tech support woes abound, printers, amico, retro consoles
Snap's continue to be a controversial software distribution method from Canonical and recently another step towards a full snap system has begun to occur and that is the replacement of Firefox's deb package with a snap as the default.
Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76 joins Jonathan Bennett and Shawn Powers on FLOSS Weekly. He's been selling Linux laptops and desktops for years, and now leads the team behind the easy-to-use Pop_OS! One of his biggest fans, Leo Laporte, also joins the show. Open Firmware, what's new in the OS, and the perfect hardware for keyboard nerds and upcoming news for System 76 are part of the show discussions. Bennett finally gets the scoop behind the "Pop_OS!" name. A fun show with great discussions.
The heart of real-time support for Linux has finally made it into the official kernel. As before, real-time support cannot be activated there, because there are still some medium-sized and all kinds of small construction sites. Developers of the project, which has been dragged out due to lack of money, discussed these things at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, which is currently taking place. There it was also discussed how they want to maintain the whole thing in the future.
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The recorded changes to locking techniques such as spinlocks, mutexes and Rwlocks are ultimately the core of it all, with the PREEMPT_RT in autumn 2004 still started under a different name Has. The now integrated adjustments added up to a whopping seventy patches. They allow a kernel compiled with real-time support to interrupt almost all of the tasks it has performed at any time without any major delay in order to temporarily devote itself to more important things.
This is crucial for real-time support: Linux can quickly turn to programs that always have to complete a certain task in a pre-defined time – even if something unimportant demands a lot from the system and creates adverse conditions. A marking on the process determines which programs the kernel should prefer. For many PCs and servers in particular, this is of no interest, because the greater responsiveness means that other tasks are interrupted more frequently and run more slowly.
There is a growing discussion among network engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals about the security benefits of bastions. Many assume that they are the “old way” of network access and have little relevance in the modern cloud native stack. These speculations are not irrelevant as in recent years, the corporate IT network perimeter as we knew it is diminishing, and the concept has been shifted to data, identity, and compute perimeter. Software-defined networking solutions have overtaken hardware firewall boxes, and the requirement of managing bare metal servers has shifted to container deployed or even serverless applications. Where do bastions fit in these scenarios? Do we even need one?
There is no shortage of package managers. Each tool makes its own set of tradeoffs regarding speed, ease of use, customizability, and reproducibility. Guix occupies a sweet spot, providing reproducibility by design as pioneered by Nix, package customization à la Spack from the command line, the ability to create container images without hassle, and more.
Beyond the “feature matrix” of the tools themselves, a topic that is often overlooked is packages—or rather, what’s inside of them. Chances are that a given package may be installed using any of the many tools at your disposal. But are you really getting the same thing regardless of the tool you are using? The answer is “no”, contrary to what one might think. The author realized this very acutely while fearlessly attempting to package the PyTorch machine learning framework for Guix.
This post is about the journey packaging PyTorch the Guix way, the rationale, a glimpse at what other PyTorch packages out there look like, and conclusions we can draw for high-performance computing and scientific workflows.
Over at the Guix-HPC blog, Ludovic Courtès writes about trying to package the PyTorch machine-learning library for the Guix distribution. Building from source in a user-verifiable manner is part of the philosophy behind Guix, but there were a number of problems that were encountered...
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' VS Mario REMASTERED V1.1 mod on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Cron is used for scheduling tasks in Linux. It helps you automate the repeating tasks at ease. The tasks that are performed at pre-scheduled times are called Cron Jobs.
For example, you could create a script for automatically backing up some of your files and run the script as a cron job at a certain interval. We use the crontab command to edit the cron table and schedule tasks according to our preferences.
In this tutorial, we’ll go through how to run cron jobs every 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, as well as the fundamentals of scheduling cron jobs.
If you want an in-depth article that covers all the topics about cron from basics to advanced, check out our tutorial on How to Schedule Cron Jobs in Linux With Crontab.
SSH (Secure Shell) is a standard network tool used to access PC and other systems remotely but in a secure way. Here we let you know how to enable SSH on Ubuntu and use it using Authentication keys.
Graphite is a free and open-source monitoring tool to store numeric time-series data and its graph in real-time.
Graphite doesn't collect data by itself, instead it receives data from other tools. As soon as Graphite receives data it can create graphs in the webapp.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install Graphite and Graphite Web on Ubuntu 20.04 using docker. The easiest way to have a running Graphite instance is by using docker.
The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). This beta 5 build provides additional features and fixes to bugs reported against previous builds.
If you already reviewed the changelog for the previous beta, you can skip right to the differences between beta 4 and beta 5 (part 1, part 2).
Some big changes since the previous beta are the promotion of object validity checks to release builds (no more "dangling pointers" release surprises), initial support for Android Play Asset Delivery, and a new ACES Fitted high quality tonemapper.
GNOME 41 is now out and while it doesn’t change as many things as GNOME 40 did, there is still a lot of stuff to talk about.
GNOME 41 is the second release to use GNOME’s new version numbering scheme. This replaced the old odd point release approach with a simpler, single integer. For your information the next GNOME 42 release is planned for March 2022.
Here are some of the big additions in GNOME 41.
GNOME 41 stable release is ultimately here.
While GNOME 40 was a radical change forcing many users to adapt to a new workflow, GNOME 41 seems to settle the dust.
With GNOME 41, there are no significant workflow changes but new feature additions and improvements across the board.
With the news that Google would be phasing in a new version of Google Docs I thought we ought to get the current version working in Flow. Because of many bug fixes in Flow for other websites, Google Docs now seemed to load mostly fine, though it rendered without word wrap and you couldn’t actually type into it.
Like Google Mail, Google Docs almost entirely consists of obfuscated JavaScript, some of it common between the two. Its HTML structure is quite simple, though it uses hidden iframes for various purposes (one for key input and another for calculating word widths, amongst others). Over the course of the couple of months I identified over 30 distinct issues that needed fixing, and I’ll discuss the more interesting ones in the second section of this blog.
It’s not just popup ads that annoy people. You also have creepy companies like Facebook and Google following your every move on the internet. They know what you have been up to and use this information to offer tailored ads. Worse still, sometimes they sell this information to third parties. So we have seen a rise in privacy extensions for browsers too.
That is the vision upon which Brave browser was born. It’s easily one of the fastest-growing browsers on the [Internet]. They claim to be a privacy-focused browser. It’s easy to see what Brave is all about. Instead of you having to install Chrome, install Adblock, tweak privacy settings and so on you can just install Brave. It is based on Chromium, the engine that powers Chrome, Chromium and Edge.
A lot of years Postgres will have some big pillar or theme to the release. Often this is thought of after the fact. Everything that is committed is looked at and someone thinks, "This is the key thing to talk about." In Postgres 9.2 it was JSON, in 9.4 it was JSONB, in 10 it was logical replication, 12 was a broader performance theme. While I look forward to each of these big highlights, in each release I'm equally excited to browse through and pull out the small things that simply make my life better.
Postgres is, and for some time will continue to be, the first database I turn to. As Postgres focuses on the little things, it just deepens my commitment to it. Why look elsewhere when the bond just grows over time? So today I wanted to call some extra attention to those little things, the ones that don't get the spotlight, but simply make a developer's life better.
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I've talked a lot over the years about how I'm a fan of psql - the CLI client that comes with Postgres. It's quite feature rich, more so than most CLI tools I know. It has the ability to customize it via a psqlrc, a lot of handy shortcuts, ability to format the output of a query with \x and \x auto to auto format it, and features like \watch to auto re-run a query every few seconds.
When I started going through the psql improvements in Postgres 14 it was great to see not just 1 new feature but a slew of them.
First, there's a nice improvement contributed by two of my colleagues to the shortcut \df to allow you to see function and operator arguments. This helps reduce the number of matches for overloaded entries.
Craig Kerstiens highlights some of the "little things" featured in the upcoming PostgreSQL 14 release.
GNU Parallel 20210922 ('Vindelev') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4
No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
The ephemeral miniconf is a Perl and Raku virtual miniconf that will take place in Zoom the 18 november 2021.
It's free, small and relax.
The spurious justifications conservative politicians have offered in 28 states for banning Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and candid discussion of the history and the persistence of racism in America leave us with a strong case of déjà vu. Why? Because, in researching America’s reception to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), we found the same arguments used by anti-radical activists as they sought for years to ban from public schools and universities Zinn’s best-selling iconoclastic introduction to the American past. Both in the 1980s with Zinn (through his death in 2010) and today with Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, the book-banners claim that exposing students to critical history will teach them to hate America and that such exposure is divisive and so disrupts the educational process.
The study examined the development of speech and linguistic expression in kids at 18 and 24 months of age, and found that as parents' and their children's use of electronic devices increased — so-called 'screen time' — the kids' vocabularies decreased.
Vocabulary size at 18 and 24 months was smaller than previously reported and negatively associated with exposure to electronic media.
As U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday kicked off a virtual Covid-19 summit with world leaders by announcing a deal with Pfizer to buy 500 million more coronavirus vaccine doses to donate abroad, public health experts warned that the administration's stated goals for tackling the pandemic are "woefully inadequate" to address the dire need for vaccines and treatments in the Global South.
"The global response to Covid-19 continues to fail millions of people in low- and middle-income countries across the world."—Deborah Burger, NNU
At the end of August, I wrote about the deficiencies in President Joe Biden’s initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic. At the beginning of September, the president announced a series of new initiatives that will tackle many, though not all, of these shortcomings. I am not positing a cause and effect here: I don’t think the president’s inner circle is reading my columns in The Nation to decide what to do. However, what is driving the Biden administration’s moves is reasonable scientific advice, and my comments here were largely framed within the existing scientific consensus of what we should be doing now. We can argue the specifics—and certainly still criticize—but by and large, “science is back” in 2021 (depending where you look, but more on that later).
A few weeks ago, with Covid cases and deaths rising and vaccinations slowing, the Biden administration finally decided to admit the reality that the virus had not been defeated and put forward a new plan to tackle its spread. One of the key pillars of the plan relies on a new regulation from the Occupational and Safety Hazard Administration (OSHA) that requires all employers with more than 100 employees to mandate the Covid-19 vaccination for their employees or subject them to regular, weekly testing. This builds on the administration’s prior commitment to mandate vaccination for federal employees. While this is certainly a good first step, the choice to use OSHA to solely regulate the vaccination of individuals rather than hold employers accountable for Covid safety failures continues the Biden flawed strategy of focusing mostly on individuals and ignoring the context in which the virus spreads.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis came under fire from Democratic lawmakers and public health experts following the Republican's Tuesday announcement that Dr. Joseph Ladapo—who opposes mask and coronavirus vaccine mandates—would be the state's next surgeon general.
"I'm speechless. I attended medical school with Dr. Joseph Ladapo and to say I'm shocked by his opposition to mask and vaccine mandates is an understatement."—Dr. Uché Blackstock, physician
I’ve written several times about the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a statement released by three COVID-19-minimizing scientists, Dr. Sunetra Gupta (University of Oxford), Dr. Martin Kulldorff (Harvard University) and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford University). Named after the Massachusetts town where the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER, the libertarian “free market” think tank that birthed the declaration) is based, the Great Barrington Declaration, which, it should be noted, was published two months before any COVID-19 vaccines received emergency use authorizations (EUAs) from the FDA, advocated basically letting COVID-19 rip through the “healthy population” to achieve “natural herd immunity” while using “focused protection” to keep those at high risk of severe disease and death from the virus (e.g., the elderly and those with chronic health conditions that put them at high risk) safe from COVID-19. Unfortunately, what was meant by “focused protection” was never really defined, and the GBD totally ignored the impossibility of “focused protection” of those at high risk from an infectious disease that was spreading unchecked through the rest of the population. As I said at the time, the entire idea struck me as not-so-thinly disguised eugenics that would let the “unhealthy” suffer and die in the name of getting the business of business rolling again, while the AIER’s likening GBD adherents to abolitionists was risible in the extreme. All of this is simply a lead-up, however, to a story from yesterday, in which Governor Ron DeSantis announced that Dr. Joseph Ladapo would be Florida’s new Surgeon General and Secretary of the Florida Department of Health:
The Tagesspiegel newspaper said far-right chat groups on Telegram were applauding the murder, with one user writing “Here we go!!!” while others posted thumbs-up emojis.
Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht said it was “repulsive” that the killing was being used online “to spread even more hatred and contempt” for human life.
COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have climbed to an average of more than 1,900 a day for the first time since early March, with experts saying the virus is preying largely on a distinct group: 71 million unvaccinated Americans.
His work showed that the continent was headed down the same path as the rest of the world when it came to COVID-19.
To expand his forecasting ability for COVID-19 waves, Sam adapted an existing mathematic model known as ARIMA, which stands for autoregressive integrated moving average. The adaptation let him extend ARIMA’s forecast capability from about one month up to eight, making it possible to predict infection waves farther into the future.
The goal was to help public health officials prepare hospitals and staff for coming waves.
Information about the resulting model, known as the Otoi-NARIMA Model, was published this year in the International Journal of Statistics and Applied Mathematics.
What they're saying: "Clean air should be a fundamental human right and a necessary condition for healthy and productive societies," said Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO's regional director for Europe, said in a press release.
Zoom’s ties to China are at the center of a US government investigation into the video-conferencing giant's $15bn plan to take over Five9, a California call-center-in-the-cloud.
The snappily titled Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Service Sector – known as Team Telecom under a previous president – is right now probing the planned acquisition. This interagency panel is chaired by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and has reps from the Pentagon and Homeland Security.
The attack on New Cooperative, which is believed to have been launched last week just as Iowa's corn and soy harvesting got under way, has been attributed to a group called BlackMatter.
The FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday issued a warning to U.S. organizations to be aware of a specific type of ransomware that has already wreaked havoc on hundreds of groups.
The agencies issued a joint alert specifically warning groups to be on guard against the Conti ransomware variant, with the agencies noting that 400 U.S. and international groups had already fallen victim to Conti.
On September 17th, Tim Cook announced during an internal company-wide meeting that Apple would be requiring frequent testing for unvaccinated employees — but was stopping short of a vaccine mandate. He also said that he was “looking forward to moving forward” after the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. Shortly after the meeting, both pieces of news leaked to The Verge.
Now, Cook is tying the news to product leaks — which the company has historically gone to great lengths to track down.
Even though Facebook Marketplace is backed by the power of the social networking giant, buying and selling items through the service can still carry the same risks as making purchases on other peer-to-peer platforms or through the classified ads of the local newspaper.
Buyers and sellers on Marketplace frequently know little about each other. Without taking sensible precautions, either party could end up being a victim of robbery or fraud. Some Marketplace users have had their goods or money stolen, while others have fallen prey to violent criminals they connected with through the popular reselling platform.
For years, Carman Alfonsi relied upon Facebook Marketplace to buy and sell used pool tables for his Michigan billiards business. He banked a steady stream of income from the wildly popular online bazaar.
But this July, Alfonsi’s Facebook account was hacked and used to post roughly 100 scam listings for cell phones and vehicles. The Marketplace posts directed buyers to contact an email address controlled by the scammers. When customers were left empty-handed, they sent enraged messages to Alfonsi by phone and Facebook Messenger.
As we have long feared, and as has already happened in other countries, COVID-19 vaccination requirements are being used to impose unrelated ID requirements.
There’s a difference between “unvaccinated” and “undocumented” — a difference that’s€ gotten lost in some recent regulations and orders imposing “vaccination mandates”.
Case in point: the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Artists on Audius can easily make their songs available for TikTok users in their videos. Artists can also link their following on TikTok back to the Audius platform. It’s a way for unsigned artists to get their music heard on a platform that has become increasingly important for music discovery.
The big picture: This newest Facebook controversy comes on the heels of a week of Wall Street Journal stories based on leaked internal research documenting problems with fairness in content moderation, misinformation and harm to teenagers.
A surveillance contractor that has previously sold services to the U.S. military is advertising a product that it says can locate the real-time locations of specific cars in nearly any country on Earth. It says it does this by using data collected and sent by the cars and their components themselves, according to a document obtained by Motherboard.
What happened was that earlier in 2014, Twitter had stopped releasing timeline views figures. The company kept track of daily active users but did not disclose those figures to shareholders. What they did disclose were monthly active users. Why? The daily active user figures showed flatlining or declining user engagement.
In November of 2014 Twitter’s management went further as to promise unattainable targets. 550 million monthly active users in the intermediate term and over a billion in the longer term. They fell woefully short in reaching those targets.
Facebook is serious about being a long-term player in hardware. On Wednesday, the company promoted Andrew Bosworth, the current head of its hardware division that makes Oculus and other consumer devices, to the role of chief technology officer, replacing outgoing CTO Mike Schroepfer when he becomes a senior fellow next year.
In his new role, Bosworth, who goes by Boz, will continue to lead the hardware group, called Facebook Reality Labs, while also assuming responsibility for Facebook’s broader software engineering organization and artificial intelligence efforts. He’ll report directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has taken a keen interest in developing AR glasses and the metaverse.
Lithuania's National Cyber Security Centre has told its citizens to get rid of Xiaomi-made mobile devices amid fears that the Chinese company could remotely enable censorship tools.
In an audit it published yesterday [PDF] the agency called out Xiaomi's Mi 10T 5G phone handset firmware for being able to censor terms such as "Free Tibet", "Long live Taiwan independence" or "democracy movement".
Defence Deputy Minister Margiris Abukevicius told reporters at the audit's release: "Our recommendation is to not buy new Chinese phones, and to get rid of those already purchased as fast as reasonably possible."
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has criticized the United States for intensifying its embargo at a time when Cuba is facing a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths. “The Biden administration policy toward Cuba today has been the Trump administration policy toward Cuba,” says Carlos Fernández de Cossío, director general for U.S. affairs in the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He says Cuba also rejects U.S. claims about “Havana syndrome,” the name given to mysterious neurological symptoms some American diplomats and CIA officers say they have experienced in foreign postings, including in Cuba. “The U.S. government has no answer to explain what has happened,” says Fernández de Cossío. We also speak with Fernández de Cossío about the U.S.’s “double standard” in its treatment of refugees, and the brutal tactics being used against Haitian asylum seekers along the border.
Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see, and it’s hard to deny his insight. Yet I’d argue that when it comes to the US military and its wars, Yoda was just plain wrong. That part of the future is all too easy to imagine. It involves, you won’t be shocked to know, more budget-busting weaponry for the Pentagon and more military meddling across the globe, perhaps this time against “near-peer” rivals China and Russia, and a Global War on Terror that will never end. What’s even easier to see is that peace will be given no chance at all. Why? Because it’s just not in the interests of America’s deeply influential military-congressional-industrial complex.
20 years earlier, the US Military said the bombing of Afghanistan was necessary to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Center, and thus began the longest war in US history.
In the Chaos of Kabul: Only Some Lives are Valuable
Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.
“The Purse is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts
Janine Jackson interviewed Milton Allimadi about New York Times coverage of Africa for the September 17, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Islamist officers in the Sudanese army tried to seize power in Khartoum on Tuesday morning but their attempted coup has been foiled.
Military and civilian Sudanese officials confirmed the aborted coup but until now the transitional government did not issue a statement about the situation.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, Member of the Sovereign Council Mohamed al-Faki who is also its spokesman issued a short call on social media to the Sudanese to take to the street to "protect the democratic transition."
NRC says that they believe that as many as 275,000 new people may have been displaced by the current violence. This violence is likely connected with the ongoing growth of militant jihadism in Mali. These extremist groups have been spreading further and further South and East into Niger and Burkina Faso.
“German police never should have detained photojournalist Michael Trammer, let alone filed criminal charges against him for simply doing his job and covering newsworthy events,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities should drop the charges against Trammer and issue a public explanation for why he was detained despite clearly identifying himself as a member of the press.”
On September 10 and 11, thousands protested at the International Motor Show in Munich against the country’s “car-dominated traffic policy,” and activists repeatedly clashed with police, according to news reports.
The Labour Party has been accused of helping biomass energy giant Drax engage in “green spin” by holding a climate event at its upcoming conference sponsored by the North Yorkshire company.
Drax – which emitted 19.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2020, including 13.2 million from burning biomass, according to environmental law charity ClientEarth – is sponsoring an event called “How Can the UK Build a Zero Carbon, Lower Cost Energy Future?” at the Labour conference in Brighton on Monday.
The day after Wilma Banks lost power, the stale, sticky air inside her apartment became suffocating.
Typically, when her breathing was strained, Banks strapped on her plastic nebulizer mask. A medicated mist would flow into her lungs, making her short breaths full again.
“Once again, Republican legislators have sided with polluters and taken hundreds of thousands of dirty dollars from the oil and gas industries,” said Brandon Dawson, director of the Sierra Club California. “This newest round of dirty money shows the oil and gas industries are committed to undermining the Democratic stronghold in the legislature and imperiling the health and safety of millions of Californians.”
While some state legislators made it out of another quarter avoiding fossil fuel campaign contributions, several others, including quite a few Assembly Democrats, amassed stashes of fossil fuel donations according to the group.
Aging populations are the inevitable symptom of our success. Thanks to modern medicine, most people born are able to live long and healthy lives. And contraception helped us avoid having more children than we can support well, in the process curtailing the impoverishment and resource constraints inflicted by population growth. If sustainable prosperity is possible, the population boom of the past 75 years must end. We will have more elderly people than ever before, but most will also be healthier and making a positive contribution to society, whether in paid work or not. The age ratios will find a new stability that still has more potential workers than jobs.
But is there something more to this question, “what do you want,” that the benefit of being on the present side of history distorts? Can we, perhaps should we, reject wrongs today while armed with a clear vision for tomorrow?
On the Left, now and often historically, there is a lack of vision. Perhaps we are merely heeding the cautions of our intellectual lamas, resisting overprescribed blueprints for future society as unknowable at best and authoritarian at worst. But perhaps, we are also using this wisdom as a crutch because we are afraid to look ahead into the void and believe that we can actually change the world, totally. So, we call out society’s wrongs, try to respond to the urgent and dire issues of now, surviving and fighting in the present. And to be fair, keeping your head above water, struggling against a rough sea of suffering, can be a task that leaves little untapped. Even those who might join the struggle for a better world often succumb to mental and emotional exhaustion before they ever lend their voice or lift a finger, let alone allow a cause to set fire to their hearts so that inaction is no longer possible. The prospect of it all can be like a lead weight. Without vision, real attainable inspiring vision, we mistake tactics for strategy, fight from one battle to the next, and too often fail to see a clear path ahead as we wither from fatigue, squabble, and generally fail to inspire massively and deeply for our cause.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has proposed two pilot programs to help low-income motorists cope with the city’s punitive vehicle-ticketing and debt-collection system. One halves the cost of the citations, the other offers debt relief.
Lightfoot, who campaigned in part on a pledge to end what she has called the city’s “addiction” to fines and fees, also proposed forgiving some tickets when motorists come into compliance with the law, a solution some advocates have supported for years.
The infrastructure of Islamic terror is made up of three groups: domestic infrastructure, financial infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure. The domestic infrastructure consists of the populations who are the source of Islamic terrorism, the financial infrastructure comes from the state sponsors and billionaire funders of terrorism, and the organizational infrastructure is represented by the terrorist groups like Al Qaeda that run training camps and plan operations.
Going after training camps and terror leaders made sense, but it was also the most difficult militarily, requiring the deployment of troops to distant countries to engage in guerrilla warfare in hostile environments and counterterrorism in enemy cities, and the easiest politically.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, signed off last month on a new initiative code-named Project Amplify.
The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network.
The idea was that pushing pro-Facebook news items — some of them written by the company — would improve its image in the eyes of its users, three people with knowledge of the effort said. But the move was sensitive because Facebook had not previously positioned the News Feed as a place where it burnished its own reputation. Several executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal, one attendee said.
Special Investigating Unit (SIU) head, Advocate Andy Mothibi, says whistleblowers remain an important aspect to combatting corruption.
Another longtime Facebook executive, Andrew Bosworth, will take over as CTO, according to an internal message on Wednesday from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg. Schroepfer’s move marks the most significant departure from the company in years and follows the recent exits of several other top executives.
Ever since “fake news” on Facebook became a public concern following the 2016 presidential election, publishers who traffic in misinformation have been repeatedly shown to be able to gain major audiences on the platform. But the NYU study is one of the few comprehensive attempts to measure and isolate the misinformation effect across a wide group of publishers on Facebook, experts said, and its conclusions support the criticism that Facebook’s platform rewards publishers that put out misleading accounts.
The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings.
“If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned,” Mayorkas warned. “Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.”
Sad but true. There are no easy answers to our border challenges, which I don’t see as a “crisis” in the way some people do. We do have answers, if our opposing political parties can find their way to agreement on some of them.
Hong Kong's national security police have ordered the organizers of a now-banned candlelight vigil for the victims of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen massacre to delete all of their online posts, the group said via its Facebook page on Thursday.
The Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China said it would comply with a national security police demand to remove all content from its website and social media accounts under a draconian national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from July 1, 2020.
The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China said on Thursday that the group, seven of its standing committee members, and the company secretary received letters from the Commissioner of Police last Friday demanding they remove all “online platform information.”
Today, the 45-year-old star has been erased from the Chinese [Internet]. Searches for her name on the country's biggest video-streaming sites come up blank. Her projects, including the wildly popular TV series "My Fair Princess," have been removed. Anyone looking up her acclaimed film "So Young" on China's equivalent of Wikipedia wouldn't know she was the director; the field now reads "----."
Ms. Zhao's online disappearance on Aug. 26 came at the onset of a broader clampdown on the country's entertainment industry as the Communist Party attempts to halt what it sees as a rise in unhealthy celebrity culture. The Chinese government hasn't publicly stated what prompted this sudden change to her status, raising questions among fans and observers about how far it is willing to go against her and other celebrities, and why.
The mystery also has sparked open speculation about what, if anything, she might have done wrong.
In June, authorities announced all films would now be scrutinised for “national security” breaches. Mok’s was the first known to have fallen foul of these rules.
A Tibetan writer jailed for three years for criticizing Chinese government policies in Tibet died this week in Sichuan’s capital Chengdu after suffering ill health for eight years following his release, Tibetan sources say.
Ra Tsering Dhondup, who wrote under the pen name Shinglo Marpo, was a monk at the Rongtha monastery in Khyungchu county in Sichuan’s Ngaba (in Chinese, Aba) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and was 34 at the time of his death.
Dhondup was arrested in February 2010 for publishing a magazine “whose content criticized the Chinese communist government,” Gendun Tsering—a friend and former colleague of Dhondup’s now living in India—told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
Here’s what you might have run into. If you were looking at a tweet on your timeline, and at the same time someone else you follow replied to it, or the original tweeter threaded it, the app would suddenly refresh, while the tweet disappeared from view. That’s obviously not ideal, so Twitter plans to make changes over the next two months to fix the problem.
Human rights watchdog Freedom House says global Internet freedom has declined dramatically in Belarus, where last year’s disputed presidential election led the authorities to repeatedly restrict access to the Internet, increase social media surveillance, and detain and use "deadly force” against online activists.
According to the report Freedom on the Net 2021, published by Washington-based Freedom House on September 21, the "repressive campaign" by authorities against Internet liberty continued into this year, leading to a seven-point decline in the country's Internet freedom -- a drop surpassed only by Burma.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is very disturbed by the “11 journalism rules” that the Taliban announced at a meeting with the media on 19 September. The rules that Afghan journalists will now have to implement are vaguely worded, dangerous and liable to be used to persecute them.
Some ancient Greeks and Romans first proposed tolerance of differing viewpoints. In 1501, Pope Alexander XI of the notorious Borgias ordered censorship of unwanted ideas. The church’s famed€ Index Expurgatorius,€ listing banned books, was launched in 1559 and continued for centuries, eventually forbidding believers to read works of Rene Descartes, Galileo, David Hume, John Locke, Daniel Defoe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and many other thinkers. In France, printer-scholar Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake in 1546 for his unorthodox writings. England’s infamous Star Chamber, which tortured and mutilated nonconformists, also censored printed material.
In 1644, poet John Milton’s€ Aeropagitica€ appeal to Parliament opposed censorship of writings. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” he wrote.
The figures - which equate to more than €£10,000 a day - were obtained by LBC radio under the Freedom of Information Act.
According to investigative site Declassified UK, which obtained the prosecution costs via a freedom of information request to the CPS, another €£22,000 of public money was spent on expert witness contributions as well as €£5,000 on transcripts.
Combined with court costs and money spent locking up Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison, Declassified reports that the costs of the extradition case total at least €£317,000.
With journalist Silkie Carlo I have co-authored a ‘handbook’ on practical information security for journalists commissioned by the UK Centre for Investigative Journalism. The CIJ handbook ‘Information Security for Journalists‘ was launched at the CIJ Summer School 2014 in London. The book will be forever freely available in a range of electronic formats – see download links below. In the four months after the initial publication in we have rewritten certain parts based on feedback from the initial readers and updated other parts to stay current with the latest software changes. Many thanks to all who gave us valuable feedback.
Altough this book was originally written for investigative journalists most of the described concepts and technical solutions are just as usable by lawyers or advisors protecting communications with their clients, doctors protecting medical privacy and of course politicians, activists or anyone else who engages powerful state and corporate organisations. Really, we’re all journalists now. Inside the book is a mailadres for getting in touch, please let us know how your are using it and what we can do better.
Housing crisis
It is widely acknowledged that the United Kingdom is experiencing a housing crisis: in recent decades, the cost of buying a home has increased faster than salaries, pricing many people out of the market.
The headlines in recent weeks read like signs of an impending apocalypse. Sixteen years to the day since Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, the Louisiana coast was again battered by Hurricane Ida, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the state. Wildfires in California have blanketed the western U.S. with smoke, prompting mass evacuations. In New York, floodwaters poured into the subway and through the windows of basement apartments.
More than a hundred Tibetans detained by Chinese police in Sichuan’s Kardze prefecture since August have been denied proper food, clothing, and medical care, leaving many in poor health, Tibetan sources say.
At least 121 residents of Dza Wonpo township in Kardze’s Sershul (in Chinese, Shiqu) county have been arrested during the last three weeks amid a crackdown by authorities on language rights and possession of banned images of Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, sources said.
Many were members of a local group promoting the use of the Tibetan language, now being replaced under government orders by Chinese as the sole medium for classroom instruction in local schools, a Tibetan living in exile told RFA, citing local sources.
Two persons waylaid and assaulted a Hindu man for giving a lift to his female Muslim colleague on Friday night. The accused abused the woman, forced her off the bike and also abused her husband over the phone.
Sahar al-Sunbati, secretary-general of the council, said in a statement that the Child Support System was notified about the incident on Saturday via their designated hotline, citing photos of the children in question being circulated on social media.
Al-Sunbati condemned the incident, stating that it violated the provision of Article 80 of the country’s constitution which stipulates that the state is obliged to intervene in cases where children are subject to violence, abuse or ill-treatment.
However, this hate speech and discrimination isn’t unique to the Baha’i Faith and includes other religious minorities like the Sabean-Mandaeans. Even choosing and officially registering a Mandaean name increases “great fear” of being insulted and facing educational and financial obstacles, said one of the members of this community to Behnaz Hosseini, a research fellow at the University of Oxford. As Hosseini noted in her March report, Sabean-Mandaeans are often called “infidels and impure Muslims in the mosques, which negatively impacted [their] collective emotions.”
Police attacked journalists and inflicted damage on the headquarters of a media outlet during a banned protest last Wednesday in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns the exceptional violence used by the police and calls for those responsible to be sanctioned.
Nigerian authorities imposed a communications blackout on Monday in several parts of Sokoto state as a crackdown against armed kidnappers in the country’s northwest region spreads.
Institution decisions are generally down in 2021 to date, compared to previous years. Nonetheless, the USPTO’s use of procedural denials rivals last year’s. In 2020, nearly 19% of all institution decisions were denied procedurally, whereas this year, over 16% are denied—over 144 of the 377 denials to date have been denied under the Board’s discretion. In other words, almost 40% of all denials this year have been non-substantive.
Innovation has long been recognized as the key factor supporting US economic growth and competitiveness. A critical element of the infrastructure facilitating product development and commercialization is the system that protects intellectual property and encourages its widespread adoption and implementation. The current framework that facilitates this process includes the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The AIA and PTAB reduce the need for patent litigation, reducing costs and generating substantial economic benefits. Potential expansions of the AIA would lead to additional gains in business activity.
Last week the Federal Circuit issued two interesting orders in appeals from the USPTO. In the first, In re Zhu (Appeal No. 2021-1761), Sept. 13, 2021, the Federal Circuit vacated the decision of the PTAB and remanded the case to the PTO “for reconsideration of whether the claims are directed to an improvement in computer functionality, especially in light of this court’s recent case law.” (internal quotations and brackets removed). The context of this, according to Timothy Hu, was the Federal Circuit’s 2020 Uniloc v. LG ruling together with the PTO’s own request for a remand “to permit further proceedings” – i.e: this was a patent eligible subject matter issue that the PTO decided to take another look at while the appeal was pending.
The second, In re Boloro (Appeal nos. 2019-2349, -2351, -2353), Sept. 16, 2021, was an order by the Federal Circuit remanding the case to allow Bolero to request Director rehearing of the final written decisions in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 141 S.Ct. 1970 (2021). The Federal Circuit had previously issued an order remanding the case for assignment to a different panel, its earlier remedy for the Constitutional appointments issue with patent judges. As Andrew Karpan recently wrote, this order extends the effects of Arthrex to ex parte appeals.
EPO President António Campinos and the new Director General of the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property (OMPIC) Mr Abdelaziz Babqiqi have met for the first time at an online meeting on 22 September, opening a new chapter of co-operation between their offices.
Mr Campinos and Mr Babqiqi took stock of the validation agreement between the EPO and OMPIC, which entered into force on 1 March 2015 as the first ever EPO validation agreement. Under the agreement, around 400 granted European patents were validated in Morocco in 2020, a number that is expected to grow in the coming years.
The makers of popular films including "Hunter Killer," "Automata," and “I Feel Pretty” are demanding over $10 million in piracy damages from VPN provider LiquidVPN. The movie companies ask the court to issue a default judgment since the VPN provider failed to show up in court. Meanwhile, LiquidVPN's website seems to have disappeared.
A just unsealed grand jury indictment places YouTuber Bill Omar Carrasquillo (Omi in a Hellcat) and two other men at the heart of a massive conspiracy to illegally obtain Comcast, Verizon, Charter and other TV services' content and distribute it to the public via several Gears-branded pirate IPTV services. According to the US government, the defendants made at least $34m.
