been in decline since I moved there nearly half a century ago, slowly sinking into its dirt foundations.
At 10 am on July 22, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners’ fire insurance. I then drove 25 miles to a dental appointment. I was lucky to make it home before burning debris closed the roads.
"Governments' failure to act on climate change in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence may well be the biggest intergenerational human rights violation in history."—Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International
A record 227 environmental defenders were murdered last year—with over half of these killings perpetrated in Colombia, Mexico, and the Philippines—according to a report published Monday by Global Witness.
"As the climate crisis intensifies, violence against those protecting their land and our planet also increases."—Global Witness
Climate campaigners took House Democrats to task on Monday for releasing a tax plan that would keep in place billions of dollars in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, a decision that one advocacy group called an "egregious dereliction of duty" amid the worsening planetary crisis.
While the proposal (pdf) unveiled by the powerful House Ways and Means Committee would close one tax loophole for international oil and gas extraction, the advocacy group Friends of the Earth pointed out in a statement that the plan would leave untouched a number of domestic fossil fuel subsidies currently embedded in the U.S. tax code, including:
Global food production accounts for more than a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, with meat and dairy responsible for twice as much planet-heating carbon pollution as plant-based foods, according to the results of a major study published Monday.
"If people are concerned about climate change, they should seriously consider changing their dietary habits."—Atul Jain, study co-author
Underscoring the necessity of immediate and sweeping action to take on the climate emergency, a World Bank report revealed Monday that 216 million people across six global regions could be forced to move within their countries by midcentury.
Groundswell Part 2: Acting on Internal Climate Migration includes analyses for East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, building on a modeling approach from a 2018 report that covered Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
The UK’s main climate science denial group has been invited to give evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into the country’s energy transition and the cost of its net zero policies.
John Constable, energy editor at the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), will speak to the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee on Tuesday morning as part of its inquiry, which also looks at the role of the energy regulator Ofgem in the transition to net zero.€
Most of Earth’s surface heat eventually diffuses into the oceans. Heat flows along the heat gradient in the negative direction from warmer air to colder water. The heat capacity (storage ability) of the oceans is IMMENSE (this is where ‘global warming’ ends up), and their heat content takes centuries to diffuse into a stable stratified distribution, rearranged by thermo-haline currents (a solar forcing effect) and by geometry (oceans as a spherical shell with warm equator and cold poles, so ocean heat diffuses poleward).
The fundamental problem of global warming is the ‘excess’ capture of outgoing IR (infrared radiation), reducing the rejection of Earth heat (originally delivered by incoming LIGHT radiation) into space: causing an imbalance between incoming energy (in the form of light to which atmospheric molecules are almost completely transparent) and outgoing energy (IR, to which heteropolar molecules, like CO2, H2O, CH4, NOx, are all quite opaque — absorbing).
"Wally, Wally, quick, come and look at this!" These were the words of my roommate on a balmy Taiwanese evening on September 11th, 2001. Emerging into the living room I was just in time to see a plane slam into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Walking through the door to work the next morning, I was met by a Canadian co-worker with the reassuring words "we are going to war man, we are going to war."€ It was hard to imagine then how momentous that event was and how our reality would change forever. The feel-good factor that had rolled over from the nineties was about to disappear in plumes of smoke, a new pointless and endless war was about to begin, our online privacy was about to vanish and the largest existential threat to our species was about to be buried along with more than 900,000 innocent lives.
The senator responded to accusations from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives who have accused him of being bought by corporate lobbyists
Warmer waters force endangered whales to move into the danger zone to find food, and leave other marine mammals hungry.
The scenery was reminiscent of duels between gunslingers in a cheap Spaghetti Western. Both waited for the starting signal. The traffic light jumped to yellow and within fractions of a second they accelerated. Their sound-amplified engines howled, tires squeaked, cars shoot forward. A few hundred meters down the road, they interrupt their race just as rabidly – and, before the next red light, it starts again.
The fact is that such inner-city races are held at traffic lights and they have become rather common. Two years ago, two young men ran several red lights during a late-night race. One of the two crashed into a car at 100 miles an hour. The driver died at the scene. A court found that the two young men had acted with intent accepting the potential death of other road users.
The House Ways and Means Committee has just unveiled their proposal to pay for President Biden's Build Back Better plans. This is an important step towards restoring a fair and balanced tax system and a making at least a down payment on much-needed investments in health care, vaccine distribution, child care, labor protections, and more. It also honors President Biden's commitment to only raise taxes on people making more than $400,000 per year.
Democrats on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee are reportedly planning to unveil a slate of changes to the U.S. tax code that would raise the rates paid by large corporations and the rich—but not to the extent that President Joe Biden proposed earlier this year.
According to a brief draft document circulating among congressional aides and lobbyists, Democrats at the helm of the House's chief tax-writing committee are aiming to raise the top corporate rate from 21% to 26.5%, short of the 28% rate that Biden endorsed.
It’s time to get this landmark bill passed and build a fairer America.
The United States should be allocating a lot more than $3.5 trillion to address fundamental economic, social, and environmental challenges that existed before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and that have only become more consequential over the course of the harrowing last year.
After eight years of Conservative Party rule under Prime Minister Erna Solberg, Norway's leftist opposition parties on Monday were headed for a "landslide" win that would task Labor's Jonas Gahr Støre with forming a coalition government, according to preliminary results from the nation's parliamentary election.
The Associated Press reported that "with a projection based on a preliminary count of nearly 93% of the votes, the Labor Party and its two allies—the Socialist Left and the euroskeptic Center Party—would hold 100 seats in the 169-seat Stortinget assembly while the current government would get 68. One seat was still unsure."
News Monday that President Joe Biden has picked Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya for a seat on the Federal Trade Commission elicited a flurry of praise from progressive groups who said he'd be an ally in fighting surveillance abuses and corporate concentration.
"In choosing Alvaro Bedoya to serve on the FTC, President Biden is doubling down on his commitment to breaking Big Tech's power and control over the U.S. economy and democracy," Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, said in a statement. "Bedoya has demonstrated a willingness to go head-to-head with the most powerful of corporations and that he knows how to defend a democratic and just society in the 21st century."
Now, with Honduran elections on November 28, the Biden administration must weigh contradicting factors in deciding how to handle Trump’s erstwhile ally. On the one hand, Honduras is strategically reliable and important to U.S. business interests; on the other, problems of state-condoned violence, corruption, and impunity are fostering both continued migration and the drug trade.
Honduras’s neoliberal economy and lax regulation allow the exploitation of the country’s natural resources at any cost to local communities. Honduras has low taxes, public services decimated by underfunding and corruption, and one of the continent’s biggest gaps between rich and poor. Although largely unmentioned in official discourse, such policies align with U.S. business interests and are not seen as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. Instead, it is the mixed economy and social programs of neighboring Nicaragua that are regarded as “an extraordinary and unusual threat” to U.S. security.
Now the commission, which oversees election laws, has dismissed those allegations, according to a document obtained by The New York Times, ruling in Twitter’s favor in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns.
The election commission determined that Twitter’s actions regarding the Hunter Biden article had been undertaken for a valid commercial reason, not a political purpose, and were thus allowable.
The Times, citing a document it obtained outlining the decision, reported Monday that the FEC said Twitter's actions in blocking the spread of the article were undertaken with valid commercial reason — not a political purpose — making them legal.
Huawei has been accused of "infiltrating" a Cambridge University research centre after most of its academics were found to have ties with the Chinese company, The Times, UK, reported.
Three out of four of the directors at the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management (CCCM) have ties to the company, and its so-called chief representative is a former senior Huawei vice-president who has been paid by the Chinese government.
Minutes before the official end of President Donald Trump's term, a young company based in Florida reportedly took control over a large chunk of [Internet] space owned by the Pentagon.
Eight months later, it has been returned to the Department of Defense, The Washington Post reported Friday, but questions remain about the program.
A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January — just minutes before President Donald Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.
The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.
CAIR's admonition against the use of the term "Islamic terrorists" also stems from CAIR's unstated ugly self-interest to sanitize the image of radical Islamist front groups, like CAIR itself, a Hamas front group which has in fact spouted reckless, unfounded and pro-Islamist conspiracy theories, not only about the 9-11 attacks but also about nearly all of the dozens and dozens of convictions of Islamic terrorists since the 9-11 attacks.
And in this regard, CAIR's willing collaborators have included many in the mainstream media—from PBS to the Washington Post to the New York Times—which have dutifully carried out CAIR's dirty work in falsely claiming illegal convictions of some Islamic terrorists, despite the cases having been upheld on appeal, many all the way to the Supreme Court.
But despite this reassuring statement, the MP himself admitted that at least one of the three people questioned by the gendarmes was already known to the police. But what surely outrages the elected representative of the Parliamentary Majority the most is the date, which was not chosen by chance: “Exactly twenty years to the day after the four Islamist suicide bombings that killed almost 3,000 people and injured 6,000 in the United States, the trial of the attacks of November 13, 2015 that caused our country to mourn is ongoing. “This display of militant religious devotion (…) has (…) rightly caused outrage among the people who witnessed it.”
Below are the statements by the Islamic terrorists who planned and carried out September 11, 2001, attacks the claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. While the west refuses to name our enemy, the terrorists clearly credit their motivation, actions, and success to their religion.
Republicans in Tuesday's California gubernatorial recall election are already laying the groundwork to argue the election was stolen — even before a single ballot is reported or a victor declared, an increasingly common tactic in conservative circles.
Republican Larry Elder appealed on Monday to his supporters to use an online form to report fraud, which claimed it had "detected fraud" in the "results" of the California recall election "resulting in Governor Gavin Newsom being reinstated as governor."
The only problem: On Monday when the link was live on Elder's campaign site, the election hadn't even happened yet. No results had been released. And Elder was still campaigning to replace Newsom as governor.
In a new report from the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, we challenge Facebook’s disavowals and show that while the use of social media may not create partisan divisiveness, it does exacerbate it. An understanding of this connection is vital to preventing a repeat of Jan. 6 and regulating online platforms responsibly. This will only become more urgent as the country turns its attention to elections in 2022 and beyond.
This aggressive conspiracy movement could seek to disrupt Germany’s federal elections on Sept. 26. Some far-right figures are already seeding narratives reminiscent of former U.S. President Donald Trump, saying the results could be tampered with. The behavior of some protesters has left observers concerned about the impact of a sizable minority that seems so disillusioned with Germany’s democracy.
Although there are no signs yet of plans for outright violence, disinformation could play a role during the elections, in which German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not seek a fifth term. False claims about fraud have already circulated during local elections this year. In the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has a strong base, polls predicted the party would increase its numbers during state elections on June 6. When the AfD lost 3.5 percentage points of its share, #Wahlbetrug—or “election fraud”—began trending on Twitter, fueled by far-right figures and AfD members.
I've never understood why so many doctors sue over bad reviews, but it just keeps happening. Dr. Muhammad Mirza has built up something of a reputation for suing people who leave bad reviews on Yelp -- and has been successful in stifling speech:
Now that Texas has signed its unconstitutional social media content moderation bill into law, the action shifts back to Florida's similar law that was already declared unconstitutional in an easy decision by the district court. Florida has filed its opening brief in its appeal before the 11th Circuit and... it's bad. I mean, really, really bad. Embarrassingly bad. I mean, this isn't a huge surprise since their arguments in the district court were also bad. But now that they've had a judge smack them down fairly completely, including in terribly embarrassing oral arguments, you'd think that maybe someone would think to try to lawyer better? Though, I guess, you play with the hand your dealt, and Florida gave its lawyers an unconstitutionally bad hand.
At least five news sites – independent or critical of the Kremlin – have had to cease operations in Russia this year. More and more media outlets are being arbitrarily declared foreign agents, including the independent TV channel Dozhd, the news portal Meduza and several investigative sites. The expulsion of longtime BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford also shows that even foreign reporters are under threat of reprisals because of their work.
The new report is an update of the report "Everything under control? Internet Censorship and Surveillance in Russia," which RSF published in November 2019. The update is available online in English, Russian and German.
Quoting from the Gejayan Calling (Gejayan Memanggil) Instagram account, which immortalised the mural before it was painted over, the picture was of a figure whose eyes were covered with the internet tab “404 Not Found” with the message “The regime is afraid of pictures”.
When Taiwanese actor Janine Chang was writing her masters’ thesis in industrial economics in 2010, she likely never imagined that two Chinese characters in it would become a diplomatic flashpoint and threaten to derail her lucrative acting career more than a decade later.
This week, however, it has done just that. Her thesis at Taiwan’s National Central University entitled “Issues Related to the Country’s Artist Management and Legal Systems” has sparked an enormous wave of Chinese nationalist criticism online over her use of the word “country.”
Just a few minutes were left in Andrew Cuomo’s term as New York governor when he issued rare—but entirely appropriate clemencies—to 10 elder men who have served, collectively, hundreds of years in the state’s maximum-security prisons. Criminal justice reform activists have long urged state leaders to repair a system rooted in mass incarceration and inhumanly long sentences.
On the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, the deadliest prison uprising in U.S. history, we speak with Tyrone Larkins, a formerly incarcerated survivor, who was shot three times in the brutal crackdown of September 13, 1971. He describes Attica as “the roughest place that I’ve ever seen in my life,” as he recalls what led to the rebellion on September 9, 1971, when prisoners overpowered guards and took over much of Attica prison in upstate New York to protest conditions. At the time, prisoners spent most of their time in their cells and got one shower per week. Larkins lays out how tense negotiations with politicized prisoners followed, and says the rebellion was on its way to being resolved through diplomacy when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered state police to storm the facility. Police opened fire, killing 29 inmates and 10 hostages.
On the 50th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, we look at the cover-up that began immediately after New York state police stormed the prison and opened fire, killing 29 inmates and 10 hostages. David Rothenberg, a member of the Attica Observers Committee brought into Attica to help negotiate a peaceful resolution, says the prison was “an institution that only knew how to run by punishment,” laying the groundwork for the uprising. “The event itself is almost a microscopic view of the failure of our criminal justice system and our prison system,” says Rothenberg. We also speak with filmmaker Michael Hull, director of the new HBO Max documentary “Betrayal at Attica,” about how the film includes never-before-seen evidence from the archive of Attica Brothers defense attorney Elizabeth Fink, including deposition interviews from the 1974 civil suit she successfully led on their behalf against the state of New York. “The state police conducted the retaking of the prison. They also conducted the investigation of themselves. So they started destroying and obfuscating evidence on September 13, 1971,” says Hull.
Fifty years ago, nearly 1,300 men would stand together in this nation’s most historic uprising against brutal prison conditions at the Attica State Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The night before, however, many of those same men were so upset they could barely speak or sleep.
Judge Alex Kozinski noted back in 2015 there was an "epidemic of Brady violations" occurring during prosecutions in this country. "Brady" refers to the Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland -- one that established the right for defendants to have access to exculpatory evidence, creating an obligation for prosecutors and law enforcement to produce this evidence during trials.
While most eyes were focused on Texas’s illegal abortion ban, the Lone Star State continued its assault on the Constitution last week, when Governor Greg Abbott signed into law SB1—Texas’s voter suppression bill. The new law makes it harder to obtain mail-in ballots, prohibits drop boxes to turn in those ballots, limits early voting times, and eliminates drive-through voting.
The city of New York tried to have the judicial inquiry into Eric Garner’s death dismissed entirely. Then it tried to delay the proceeding. Now, the city is largely ignoring a court order demanding it produce documents related to Garner’s death.
For twenty-five years now, U.S. broadband has been painfully mediocre in nearly every metric that matters thanks to regulatory capture (read: corruption) and limited competition. With the occasional exception, the U.S. policy solution to this problem has been to kiss the ass of regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, throw billions of dollars at these companies for networks that they repeatedly fail to complete, then stand around with a dumb look on our collective faces wondering why we still don't have affordable, widely available, next-generation broadband access.
A few years ago, Professor Eric Goldman wrote an important paper, explaining how Section 230 is better than the 1st Amendment. The key part of the argument is that if you treat Section 230 as a rule of civil procedure that kicks out frivolous and wasteful cases quickly, you realize how important it is.
The third area of concern is market concenration. In 2016 we published an analysis that divided the American economy into around 900 sectors covered by the five-yearly economic census. Two-thirds of them became more concentrated between 1997 and 2012. The weighted-average market share of the top four firms in each sector rose from 26% to 32%. The latest census data, which include years up to 2017, show that the trend did not reverse. But did it accelerate? Although concentration edged up in around half of industries between 2012 and 2017, the weighted-average market share across all industries remained at 32%.
Apple hasn’t taken a position on whether it will ban any Epic-related apps beyond Fortnite. Asked for comment, a representative said Apple is still looking at its options regarding Epic’s future on iOS.
Last year, Epic said Apple might cut off support for the widely used Unreal Engine on iOS — a nuclear option in the conflict between them. That seems theoretically possible now, but Apple has publicly taken a measured tone so far, saying it would “welcome” Fortnite back into the App Store if it removed its non-Apple in-app purchase option.
The new hotness for law enforcement is trying to end the careers of police accountability activists. When approached by people filming them, officers from multiple law enforcement agencies have begun playing the zero-accountability hits, hoping that notoriously litigious artists like Taylor Swift and the Beatles will join forces to keep these recordings from being uploaded to social media sites.
Based in: Lagos, Nigeria
Based in: Victoria, Canada
Earlier this month Russian telecoms watchdog Roscomnadzor said it would begin blocking VPN providers including NordVPN, ExpressVPN and IPVanish to prevent access to information the government wishes to censor. It now appears that multiple online services have been disrupted including BitTorrent and Twitch, with multiple parties pointing the finger towards Russia's blocking tools.
Two Netflix movie screeners appeared online a few hours ago, way ahead of their planned release date. Pirate release group EVO published advance copies of 'The Power of the Dog' and 'The Guilty,' which subsequently leaked online. The releases are not typical award screeners but appear to be film festival screeners instead.
