NVIDIA Corporation has unveiled a new release of the proprietary driver NVIDIA 470.74 . The driver is available for Linux (ARM64, x86_64), FreeBSD (x86_64) and Solaris (x86_64).
More improvements and new extensions have landed for the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Driver with version 470.62.05 out now.
VIDIA today published their newest Vulkan beta driver update for Windows and Linux with some new extension support plus Vulkan Video enhancements.
Following yesterday's Vulkan 1.2.195 spec release, VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2 and VK_KHR_maintenance4 are now supported. Those are some subtle but important extensions moving forward.
Hinterland has released Episode Four "Fury, Then Silence" of The Long Dark story mode getting one step closer to reaching the conclusion with big updates planned in future.
"A murderous gang of convicts have captured Mackenzie. Desperate to escape one of the darkest corners of Great Bear Island, he must somehow survive his fiercest enemy yet. Can Mackenzie recover the Hardcase, continue his search for Astrid, and save the innocents caught up in this deadly confrontation?"
This of course brings me to the last two weeks in which I purchased two aRPGs (Action RPGs). One was a remastered version of an absolute classic, Diablo 2: Resurrected. It's basically the same game as 20 years ago with a total visual overhaul. Every other aspect of the game has been left untouched. The second is a much newer game that came out in the last couple years for the Switch and recently made it's way to Steam and runs on Linux via Proton: Minecraft: Dungeons.
Valve has posted an official teardown of its upcoming handheld gaming PC, the Steam Deck. Before diving into the teardown, though, the company spends about a minute to strongly caution against taking one apart unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing.
Indeed, the 5-minute video goes into great detail on how to perform Steam Deck surgery, and even states you have the “right” to open up your Steam Deck, but more than half of the video discourages you from doing so.
KDE Gear 21.08.2 is here about five weeks after the first point release to KDE Gear 21.08 with more improvements for your favorite KDE apps, including the popular Dolphin file manager, which no longer stays open in the background after running an archive operation using the context menu and then exiting the app.
KDE’s standard document viewer app Okular has been updated in KDE Gear 21.08.2 to automatically enable the “Force rasterization” setting when printing a document using a scaling mode that requires this setting to be active, as well as to strip off trailing newline characters when copying text and prompt users to save a read-only file on a different location.
UnifiedPush is a protocol and small collection of tools for Android and Linux that, as their site says, "let the user choose how push notifications are delivered. All in a free and open source way".
It uses what it calls "Distributors" to give notifications for apps that support it. For example, it currently has three distributors available - FCM (Google Firebase), Gotify and what it calls NoProvider2Push, a hardcore and experimental way of sending notifications without a push provider, but requires a static IP address on your device.
Of those three, two are the most obvious options - FCM and Gotify.
Facebook Inc. was ordered by a court-appointed referee to search for any personal notes by the company founder that haven’t been destroyed and might be relevant to a consumer lawsuit accusing the social networking giant of failing to safeguard privacy in the years leading up the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In July 2021, I and a few fellow Mozillians attended the SciPy conference with Mozilla as a diversity sponsor, meaning that our sponsorship went towards paying the stipend for the diversity speaker, Tess Tannenbaum. This was my first time attending a SciPy conference and also my first time supporting data science recruiting efforts at a conference. The conference involved the showcasing of the latest open source Python projects for advancement in scientific computing. I was eager to meet the contributors of many commonly used data science Python packages and hear about new features in upcoming releases. I was excited about having this opportunity as I strongly believe that conference attendance is an extremely rewarding experience for networking and learning about industry trends. As a Data Scientist, my day to day work often involves using Python libraries such as scikit-learn, numpy and pandas to derive insights from data. It felt particularly close to heart for a technical and data science geek like me to learn about code developments and use cases from other enthusiasts in the industry.
One talk that I particularly enjoyed was on the topic of Time-to-Event Modeling in Python led by Brian Kent and a few other data science experts. Time-to-Event Modeling is also referred to as survival analysis, which was traditionally used in biological research studies to predict lifespans. The speakers at the talk were the contributors of some of the most popular survival analysis python packages. For example, Lifelines is an introductory Python package that can be used for starters in survival analysis. Scikit-Survival is another package built on top of Scikit-learn, which is a commonly used package in machine learning. The focus of the talk was around how survival analysis could be useful in many different scenarios, such as in customer analytics. There is also increasing usage of survival analysis in SaaS businesses where it can be used to predict customer churn, which can help companies plan their retention strategies. I am curious how Mozilla can potentially apply survival analysis in ways that also respects data governance guidelines.
Tor Browser 10.5.8 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 78.15.0esr. This version includes important security updates to Firefox.
There have been open access beer recipes before – indeed, brewing culture in by nature collaborative and open. But the point of Open Access Ninja isn't (merely) making beer – it's making a point. It's that malamudian showmanship.
Structural pattern matching (PEP (python enhancement proposal) 634) is the main new feature of the new python 3.10.
Not everyone was happy with structural pattern matching. One of the comments: I see the match statement as a domain specific language that looks like python, but that does something surprisingly differently. Yes it is a special mini-language. A bit like regular expressions, which is also a special mini-language within python.
What is structural pattern matching?
There is one disclaimer at the end of Cured which I could not imagine that the filmmakers would have inserted on their own without pressure from the APA and establishment psychiatry. Owing to my speculation of establishment psychiatry pressure—which has been reported in other psychiatry films (more later on A Beautiful Mind)—the Cured filmmakers reached out to me, and we had a teleconference discussion for approximately an hour, which I’ll get to.
As I previously noted, Cured includes a graphic portrayal of the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), commonly known as electroshock, to “cure” homosexuality, showing just how traumatizing and brain injuring ECT was for its victim patients. Cured also points out that another commonly used barbaric “treatment” was “aversion therapy,” in which electric shock to the genitals and/or nausea-inducing drugs were administered simultaneously with the presentation of homoerotic stimuli; and Cured notes that psychiatry also attempted to “cure” homosexuality with castration and lobotomy.
Over the last year, Doctors Without Borders has faced a major scandal, as more than 1,000 current and former employees signed on to a letter accusing the Nobel Peace Prize-winning humanitarian organization of institutional racism, citing a colonial mentality in how the group’s European managers view the developing world.1
Such an allegation would be serious in any field, but it deserves another level of scrutiny in the context of global health and humanitarianism, two fields built on a paternalistic premise: rich white people from wealthy nations setting themselves up as saviors of poor people of color. The assumptions embedded in this model have provoked increasingly popular calls to “decolonize” the sector, and many organizations have responded by invoking social justice rhetoric, claiming, for instance, that their work intersects with the Black Lives Matter movement.2
“What the outage yesterday shows as well as a bunch of these [documents], is that that in fact is true, Mark Zuckerberg is incompetent,” Stoller said. “And that's why the only reason that he has market power in social networking is because he is engaged in monopolization.”
The difference between cocaine and crack cocaine is almost entirely one of pH, the relative scale of acidity or alkalinity. Regular cocaine in its original plant form, coca leaf, is commonly consumed by people across the mountainous parts of South America and has been for millennia, much as caffeine has been used through drinking tea in parts of Asia. It causes little to no harm; people can drink coca tea with no more impact than the caffeine from a soft drink.
The New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant Merck is facing accusations of price gouging after it charged the U.S. over $700 per patient for a taxpayer-funded coronavirus treatment that, according to research, costs just $17.74 to produce.
"This is why we need to waive patents on all Covid treatments and vaccines."
Two of Moderna's founders landed on this year's Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the U.S. as the Massachusetts-based pharmaceutical giant continues to rake in major profits from its coronavirus vaccine—and resists calls to share the recipe with the rest of the world.
Moderna chairman and co-founder Noubar Afeyan, board member and co-founder Robert Langer, and early investor Timothy Springer each appeared on the Forbes list for the first time.
But for researchers who study social media, the internal study that sparked the controversy was mostly confirmation of what they already knew — that Instagram makes teen girls feel worse about their bodies, and that they blame the platform for anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
Megan Moreno, principal investigator of the Social Media and Adolescent Health Research Team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Haugen’s interpretation of the internal research squares perfectly with other work done on social media, especially Instagram.
The vulnerability arises because the system is failing to sanitize user inputs. The input field allows 50 characters, Young found, “which was plenty to source an external script.”
He said there are multiple ways to exploit the issue.
The European Parliament has overwhelmingly approved a call to ban facial recognition surveillance—a development heralded by the technology's foes as a "big win for human rights."€
The vote on the resolution was 377-248. While the measure is nonbinding, the EUObserver reported Wednesday that its passsage means "Parliament now has for the first time an official position advocating for a ban on biometric mass surveillance, which sends a strong signal for negotiations of the first-ever EU rules on AI systems."
The new hotness for law enforcement isn't all that new. But it is still very hot, a better way to amass a list of suspects when you don't have any particular suspect in mind. Aiding and abetting in the new bulk collection is Google, which has a collection of location info plenty of law enforcement agencies find useful.
For over a year now, we have discussed Facebook's decision to require users of Oculus VR headsets to have active Facebook accounts linked to the devices in order for them to work properly. This decision came to be despite all the noise made by Oculus in 2014, when Facebook acquired the VR company, insisting that this very specific thing would not occur. Karl Bode, at the time, pointed out a number of potential issues this plan could cause, noting specifically that users could find their Oculus hardware broken for reasons not of their own making.
Earlier this year, a data retention law passed by the Belgian government was overturned by the country's Constitutional Court. The law mandated retention of metadata on all calls and texts by residents for one year, just in case the government ever decided it wanted access to it. Acting on guidance from the EU Court on laws mandating indiscriminate data retention elsewhere in the Union, the Constitutional Court struck the law down, finding it was neither justified nor legal under CJEU precedent or under Belgium's own Constitution.
The social-media company acquired MoPub in September 2013 for $350 million as a way to expand its advertising business and help place ads inside of other apps, as well as build an auction for Twitter’s own ad product.
The Senate largely ate it up. Long frustrated by Facebook’s size and power — and, one suspects, by its own inability to address those issues in any constructive way — senators yielded the floor to Haugen to make her case. During the hearing titled “Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower,” Haugen walked senators through most of The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files, touching on ethnic violence, national security, polarization, and more during her testimony.
For their part, senators sought to paint the hearing in historic terms. There were repeated comparisons to Big Tobacco, and a “Big Tobacco moment.” “This research is the definition of a bombshell,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who led the hearing.
It also showed that despite the presence of Twitter, Telegram, Signal, TikTok, Snapchat, and a bevy of other platforms, nothing can easily replace the social network that over the past 17 years has effectively evolved into critical infrastructure. The outage came the same day Facebook asked a federal judge that a revised antitrust complaint against it by the Federal Trade Commission be dismissed because it faces vigorous competition from other services.
There are certainly other online services for posting selfies, connecting with fans or reaching out to elected officials – but those who rely on Facebook to run their business or communicate with friends and family in far-flung places saw this as little consolation.
Google has announced that it will auto-enable 2-step verification (2SV) for an additional 150 million accounts by the end of this year. The company will also require more than 2 million YouTube creators to turn on 2SV. According to the company, 2SV is one of the most reliable ways to prevent unauthorised access to accounts and networks. Google says that they are only auto-enrolling accounts that have the proper backup mechanisms in place.
The [breach] in question was brought to light in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Syniverse published last week. In it, Syniverse shares that in May 2021 it “became aware of unauthorized access to its operational and information technology systems by an unknown individual or organization.” The company did its due diligence notifying law enforcement and conducting an internal investigation, resulting in the discovery that the security breach first started in May 2016. That’s five years of (possibly) unfettered access.
The company, Syniverse, revealed in a filing dated September 27 with the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission that an unknown "individual or organization gained unauthorized access to databases within its network on several occasions, and that login information allowing access to or from its Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment was compromised for approximately 235 of its customers."
It's no secret that Amazon-owned Twitch has had a rough go of it for the past year or so. We've talked about most, if not all, of the issues the platform has created for itself: a DMCA apocalypse, a creative community angry about not being informed over copyright issues, unclear creator guidelines for content that result in punishment from Twitch while some creators happily test the fences on those guidelines, and further and ongoing communication breakdowns with creators. All of that, mind you, has taken place over the last 12 months. It's been bad. Really bad!
The leak has been labeled as “part one,” suggesting that there could be more to come. While personal information like creator payments is included, this initial leak doesn’t appear to include passwords, addresses, or email accounts of Twitch users. Instead, the leaker appears to have focused on sharing Twitch’s own company tools and information, rather than code that would include personal accounts.
Well, this is bad. Twitch, the ultra-popular streaming site, appears to have been [breached]. An anonymous leaker on the 4chan message boards released a 125GB torrent that allegedly contains source code for the streaming service, along with payout information for creators and details about an unreleased Amazon Steam rival dubbed “Vapor.”
All the Bond movies deal with foreign enemies. From the mountain tops in Switzerland to the sandy beaches in Jamaica, from the sleazy streets of Las Vegas to the charms of Venetian canals, Bond has hunted down Britain’s enemies. (There are even tours “On the Tracks of OO7,” promising “trips, tours and events to the fascinating James Bond filming locations around the world.”) He is not a local London Bobbie. The MI6 agent always finds ways to thwart global plots to take over the world.
That’s fine. But who are the enemies? Many are underground groups like SPECTRE (SPecial€ Executive for€ Counter-intelligence,€ Terrorism,€ Revenge and€ Extortion), or in legal terms, non-state actors with global ambitions. The distinction between state enemies and non-state actors is central to the question of who gives Bond his licence to kill. For if the enemy were a state actor, as was originally the Soviet Union or North Korea, one might assume the British consider themselves at war with such an enemy. In that case, some would assume Bond would have a legal right to kill enemy agents as he does.
Human rights defenders renewed calls for the abolition of capital punishment in the United States after the state of Missouri on Tuesday executed Ernest Lee Johnson, an intellectually disabled man.
"A disabled Black man was killed by the state of Missouri tonight. We must #EndTheDeathPenalty."
On September 27, 2021, the FBI released much-anticipated crime data on that most unusual year 2020. The statistics revealed a continued steady decline in major crimes overall—apart from one unfortunate outlier: homicides. Despite homicides being at historic lows, especially when compared to the 1980s and 1990s, the murder rate last year rose by 30 percent compared to the previous year. This rise has left journalists and analysts seeking explanations. Yet the notoriously volatile nature of short-term crime data renders such efforts futile. Ascribing a short-term fluctuation to any particular cause—even a global pandemic—is impossible.
“Call me old-fashioned but the thing that stands out from the photos isn’t their fashion choices but that they are carrying MASSIVE GUNS,” the Politico railed.
They’re not looking hard enough. If big guns defined the Taliban, I would be more worried whenever I see heavily-armed soldiers at Penn Station.
It is being sponsored by five members of the House of Representatives led by Representative Jared Huffman. In a statement announcing the September 22nd introduction of the measure, Huffman called the U.S. Space Force “costly and unnecessary.”
The arms and aerospace industries, which have a central role in U.S. space military activities, will no doubt be super-active in coming weeks working to stop movement of the legislation.
It’s also a good thing that Biden’s withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan was poorly orchestrated with the lingering “coalition partners” such as Britain, French and Germany, producing angry criticism. It’s great that the British prime minister proposed to France a “Coalition of the Willing” to continue the fight in Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal—and better that it was dead in the water. (Maybe the French better than the Brits remember the Suez Crisis of 1956, the disastrous joint Anglo-French-Israeli effort to reimpose imperialist control over the canal. Not only did it lack U.S. participation; Eisenhower rationally shut it down after warnings from the Egyptians’ Soviet advisors.) It’s good that these three countries heeded the U.S. command to uphold their NATO promise to stand with the U.S. when attacked; that they lost over 600 troops in a fruitless effort; and that in the end the U.S. didn’t see fit to even involve them in the end plans. It’s good to wake up to the fact that the U.S. imperialists could care less about their input or their lives, but only demand their obedience and sacrifice.
It’s wonderful that Germany, despite obnoxious U.S. opposition, has maintained its involvement in the Nordstream II natural gas pipeline project along with Russia. The last three U.S. administrations have opposed the pipeline, claiming it weakens the NATO alliance and helps Russia (and urging purchase of more expensive U.S. energy sources instead—to enhance mutual security, don’t you see). The Cold War arguments have fallen on deaf ears. The pipeline was completed last month. Good for global free trade and for national sovereignty, and a significant European blow to U.S. hegemony.
But one big problem is that throughout the decades of drug warfare, there have been crackdowns — big crackdowns.€
Many federal judges, for example, some of whom have considered themselves to be fierce drug warriors, have long imposed maximum jail sentences on drug-law violators.€
"How're you going to pay for it?" clearly applies only to "money for people," never to "money for war." Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the measures Tuesday at a virtual cybersecurity conference, warning that recent incidents such as the SolarWinds [crack] and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed that "what is at stake is not simply the way we communicate or the way we work, but the way we live."
The new security directives target what the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration describe as "higher risk" rail companies, "critical" airport operators, and air passenger and air cargo companies.
A Conservative MP who helps run two parliamentary climate groups has taken a €£5,000 donation from the chair of a leading racing car manufacturer.
Sara Britcliffe has represented the constituency of Hyndburn and Haslingden in East Lancashire since 2019, one of the “Red Wall” seats won by Tory MPs in former Labour heartlands.€
As the winners of the inaugural Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards were announced Wednesday evening, environmental campaigners hailed the new prizes for elevating journalists who chronicle one of the world's most crucial news stories—but one critics say is woefully underreported by U.S. corporate media.
Covering Climate Now (CCNow) is a collaborative effort co-founded by Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) and The Nation and joined by hundreds of partner outlets including Common Dreams.
On behalf of the entire Creative Commons Board of Directors, I am delighted to announce the appointment of three new members of the Board: Glenn Otis Brown, Angela Oduor Lungati, and Jeni Tennison. Glenn is one of CC’s original architects: he was our Executive Director from 2002-2005, and then served on the Board from 2009-2012. He returns to CC with a deep sense of our history and fresh ideas for our future. Angela and Jeni are both long-time supporters of Creative Commons and leaders in the open knowledge movement, who are joining the board with a wealth of experience in technology and innovation. We are truly honored and grateful to have all three of them join us at this critical stage in the development of CC, as we celebrate our 20th anniversary and look to the future of better sharing.
This column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration co-founded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. Mark Hertsgaard is CCNow’s executive director and the environment correspondent of The Nation. Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of CJR.
As House Democrats prepare to grill representatives of Big Oil about their efforts to spread climate misinformation, a new InfluenceMap report details how fossil fuel trade groups are spending millions of dollars to mislead Americans against President Joe Biden's widely popular $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan and its robust climate provisions.
"Big Oil talks a big game about supporting climate solutions—that is, until it might affect their banner profits and wealthy executive paydays."
Judge Loretta Preska, an advisor to the conservative Federalist Society, to which Chevron is a major donor, sentenced human rights attorney and Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger to six months in prison Friday for misdemeanor contempt of court after he had already spent 787 days under house arrest in New York.€
"The National Environmental Policy Act is critical to ensuring that federal project managers look before they leap—and listen to experts and the public on a project's potential impacts to people and wildlife alike."
"Assessing all cumulative impacts and alternatives for a project will mean better federal decisions, better outcomes for communities, and better results for public health."
As environmental campaigners stress the urgency of a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution recognizing "the human right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment," reporting out Tuesday spotlights the U.S. and U.K.'s refusal to support the proposal.
The resolution—backed by dozens of countries—is before the 47-member Human Rights Council (HRC), which is in an ongoing session this week.
This column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story. Mark Hertsgaard is CCNow’s executive director and the environment correspondent of The Nation. Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of CJR.
Natural gas’s notorious price volatility has been making a comeback — in a big way.
The UK is experiencing a natural gas price surge so severe that the government stepped in to prevent a cascade down the supply chain that threatened to create food shortages. In the U.S., deals to sell natural gas this winter carry a price tag that’s roughly double or triple the costs in recent years, with a few traders placing bets that U.S. prices could multiply again, hitting $40 per thousand cubic feet (mcf), up from about $5 now. Major bank Citi said it won’t rule out $100/mcf for cargoes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) this winter, a tab for the supercooled form of the fossil fuel that’s used to ship it between continents which dwarfs even today’s record-setting heights.
The climate argument for using nuclear power assumes that since nuclear power generation directly releases no CO2, it can be an effective climate solution. It can’t, because new (or even existing) nuclear generation costs more per kWh than carbon-free competitors—efficient use and renewable power—and thus displaces less carbon per dollar (or, by separate€ analysis, per year): less not by a small margin but by about an order of magnitude (factor of roughly ten). As I noted in an unpublished 17 Aug letter to The New York Times:
Thus nuclear power not only€ isn’t a silver bullet, but, by using it, we shoot ourselves in the foot, thereby shrinking and slowing climate protection compared with choosing the fastest, cheapest tools. It is essential to look at nuclear power’s climate performance compared to its or its competitors’ cost and speed. That comparison is at the core of answering the question about whether to include nuclear power in climate mitigation.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency after a devastating oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach sent up to 144,000 gallons of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean. Investigators say a split in an underwater pipeline, likely damaged by a ship anchor, is the source of the oil spill. The pipeline owner, Texas-based Amplify Energy, didn’t report the leak until 12 hours after the Coast Guard was first notified, and beaches in the area are expected to be closed for months as crews race to minimize the environmental damage. “California’s offshore oil platforms are a ticking time bomb,” says Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s time to shut them down.”
His experience parallels a rising number of U.S. farmers who are growing solar energy alongside crops or livestock. It’s an idea with big promise at a time of rising focus on climate change and the need to transition away from fossil fuels.
A crude oil spill at a Marathon Petroleum refinery in Texas City outside of Houston on Wednesday—just the latest in a series of recent leaks—sparked fresh calls for rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and transitioning to 100% renewable energy.
"The crazy thing is to expect that this won't keep on happening every damn day until we just keep the oil in the ground."
The UK organisers of the upcoming COP26 climate summit have come under fire for approving just two events that refer to fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change, in a programme of public events happening alongside the main conference.
The government-managed “Green Zone”, set to take place in the Glasgow Science Centre, will feature talks, films and performances, separate from the “Blue Zone” that will host the official United Nations negotiations.
The Biden administration has defended the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services’ actions in Idaho after the agency preemptively killed eight wolf pups from Idaho’s Timberline pack in response to complaints from a rancher grazing livestock on public lands.
“Killing these wolf pups was inhumane, unscientific, and indefensible,” said Joe Bushyhead with WildEarth Guardians. “Wolves face enough persecution in Idaho already at the hands of the state. The Biden administration should not be using federal resources to make a bad situation even worse.”
As the world sinks into climate anxiety amid a global pantomime of broken promises and unconcealed corruption, is it possible that the solution to the climate and biodiversity crises could be cheap, quick and driven by the grassroots?
Last weekend, around 600 Israeli, Palestinian and international activists marched across Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank to deliver a water tanker to Palestinian villagers. Their message was clear: Water is a human right, and Israel is depriving Palestine of this basic necessity.
"We need to wake up to the looming water crisis."
That's what World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said Tuesday to mark the publication of a new report, which shows that as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency intensifies floods and droughts, access to clean water is expected to become even more unequal—increasing the importance of sustainable resource management.
Here’s how it works. Parents of children aged 6 and younger across the country are receiving direct payments of up to $300 per month per child, or $3,600 per year per child. The payments drop to $250 a month for children between the ages of 6 and 17, and phase out for families with higher incomes.It’s an historic expansion of the original credit that’s already helping millions of working families.The direct payments are coming because the Child Tax Credit is a refundable tax credit. Normal, non-refundable tax credits simply cut your taxes. But a refundable tax credit, like the Child Tax Credit, helps you even if you don’t earn enough for it to reduce your taxes — so it’s a direct payment to you.Say you owe $3,000 in taxes. A non-refundable tax credit of $3,600 won’t be worth $3,600 to you. It would just reduce your taxes to zero. So you wouldn’t get the full benefit. And if you don’t owe any taxes to begin with, a non-refundable tax credit wouldn’t do you any good at all since you can’t reduce your taxes to less than zero dollars. But a refundable tax credit would help you. You’d get the money no matter what, the full $3,600. That’s why this expansion is such a big deal: it ensures that the money gets to lower-income families.The early results show that this policy is a game-changer. Over 3 million more households with children now report having enough to eat € after just the first two payments. More report being able to make rent, stay in their homes, and afford basic necessities. And 3 million children have been lifted out of poverty. It’s reduced racial disparities, as well. Hunger has fallen by one-third among Latinx families and by one-quarter among Black families.It bears repeating that if the credit is made permanent, and reaches everyone it should, it could cut child poverty in half.Yet the Republican Party — the so-called “party of family values” — is dead set against it.€ That’s because the program works.Every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan, which contained the initial expansion of the Child Tax Credit. You can bet they’re all going to vote against making that expansion permanent as part of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget plan. It’s obvious: they do not care about helping working families. Democrats must get this done, no matter how staunch the Republican opposition. In the richest country in the world, it is inexcusable that millions of our children are living in poverty. For decades, almost all economic gains have gone to the top, leaving working families behind. This historic expansion of the Child Tax Credit is a crucial step towards righting this wrong. Poverty is a policy choice. Congress must make the Child Tax Credit permanent.
A decade ago, in an essay for The New York Times, Warren Buffett disclosed that he had paid nearly $7 million in federal taxes in 2010. “That sounds like a lot of money,” he wrote. “But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.”
The words “taxable income” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Not even Eisenhower had the experience that Biden accumulated over nearly 50 years in government that included 20 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (12 of those years as chairman or ranking member) in addition to eight years in the White House as vice president.€ During the campaign of 2019-2020, Biden frequently cited his trips to more than 60 countries and his one-on-ones with more than 100 national heads of state.€ Biden privately boasted about his ability to dominate the national security bureaucracy, stressing that not even the “military will fuck with me.”
Now, we are nine months into his administration, and there is no comprehensive picture of Biden’s priorities in foreign policy, let alone a Biden doctrine or strategy.€ Biden has proclaimed an end to “forever wars,” but U.S. forces remain active in Iraq and Syria, where there are more than 3,000 U.S. combat forces.€ Elsewhere, the United States is conducting shadowy operations and drone strikes in such places as Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.€ So there is no reason to believe that U.S. forever wars will actually end.
The US would far prefer to just quietly extradite Saab to Miami, use whatever means necessary to extract sensitive information from him, and then warehouse him in the world’s largest prison system. Forbes uses the euphemism “under pressure” by US prison authorities as the means to force Saab to “shed light on Venezuela’s post-sanction economic network.” Saab already reports that his surrogate captors in Cabo Verde, described below, have unsuccessfully employed torture to try to break his will and induce him to betray Venezuela.
That an elite business magazine such as Forbes is featuring a diplomat from a country aspiring to become socialist is a testament to the growing international movement to free the imprisoned Alex Saab and an indication of the weakness of the US case against him.
President Joe Biden’s agenda, once seemingly on life support after a small coterie of right-wing Democrats announced they’d oppose pairing a social spending bill with infrastructure legislation, has a new lease on life—thanks to progressive Democrats who held the line.
Entropy, which is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, is€ defined as€ “a scientific concept, as well as a measurable physical property that is most commonly associated with a state of disorder, randomness, or uncertainty.” In more understandable terms, it basically says the universe and all its systems move toward chaos, not organization. Additionally, the more complex a system, the more energy it takes to maintain order and the more likely it is to break down.
This is an easy concept to understand in our current societal systems€ — they are extremely complex, take enormous amounts of energy to maintain, and thanks to their complexity are increasingly likely to break down. A simple example would be our transportation systems€ — it’s easy to walk down a path. When you convert the path into a multi-lane highway and fill it with thousands of vehicles, maintaining “order,” as in preventing accidents, gets a lot harder and much, much more expensive.
We've noted for a while there's a weird myopia occurring in internet policy. As in, "big tech" (namely Facebook, Google, and Amazon) get a relentless amount of Congressional and policy wonk attention for their various, and sometimes painfully idiotic behaviors. At the same time, just an adorable smattering of serious policy attention is being given to a wide array of equally problematic but clearly monopolized industries (banking, airlines, insurance, energy), or internet-connected sectors that engage in many of the same (or sometimes worse) behaviors, be they adtech or U.S. telecom.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders responded forcefully on Wednesday to remarks from Sen. Joe Manchin, one of just two senators holding up the Build Back Better budget reconciliation package containing key parts of President Joe Biden's agenda.
"Does Sen. Manchin really believe that seniors are not entitled to digest their food and that they're not entitled to hear and see properly?"
After previously opposing such a move, President Joe Biden on Tuesday said it is a "real possibility" that Democrats will change Senate rules to exempt debt ceiling votes from the 60-vote legislative filibuster—a reversal that comes as the U.S. is careening toward a default on its financial obligations.
"Senate Republicans are playing a dangerous game with the debt ceiling. It could destroy our credit, jobs, and family savings."
Now, with his newest book, The Crooked Path to Abolition, Oakes brings his trilogy to a close. If Freedom National focused on the actions Republicans took to end slavery and Scorpion’s Sting explained how they expected those actions would accomplish their goal, The Crooked Path explores the legal and political justification behind the antislavery program—namely, that the Constitution was in fact an antislavery document, contrary to the claims of both slavery’s defenders and the noisiest faction of its radical critics. Even if it deprived the federal government of any power to abolish slavery within the Southern states, the Constitution provided a number of powerful tools for limiting slavery’s spread. While some of this argument is familiar from the earlier books, in The Crooked Path we get a more detailed and focused emphasis on the Constitution itself.
Members of the European Parliament have adopted a report on the use of Artificial Intelligence in Criminal Law. The file includes a paragraph that speaks out in favour of a ban on any processing of biometric data, including facial images, for law enforcement purposes that would lead to mass surveillance in publicly accessible spaces. With error rates of up to 99%, ineffective facial surveillance technology has nothing to do with targeted searches. The report also calls for a ban on AI-based predictive policing.
Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that the Wikimedia Foundation’s application for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was blocked due to opposition by China for the second time after its initial application in 2020.
The House select committee could hear from Haugen as early as Thursday, according to the network. The lawmakers on the committee are tasked with investigating the events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which supporters of former President Trump stormed the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
CNN reported that the committee wants to know from Haugen how the platform was used to organize and encourage the violent protest.
The select committee is also interested in hearing from Haugen, CNN has learned, as she could provide insight into how Facebook was used to ultimately facilitate violence that occurred at the US Capitol on January 6.
The bill would require owners and operators of critical infrastructure groups to report cyber incidents to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within 72 hours. It would also require critical infrastructure groups, nonprofits and most medium to large businesses to report making ransomware attack payments within 24 hours.
According to Mayorkas, the directive will require these groups to “identify a cybersecurity point person” charged with reporting cybersecurity incidents to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), along with establishing “contingency and recovery plans” in the case of cyberattacks.
The upcoming changes will make it mandatory for “higher-risk” rail transit companies and “critical” U.S. airport and aircraft operators to do three things: name a chief cyber official, disclose [breaches] to the government and draft recovery plans for if an attack were to occur.
In Western media’s latest anti-China crusade, unsubstantiated allegations of a Chinese disinformation campaign—which the reports themselves admit have had little engagement on social media, and nonexistent impact offline—supposedly represent a very serious threat to the US.
A little over a month ago,€ I wrote about€ how the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) had recently€ issued a statement€ asserting that physicians who spread COVID-19 misinformation should be subject to disciplinary measures by their state medical boards up to and including revocation of their medical licenses. Given that there have been some developments on that front since then, I thought that now would be a good time for an update and a bit more discussion on the general issue of what should be done about physicians who promote misinformation not just about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines, but medical misinformation, antivaccine conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience in general. At the time of my original post, I expressed major skepticism that the FSMB’s statement would result in any action. The situation is perhaps not as bad as I had predicted then, but it’s also not so great, either.
A recent study from The Pew Research Center, published late last month, found that 31 percent of Americans routinely receive their news from Facebook.
Summary:€ In its 15 years as a micro-blogging service, Twitter has given users more characters per tweet, reaction GIFs, multiple UI options, and the occasional random resorting of their timelines.
Multiple sources have now reported that Resident Evil 4's dialogue has been altered according to the requests of Facebook, the producer of Oculus Quest headsets. According to the claims, Capcom agreed to the requests, and developer of the VR version, Armature Studios, made them accordingly. While the gratuitous violence and gore Resident Evil is known for is apparently untouched, several sexually-charged or flirtatious comments have been cut.
On October 7, 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a reporter for Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in the entry of her building in Moscow. She belonged to a generation that started out on its journalistic path as perestroika began, a group that actively built the new journalism. During the first war in Chechnyam, she reported deeply on the suffering and fate of ordinary people, soldiers and their mothers, Chechen women, children, and old people. She showed the human dimension of war, a quality that some, to this day, wrongly consider a distinction of women’s reporting from hot or war spots. Moreover, she sometimes participated in helping the people she wrote about—she helped residents of a nursing home evacuate from Chechnya.
Humanism means helping people, and secular means doing it without supernatural religion. The movement soared three centuries ago in The Enlightenment, when bold thinkers sought to end the divine right of kings, end church abuses, create democracy, launch human rights, halt the privileges of aristocrats, and bring other reforms such as personal equality, free speech and a social safety net.
Thomas Hobbes envisioned a “social contract” in which people granted power to government to gain protection. John Locke sought separation of church and state. Baron Montesquieu outlined a democracy with judicial, executive and legislative branches. Voltaire sneered at Christianity as “the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that ever infected the world.” Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated by Jews for doubting a personal god. Francis Bacon developed the scientific method of seeking facts. David Hume said scientific inquiry makes miracles implausible.
It was very instructive regarding a topic I had not previously understood with sufficient clarity: the significant extent to which current American anti-abortion sentiment and activists are linked to a broader right-wing neofascist world view and movement.
I was approached by numerous OR proselytizers across the street from the besieged clinic. Beyond expressing their standard horror at the “murder of babies,” OR activists informed me that...
Derecka Purnell draws from her experience as a human rights lawyer in her new book, published this month, “Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom,” to argue that police reform is an inadequate compromise to calls for abolition. Since the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville in 2020, many states have passed laws aimed at reforming police, but congressional talks at the federal level have broken down. Purnell reflects upon her personal journey as a Black woman who believed in police reform before pivoting to abolition, saying, “I became a part of social movements who pushed me to think more critically … about building a world without violence and how to reduce our reliance on police.”
The proposed Goals and Objectives of the SPD include the list below for Safety.
Nearly half of the Supreme Court spent the summer and early fall on a national gaslighting tour. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Stephen Breyer all gave high-profile speeches or interviews during which they extolled the nonpartisan nature of the court. They further used their bully pulpits to attack the media and accuse it of misleading the public about the court’s stark political divide.
Isaabdul Karim wasn’t sentenced to death. In fact, he was never sentenced at all. But after the father of two was accused of a nonviolent parole violation and sent to Rikers Island, on September 19, he€ became the 11th person this year to die in a New York city jail.
Roughly 1,400 workers who make Corn Flakes, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Raisin Bran, and Rice Krispies walked off the job on Tuesday to demand a fair contract, bringing all of the Kellogg Company's U.S. cereal factories to a halt in one of the nation's latest strikes.
Anthony Shelton, president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), on Tuesday expressed the union's "unwavering solidarity with our courageous brothers and sisters who are on strike against the Kellogg Company" in four cities: Local 3G in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the company is headquartered; Local 50G in Omaha, Nebraska; Local 374G in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Local 252G in Memphis, Tennessee.
A spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department told KSTP that they are unable to comment on the footage due to an ongoing internal investigation.
It’s a rare example of a so-called keyword warrant and, with the number of search terms included, the broadest on record. (See the update below for other, potentially even broader warrants.) Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 asked for anyone who had searched for the address of an arson victim who was a witness in the government’s racketeering case against singer R Kelly. Another, detailed in 2017, revealed that a Minnesota judge signed off on a warrant asking Google to provide information on anyone who searched a fraud victim’s name from within the city of Edina, where the crime took place.
Ms Stevenson said she had also become the focus of internet conspiracies since her arrest and "can't count the amount of death threats I've had".
She said people had claimed she was a "crisis actor" paid to attend the vigil and get arrested to legitimise attacks on the police.
She added that many of the threats had been about kidnapping her.
“I do not understand why someone would do that. It is almost like an intimidation thing, saying ‘look we can see you’, and that..."
The sheer number was overwhelming: between 1950 and 2020 at least 216,000 children were sexually abused in France by Catholic clergy. Thus, on October 5th, concluded a two-year, independent inquiry commissioned by the church. Jean-Marc Sauvé, the president of the commission that conducted the investigation, said it uncovered “the lead weight of silence smothering the crimes” committed by 2,900-3,200 clergy. If lay members were also included, the number of abused could reach 330,000.
We've been running our Greenhouse discussion on content moderation at the infrastructure level for a bit now, and normally all of the posts for these discussions come from expert guest commentators. However, I'm going to add my voice to the collection here because there's one topic that I haven't seen covered, and which is important, because it comes up whenever I'm talking to people about content moderation at the infrastructure level: do we need a new taxonomy for internet infrastructure to better have this discussion?
So for years we've talked about the growing threat of SIM hijacking, which involves an attacker covertly porting out your phone number from right underneath your nose (sometimes with the help of bribed or conned wireless carrier employees). Once they have your phone identity, they have access to most of your personal accounts secured by two-factor SMS authentication, opening the door to the theft of social media accounts or the draining of your cryptocurrency account. If you're really unlucky, the hackers will harrass the hell out of you in a bid to extort you even further.
Here we go again. Yesterday, the Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. Frankly, she came across as pretty credible and thoughtful, even if I completely disagree with some of her suggestions. I think she's correct about some of the problems she witnessed, and the misalignment of incentives facing Facebook's senior management. However, her understanding of the possible approaches to deal with it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag.
The European Union is set to file an anti-trust suit against Apple over the NFC chip technology it uses for tap-and-go payments, a report claims.
Preliminary concerns were Apple's NFC chip which enables tap-and-go payments on iPhones, its terms and conditions on how mobile payment service Apple Pay should be used in merchants' apps and websites, and the company's refusal to allow rivals access to the payment system.
The European Commission has since narrowed its focus to just the NFC chip, which can only be accessed by Apple Pay, one of the sources said.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified to Congress Tuesday, denouncing the company for prioritizing “astronomical profits” over the safety of billions of users, and urging lawmakers to enact strict oversight over Facebook. Haugen’s testimony gave a rare glimpse into the secretive tech company, which she accused of harming children, sowing division by boosting hateful content, and undermining democracy. “Facebook wants you to believe that the problems we’re talking about are unsolvable. They want you to believe in false choices,” Haugen said at the hearing. Roger McNamee, a former mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, says a U.S. business culture “where CEOs are told to prioritize shareholder value at all cost” is partly to blame for Facebook’s design. “We have abdicated too much power to corporations. We have essentially said we’re not going to regulate them.” We also speak with tech reform activist Jessica González, who says Haugen’s testimony has exposed how little Facebook regulates its platform outside the English-speaking world. “Facebook has not adequately invested to keep people safe across languages,” says González. “There is a very racist element to the lack of investment.”
The powerful global anti-piracy coalition Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment has taken over yet more pirate IPTV-related domains. The latest wave includes more than three dozen new additions to a rapidly growing list. All indications suggest that ACE gave the suppliers an ultimatum - shut down and hand over your domains or face more vigorous legal action.
The RIAA has secured an important victory in its piracy lawsuit against YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com and their Russian operator. A Virginia federal court has issued a default judgment in favor of several prominent music companies. The RIAA also requests over $82 million in damages, which has yet to be signed off in court.
Against this backdrop, a new sales model known as “Inclusive Access” has taken off. Also known as automatic textbook billing, this model adds the cost of digital course content into students’ tuition and fees. Hardly known five years ago, one in three college students reported participating in at least one Inclusive Access course during the 2020-21 academic year.
