On August 25th, 2021, the Linux kernel celebrated its 30th anniversary. Since then, it’s changed a lot. We changed too. Nowadays, the Linux kernel is a huge project used by millions. We checked the kernel 5 years ago. So, we can’t miss this event and want to look at the code of this epic project again.
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Last time we found 7 peculiar errors. It’s noteworthy that this time we’ve found fewer errors!
It seems strange. The kernel size has increased. The PVS-Studio analyzer now has dozens of new diagnostic rules. We’ve improved internal mechanisms and data flow analysis. Moreover, we introduced intermodular analysis and much more. Why has PVS-Studio found fewer exciting errors?
The answer is simple. The project quality has improved! That’s why we are so excited to congratulate Linux on its 30th anniversary.
The project infrastructure was significantly improved. Now you can compile the kernel with GCC and Clang – additional patches are not required. The developers are improving automated code verification systems (kbuild test robot) and other static analysis tools (GCC -fanalyzer was implemented; the Coccinelle analyzer is enhanced, the project is checked through Clang Static Analyzer).
However, we found some errors anyway :). Now we’re going to take a look at some really good ones. At least, we consider them “nice and beautiful” :). Moreover, it’s better to use static analysis regularly, not once every five years. You won’t find anything that way. Learn why it’s important to use static analysis regularly in the following article: “Errors that static code analysis does not find because it is not used.”
When we format a hard drive in Windows, the normal thing is to give it a file system known , such as FAT32 (rare today due to its limitations), exFAT for those looking for compatibility without the limitations of FAT32, or the most complete and the best for working on Microsoft systems, NTFS. However, if we are users Linux , in addition to being able to work with those, we can find another variety of file systems. What is the difference between them? Which is better? Let’s see it.
Darktable 3.6.1 Released (Download), Darktable is an open source application for the photo workflow and processing of RAW data. A virtual light table and a darkroom for photographers, so to speak. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable light table and enables you to develop and improve raw images.
At the beginning of July, Darktable 3.6 was released as the main version, which introduced numerous new functions and improvements. Darktable 3.6.1 has now been released as the first point version, which fixes some unpleasant problems and offers support for new digital cameras.
This is a series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We cover a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
When people talk about screen sharing they typically refer to desktop sharing applications (remote display). Good examples of open source software include TigerVNC, Remmina, X2Go and Veyon. But this review looks at a different approach with live streaming your desktop or a specific application to a web browser.
Deskreen is free and open source software that lets you use any device with a web browser as a secondary screen. This device can be a wide range of hardware such as a smartphone, tablet, smart TV, or a notebook. And you can connect as many devices as required.
If you have a multi-monitor setup, you already appreciate the virtues of multiple screens. But Deskreen offers many of these advantages without additional outlay.
I found that, while gemini was pleasant to play around with, write scripts for, and type up, it doesn't really add that much to my experience to warrant the complexity it adds to how I write blog posts and publish web pages. And with a gemini capsule, and a web page, and a blog, writing a post somewhere becomes a three-way decision, and stuff tends to become messy. I tend to not like a situation like that, so I had to drop something, and that ended up being Gemini.
i3 is a tiling window manager developed from scratch and written in C. It is available under a BSD license, is primarily aimed at professionals and programmers, and has several special features. This slim window manager also supports window stacks, which it stacks in a tab structure similar to a web browser. Here we learn how to install i3 Window manager on Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 LTS to get a slim and lightweight interface on this Linux.
Well, Linux operating systems are known for their low resource consumption, however, due to the latest highly graphical desktops, many distros now become extensive resource guzzling OS. Nevertheless, there are many lightweight Desktop Window Managers and i3 is one of them. This Tiling Window Manager i3 brings particularly a slim interface to your Linux screen.
Ksnip is a Qt-based cross-platform screenshot tool that provides many annotation features for your screenshots. In this tutorial, learn how to install Ksnip screenshot on Linux using Flatpak packages.
The Ksnip has many features and settings that enable the capture of perfect canvas. Make an image of your screen however you like, or the window you need. Do this simply and quickly. Don’t waste any more time and install this powerful tool right now on your Linux.
If you are a Kali Linux user and you tend to do penetration tests in places with a lot of people, be aware that in a way this can be scary. However, Kali Undercover was created to undo your testing with Kali Linux. Imagine being in a family and trying to run a security test on some network, and everyone assuming you’re breaking into a bank or committing crimes? Well, in the face of repeated scenarios like this, Offensive Security, the company that maintains Kali Linux, created the solution.
But don’t worry, as stated in the first paragraph, in this article you will learn how to use and install Kali Undercover on Linux. There are few commands, but they should help you not to have problems or distorted looks.
Writing websites from scratch can be beneficial for learning but it is time-consuming. And there are simple or personal projects that need to be done quickly. To solve this problem is that there are static website builders. Today you will learn how to install Hugo on Ubuntu 20.04 which is perhaps one of the most popular website builders out there.
As with antivirus or office suites such as Office, a good multimedia player at the moment cannot be missing from any PC. These programs are not used to view our favorite photos, play all kinds of videos and music , or even watch Internet television. A clear example of all this is found with the multimedia center called Kodi .
This is a complete solution that acts as a multimedia center that will be of enormous help when dealing with all kinds of content of this type. Keep in mind that it not only serves as a player, but also offers us a multitude of functions for managing our own independent libraries. In addition, it offers us a somewhat peculiar user interface that looks like an independent operating system.
Precisely because of all these additional features that it offers us, together with the complete user interface that we see, sometimes this program consumes more resources than we would like. It is true that it is optimized to work on most computers, platforms and operating systems, but it will not always do so with the same fluency. In addition, the types of content that we deal with also come into play here. Loading a simple photo is not the same as playing a video in four in 4K .
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Spotify on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Spotify is a free-to-use music streaming service with a subscription for premium content at a small fee. Spotify enables you to stream music of your favorite artists, create custom playlists, shuffle play, share music and podcasts. Spotify is available for installation on Windows, Linux distributions, macOS, and Mobile devices powered by iOS and Android operating systems.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Spotify’s digital music streaming service on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
FreeTube is available for Linux users on Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux AUR, and others. To install this program on your Linux PC, start by opening up a terminal window.
You can open up a terminal window on the Linux desktop by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard. Alternatively, search for “Terminal” in the app menu to open it. Once the terminal window is open and ready to use, follow the installation instructions outlined below.
Spine is a PlayStation 4 emulator that works much like WINE, acting as more of a compatibility and translation layer than an emulator.
Yes that's right, Maggie Thatcher has somehow escaped from Hell in Thatcher's Techbase, a new Doom II campaign that has been announced that will be free to grab on September 24.
Developed by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital this will be a very British take on the whole Doom thing that I can't wait to jump into with a cuppa. Might need a few biscuits too as apparently the UK is the 10th circle of Hell - well it's not wrong. It will be provided as a standard WAD file so it will be playable across any system that can play it. The developer mentioned compatibility with PRBoom, DSDA-Doom, ZDoom and GZDoom.
While Ray Tracing has worked on Linux for a long time with NVIDIA, the situation with Mesa+AMD is still being worked out but the good news is that it's all finally coming together.
Developer Bas Nieuwenhuizen wrote in a new blog post about the current situation noting that after over 9 months of work, that they're now seeing games working. Control was one title shown off that worked "on first try" once the required bits were hooked up in the radv Mesa driver.
With The International 2021 tournament fast approaching Valve has given an update on the future of Dota 2 with some major underlying tech changes planned to come in.
Valve and CodeWeavers have updated Proton Experimental again, the special testing version of Proton that brings in some of the latest fixes for the Windows-game compatibility layer. If you don't know what Steam Play Proton is be sure to check our dedicated page.
DEATHLOOP, the brand new release from Arkane Studios and Bethesda, will now work on Linux thanks to the latest Proton Experimental updates. However, currently the changelog notes that this is specifically for AMD GPUs using the radv driver.
Learn how Gamerzilla brings an achievement system to open source games and enables all developers to implement achievements separate from the game platform.
Some open source games rival the quality of commercial games. While it is hard to match the quality of triple-a games, open source games compete effectively against the indie games. But, gamer expectations change over time. Early games included a high score. Achievements expanded over time to promote replay. For example, you may have completed a level but you didn’t find all the secrets or collect all the coins. The Xbox 360 introduced the first multi-game online achievement system. Since that introduction, many game platforms added an achievement system.
Open source games are largely left out of the achievement systems. You can publish an open source game on Steam, but it costs money and they focus on working with companies not the free software community. Additionally, this locks players into a non-free platform.
The developers of the Budgie desktop environment have made the decision to move away from the GTK library in favor of the EFL Enlightenment Foundation Library ( ), developed by the Enlightenment project. The results of the migration will be offered in Budgie 11. Notably, this is not the first attempt away from GTK – in 2017 the project already made a to move decision to switch to Qt, but later revised plans in the hope that the situation would change in GTK4.
Unfortunately, GTK4 did not live up to the expectations of the developers due to the continued focus only on the needs of the GNOME project, the developers of which do not listen to the opinions of alternative projects and do not want to take their needs into account. The main incentive to move away from GTK was GNOME’s plans to change the way it works with skins, which make it difficult to create custom skins in third-party projects. In particular, the platform interface style is provided by the libadwaita library, which is tied to the Adwaita skin.
This article is not an how to or explaining anything, I just wanted to share how I spend my current free time. It's obviously OpenBSD related.
When updating or making new packages, it's important to get the dependencies right, at least for the compilation dependencies it's not hard because you know it's fine once the building process can run entirely, but at run time you may have surprises and discover lacking dependencies.
Linux Mint 20.3 distribution design changes, The end of the previous month brought another report with a summary of news in the development of one of the popular Linux Mint distributions. The developers have decided to focus on design modifications that will make the appearance of this distribution more modern and consistent. Users can expect this news with the release of Linux version Mint 20.3.
Some of the changes are prepared for the Cinnamon desktop environment and Mint-X or Mint-Y themes. Mint-X will bring only a few minor tweaks, such as the new look of notifications in applications or the toolbar in Nemo File Manager. However, most of the changes will come for the Mint-Y theme. The colors of its panels will be more consistent and components with lighter and darker color contrasts should no longer be mixed in one application.
Congatec’s Qseven form-factor “Conga-QMX8-Plus” module runs Linux or Android on the NPU-equipped i.MX8M Plus with up to 6GB LPDDR4, up to 128MB eMMC, a microSD slot, GbE with TSN, and optional -40 to 85€°C support.
Congatec announced the first Qseven-form-factor module we have seen build around NXP’s i.MX8M Plus, which it has already deployed in its Conga-SMX8-Plus SMARC module. The Conga-QMX8-Plus, which follows earlier i.MX8 family Qseven modules, including the i.MX8X based Conga-QMX8X, runs Linux, Yocto, or Android on the 14nm 1.8GHz, quad-core, Cortex-A53 SoC.
Inherited from the USSR, the modern Russian Federation has its own CPU architecture (Elbrus) and platforms to build PCs and servers. In addition, there are Russian companies that develop various Arm-based system-on-chips and controllers. The country also has 300-mm equipment purchased from AMD's fab near Dresden in the early 2000s. This means that, in theory, Russia could build CPUs for its own domestic needs (yet it will hardly satisfy even 50% of its needs as most programs are designed for x86 or Arm processors).
My blog here has been rendered with the Hugo static site generator since at least 2016. Having all my blog posts stored as plain text files, wrapped with a simple enough theme, and generated on a server makes so many things easier. Hugo cuts through my almost 8,000 blog post archive like butter, rendering it in fewer than 20 seconds. My web server is the most basic thing imaginable, because all it has to do is deliver HTML.
Firefox 92 Browser for Linux Released Download and Install, Mozilla Firefox 92 is a free, cross-platform browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation with the help of hundreds of contributors. The foundation’s intent is to develop a lightweight, secure, intuitive, and highly extensible browser. Wikipedia
Enhance your data science toolkit with our “Introduction to R” learning path: from the basis of the syntax, to operations and functions, for solid programming foundations.
R is one of the most popular programming, scripting, and markup languages. Written by statisticians for statisticians, it is an incredible tool for data exploration, data manipulation, visualization and data analysis. If you don’t have it yet in your pocket, or if you would like to build better foundations for your programming skills, this workshop series is what you were looking for.
A recent Lobsters post laud€ing the virtues of AWK remind€ed me that although the lan€guage is pow€er€ful and lightning-ââ¬â¹fast, I usu€al€ly find myself exceed€ing its capa€bil€i€ties and reach€ing for Perl instead. One such appli€ca€tion is ana€lyz€ing volu€mi€nous log files such as the ones gen€er€at€ed by this blog. Yes, WordPress has stats, but I’ve nev€er let rein€ven€tion of the wheel get in the way of a good pro€gram€ming exercise.
My primary use of Python's pip package manager is to install programs like the Python LSP server; I may install these into either a contained environment (a virtual environment or a PyPy one) or as a user package with 'pip install --user'. In either case, the day will come when there's a new version of the Python LSP server (or whatever) and I want to update to it. As I noted down back in my pip cheatsheet, the basic command I want here is 'pip install --upgrade <package>', possibly with '--user' as well. However, it turns out that there are some complexities and issues here, which ultimately come about because pip is not the same sort of package manager as Fedora's DNF or Debian's apt.
Years ago, OpenBSD gained two new security system calls, pledge(2) (originally tame(2)) and unveil. In both, an application surrenders capabilities at run-time. The idea is to perform initialization like usual, then drop capabilities before handling untrusted input, limiting unwanted side effects. This feature is applicable even where type safety isn’t an issue, such as Python, where a program might still get tricked into accessing sensitive files or making network connections when it shouldn’t. So how can a Python program access these system calls?
Bash functions seem to sit in a sweet spot between aliases and full blown scripts. I’ve defined a number of functions in my dotfiles which are all useful. Unlike aliases, they can take parameters and have greater scope for doing things; unlike scripts, they run in the context of the current shell which means, for example, that I can set a value in a variable during the course of a function’s execution and it’s available directly afterwards, in the same shell session.
After six months of development, Oracle has released a platform Java SE 17 (Java Platform, Standard Edition 17), as a reference implementation that uses an open source project OpenJDK. Except for the removal of some deprecated features, Java SE 17 retains backward compatibility with previous releases of the Java platform — most previously written Java projects will work unchanged when run under the new version. Ready-to-install Java SE 17 assemblies (JDK, JRE, and Server JRE) are prepared for Linux (x86_64, AArch64), Windows (x86_64), and macOS (x86_64, AArch64). The reference implementation developed by the OpenJDK project is Java 17 fully open source under the GPLv2 license with GNU ClassPath exceptions to allow dynamic linking to commercial products.
Java SE 17 has been categorized as a Long Term Support (LTS) release with updates to be released until 2029. Updates for the previous Java 16 interim release have been discontinued. The previous LTS branch of Java 11 will be supported until 2026. The next LTS release is slated for September 2024. Recall that starting with the release of Java 10, the project moved to a new development process, implying a shorter cycle of forming new releases. The new functionality is now being developed in one constantly updated master branch , which includes ready-made changes and from which branches are branched every six months to stabilize new releases.
Based on hundreds of documents and interviews, the two-volume history starts off with long mea culpa—an acknowledgment of the naiveté that led the U.S. into a chaotic and bloody occupation of the land where human civilization began.
The confessional drumbeat begins near the start, on p. 43, when, in the wake of 9/11, the military, at the direction of President George W. Bush, began forming its plan for regime change in Iraq.
The scandal broke when video footage emerged of the former leader of Austria’s far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÃâ), Heinz-Christian Strache, then Austria’s Vice-Chancellor, promising public contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch’s niece in exchange for support for the FPÃâ in the 2017 election campaign.
The fake billionaire woman offered to buy the country’s leading tabloid newspaper Kronen Zeitung and, somewhat in the manner of Rupert Murdoch, said she would change its editorial line to support the FPÃâ’s anti-Islam, anti-immigration platform.
A broader reason is that most colour schemes are not designed with a focus on contrast, readability, and communication (I think they're often not systematically designed at all). Instead they are all too often a combination of what looks good and matches the tastes of their creators, mingled with what has become traditional. This is colour for colour's sake, not colour for readability, information content, or clear communication.
If you're a troll online, you are most likely also a troll offline, at least with respect to political discussions, reports new research published in the American Political Science Review. In their study, Aarhus University researchers Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen investigate what they call the "mismatch hypothesis." Do mismatches between human psychology, evolved to navigate life in small social groups, and novel features of online environments, such as anonymity, rapid text-based responses, combined with the absence of moderating face-to-face social cues, change behavior for the worse in impersonal online political discussions?
No, conclude the authors. "Instead, hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline," they report. However, they also find that online political discussions may tend to feel more hostile because the greater connectivity and permanence of various Internet discussion platforms make trolls much more visible online than offline.
Even bigger success followed a year later with the ZX81, and then the ZX Spectrum in 1982, which became the best-selling personal computer in the UK. Various official and unofficial clones and spinoffs followed over the years, and Sinclair was granted a knighthood in 1983 for his contributions to British industry.
Sinclair created the world’s first pocket calculator and kick-started the home computing revolution by producing the first PC to retail at less than €£100. However, these triumphs were eclipsed in 1985 by the commercial failure of his electric three-wheeler, the Sinclair C5.
As the debate over booster vaccine shots heats up in the United States, global health leaders have issued an urgent call for global vaccine equity. The WHO reports vaccination rates on the African continent fall far below its target for 70% of the population of all countries to be vaccinated by mid-2022. “The science is not completely behind the need for booster shots yet,” says Zane Dangor, special adviser to the foreign minister of South Africa, who has called on the U.S. to come up with a proposal for allowing other countries to manufacture vaccines. “This is an emergency that affects all of us because variants are coming from areas where there are large numbers of unvaccinated people,” adds infectious disease specialist Dr. Joia Mukherjee.
On the eve of what was expected to be a contentious board of directors meeting, the head of Florida’s compensation program for brain-damaged children abruptly resigned.
Kenney Shipley, who has overseen the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, for nearly two decades, announced her resignation in a letter Wednesday. It takes effect Jan. 4, 2022, though Shipley intends to claim accrued leave time after an interim director is appointed.
After three House Democrats voted against a key plank of their party's plan to lower prescription drug prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders said Wednesday that Congress must ensure the provision is included in the final budget reconciliation package despite objections from conservative lawmakers.
Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, said he understands that "the pharmaceutical industry owns the Republican Party and that no Republican voted for this bill, but there is no excuse for every Democrat not supporting it."
“I have zero need for drugs and cannot understand why people need them”, she says. But she says that many people like her remain on the fence about further liberalization and await the results of recent legalization efforts in other parts of the world, including some U.S. states.
According to a new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Americans now die earlier than their European counterparts, no matter what age you’re looking at. Compared with Europeans, American babies are more likely to die before they turn 5, American teens are more likely to die before they turn 20, and American adults are more likely to die before they turn 65. At every age, living in the United States carries a higher risk of mortality. This is America’s unsung death penalty, and it adds up. Average life expectancy surged above 80 years old in just about every Western European country in the 2010s, including Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, the U.K., Denmark, and Switzerland. In the U.S., by contrast, the average life span has never exceeded 79—and now it’s just taken a historic tumble.
Why is the U.S. so much worse than other developed countries at performing the most basic function of civilization: keeping people alive?
The Central government has further rolled out a Digital Agriculture mission for 2021-25 for projects based on new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, remote sensing, and GIS technology, use of drones and robots, among others.
The agriculture department is also creating a federated farmers database which will be linked by the land records of farmers from across the country for the creation of a unique Farmer ID.
Facebook’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, wrote in a blog post that the company was taking steps to crack down on “networks of primarily authentic users who organize to systematically violate our policies to cause harm on or off our platform.”
The campaigns are separate from individuals who post on their own social media. They’re also different from efforts launched by “inauthentic users” where it is not immediately clear who is running the social media page or account.
“It is clear that Facebook is incapable of holding itself accountable. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting reveals Facebook’s leadership to be focused on a growth-at-all-costs mindset that valued profits over the health and lives of children and teens,” Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) said in a joint statement.
Blumenthal and Blackburn, the top members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation's consumer protection subcommittee, said they are in touch with a Facebook whistleblower and will use “every resource at our disposal to investigate what Facebook knew and when they knew it.”
The senators said they’ll seek further documents and pursue witness testimony.
Firefox has always been the favorite web browser for users who are committed to free software and privacy. However, for months, Mozilla has only lost followers who, little by little, are migrating to both Chrome and Edge, the two most used browsers today. Although it is not the most used web browser within Windows, the orange fox has always been an icon in Linux distributions. However, this may be over very soon.
What a web browser needs to be successful is to have great allies. Chrome, for example, appears on the main page of the Google search engine, so we will forcefully end up installing it. Edge comes by default in Windows 10, with banners that call us to try it. Safari the same on macOS. But what about alternative browsers, like Vivaldi ?
Recently, OpenSSL 3.0 was announced , the new major version of the popular cryptographic library that is also one of the most essential components of the Internet . This is a job that has occupied developers for three years in which there have been 17 alpha releases, 2 betas and 7,500 commits, all of that coming from 350 different authors.
OpenSSL 3 comes with many major changes that not only cover the software itself, but also other aspects such as the documentation and licenses used. As Matt Caswell explains in the official announcement, “there has been a 94% increase in the amount of documentation we have since OpenSSL 1.1.1 and an (adjusted) increase in ‘lines of code’ in our tests of 54% . “
Caswell has also highlighted the community’s enthusiasm and level of activity in making contributions. The new version of the cryptographic library has been able to count on some dedicated engineers, who have been able to be paid thanks to the fact that the project has obtained financing through different channels.
With regard to changes and news, we start with the change of license. Previous versions of OpenSSL used both their own license and SSLeay (which will remain), but OpenSSL 3 will use Apache License 2.0 , which is an Open Source license and free software of a lax nature compatible with version 3 of GPL, but not 2.
A jury in California today reached a guilty verdict in the trial of Matthew Gatrel, a St. Charles, Ill. man charged in 2018 with operating two online services that allowed paying customers to launch powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Internet users and websites. Gatrel’s conviction comes roughly two weeks after his co-conspirator pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to running the services.
Currently, users can choose to periodically back up their WhatsApp message history on iCloud (for iOS phones) or Google Drive (for Android phones), or to never back them up at all. Backing up your messages means that you can still access them if, for example, your phone is lost or destroyed.€
WhatsApp does not have access to these backups, but backup service providers Apple and Google sure do. Unencrypted backups are vulnerable to government requests, third-party hacking, and disclosure by Apple or Google employees. That’s why EFF has consistently recommended that users not back up their messages to the cloud, and further that you encourage your friends and contacts to skip it too. Backing up secure messenger conversations to the cloud unencrypted (or encrypted in a way that allows the company running the backup to access message contents) means exposing the plaintext to third parties, and introduces a significant hole in the protection the messenger can offer.
When encrypted WhatsApp backups arrive, that will change. With fully encrypted backups, Apple and Google will no longer be able to access backed up WhatsApp content. Instead, WhatsApp backups will be encrypted with a very long (64-digit) encryption key generated on the user’s device. Users in need of a high level of security can directly save this key in their preferred password manager. All others can rely on WhatsApp’s recovery system, which will store the encryption key in a way that WhatsApp cannot access, protected by a password of the user’s choosing.€
The recent meeting of G7 interior and security ministers in London resulted in a detailed set of commitments, including reassertion of the need to undermine encrypted communications, reinforce Interpol, and to enforce new international standards on Passenger Name Record (PNR) travel surveillance and passenger profiling systems.
Contrary to common belief, the cities mainly target companies, not individuals. Nonetheless, legal representatives of a violating company are also included in the blacklists to prevent reoffending elsewhere or under a different company. Nationally, about 75 percent of entities targeted by the system end up on blacklists because of court orders they have ignored—the so-called judgment defaulters. The remaining companies are typically collared for severe marketplace violations—for instance, for food safety infringements, environmental damage, or wage arrears. But much of these cities’ day-to-day use of the SCS is banal thanks to the system’s fragmentation and inflation of results.
Fragmentation is a symptom of central authorities being unclear about goals and how to reach them. This gives local authorities leeway to implement policies in creative or self-serving ways, producing numerous quirky experiments. During China’s first COVID-19 wave, the city of Anqing logged one blacklisting in excruciating detail, as our research found. At a checkpoint, “the culprit” refused to follow the advice of Chinese Communist Party members on duty, used a pair of pliers to cut through a fence that blocked the road and threw it off to the side. This led “the [Chinese Communist] Party flagpole on the fence to be bent across the road” and “the offender then [driving] over the flagpole, causing the party flagpole to be damaged. The damaged items were worth RMB 20.”
So how will your account be secured? In place of a password, Microsoft will use its Microsoft Authenticator app for your phone, Windows Hello, and codes sent to your email or phone in place of a traditional password. We’ve seen Microsoft offer to sign into your account without a password since 2017, but today is the first day that Microsoft is also inviting you to ditch passwords entirely.
The watchdog is looking into its processing of children's personal data, and whether TikTok is in line with EU laws about transferring personal data to other countries, such as China.
Is the phone in your pocket spying on you? As cell phones have become ubiquitous, government intelligence agencies have poured vast resources into hacking them, remotely stripping people of their privacy in the name of national security. Now, a burgeoning industry has emerged, generating huge profits for shadowy corporations that specialize in developing ever-more innovative ways to secretly infect digital devices with spyware. Activists, journalists, human rights defenders and dissidents the world over have been surveilled and in a number of cases arrested, tortured or killed. This week, Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research organization based at the University of Toronto, revealed the existence of a "zero-click" exploit that exposed 1.65 billion Apple iPhone and other Apple devices to a complete and almost undetectable takeover by the spyware known as Pegasus, produced by NSO Group, a private company.
Humane warfare is a paradoxical idea with a long history. Essentially, the notion speaks of the attempt to make war less lethal and more ethical for the purpose of minimizing the suffering of soldiers and civilians, a concern that, by the 19th century, had grown on account of the carnage of industrialized and mechanized warfare. Expressing this view in the early 1860s, for instance, the founders of the Red Cross struggled to make warfare less hostile even as they acknowledged its inevitability. From their efforts emerged the First Geneva Convention (1864), which established international rules of warfare for the treatment of sick and wounded soldiers. At the same time there emerged a transatlantic peace movement that sought to resist war, not by making it more humane but by outlawing it altogether. For peace activists such as Leo Tolstoy, Jane Addams, Bertha von Suttner, and others, humanizing warfare amounted essentially to legitimating and perpetuating it. They believed that criminalizing and abolishing war was the only option.
Nations judge potential adversaries on the basis of intentions and capabilities.€ Soon after World War II, the United States formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) due to an exaggerated fear of Soviet intentions and capabilities as well as the fear that Joseph Stalin was another Adolf Hitler.€ Six years after the creation of NATO, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact, which institutionalized the Cold War between East and West.€ Ironically, many European nations supported the creation of NATO because they feared a German revival rather than a Soviet challenge.€ Similarly, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact because they questioned the loyalty and support of their East European neighbors more than they feared a threat from the West.
In addition to exaggerating threats, the United States has tended to exaggerate its own skill and power in the resolution of tensions. Even when Stalin demonstrated his fear of another war in Europe by backing down from the Berlin blockade, U.S. policymakers considered his retreat the triumph of allied agility and military unity.€ Years later, the United States believed that its military power solved the problem of the Cuban missile crisis, when a secret agreement involving the removal of U.S. missiles from Turkey had been central to the agreement.
Disagreements over how to assess the American exodus from Afghanistan have kept the pundits busy these last weeks, even though there wasn’t much to say that hadn’t been said before. For some of them, however, that was irrelevant. Having overseen or promoted the failed Afghan War themselves, all the while brandishing various “metrics” of success, they were engaged in transparent reputation-salvaging.
Violence in Afghanistan’s countryside has reportedly dropped after the Taliban takeover and the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but the country continues to face an ongoing humanitarian and economic crisis, with millions of children at risk of starvation. Joining us from Kabul, New Yorker reporter Anand Gopal says he was shocked by the “sheer level of violence” Afghan women outside the cities have experienced in the last two decades of war. “The level of human loss was really extraordinary,” Gopal says. “I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.”
On the one hand, many of the poorest people on Earth live in such desperate circumstances that they often feel understandably angry that so little seems to be available to them except US military domination.
On the other hand, many welcome US influence and would love to escape to live with us.
The attacks of September 2001 had their inception in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan at the end of the decade of the 1970s. The intention of the US was to make Afghanistan the Soviet Union’s Vietnam. The US achieved that goal and created its own Vietnam-style quagmire there. History doesn’t often repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. We will never know how many trillions of dollars were pissed away beginning in the 1980s, but Brown University’s Costs of War project gives a good reckoning of the trillions, $8 trillion, pissed away in the wars of the post-9/11 epoch and the lives ended.
In August 1970, I climbed the stairs to the roof of my graduate dormitory on Washington Square South in Greenwich Village in New York City. The view of the towers of the World Trade Center was breathtaking. Almost forgotten were the environmental costs of such a project, in concrete and steel alone. In the night, it felt as if by reaching out, a person could touch those towers and the golden glow from the work lights of the South Tower that was reaching its completion gave the buildings a magnificent and eerie glow.
A recent New York Times op-ed was perhaps the strangest, most awkward and tentative defense of the military-industrial complex—excuse me, the experiment in democracy called America—I've ever encountered, and begs to be addressed.
Anti-war advocates are denouncing Wednesday's formation of a trilateral military partnership through which the United States and the United Kingdom plan to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines—a long-term initiative broadly viewed as a challenge to China by Western powers determined to exert control over the Pacific region.
"If Biden and the Pentagon really want to 'ensure peace and stability' in the region, they could simply stop dealing missiles, weapons, [and] nuclear tech to Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan."—CodePink
As a longtime Hawaii resident, I have always scratched my head as to how Grover Cleveland—the president of the United States—had been so ineffective when it came to foreign policy. His efforts to right the wrong of the unauthorized armed invasion and imprisonment of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 fell woefully short. Corporate and military forces influenced Congress to undermine the president and successfully orchestrate the overthrow of the sovereign nation of Hawaii.
Faghihi, 52, was arrested on conspiracy and related charges stemming from allegations that he shipped genetic sequencing equipment to the Iranian military without a required license from the U.S. Department of Treasury. Faghihi was in contact with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, which bought several genetic testing machines from his local business, Thakur said.
What Biden could have added is that his critics are willfully dishonest about the history of the war—and the nature of the status quo before the collapse. One of the very best guides to that history is the blockbuster “Afghanistan Papers” report that Craig Whitlock released in The Washington Post in 2019 (now available in expanded form as a book).
Neighboring Poland declared a state of emergency along its eastern border with Belarus last week ahead of the military exercises. Baltic states Latvia and Lithuania have also declared states of emergencies as all three countries have seen a huge increase in the number of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa looking to cross into the European Union from Belarus—thought to have been deliberately sent to the border by Lukashenko. Then, on Sunday, Lukashenko added to tensions by announcing that Belarus would buy $1 billion worth of Russian military equipment over the next four years.
The world’s greatest forests are turning to patchwork. The patches get more frequent, the carbon leaks and the heat rises.
Maggots: The Record, the 1987 concept album by Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics, opens with the following monologue: It is 25 years in the future. Environmental abuse and the burning of fossil fuels have effectively doubled atmospheric CO2 levels creating a greenhouse effect of strength unknown in historical times. Global temperature rises have caused accelerated melting of the earth’s glaciers and polar ice caps. Preventative measures against massive flooding have been unrealistic and poorly constructed. New York City is typical of cities all over the world. The part which is not completely submerged is a network of festering stagnant pools percolating in a blistering heat in humid air. Day by day, the sound of buzzing flies has become more and more pronounced.
A coalition of conservation groups sued the Biden administration on Thursday over the U.S. Department of the Interior's recent rule allowing fossil fuel companies to harass polar bears and walruses while searching and drilling for oil and gas in the Southern Beaufort Sea.
"Unchecked oil and gas development in Alaska's Arctic impedes the survival of Southern Beaufort Sea polar bears, already one of the world's most imperiled populations."—Nicole Whittington-Evans, Defenders of Wildlife
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Thursday that humanity's "future is at stake" with governments' climate commitments, as he marked the launch of a U.N.-backed report he called "an alarming appraisal of just how far off course we are."
"We continue to destroy the things on which we depend for life on Earth."
Democratic leaders on the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee sent letters Thursday inviting the heads of key fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups to testify before the panel about the industry's contributions to climate disinformation in recent decades.
"Exposing the industry's disinformation is a critical step in holding it accountable for the damage it has done and clearing the way for meaningful change."—Jamie Henn, Fossil Free Media
One of the UK’s biggest trade unions has been accused of being “deeply misleading” after suggesting government climate plans involve “ripping out” gas boilers from people’s homes.
The GMB union, which represents 500,000 workers including gas engineers, said this week that plans to replace fossil fuel boilers to cut household carbon emissions would lead to “heating chaos for millions”, calling low-carbon alternatives such as heat pumps “unproven technology”.
“Our demand is to stop looking for oil and gas, and stop handing out new permits to companies,” says Lars Haltbrekken, climate and energy spokesman for the Socialist Left party – a likely coalition partner for Labor. He claims that after eight years in charge the government is protecting a status quo at a time when the country is thirsty for a post-oil future.
A report in August from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicting global floods and fires created a wave in Norway that has crested throughout this election campaign.
Nearly 170 years ago, the U.S. government started signing treaties with Indigenous tribes in the Pacific Northwest that amassed millions of acres of land for new settlers. In exchange for their signatures, hundreds of tribes retained the rights to critical natural resources, including fresh water and salmon.
But the U.S. government broke those agreements. It ignored them. It even fraudulently altered them. Some tribes were excluded from these treaties altogether.
Starting today, iconic Yellowstone wolves crossing the boundary of Yellowstone National Park into the state of Montana face slaughter by trophy hunters with high-powered rifles, including within federally-designated Wilderness areas. Wolves living in Glacier National Park face a similar fate when they exit the national€ park.
Last month, Montana not only eliminated any cap on the number of wolves that can be killed in hunting and trapping zones bordering Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park, but individuals can now kill a total of 10 wolves per season.€ New regulations also allow unethical baiting for wolves statewide, including within federal public lands and Wilderness areas.€ Night hunting with artificial lights or night vision scopes is also allowed on private lands statewide.
Clean water didn't used to be an issue in Dworzak. In the 1980s and '90s, people started building small houses on the lush terrain. Water bubbled up from multiple springs, and it gushed down streams that cut through ravines. Then during Sierra Leone's brutal civil war in the 1990s, Dworzak grew rapidly. More and more people moved to the capital to get away from fighting in the countryside.
And while new residents arrived quickly, basic infrastructure such as roads, electricity, sewers and piped water didn't. Streams got polluted with sewage and trash. Springs that had been sufficient for a few families couldn't keep up with the demands of the growing population.
How the planned water cuts shake out depends on who is given top priority under a complex set of water-sharing agreements. Arizona, with more junior rights to the water than other states it shares it with, will suffer the biggest cuts, losing about 8 percent of the total water it receives a year. But for now, those cuts will primarily affect agriculture, which used more than 70 percent of the state’s water in 2019. Water for tribes, municipal use, and industry are given higher priority in the state, shielding residents and companies unless a more severe water shortage is eventually declared at Lake Mead.
The reservoir near Las Vegas has fallen to its lowest levels since Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s and is continuing to drop after years of chronic overuse and drought intensified by climate change. It now stands at just 35% of full capacity.
A curious news story popped up in the Sonoma County Press-Democrat this summer, just as a bipartisan group of US senators was trimming the sails on Joe Biden’s infrastructure plans and sending their own $1.2 trillion package to the Senate floor: The Wine Country paper of record reported that one of those senators, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, had traveled to the city of Sonoma in August 2020, where she earned $1,117.40 as a paid intern at a winery.
A group of over 400 economists on Wednesday sent a letter to congressional leaders calling for the expanded child tax credit to be made permanent, citing "potential tremendous immediate and long-term benefits for children and their families."
The America Recovery Plan, prompted by the pandemic, expanded the child tax credit (CTC), first enacted over two decades ago. In addition to boosting the amount of the credit to up to $3,600 for parents of younger children, it advanced half of the credit ahead of tax-filing time.
Thousands in El Salvador took to the streets Wednesday to protest President Nayib Bukele’s growing consolidation of power and a new law making El Salvador the world’s first country to recognize the highly volatile cryptocurrency bitcoin as legal tender. Protesters in El Salvador are also criticizing a recent court ruling that paves the way for Bukele to run for reelection in 2024. El Salvador’s turn to bitcoin comes as a “surprise” to many, but has been pushed by Bukele as a way to lessen remittance fees, says Jorge Cuéllar, an assistant professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean studies at Dartmouth College. “There’s no reason why bitcoin should be at the top of the government agenda in a moment of pandemic, of water stress, of food insecurity, of depressed wages,” Cuéllar says. “People are very suspicious of this.”
One country has decided to make using cryptocurrency a reality, sticking its neck out in adopting bitcoin as something akin to an economic messiah.€ Few thought it would be El Salvador, whose government made the currency legal tender on September 7.€ To mark the occasion, each citizen signing up to Chivo, the national digital wallet, has receivedUS$30.€ Foreigners adventurous enough to invest three bitcoins in the country are promised residency.
The introduction was far from spontaneous.€ The surf town of El Zonte, with its Bitcoin Beach project, began an experiment to adopt the currency in 2018, a venture aided by the Californian cryptocurrency zealot Michael Peterson.€ Through the Evangelical Christian church, Peterson combined God and crypto, proselytising the value of such currency.€ Each local family received US$50, and the currency came to be used for such projects as rubbish collecting and lifeguarding.
Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an economic crisis in which millions are being cut off from Pandemic Unemployment Insurance, even as August job gains proved underwhelming. There’s also a crisis taking place in state legislatures with an ongoing attack on women’s autonomy over our own bodies. The Supreme Court let a law go into effect that makes abortions nearly impossible in Texas and turns its enforcement over to vigilantes. And then, of course, there’s the looming eviction crisis that could precipitate the worst housing and homelessness disaster in American history.
I remember finding out I was about to become a mother. I felt the fear taking hold of me. My brain stopped. I remember crying but had no tears. I remember trying to run, but I couldn't move.
“Just where do you think You’re going?” it asked, in a heavy Slovenian accent.
“I’m going to Tax the Rich,”replied AOC’s dress. “I thought you didn’t care.”
The Democrats in the United States Senate have failed to pass either the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Both measures seek to restore voter protections that have been stripped away from people of color by either state legislatures or the Supreme Court. Both were passed by the House of Representatives. Neither has passed the Senate because Republicans oppose voting rights, while certain Democrats still love the filibuster. One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin (D-Koch Brothers), opposes the For the People Act outright.
It appears, at the very least, that a contract signed on July 28 by the Cyber Ninjas—the lead contractor in the Arizona Senate Republicans’ election review—and Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a Boston-based technologist and unsuccessful GOP U.S. Senate candidate, indicated that all 2020 election results would be tallied by August—and that deadline has now been missed.
An Arizona Republic report about Dr. Shiva, as he is known on social media, and the contract quoted Randy Pullen, the Senate review’s spokesman, as saying that Ayyadurai’s tally of the votes on digital images of 2.1 million paper ballots (created by vote-count scanners) was “sidetracked because the data was corrupted.” Pullen said “only 60 percent of the ballots were accessible.”
Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley stepped outside the realm of his constitutional power to prevent Donald Trump from starting nuclear war with China or Iran. € It was definitely unconstitutional and probably illegal. € But he's not the true villain in this story; the true villain is almost never mentioned in the press.
The third explanation is that another plane flew near the Albertina as it tried to land, either deliberately or accidentally, causing it to crash, either by forcing it to take evasive action or by downing it with warning shots. This would explain the eyewitness accounts, as well as tidbits other theories struggle with. In 2015 the UN reopened its investigation. Its first report found this explanation “plausible” and suggested that the governments involved ought to prove that they had made exhaustive checks of their records. It will report again in 2022.
We're going to have to do this again up front because I know how this is going to go over among some: even if you think Amazon is the root of all evil, and Senator Elizabeth Warren truly is the greatest Senator in the last century, that does not mean that she gets to ignore the Constitution. We had this issue earlier this year when Warren threatened to punish Amazon for its constitutionally protected speech, and now she's going even further. She has sent a letter to new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to complain about the fact that there are some books on Amazon that have dangerous mis- and disinformation about COVID-19 and various treatments and vaccines. And, yes, I recognize just as well as you do how dangerous that kind of mis- and disinformation can be. But, whether you like it or not, that mis- and disinformation is almost certainly protected by the 1st Amendment. And Warren ignores all that and implies that Amazon hosting this material is potentially "unlawful." It's not and threatening Amazon for carrying it is a huge 1st Amendment issue.
A new analysis released Thursday by the environmental group Friends of the Earth shows that Facebook is continuing to allow thoroughly debunked climate lies to run rampant on its platform, despite the tech giant's frequent public pledges to combat disinformation.
"Facebook is becoming the last bastion of climate denial."—Michael Khoo, Friends of the Earth
Lies about climate change still fester unchecked on Facebook, environmentalists say, even as the social media giant announces new climate initiatives. The company today said that it’s beefing up a “Climate Science Center” with more facts, quizzes, and videos. It’s also investing $1 million in grants to groups “working to combat climate misinformation.”
Those efforts still don’t get at the root of the problem. Trying to funnel Facebook users to a “science center” doesn’t actually stop climate deniers from posting false information that can spread like wildfire on the platform. And Facebook continues to accept advertising dollars from oil and gas companies.
One key provision of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan is causing confusion amid a sustained lobbying campaign from banks both big and small — and a big signal-boost from right-wing media personalities.
A flurry of headlines about a proposed Internal Revenue Service reporting requirement for banks, which would require financial institutions to report net annual inflows and outflows on accounts with more than $600 — or that same amount in transactions — seem to be based on the false premise that the Biden Administration would be "snooping" or "monitoring" individuals' finances, or otherwise tracking all transactions a person makes.
Rep. Devin Nunes has kept up his suing news organizations (and satirical internet cows). He has been mostly losing. Lately, we've been writing a fair bit about the lawsuit Nunes' family has (using the same lawyer, Steven Biss) against reporter Ryan Lizza, which has gone somewhat off the rails. There's been more nonsense since we last wrote about it, but I'm kind of waiting on the judge to actually rule before I go into the details.
Last week, China restricted children under 18 to three weekend hours of video games per week. If you’re a parent of a Minecraft- or Fortnite-obsessed child, you may be wondering why the U.S. doesn’t do something similar. But China’s move against juvenile gaming is just the Chinese government's latest salvo in their barrage of attempts to control internet technology. Their centralized approach is one that we in the U.S. have historically rejected and should continue to reject.
He was arrested last year after announcing the album and his intention to work with female singers. An Iranian judge told him he was ‘encouraging prostitution’ by working with women. Rajabian says he’s worried about being reaccused by the Iranian government now that his work on the album is complete.
In a ruling on what is known as the “shadow docket” as opposed to the traditional€ “merits docket,” the Court ruled that the Texas “Heartbeat” Act (Senate Bill 8) was Constitutionally permitted.€ The bill outlaws abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detectable, which typically occurs in the sixth week of pregnancy.€ In 2013, North Dakota passed a fetal heartbeat law that was, in 2015, ruled unconstitutional by the Court under Roe v. Wade (1973).€ Other heartbeat bills – e.g., Georgia, Mississippi and Ohio – are on hold.
The Court’s ruling with regard SB8 effectively overturns the landmark Roe decision of a half-century ago.€ It demonstrates just how powerful the conservative movement is at both the state and federal levels.€ So, this raises a critical question: While the Supreme Court is at it, what other critical or landmark prior decisions could it overturn?
Jennifer Moston was about seven months pregnant when, she said, her husband grabbed her by the arms, picked her up and threw her against the staircase. Each time she tried to get up, he pushed her down again.
Such abusive episodes continued for several years, she said, until 2016, when he allegedly tried to strangle her. She went to the police and filed for divorce.
Earlier this year, the Florida state legislature passed a law that turned protesting into a crime by expanding the definition of "riot" to make peaceful protesters culpable for the actions of those actually engaged in rioting. It refused bail to those arrested at protests and the term "aggravated rioting" was expanded enough to cover any gathering of more than nine people that blocked any road.
Another bullshit forfeiture has attracted national press attention. This one has some added bonuses, like local cops stating on (body cam) that the easiest way to get their hands on the seized money would be to ask the feds to come in.
In a major win for asylum-seekers and human rights advocates, a federal judge on Thursday ordered President Joe Biden's administration to end a Trump-era policy of using Covid-19 pandemic to justify the swift deportation of migrant families.
"This court order reaffirms our pride in being a nation of refuge, as Congress intended."—Cecillia Wang, ACLU
Documents obtained via public records requests by the Brennan Center reveal the Los Angeles Police Department has made social media part of its everyday business. The LAPD is wholly embracing the 21st century. This doesn't mean its public relations department is making the most of numerous platforms to address citizens' concerns and engage in more transparency.
Infuriated human rights advocates on Thursday denounced the Biden administration for resuming deportation flights to Haiti—even as residents of the impoverished Caribbean nation continue to struggle in the aftermath of last month's disastrous earthquake and tropical storm, which came amid the Covid-19 pandemic and in the wake of an ongoing political-economic crisis.
"That ICE would continue to carry out the mass deportations of our Haitian neighbors—with Haiti in the midst of its worst political, public health, and economic crises yet—is cruel and callous."—Rep. Ayanna Pressley
The lawsuit, obtained by Rolling Stone and embedded below, seeks damages for invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The case stems from a shocking incident of police violence last October, that itself followed the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr., a young Black man experiencing a mental health crisis whom cops shot after he allegedly lunged at them with a knife. That shooting set off mass protests, as well as incidents of vandalism and looting, late into the night of October 26th.
After the idiotic and dangerous events of January 6, you might recall how corporations like AT&T and Comcast proclaimed they'd paused donations to any politicians behind the clumsy, violent attempt to, you know, dismantle functioning democracy. But, of course, this was mostly a show; the companies continued to donate money to those same politicians via their lobbying and policy umbrella orgs. Then, once the public was adequately distracted by the next big scandal du jour, quickly got back to work funding those same politicians again with zero meaningful penalty.
The argument they make is that gigantic tech companies are the only ones who can innovate and compete with China. But this completely misses the point on innovation. When companies have monopolies, they have no reason to innovate since they have captured the market. There is no need to compete to have the best product when you are the only product. Innovation depends on the best ideas from everyone being put forth to the public. € €
Now, we don’t know if these folks actually believe in the argument or if they think the rest of us will believe in the argument because they say it, but this letter is really only about delaying legislative antitrust action through raising not just fictional concerns, but completely bogus takes on how innovation happens on the internet.
The irony about the national security argument is that it takes a page straight out of the AT&T monopoly playbook and history. Forty years ago, AT&T was the largest corporation in the world and was facing antitrust action both in Congress and the courts. In a Hail Mary effort to get the Department of Justice to abandon its lawsuit, AT&T lobbyists went to the Department of Defense and convinced them that a monopoly communications network was essential for national security.
The first edition of Intellectual Property Law in China (IPLCN) was the first of a bunch of goodies this Kat enthusiastically gathered from the incomparable IP library of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (MPI). It was published in 2005 – a bit aged – but it still stands as the visible fruit of the MPI’s Asian Department, which was founded in 1975. From 2000 to 2005, the department published 12 volumes in the Asian studies series, demonstrating the institute’s policy and dedication to Asia. At that time, the Institute’s academic focus was allocated according to geographical expertise, for example, Nordic Department, Asian Department, and had not yet shifted towards the current project-based approach. The editor of the 2005 IPLCN was Dr Christopher Heath, then Head of the Department for Japan and East Asia.
Way back in 2017, years before CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077 in a poor enough state so as to kickoff lawsuits from investors and a shitstorm of criticism by the public, we discussed how CDPR had acquired the US trademark for "Cyberpunk" in its licensing arrangements and then applied for a mark on the same term in the EU. The problem, of course, is that "cyberpunk" isn't just the name of a series of tabletop and video games, but also the name of a broad genre of fiction. These are trademarks that should never have been granted, as they are akin to getting a trademark on something like "True Crime". Plenty of folks in American and the EU cried foul over this, leading to CDPR putting out a statement that, among other things, noted that the company is not a trademark bully and would not be aggressive in enforcing the mark for unrelated projects in the cyberpunk genre. Pay special attention to the tweet from CDPR below in the section headed "What does it mean that CD Projekt owns the trademark for "Cyberpunk"?
Based in: South Orange, United States
The pirate movie screener season has started early this year. After two Netflix films leaked a few days ago, reportedly from festival screeners, a 'webscreener' copy of "The Card Counter" has just appeared online. All movies are linked to the pirate release group EVO, which appears to have multiple sources.
West Midlands Police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft say they have dismantled a major illegal streaming operation in the UK. Two men and a woman have been arrested on suspicion of copyright infringement, fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud. Hundreds of thousands of customers are reportedly being greeted by a police message instead of their expected TV content.
