Out for a new laptop for both work and play? The third-generation Kubuntu Focus M2 seems like it can hit the sweet spot so let's take a look. Revealed late in September, this new laptop has some pretty nice specifications.
"The M2 makes quick work of the most demanding tasks and outperforms nearly all thin-and-light laptops. Run GPU-accelerated AI immediately with the included Deep Learning Suite. Accelerate TensorFlow jobs from 8 hours to less than 15 minutes. Render Blender scenes 10x faster with NVIDIA RTX Optix. All with unmatched Linux-first optimization and support."
You can expect with the base model to get a Core i7-11800H 8C/16T 4.6 GHz, an NVIDIA RTX 3060, 16 GB 3200MHz RAM, a 250GB Samsung NVMe and a 15.6-inch IPS display with a 144Hz refresh rate and anti-glare matte coating. You can spec it out with much more though up to an NVIDIA RTX 3080, two NVMe drives (each up to 2TB) and 64GB RAM. There's also the included Intel Irix Xe 32EU graphics too, still pretty good for when you don't want to have more power sucked away by the NVIDIA chip.
When you try to add a new software repository then there are chances you face the “add-apt-repository command not found’ Ubuntu error, this article shows you to FIX it for good. This is used to indicate that its package is missing from the system.
Let’s look at some of the differences between Jenkins freestyle and pipeline jobs.
Let’s look at playbooks, modules, and collections in Ansible. These are basic concepts, but you must know this to get started with Ansible. This guide will describe their roles in the automation process.
Let’s try to automate something and write our Ansible playbook. For our first example playbook, we’ll configure a server to run a web server using Nginx.
PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is the most commonly used server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic websites. All most popular CMS (Content Management Systems) and frameworks such as WordPress, Laravel, and Magento are built in PHP programming. You will explore in this guide how you can install PHP 7.4 version on CentOS 8 system. Different PHP versions are available for installation on CentOS 8. Before choosing a PHP version for installation from all of them, make sure this version must meet the application requirements.
Today we are looking at how to install FreeOffice 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.
ownCloud is an efficient cross-platform software used for file hosting services. Originally, ownCloud works pretty much like Dropbox, however, there are such plugins available with the help of which you can make it function like Google Drive. In this article, we want to share with you the steps of installing ownCloud on a Linux Mint 20 system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ONLYOFFICE offers a secure online office suite highly compatible with MS Office formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX). ONLYOFFICE is available for Linux, Windows, and macOS users. Freely distributed under the terms of AGPL v3.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors free and open-source office suite on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Apt (Advanced Packaging Tool) is a command-line package installation and dependency management utility in Debian-based distributions.
When you install packages in Debian using the apt-get or apt command, a copy of the .deb file is saved in the /var/cache/apt/archives directory. If you uninstall and reinstall a package, your system will look for it in the cache and download it from there rather than downloading it again.
If you run out of disk space on your Debian system, you can clear the apt-cache and free up some space.
In this guide, you will learn how to clear the apt-cache on Debian.
There are tons of browsers available to install on any operating system. Although many people prefer Chromium browsers, some users prefer something different depending on their needs. Dooble is one browser that helps users to customize their internet browsing. Today I will show you how to install a highly customizable and privacy-focused browser that makes your workflow professional. The Dooble browser does things that other browsers might not be able to do in some cases. To follow along, you will need a running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS instance.
Krita is an exclusive painting program that helps artists to unleash their professional skills in the digital world. It uses the latest KD supported technologies to help digital artists to create digital art. Krita is tightly bonded with KDE and works flawlessly on any distribution. I am using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and will guide you to install Krita on your Ubuntu system.
Throughout this post, we will take you to step by step to install Nginx with PHP-FPM on Debian 11. Before we start, it is necessary to explain what Nginx and PHP-FPM are to get a better understanding of the process.
Nginx is an open-source HTTP web server that stands out for being very fast and efficient. In addition, Nginx is ready to be used as a reverse proxy. In this mode, it is used to balance the load between back-end servers, as well as to be used as a cache on a slower back-end server. One of the main advantages of using Nginx is that it processes tens of thousands of simultaneous connections in a compact, multi-core CPU process. This is why it is so lightweight, efficient, and above all robust.
In this guide we are going to explore how to run Mysql 8 locally with docker and docker compose. This can be helpful if you want to run Mysql 8 locally without installing it in your machine or if you want to run multiple versions of Mysql seamlessly.
In Ubuntu, we can use text editors for the configuration of files, editing files, writing codes, and much more.
There are two types of text editors;
Command-line Interface (CLI) and Graphical User Interface (GUI).
Today in this article, I will discuss the most commonly used text editors in Ubuntu 20.04.
In the past months I’ve set up LDAP at home, to avoid having different user accounts for the services that I run on my home hardware. Rather than the venerable OpenLDAP I settled for 389 Directory Server, commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server, mainly because I was more familiar with it. Rather than describing how to set that up (Red Hat’s own documentation is excellent on that regard), this post will focus on the steps required to enable encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.
Do you want to switch to the old Ambiance app theme on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa? Then via this article, we let you know how to do that in a very easy way.
Well, earlier in the old versions of Ubuntu we were getting Ambiance or Radiance as the default theme. However, this got changed with the release of Ubuntu 19.10 because since then we have had Yaru as the default one. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we cannot switch back to the old days (themes) on the newer versions of Ubuntu. After all, it is just a theme but may give some a familiar feeling.
And the best thing is the package to install the Ambiance theme is available in the default official repo of Ubuntu, hence just follow the given steps.
The Wine development release 6.20 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - MSXml, XAudio, DInput and a few other modules converted to PE. - A few system libraries are bundled with the source to support PE builds. - HID joystick is now the only supported joystick backend in DirectInput. - Better support for MSVCRT builds in Winelib. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.20.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.20.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Additionally, we can note the formation of a release of the Wine Staging 6.20 project , within which extended Wine assemblies are formed, including incompletely finished or risky patches that are not yet suitable for adoption into the main Wine branch. Compared to Wine, Wine Staging provides 557 additional patches.
The new release provides synchronization with the Wine 6.20 codebase. 5 patches related to joystick support in DirectInput and COM initialization when windows are activated in imm32 have been transferred to the main Wine composition. Updated patches eventfd_synchronization and ntdll-NtAlertThreadByThreadId. Temporarily disabled the mfplat-streaming patch set and all remaining dinput patches (to coordinate with the new HID backend).
Wine 6.20 was released today as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.
Wine 6.20 continues the recent trend of converting more modules over to the PE (Portable Executable) format. The latest Portable Executable conversion work is for MSXml, XAudio, and DInput, among others. There are also some system libraries bundled with the source to support PE builds.
It's been an exciting week for KDE developers with preparing their formal support for handling NVIDIA's driver with GBM support as well as getting fingerprint authentication finally in place, among other improvements.
The autumn excitement for KDE developers this week included:
- Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.
Two big features landed this week: support for fingerprint readers and the NVIDIA driver’s GBM backend!
Fingerprint support has been in progress for quite some time thanks to Devin Lin, and this week, it was merged for Plasma 5.24! So far we let you enroll and de-enroll fingers, and any of those fingers can be used to to unlock the screen, provide authentication when an app asks for your password, and also authenticate sudo on the command line! It’s really cool stuff.
Renowned KDE developer Nate Graham shared today the big news that a fingerprint authentication feature, which is in development for quite a while now, has finally been merged and will be ready for deployment as part of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.24 desktop environment series, due for release next year.
Fingerprint authentication support has been implemented in the Users panel in System Settings. There, users who have a fingerprint reader, either built-in in their laptop or as an external device, will be able to enroll, as well as to de-enroll fingerprints.
These are some really cool or obfuscated code snippets for your amusement. We didn’t want to rate them, so the order doesn’t mean anything at all
Just to make sure that there’s no misunderstanding: This code really is/was in the Qt or KDE repositories.
Since decades KDE’s translation and localization framework KI18n provides a mechanism for marking strings for message extraction and deferred translation, the I18N_NOOP prepprocessor macros. Those can be very error prone though, so for KDE Frameworks 5.89 there is now a proposed replacement.
After a lengthy consolidation phase, the developers of MX Linux, first published in 2014, have now officially released version 21 with the code name €»Wildflower€«. The new version of the popular distribution is based on Debian 11 €»Bullseye€«, but is delivered without a systemd. Further ingredients are Kernel 5.10 LTS, Xfce 4.16, KDE Plasma 5.20 and for the first time outside of the Raspberry Pi Edition also Fluxbox 1.3.7, provided with the mx-fluxbox configuration.
Best of both worlds
MX Linux attaches great importance to the support of older computers and so the images for Xfce and Fluxbox are also available in 32-bit versions. So even old treasures can be operated without Systemd. SysVinit is used as standard, but Systemd is available as a boot option on installed systems.
The installer has been expanded and now supports LVM for the first time. Currently, however, the LVM volumes have to be created manually in advance. The UEFI live system boot menu has also been revised and allows you to select the live boot options such as persistence from the boot menu and the submenus instead of selecting them from the console menu as before. With MX Linux 21, Sudo becomes the standard for administrative tasks, but this behavior can be switched off via mx-tweak . The snapshot function now also allows rolling back via the boot menu.
MX Linux 21 (Wildflower) is the latest version from the MX Linux developers based on stable Debian 11 Bullseye. As we know MX Linux is already popular among Linux users who want lightweight and speed, hence this is the new major version for them. It is because on one side standard PC users refrain from using Debian due to its slow process of adopting new features, and it has to be because Debian is mainly a Server target Linux rather than the consumer.
Well, we already have Ubuntu out there based on Debian but MX Linux has successfully made its special place among netizens due to its speed and 32-bit support, which still it offers.
The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 21.10.0 and cards 2.4.138.
The xorg-server graphics server version 1.20.13, the Mesa 3D library in 21.2.4, Gtk4 4.4.0 and Qt 5.15.2.
The python interpreters are en 3.9.6 et 2.7.18.
The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.
The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26 version .
The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 40.4.
The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.23.1, Framework 5.87.0 and applications in 21.08.2.
Available browsers are: Firefox 93.0, Chromium 94.0.4606.81, Epiphany 40.3, etc
Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Thunderbird 91.2.0, Scribus 1.5.7, Libreoffice 7.1.5.2, Gimp 2.10.28, etc.
The first BETA build of the 12.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 12.3-BETA1 amd64 GENERIC o 12.3-BETA1 i386 GENERIC o 12.3-BETA1 powerpc GENERIC o 12.3-BETA1 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 12.3-BETA1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 12.3-BETA1 sparc64 GENERIC o 12.3-BETA1 armv6 RPI-B o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 BANANAPI o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 BEAGLEBONE o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD2 o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 RPI2 o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 WANDBOARD o 12.3-BETA1 armv7 GENERICSD o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 GENERIC o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 RPI3 o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64 o 12.3-BETA1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.3/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/12.3" branch.
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 12.3-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/12.3-BETA1/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
The FreeBSD team has begun preparations for their next release process with an aim to ship FreeBSD 12.3 in early December.
Announced on Friday was FreeBSD 12.3-BETA1 as the first stepping stone toward this next FreeBSD operating system update. While FreeBSD 13 is already out in production and all major feature work is centered around what will become FreeBSD 14, the FreeBSD 12 series continues maturing for those still on that N-1 stable series.
The following kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel LTS 5.4.155. Kernel LTS 5.10.75 and Kernel 5.14.14.
Calibre has been updated to 5.30.0. Calibre is meant to be a complete e-library solution. It includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion as well as e-book reader sync features.
Waterfox-G browser has been updated to 4.0.1 and shipped to the software repository.
Earlier this year, Canonical announced that they will start work on a new Ubuntu Desktop Installer that will replace the current Ubiquity installer in future release of the popular GNU/Linux distribution.
The installer is written in the Flutter SDK developed by Google and sports a fresh and modern design with some new options that are missing from the current Ubuntu installer.
Linux phones are basically just small, low-power Linux computers with touchscreens, and modems. While most mobile Linux distributions designed for phones feature touch-friendly user interfaces and apps, you can also run desktop applications on a Linux phone.
But you may have trouble actually using software that obviously weren’t designed for small screens, because it can be hard to navigate applications designed for keyboard and mouse input when you’re using a fingertip. So developer CalcProgrammer1 built a Touchpad Emulator that lets you use the entire surface of your phone as a trackpad, controlling an on-screen cursor.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation have been busy little bees for the last couple of years producing their own silicon, new boards and now in collaboration with the LEGO Education team a new HAT to connect to the LEGO SPIKE education platform. This new HAT board will work with every Raspberry Pi board with a 40-pin GPIO header.
While we’ll admit seeing your Game Boy Camera shots come out on a little slip of thermal paper was pretty neat back in 1998, anyone who’s still using the Game Boy Printer these days is probably more interested in getting their images in digital form. Which is why the open source NeoGB Printer is so exciting.
A collaborative effort between [Rafael Zenaro], [Raphaël BOICHOT], and [Brian Khuu], the project combines an ESP32 development board and some common components with their GPLv3 firmware to fully emulate the Game Boy Printer hardware. Once plugged into your Game Boy, any of the 110 titles that support Nintendo’s paper-pushing peripheral will recognize the NeoGB Printer as the real deal and happily send along the image.
Alibaba, one of the largest Chinese IT companies, announced the discovery of developments related to XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910 processor cores, based on the 64-bit architecture of the RISC-V instruction set. The open XuanTie kernels will develop under the new names OpenE902, OpenE906, OpenC906, and OpenC910.
Diagrams, descriptions of hardware blocks in Verilog language, simulator and accompanying project documentation are published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Separately published adapted to work with chips XuanTie versions of compilers GCC and the LLVM , library Glibc to , tools of Binutils , loader the U-the Boot , the Linux kernel , middleware interface OpenSBI (RISC machines-the V the Supervisor Binary Interface), a platform for the creation of embedded Linux-based systems Yocto Project , and See also patches for launching the Android platform.
The documentation says that it appears to run under Wine as well if you prefer to run it under Linux.
Being able to add dynamic lighting and images that can synchronize with a dancer is important to many performances, which rely on both music and visual effects to create the show. Eduardo Padrón aimed to do exactly that by monitoring a performer’s moves with an accelerometer and triggering the appropriate AV experience based on the recognized movement.
Padrón’s system is designed around a Raspberry Pi 4 running an MQTT server for communication with auxiliary IoT boards. Movement data was collected via a Nano 33 BLE Sense and its onboard accelerometer to gather information and send it to a Google Colab environment. From here, a model was trained on these samples for 600 epochs, achieving an accuracy of around 91%. After deploying this model onto the Arduino, he was able to output the correct gesture over USB where it interacts with the running Python script. Once the gesture is received, the MQTT server publishes the message to any client devices such as an ESP8266 for lighting and plays an associated video or sound.
Every year, Google organizes a program called Summer of Code (GSoC). Students worldwide can write open source code under an open source mentoring organization and get paid to do so! You get to work on cool open source projects, network with talented engineers, and get paid during the summer break. How cool is that!?
In this blog post, we'll guide you through our GSoC experience and give you tips and tricks so that you can have a fantastic experience like we did. We'll also share our differing perspectives based on our different interests and challenges.
According to software developer and SFC policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) broke the licensing agreement for an open-source software platform called Mastodon when it launched “a so-called ‘test site'” of its Truth Social product, which was built using Mastodon software. Although any company can use the code from Mastodon, according to the licensing agreement (AGPLv3), each user of the software must receive “an opportunity to receive the entire Corresponding Source for the website based on that code.” Early users of Truth Social, Kuhn alleged, did not get the source code, and TMTG is “currently ignoring their very public requests for it.”
Truth Social doesn’t comply with that license and, in fact, refers to its service as “proprietary.” Its developers apparently attempted to scrub references that would make the Mastodon connection clear — at one point listing a “sighting” of the Mastodon logo as a bug — but included direct references to Mastodon in the site’s underlying HTML alongside obvious visual similarities.
As most anyone in this community knows, there’s an excellent chance that any consumer product on the market that’s advertised as “smart” these days probably has some form of Linux running under the hood. We’re also keenly aware that getting companies to hold up their end of the bargain when it comes to using Linux and other GPL licensed software in their products, namely releasing their modified source, isn’t always as cut and dried as it should be.
Occasionally these non-compliant companies will get somebody so aggravated that they actually try to do something about it, which is where smart TV manufacturer Vizio currently finds itself. The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) recently announced they’re taking the Irvine, California based company to court over their repeated failures to meet the requirements of the GPL while developing their Linux-powered SmartCast TV firmware. In addition to the Linux kernel, the SFC also claims Vizio is using modified versions of various other GPL and LGPL protected works, such as U-Boot, bash, gawk, tar, glibc, and ffmpeg.
GNU Parallel 20211022 ('Sinclair') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4
A process in which a specific function calls itself either directly or indirectly is known to be a recursion, and that respective function is a recursive function. The recursion process deals with the iteration of several numbers to the same function. To terminate the execution of a recursion process, we need to have a base case followed by any condition. This tutorial uses the involvement of recursion functions in C++, so before reading this, you must be familiar with the basics of this programming language.
Recursion is an effective approach to dissolve the issues like complex mathematical computations tasks. This is done by distributing the task into sub-tasks. This process is done by following the divide and conquer rule. It’s not a mandatory thing to always use a recursion process in your program for the repetition. Any problem that is resolved through recursion can also get solved through iteration. But the recursive function is more efficient in programming as the code is very short and easily understandable while performing the same task. The recursion process is always recommended for issues like searching and sorting, tree traversals, etc.
An iterator is a pointer-like object that points towards an element present inside the container like arrays, structures, etc. A pointer is used to move through the data inside the container. Iterators play an important role in connecting with the containers through the algorithms. The pointer is an absolute part of the pointer. A pointer can iterate through the containers having elements by navigating and pointing towards the specific element. But not all the iterators are the same as pointers.
The big advantage of iterator is that it offers an interface for any container type. Iterators are capable of making the algorithms independent of the container type. In other words, iterators are applied to every data type and every container.
A diamond problem is an issue that occurs in programming languages, especially in C++, when you are using multiple inheritances. Multiple inheritances in C++ are commonly used as a tool when the code is very lengthy. So to handle the source code, we use classes to manage the program. However, the multiple inheritances cause a problem if it is not used properly. These problems mainly contain the DIAMOND problem. This tutorial aims to highlight the main factors of the diamond problem, how it occurs from the multiple inheritances, and all the solutions required to resolve it.
To execute the programs regarding “C++ diamond inheritance” in the Linux operating system, you need to have an Ubuntu system installed and running on the Virtual machine. Two tools are used. One is any editing tool, and as such, we will use the default “text editor” of Linux. You may use other preferred editing tools. The second one is the Ubuntu terminal. On which, you will run the program and can see the output displayed.
First, we will discuss multiple inheritances in the article, as the “diamond problem” occurs in the case of having inheritance in the source code.
You might have heard or worked on permutations in Mathematics or Calculus. In the realm of mathematics, it’s a very well-known idea. The permutation is said to be a set of possible outcomes generated from a single set. Similarly, the Python language also supports permutation by utilizing some of its built-in methods and modules. Today, we will learn to get the possible permutations of a single list by using different methods in Python.
I had to package a nontrivial Python codebase, and I needed to put dependencies in setup.py.
I could do git grep -h import | sort -u, then review the output by hand, but I lacked the motivation for it. Much better to take a stab at solving the general problem
The great jazz musicians didn’t write out elaborate scores in private like European classical composers did. Nor did they remain enclosed in their community like the virtuosos of African or Indian music. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis—they all worked out their innovative sounds in public, onstage with others, under the bright lights of racism and capitalism. And while they all had to master a public performance tradition—including pleasing the toughest crowd of all, ballroom dancers—in the end they were each alone with their unique compositional perspective.1
Quick tangent – I got made fun of as a kid for “freaking out” or “spazzing out” all the time, but when you think about it — when you really think about it — shouldn’t we all be freaking out? When you look around and so few people are enjoying their lives and so many people are struggling or oppressed, and there are new and bizarre illnesses and viruses to worry about, and all of our so-called leaders are goddamn corrupt€ morons€ — shouldn’t we all be spazzing out? If you look at our current reality, it’s€ all€ spazz-worthy.
Anyway, we have three or four levels of reality that we should be discussing all the time because they’re incredibly important. But, generally speaking, American politicians and media don’t talk about the deeper layers. In fact, they€ only€ talk about the surface layer (because they’re corporate tools).
A while back, I wrote this piece on the Sound Blaster where I spent a bit of time explaining that internal expansion ports were once very common in PCs. It was the type of thing that, had I written the story even five years earlier, might not even have been necessary. But so many people have grown up without them, on laptops and tablets, that the explainer was actually useful. There are a lot of pop culture phenomena like that—where the passage of time makes the common feel obscure again. The Three Stooges, which I’m writing about tonight, aren’t necessarily obscure just yet, but maybe they’re not out in front of pop culture they way they once were. That’s a fate undeserved for the short-subject films that Howard, Fine, and Howard created. Sure, there was a movie back in 2012, but I think the Stooges deserve a bit of a cultural refresher. So here goes. Today’s Tedium takes a look at The Three Stooges with fresh eyes. Nyuk, nyuk
World-renowned composer and University of Michigan (UM) professor Bright Sheng will not be investigated by the university’s Equity, Civil Rights and Title IX office (ECRT) for possible discrimination practices. UM School of Music, Theater and Dance (SMTD) Dean David Gier reported Sheng to the ECRT after Sheng screened the 1965 Stuart Burge-Laurence Olivier film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello in his undergraduate music composition course.
University officials made no public announcement as to why they were no longer considering an inquisitorial ECRT review of Sheng’s curriculum. Instead, according to MLive news, they communicated their decision to his lawyer. The university’s action not to review the incident simply confirms the fact that the claims of “racism” were always slanderous and baseless.
Moreover, even if online teaching ends up being effective, its adoption may still hamper efforts to form a cohesive campus community. In our surveys, students who had more frequent in-person classes were also more likely to feel that they “belonged” at their school. The challenge of preserving that sense of belonging online may be especially pressing with regard to Black and LGBTQ+ students, who, our research shows, are less likely to feel part of their school’s community than their white, non-LGBTQ+ peers, regardless of whether they are learning in person or online.
It seems likely that even when the threat of Covid-19 has passed, the technology we used to survive during the pandemic will continue to be a major force in higher education. Online learning has enormous potential; in some form or another, it is here to stay.
But our study also shows that being physically present together on campus has a unique value. Exactly how much value it has is something that needs further study. So too does the question of how much of that value could be replicated in better designed digital settings; are there better ways to harness technology while preserving the relationship between students and faculty?
One might wonder why. Well, he has been blamed for instigating residential schools: these schools (only becoming federal government policy in 1883) are accused of being nothing-less than vile instruments of cultural genocide. Founded in 1948, Ryerson University in Toronto has gone so far as to call for the change of their university’s name. € I will put this claim under careful scrutiny, drawing from the essays of Ronald Stagg and Patrice Dutil, “The imbecile attack on Egerton Ryerson,” The Dorchester Review, August 12, 2021 and Donald B. Smith, “Egerton Ryerson and the Mississauga, 1826 to 1856, an appeal for further study,” Ontario History, vol. 113 (2), Fall 2021, Lynn McDonald’s “Letter to the president of Ryerson University” and Smith’s biography of Peter Jones (Sacred Feathers: the Reverend Peter Jones [Kahkewaquonaby], 1987).
In the 1970s and 1980s educational history underwent a renaissance. The upheavals of the 1960s had precipitated three significant historiographic developments: writing the oppressed and voiceless back into historical narrative, situating the school in the context of social development and ideological contestation as well as using social scientific and Marxian modes of interpretation. It was heady stuff for a new doctoral student: the school was now thrown into the political, economic, cultural and religious upheavals of an insecure and anxiety-ridden colonial Upper Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. And Egerton Ryerson was placed under the historian’s searchlight.
This explanation article is for beginners in The Free Software and GNU/Linux Community. You will certainly meet terms like amd64, i386, and ppc64el as choices when getting copy of a software or an operating system. In short, these terms refer to choices of computer's CPU products (also known as processors) which would determine choices of software and operating systems that you can run on it. In practice, knowing these terms may benefit you to select correctly software and operating systems for your computer. Now let's start learning!
Environmental and Indigenous advocates on Friday cheered as a federal judge rejected a Biden administration request to temporarily keep in place a Trump-era Clean Water Act rule that one attorney said would have "devastated" states' ability to manage their rivers.
"The Trump administration took an industry wish list and ran with it, trampling over state and tribal authority and public rights to clean water in the process."
Case managers at Florida’s $1.5 billion compensation program for catastrophically brain-damaged children didn’t consult specialists to determine whether medications, therapy, medical supplies and surgical procedures were “medically necessary” to the health of children in the plan.
They relied on Google instead.
One of the odd things about the pandemic that has simultaneously amused and irked me is just how many “blasts from the past” have reappeared, washed-up quacks who were once prominent but had faded into the background. I’m referring to quacks that I used to write about a lot “back in the day” (as in 2004-2009 or so) but about whom I haven’t thought much in a long time. Although the topic of this post is a doctor named Richard Moskowitz, perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Dr. Rashid Buttar.
Adults in the Grand Duchy will be allowed to cultivate up to four plants per household in their homes or gardens.
Consumption will only be legal within the household, although fines for the possession of up to three grams in public will be reduced considerably to a maximum of €500.
Cannabis seeds will be made available to buy in shops as well as online.
A new feature in Google Calendar – Focus Time – that can auto decline meetings, make you more productive, among other things. Here’s how to enable.
As the world gets busier and smarter, Google finds ways to make it easier, specially in this Pandemic driven days with work-from-home situations. With the launch of ‘Focus Time’ the latest update to its brainchild – Google Calendars, Google now lets users automatically decline meeting requests for a selected time slot. A focused time entry will allow users to block out incoming meetings during the specific time set by the user and let them focus on the task at hand.
A steady drumbeat from some of the most influential executives in the technology industry has emerged in recent months to push the idea that the U.S. government should invest in a "national research cloud" — a hub for U.S. research into artificial intelligence where researchers from academia and smaller tech companies could share data sets and other resources.
It's an idea that has been backed by a government commission led by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and including executives from Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, which recommended that the Biden administration create a hub for U.S. research into artificial intelligence. The White House has warmed up to the idea, ordering another report on it due next year with an eye toward competing with China on the development of artificial intelligence.
A number of Windows ransomware gangs have reacted to the reported takedown of the REvil gang, with one of them, Darkside, now known as BlackMatter, moving some of the bitcoin it holds, according to a statement from the cryptocurrency tracking firm Elliptic.
But financial advisers see this differently. By some estimates, an investment of $1,000 in a retirement account today would balloon to about $17,000 in 30 years.
In other words, $700 to $1,000 — the price range of modern smartphones — is a big purchase. Fewer than half of American adults have enough savings set aside to cover three months of emergency expenses, according to the Pew Research Center. Yet one in five people surveyed by the financial website WalletHub thought a new phone was worth going into debt for.
Disguised as an IT firm, the APT is hitting targets in Afghanistan & India, exploiting a 20-year-old+ Microsoft Office bug that’s as potent as it is ancient.
A typical infection would consist of a malicious document, such as an RTF file exploiting CVE-2017-11882, a stack overflow vulnerability that enables arbitrary code execution on a vulnerable version of Microsoft Office.
The recon phase deployed a custom file enumerator and infector module. This module aimed to discover all the different Office files on an infected endpoint. The infector module is meant to weaponize all .doc, .docx and .rtf files present in removable drives connected to the system to exploit CVE-2017-11882.
The attack phase consists of deploying RAT payloads, such as DcRAT and QuasarRAT, to the victim's endpoint instead of the file recon and infector modules seen previously. All the malware observed in the attack phase of the campaign consisted of commodity RATs compiled and deployed with minimal changes.
Though there are other players, such as lobbyists and pro-defense think tanks, this military-industrial-governmental complex comprises central casting. They work together to meet and sometimes exceed the military’s funding requests, in good economic times and bad, in peacetime as well as in times of crisis. To them, national security is a gravy train.
The Iron Triangle in Action
Hey Missouri: stop electing technically illiterate dipshits. First you had Claire McCaskill, one of the key sponsors of FOSTA (who is still defending it years later). You got rid of her, but replaced her with Josh Hawley, who seems to think his main job in the Senate (besides whipping up support for insurrectionists and planning his run for the Presidency) is to destroy the internet and reshape it according to his own personal vision.
Cybersecurity threats have significantly increased since March of 2020 when much of the economy was forced online to help us cope with the Covid crisis, including a number of high profile attacks by international criminal groups and adversarial governments. This past June, FBI Director Christopher Wray compared the danger of ransomware attacks on US firms by Russian criminal groups to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When Biden and Putin met in Geneva a few weeks later, cyberweapons control was at the top of the agenda, a spot previously occupied by the control of nuclear weapons.
It’s been clear for a while that in a world increasingly governed by digital data and transactions, our existing cybersecurity methods have been far from adequate. To learn more about this very important area, earlier this year I joined CAMS, MIT’s interdisciplinary cybersecurity initiative, and started attending its research seminars.
At a recent seminar, I heard a very interesting presentation on Compliance and Cybersecurity by CAMS research affiliate Angelica Marotta. Her seminar was based on Convergence and divergence of regulatory compliance and cybersecurity, a recent paper she co-authored with MIT professor Stuart Madnick.
Versions of a popular NPM package named ua-parser-js was found to contain malicious code. ua-parser-js is used in apps and websites to discover the type of device or browser a person is using from User-Agent data. A computer or device with the affected software installed or running could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information or take control of the system.
Here at Hackaday we love the good kinds of hacks, but now and then we need to bring up a less good kind. Today it was learned that the NPM package ua-parser-js was compromised, and any software using it as a library may have become victim of a supply chain attack. What is ua-parser-js and why does any of this matter?
In the early days of computing, programmers would write every bit of code they used themselves. Larger teams would work together to develop larger code bases, but it was all done in-house. These days software developers don’t write every piece of code. Instead they use libraries of code supplied by others.
Of all the places to come across illegal facial recognition tech deployment, a convenience store chain is certainly one of the strangest. The tech wasn't deployed to stop shoplifting or keep unwanted people off the premises. Instead, somewhat ironically, it was deployed to help 7-Eleven convenience stores quantify how well it was doing in the customer service department.
"Today we have 1.18 billion mobile connections, 700 million Internet users, and 600 million smartphones, which are increasing 25 million per quarter. We have a strong connectivity base today," Ram Sewak Sharma, chief executive of the National Health Authority of India said, adding that India has the highest data consumption which is about 12 GB per person a month.
African governments are using new technology and laws to increase surveillance of opposition figures, researchers warned on Thursday, calling for restrictions on the sale of tracking tools and tougher privacy protections.
Existing laws have largely failed to stop state surveillance across the continent, from monitoring academics in Egypt to tracking journalists in South Africa, the African Digital Rights Network (ADRN) think-tank said in a report.
It comes as governments around the world pile pressure on tech giants like Facebook and Apple to grant authorities access to encrypted messages. Several countries are calling for so-called "backdoors" which would allow them to bypass encryption.
The U.S., European Union, Australia, Russia and China are among the jurisdictions "trying to develop means and methods for requiring weak encryption systems," Snowden claimed.
Call me faint-hearted but it strikes me as a bad idea to deliberately stir up trouble against a country armed with nuclear weapons.
10. Bloated government? Misplaced priorities? The military is by far the largest Canadian government department, employing the largest number and purchasing the most equipment. The combined budget of the Department of National Defence (DND) and Veteran Affairs is $30 billion, about 15 times Environment and Climate Change Canada's. With 0.5 percent of the world's people, Canada is responsible for 1.5% of international military spending.€
Much more than I thought I might, I enjoyed my walk around Tirana. I stopped at an excellent bookshop and admired several shelves devoted to Albanian history, including Arthur Evans’s Albanian Letters, a book about “Financial Relations in the Fascist Period,” and an account called From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World: always judge a country by its book covers.
I would have been happy departing with an armload of books, but there was no room in my small backpack. The books did enliven my walk, however, and whenever I was dragging from my early start in Durrës I would stop in at a sidewalk café (there were many) and drink Turkish coffee.
Before it’s too late, we need to ask ourselves a crucial question: Do we really—I mean truly—want a new Cold War with China?
Neoliberalism was born in Chile, as the popular€ slogan€ goes, and it will die in Chile. This slogan seems to have come true with the ending of the Pinochet era.
But Sepúlveda is not sure about what comes next. “Everybody knows everything is uncertain,” she says frankly. “That is an opportunity to begin a new era.” The first decade and a half after Pinochet’s removal seemed bleak. Then, in 2006, a€ cycle€ of student protests rattled the country. These were led by young students, whose black-and-white school uniforms gave the protests a name—La Revolución Pingüina, or the Penguin Revolution. The young people€ demanded€ a new national curriculum as well as a reduction in public transportation fares and examination fees. When the government failed to deliver on these demands, a second cycle of protests mobilized in 2011-2013 with the same demands. Their leaders—including Camila Vallejo of the Communist Party and Giorgio Jackson of the Democratic Revolution—are now important figures of the left project in Chile. Once more in 2011-2013, the students were met with a stalemate, with the Constitution of 1980 being a barricade to their ambitions.
Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for Nutrition and Education International, a U.S.-based aid organization, became the target because he drove a white Toyota, went to his office, and stopped to pick up containers of clean water for his extended family.
Those actions, deemed suspicious by the drone surveillance program and its human handlers, were enough to identify Ahmadi€ falsely€ as an ISIS-K terrorist and place him on the kill list for that day.
The Afghan warriors, some of the Turkic ancestry, transformed the Gandhara region and the contiguous areas through invasions, Islamization, and de-Hinduization — a set of forces that created modern Afghanistan, separated Pakistan from India, and may influence the future of Kashmir. The Taliban of Afghanistan and the Taliban of Pakistan are the current versions of the old warriors. The ancient warriors, Afghan Turks, and the Mughals ventured into and beyond Gandhara to reach Delhi and further East into India. The modern warriors, carrying the Gandhara sensibilities, refuse to accept invasions and occupations. They also resent the Indian sovereignty over Muslim Kashmir since it runs antithetical to the historical narrative of de-Hinduization of Muslim territories.
Below, a brief historical overview will explain how the Afghan weltanschauung (spirit of fighting and piety) shaped the six historical cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Quetta, Multan, Lahore, and Peshawar, framing the Gandhara Hexagon. Even though its borders have contracted and expanded under various rulers, the Gandhara Hexagon contains Pashtuns, Balochis, Punjabis, and numerous other ethnic groups. Afghanistan and Pakistan, as presently constituted, are modern nation-states built around the Gandhara region.
The Powell Doctrine was one of certitude and caution: do not engage in conflict except in conditions whereby you could bring overwhelming and decisive force to bear. Political goals had to be clear; hostilities would be brief. There would be no more quagmires, no more Vietnam Wars for the US imperium. The model for this was his first engagement with Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991. The other manifestation of this approach was opposing military intervention in Bosnia.
Such ruminations were reached after service in Vietnam, where he made his mark as a major who questioned the account of the My Lai massacre. Tasked with providing the first response to the Pentagon’s queries spurred on by Ron Ridenhour, he showed an all-establishment view to the butchering of over four hundred villagers, questioning the complaint against Charlie Company as vicious rumour mongering.
It might be thought that in such circumstances the world’s “best-educated, best-prepared”€ nation€ that President Biden also€ declares€ has “unmatched strength” would apply at least some of its education, preparation and power to encouraging India and Pakistan to engage in meaningful negotiations and move towards rapprochement.
Not a hope.
Because that’s just where the Biden administration is clearly taking us. If you need proof, check out last month’s announcement of an “AUKUS” (Australia, United Kingdom, U.S.) military alliance in Asia. Believe me, it’s far scarier (and more racist) than the nuclear-powered submarine deal and the French diplomatic kerfuffle that dominated the media coverage of it. By focusing on the dramatically angry French reaction to losing their own agreement to sell non-nuclear subs to Australia, most of the media missed a much bigger story: that the U.S. government and its allies have all but formally declared a new Cold War by launching a coordinated military buildup in East Asia unmistakably aimed at China.
It’s still not too late to choose a more peaceful path. Unfortunately, this all-Anglo alliance comes perilously close to locking the world into just such a conflict that could all too easily become a hot, even potentially nuclear, war between the two wealthiest, most powerful countries on the planet.
Spending for the U.S. military is about three times the amount Chinese government spends, and is more than the military budgets of Russia, India, the U.K., Saudi Arabia, France, Japan, Germany and China combined.
“The U.S. will remain a dominant imperial power for a long time into the future,” Daniel Bessner, assistant professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington explained to me, adding, “The sheer power of the U.S. is just overwhelming.”[1]
The goal was to frighten the American people with images of nuclear bombs setting off mushroom clouds over American cities, along with biological and chemical weapons being unleashed all across America.€
The plan worked. Given the overwhelming fear and anger arising from the 9/11 attacks, most Americans enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq in 2002, an invasion that ultimately killed countless Iraqis and ended up destroying the country.€
Hoffman, N.C.—With a population of 588, Hoffman is a majority-Black town in a majority-white county, next to which, not long ago, Oak Grove Technologies moved in. Oak Grove is a self-described “Tactical and Cultural Training Center” occupying 300 acres between Hoffman and nearby Camp McCall. According to the company’s website, facilities include a multistory shoot house, a small-arms range, a rappelling tower, an explosive breaching bay (to practice blowing down doors for forced entry), and five “realistic cultural training villages ranging in size and type with available role players and livestock.”1
Yes, as I hope you’ve noticed, we are nearing the end of the first week of our annual fundraiser. We’re doing okay, thanks to opening salvos of donations from loyal CounterPunchers, but as of yet not nearly well enough.
CounterPunch needs your help and without it in generous measure in the next three weeks we will not survive. We make this appeal€ every year and please empty your mind of the sort of cynicism one develops after meeting for the fourth time in one day the same mendicant trying to raise “bus money” to get home.€ We are mendicants year-after-year because we have no safety net.
This past Wednesday the parliamentary commission that investigated the actions and omissions of the Brazilian government during the covid19 pandemic presented its final report. In more than a thousand pages that were summarised for reading in a 50-page report, the commission’s rapporteur Renan Calheiros exposed that the government’s actions caused more than 600,000 deaths.
The report, which will be voted on by the commission next week for approval, details nine crimes committed by the president during the pandemic. Among them are epidemic with death as a result, incitement of preventive health measures, incitement to crime, falsification of documents, irregular use of the public budget and crime against humanity. In addition to Bolsonaro, the president’s three sons who are active in politics, 63 other people and two companies were also accused of various crimes.
After all, U.S. policy toward China remains as provocative today as it was under Trump. Tariffs and economic sanctions against Beijing remain largely intact. Little has been done to resolve disputes on trade, security, and human rights. The Pentagon is cutting back on the kinds of weapons it was using in the Middle East in favor of munitions more suited to the Pacific theater. There hasn’t been much in the way of cooperation on the major global problems of pandemic and climate change. Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have barely talked with one another, though there are plans for a virtual meeting by the end of the year.
All of that would suggest merely a continuation of the cold war that has settled on U.S.-China relations since the tail end of the Obama administration.
We go to Brunswick, Georgia, for an update as jury selection began this week in the trial of three white men who fatally shot 25-year-old unarmed man Ahmaud Arbery while he was out for a jog last year. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael claim they were attempting a “citizen’s arrest” of Arbery last February when they pursued him in their pickup truck. Their neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan, joined the pursuit in his own truck and recorded a cellphone video that would later be released as evidence and spark nationwide outcry. Travis McMichael fired two shots, killing Arbery. Theawanza Brooks, Ahmaud Arbery’s aunt, remembers Arbery as “an amazing young man … they took away from us,” and discusses ongoing protests outside the courthouse and racial dynamics in the case. “It’s impossible to find anyone in that small community who has not heard about what happened to Ahmaud,” adds Lee Merritt, civil rights attorney representing the Arbery family, who also addresses key aspects of the defense’s argument, including the citizen arrest law the McMichaels used as an excuse to stop Arbery.
The letters followed each other within a few days. Some teachers in Marseille have been sent death threats and a photo of Samuel Paty, reports BFMTV on Monday October 18. According to the public prosecutor’s office, an investigation has been opened. The incidents occurred in the days leading up to commemorations across France for the teacher who was murdered by an Islamist terrorist in Yvelines a year earlier, on October 16, 2020.
The Turkish Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) is an umbrella organization that controls more than 900 mosques in Germany. DITIB is nothing more than an arm of the Turkish state. The DITIB controlled mosques comprise the majority of those blasting the Adhan across Germany.
The DITIB charter states that it is “linked to the Turkish government’s Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet).” The Diyanet answers directly to Erdoßan employ imams, writes sermons, and issues fatwas. In addition, they set the theological guidelines for all of the messages preached in their German mosques.
The Diyanet sends Turkish imams to DITIB mosques to influence their congregants to not assimilate into Europe and push Erdoßan’s agenda. While in Cologne, Germany, Erdoßan himself urged Turkish immigrants not to assimilate and called the assimilation of migrants in Europe “a crime against humanity.” Erdoßan’s DITIB imams have been caught reporting dissidents to Turkey’s Embassy in Germany.
Some two-thirds of Germany’s 5.6 million Muslims are of Turkish origin, representing the largest Turkish community outside Turkey and Germany’s largest immigrant group.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN will soon decide an obscure but potent question: Which secret files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should be made fully public?
Indian leaders love to talk up Mahatma Gandhi when they travel abroad. It plays well to the popular notion of India as a land of peace and love, and boosts its moral authority as a responsible democracy on the world stage. So, Gandhi and his ideas came up a lot as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stepped out of India recently for the first time in about one and a half years.
Meeting Modi at the White House on Sept. 24, President Joe Biden said Gandhi’s “message of non-violence, respect, and tolerance matters today maybe more than it ever has.” In his own speech to the United Nations, Modi rued that “the world faces the threat of regressive thinking and extremism,” and underlined his country’s democratic credentials. To reinforce his point, he even coined a new sobriquet for India: “the mother of all democracies.”
Today, The Washington Post reported that a second Facebook whistleblower came forward detailing sketchy internal conversations and decisions that show it is time for the U.S. Congress and Federal Trade Commission to regulate Facebook, and other big tech companies.
The new, currently anonymous whistleblower claimed, in an affidavit to the Securities and Exchange Commission, that the company repeatedly “undermined efforts to fight misinformation, hate speech and other problematic content.” The whistleblower argued Facebook made these decisions to avoid angering former President Trump and his allies and to protect the company’s bottom line.
Another former Facebook employee on Friday submitted a complaint to the U.S. government, bolstering whistleblower Frances Haugen's recent criticism of the company in testimony to Congress and other formal complaints, and sparking fresh calls for accountability.
"It's time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it's inflicted on our democracy."
Yeah, it can suck when you fail to handle FOIA requests properly and give the public more information than you intended to. It sucks for the government. It doesn't suck for the public, which is rarely treated to anything more than the most minimal of transparency.
In the affidavit, copies of which were provided to The Verge, the whistleblower alleges, among other things, that a former Facebook communications official dismissed concerns about interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, assisted unwittingly by Facebook. Tucker Bounds said, according to the affidavit, that the situation would be “a flash in the pan. Some legislators will get pissy. And then in a few weeks they will move on to something else. Meanwhile we are printing money in the basement and we are fine.”
The new whistleblower is a former member of Facebook’s Integrity team whose identity is known to The Post and who agreed to be interviewed about the issues raised in the legal filing. Perhaps the most vivid moment in the affidavit comes in a direct quote the whistleblower reported hearing from a top Facebook communications official during the controversy following Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The whistleblower’s name is redacted in the affidavit.
Contrary to claims by former U.S. President Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians and pundits that Twitter favors posts by liberals, new internal research shared Thursday by the social media titan showed that conservative tweets received greater algorithmic amplification on the platform.
"It's honestly amazing that people on the right keep pushing the 'social media is biased against conservatives' line even though every social media platform's algorithm is tilted in their favor."
If we take Rathje’s research into account, this could mean that right-leaning posts on Twitter successfully spark more outrage, resulting in amplification. Perhaps Twitter’s algorithm issue is tied to promoting toxic tweeting more than a specific political bias. And as we mentioned earlier, Twitter’s research said that Germany was the only country that didn’t experience the right-leaning algorithm bias. It could be related to Germany’s agreement with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to remove hate speech within 24 hours. Some users even change their country to Germany on Twitter to prevent Nazi imagery from appearing on the platform.
In every country but Germany, tweets posted by accounts on the political right received more amplification than those on the political left.
Twitter's study examined tweets from political parties and users sharing content from news outlets in seven countries around the world: Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, the UK, and the US.
It analysed millions of tweets sent between 1 April and 15 August 2020.
Researchers then used the data to see which tweets were being amplified more on an algorithmically ordered feed compared with a reverse-chronological feed, both of which users have an option of using.
They found that mainstream parties and outlets on the political right enjoyed higher levels of "algorithmic amplification" compared with their counterparts on the left.
Major businesses and the fossil fuel industry are engaging in "a dangerous distraction" by utilizing a scheme known as carbon offsetting while continuing activities that are worsening the climate emergency, according to a report released Friday.
"The real and credible solutions to the environmental emergencies we face are clear."
Echoing the demands of demonstrators who were arrested outside the White House throughout last week, Congresswoman Cori Bush led a dozen other progressive lawmakers Friday in pressuring President Joe Biden to block fossil fuel projects and immediately declare a climate emergency.
"Ongoing actions by your administration threaten to undermine our shared goal to further climate, racial, and economic justice."
More extreme weather "will increasingly exacerbate a number of risks to US national security interests, from physical impacts that could cascade into security challenges, to how countries respond to the climate challenge," the White House said in a summary of the intelligence reports.
The prediction was made in the first official assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which oversees the sprawling US intelligence apparatus.
The document "represents the consensus view of all 18" elements in the intelligence community, the White House said.
After months of waiting, environmental groups responded with disappointment tinged with outrage late Thursday after the White House released a report on the financial risks associated with the climate crisis—a document critics say would have been promising at some earlier point in history but that falls "pitifully" short given the urgency of the crisis and just ahead of a major U.N.-backed summit kicking off at the end of the month.
"A terse summary of the report would read 'it's good to notice that our planet is burning, but we won't do anything to fix it.'"
As the global pollution crisis continues to endanger the world's ecosystems, people, and climate, the United Nations warned Thursday that "a€ drastic reduction in unnecessary, avoidable, and problematic plastic"—achieved through a rapid transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and a shift to more sustainable patterns of production and consumption—is key to cutting down on waste at the needed scale.
"Continuing with business-as-usual is simply not an option."
Since the 1988 Congressional definitive testimony of James Hansen and other climate scientists, there is no discourse about “Stop”: elimination of fossil fuel emissions quickly morphed into adaptation and mitigation which is now replaced by “transition”. EVs is a representative example of focusing on one small part, conveniently deleting the whole. The whole EV picture must include externalities, life cycle analysis, consideration of non-essential production, impacts of its production on basic human needs, the urgent timeline due to non-linear climate processes, regional climate and sociopolitical processes and who EVs actually serve, EV’s effects on carbon sinks, pertinent facts about human and climate history, loss and damage obligations and debt to people totally impacted and totally innocent regarding the climate emergency, alternatives, elucidating who is served in a “just transition”.
The carbon footprint of the automobile whole picture includes asphalt roads, the amount of cement used in parking garages and driveways, building codes that allow heated driveways. Past research from the Earth Policy Institute reported that there were 214 million cars and 3 million km of roads, consuming 1 million hectares of land, enough cropland to feed 9 million people in the U.S. Highway systems lead to deforestation and soil depletion, eroding these crucial carbon sinks. Water campaigner Maude Barlow [1] reported that water was often given by governments to private industries in the automobile, computer, and bottled water sectors, and that it took 400,000 liters to construct one car. Water shortages for people’s basic needs is glaringly one consequence of climate change-caused drought. From the Earth Policy Institute in 2008, Lester Brown wrote that food production suffers because farmers earn much more by selling water to the steel industry than by using water on their land to grow wheat. These are all climate-linked externalities related to all cars.
We couldn’t be much more different: One of us lives in greater Houston, the hydrocarbon capital of the planet, the other all the way across the country in the Green Mountains of Vermont. More to the point, we span the even wider continent of age: One of us collected his diploma in the 1970s, while the other just graduated high school amid this pandemic in the Class of 2021. Still, in the face of climate change, we’ve transcended our differences to form a powerful alliance between the ends of the generational spectrum—the perfect combination to take on this most crucial of issues.
Many of the largest U.S. companies, including Walmart, Amazon, and Microsoft, employ lobbyists that also do work for the oil and gas industry, according to new research into state lobbying data. The connections with oil and gas lobbyists, the researchers say, undercut the highly public positions the companies have taken on addressing climate change.
The research, conducted by the non-profit Global Energy Monitor and shared with DeSmog, found thousands of cases in which high-profile corporations engage in lobbying in state capitols, hiring the same lobbyists that do work for powerful fossil fuel companies.
The city of Paris on Thursday promised to deve€l€op its network of secure cyc€ling lanes as part of a five-year plan to make the French capital “100-percent bikeable” with 250 million euros ($290 million) of extra spending.
The bicibus operates the same way a school bus would, with three "stops" along the way where more riders join as it travels to several schools in the Eixample.
Parents often join in, some of them carrying younger children on their bikes. Police vehicles have started to escort the group, with officers traveling in the front, back and on the sides of the group, Boix said.
All of these proposals are based on the idea that due to fire suppression a build-up of fuels is the problem, and hence a reduction in fuels will solve the issue. There are reasons to believe fuel build-up due to fire suppression is greatly exaggerated. I can’t go into it in detail here, but you read more on this topic here, here, here, and here.
The major problem with these assertions is that most of the West’s vegetative communities including higher elevation pines like west side Douglas fir, lodgepole pine, aspen, most fir and spruce species, sagebrush, juniper, and chaparral to name a few plant types that naturally have long fire rotations of decades to hundreds of years. Fire suppression, to the degree it may have been effective, has not influenced these communities.
In what wildlife defenders called "the biggest news so far for wolf protection in the United States in 2021," a Wisconsin court on Friday sided with conservation groups and canceled this year's wolf trophy hunt season just 15 days before it was set to begin.
"Zealots hell-bent on eliminating wolves invited this legal action."
Yet the rocker/hunter provocateur was invited to speak this month at Wisconsin’s legislature in Madison to lend credibility to new hunting bills sponsored by Republican lawmakers. Specifically, the GOP legislators want to establish a hunting season for sandhill cranes, known for their engaging migratory “dances” and mating for life. Wisconsin already has a dove hunting season and is working on a swan hunting season.
At the hearings, Nugent called sandhill cranes “rib-eyes in the sky” and suggested eating them with butter and garlic.
It is now widely recognized that communities of color in the United States are far more likely than their white counterparts to be exposed to pollution and toxic wastes in their neighborhoods. Black and brown residents of these communities disproportionately suffer from the health effects of these harmful exposures, from children with asthma to seniors with cancer.
The macaque signs, indications of the resilience and resourcefulness of biodiversity advocates in the global South, provide a useful context for what took place last Friday, when the € first part of the UN Biodiversity Conference concluded with the adoption of the “Kunming Declaration” and the establishment of the “Kunming Biodiversity Fund.” With the Declaration and the Fund, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has set a path toward drafting a more just post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, which will be adopted during the in-person gathering of the UN Biodiversity Conference scheduled to take place next spring, also in Kunming, China. This is a big deal. We should all take a moment to applaud the CBD for choosing to adopt an expansive, inclusive, and justice-attentive approach for both the Declaration and the Fund. I elaborate below a few significant aspects of both, starting with the Declaration.
The five-page “Kunming Declaration” includes a section titled “We Commit to,” which lists 17 different principles as the basis for global biodiversity conservation. Interestingly, that section makes no explicit mention of the 30Ãâ30 biodiversity proposal, which aims to protect 30% of land, freshwater, and seas by 2030. The 30Ãâ30 plan was developed largely by scientists in the global North and promoted by influential conservation NGOs and nation states, also largely in the global North. However, this 30Ãâ30 plan has been critiqued by the UN Special Rapporteur of Human Rights and the Environment as well as several human rights NGOs such as Survival International, who have labeled it as “fortress conservation.” Arguing against such a blatantly neocolonial vision, human rights defenders have urged for a rights-based approach to conservation that would protect and honor the stewardship of biodiversity routinely practiced by the Indigenous and other “ecosystem peoples” in the global South and around the world. Last month, I wrote a commentary in which I offered my own critique of not only the content of the 30 X 30 proposal but also the process used to develop it, which included very little participation from the global South. I also urged that the human rights defenders of the global South and their allies in the global North demand that the UN CBD reject this model and, in its place, adopt a more inclusive approach to biodiversity conservation.
The current moratorium on shrimping is scheduled to end this year and regulators are expected to decide this winter whether to continue it.
During the Great Depression, about three million young Americans, with few job prospects in the private sector, enlisted in the€ Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC),€ part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They planted trees, built new roads, hiking trails and camp-grounds, fought forest fires, and learned valuable skills, while receiving a small federal government paycheck.
Modern-day advocates of a “Green New Deal” have been pushing the Biden Administration to fund socially useful work of a similar sort, via formation of a Civilian Climate Corps. In this modern-day national service program, low-income youth would be involved in “installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings, and providing water and other supplies during heat waves and storms,” according to the€ New York Times.€
Senate Democrats are weighing their options regarding their plans to ensure the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations pay their fair share in taxes, as right-wing Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema appears poised to block a key component of President Joe Biden's economic agenda: a reversal of the Trump-era corporate tax cuts.
The working class is cornered but the working class is fighting back.
It’s a two-pronged labor revolt: an organized strike wave and an unorganized but much larger movement in which millions of workers are quitting their damned jobs. The corporate media is calling it the “Great Resignation.” It’s less polite than that — millions have simply walked off without giving notice. They are not looking back.
Unless these shortages are rectified, this unofficial general strike will continue.I say it’s about time.
There have been numerous stories and papers about the huge increase in the wealth of the super-rich since the pandemic began. Virtually all of this is due to the run-up in the stock market during this period. Part of that is bounce back, the S&P 500 lost almost one-third of its value between its pre-pandemic peak in February of 2020 and its pandemic trough a month later. If we want to tell a really dramatic story we can start at the pandemic trough and take the rise in the stock market from March 20th.
But even if we are being serious, there has been an extraordinary runup in the stock market in the last twenty months. The S&P 500 is more than one-third higher than its pre-pandemic peak.
In a move that has sent shock waves through NFL circles, two Democratic members of Congress sent a letter late on Thursday to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, calling on the league to provide Congress with the results of its internal investigation into the Washington Football Team’s workplace culture of toxic, predatory sexism.1
"Are we going with, 'The filibuster is more important than democracy?' Is that the plan?"
"As long as this racist relic of the Senate stays in place it will prevent legislation that advances racial justice, both now and in the future," said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the organization. "It's a simple choice between a free America or one chained by the past. Our democracy hangs in the balance."
On his second day in office, President Joe Biden promised a top-to-bottom review of US sanctions policy, the humanitarian impact of these punitive economic restrictions, and whether sanctions are hindering pandemic relief efforts abroad. It was supposed to be an opportunity to honestly assess the human cost of sanctions, to constrain the use of such measures, and to offer an alternative to former President Donald Trump’s aggressive approach.
The wrongful conviction happened because police coerced a false confession from 14 year old Robert Veal, who had no attorney or parent present during his interrogation. You can find plenty more examples from all over the country at Innocence Project. But now, things are changing in Illinois and Oregon to prevent any cases like this in the future. And other states should follow suit.
Illinois Governor J.B Pritzker signed Senate Bill 2122 into law in July, around the same time Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed off on Senate Bill 418 to ban police from lying to juveniles during interrogations. They are currently the only two states to pass legislation to ban juvenile deception by police. Every state should follow its lead to protect young people.
Trump was bad enough. Efforts to dislodge him, specifically, the phony Russiagate fiasco, descended to shocking new lows. I get that Trump was a five-alarm fire and the bi-partisan war party was determined to put it out, no matter what. But sinking to “the Russians are coming?” Or a bunch of ads on Facebook had somehow undermined our putative democracy, which had, in fact, succumbed to terminal oligarchic tyranny sometime back in the Reagan administration – this was opening a Pandora’s box and we are very lucky the supersonic missiles didn’t start flying. Trump was a lethal disease (once covid arrived, literally), but the Russiagate attempt to oust him was deadly medicine.
On the very unlikely chance that Trump regains power, how bad would it be? Worse than your worst nightmare. And that’s assuming the powers that be wouldn’t try to resuscitate Russophobia. First, covid would roar back, as Trump would dismantle the Biden architecture of mask and vaccine mandates. Second, he would strip government of career officials and pack it with fanatical Trump parasites, and he would do this at once, having learned from his presidency that he can’t run departments like Justice as his own personal mafia without ditching people marked by any modicum of integrity. Without doubt, he would assault the press in every way possible, up to and including arresting journalists.
Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Bobby Lewis about AT&T and OAN for the October 15, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
But Emanuel was thoroughly dishonest, under oath, when he testified€ that€ his administration€ could not release the shocking€ dashcam video€ of the shooting€ because it did not want to taint€ “the€ integrity of an investigation”€ – and that€ if a politician intervenes in the release€ of evidence, “you’ve politicized that investigation.”
Anyone who knows the timeline of events can see the big lie in this testimony.€ It was the suppression of the video that was “politicized”€ – a€ suppression that was decisive in Emanuel’s reelection as mayor. As for the so-called investigation, it had little or no “integrity.”
A day before Furchner’s indictment, Colin Powell, the US government’s 16th national security advisor, 12th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,€ and 65th Secretary of State, died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center from complications related to COVID-19.
Seventy-six years after the end of World War Two, governments are rounding up the last few living Nazi war criminals — nonagenarians and even centenarians who played minor roles in the Holocaust — and hauling them to court for their crimes against humanity.
Daniel Falcone: As the US media mourns the death of Colin Powell and regrets the passing of a “memorable and principled statesman,” can you comment on how the actual history competes with this memory and knowledge construction of this notable figure?
Richard Falk: The legacy of Colin Powell is a complex one that will take time to sort out. There is no doubt that he projected the public image of an African American who was moderate and genuine in his commitment to national military and diplomatic service, and a patriot in the traditional sense of supporting his country, ‘right or wrong.’ He had a notable career in both the armed forces and diplomacy, becoming the first African American to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State. These achievements set Powell on a high pedestal, a role model for persons of color, long excluded from the pinnacles of power and influence.
As the October 31 deadline to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill approaches, the media have made a project of examining senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, also known as the Build Back Better Act (FAIR.org, 10/6/01). Despite countless hours of coverage and conjecture about what might or might not get Manchin and Sinema to vote for the bill, the financial conflicts of interest that reinforce their reluctance to vote for the bill have been almost completely ignored. In a review of 21 relevant news programs, airing on October 3–4 on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, financial conflicts were discussed for only 45 seconds.
"Are we going to pursue an equitable path that will be good for children and the aged and others to give them economic security and a dignified life? Or are we going to continue to let so much of our country's vast resources flow into the pockets of people at the top?"
Corporations that previously trumpeted their support for sustainability and climate action have quietly given thousands of dollars to€ Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—the two right-wing Democrats most responsible for gutting the Build Back Better Act's clean energy provisions and otherwise preventing their party from passing a transformative version of its reconciliation package.
"Manchin and Sinema€ are standing in the way of the nation's largest climate bill ever."
I struggle to make ends meet, whether it's a utility bill or groceries, every month is an unpredictable fight to stay financially afloat. Thankfully, the American Rescue Plan expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for struggling Americans like myself during COVID-19 and alleviated some of these burdens.
Senator Joe Manchin, echoing the rightwing billionaire’s think-tanks’ PR and every Republican in Congress, recently said his objection to free college for students and eyeglasses for seniors was that such things created an “entitlement society,” a slur that means “a nation of welfare recipients.” €
Most pundits and journalists seem to agree. It’s common sense to refer to Republican politicians and judicial appointees as conservatives. Sometimes the conservative label is also applied to Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Definitions usually echo the Reagan line: “Conservatives believe individuals can and must live their lives with a presumption of personal responsibility for what happens,” as two political scientists define the term.
That such statements are taken as serious analysis rather than Orwellian satire is a dismal comment on U.S. intellectual culture. Those who extol Reagan’s virtues of “personal responsibility, thrift, and initiative” and decry “big government” are typically the loudest advocates of public subsidies to private capitalists. They keep the public trough wide open for military contractors, banks, and drug companies to gorge themselves, at a scale that dwarfs the Build Back Better legislation. They’re the staunchest defenders of “qualified immunity” for police, which frees killer cops of personal responsibility for their actions.
As President Biden negotiates the final size and scope of the Build Back Better Act with fellow Democrats, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia has emerged as a major hurdle to his agenda. The conservative Democrat and his family would potentially profit from his opposition to the key planks of the bill, including green energy investment and raising corporate taxes to pay for the package. Stephen Smith, co-chair of West Virginia Can’t Wait, says Manchin fits into a long history of state lawmakers working for corporate interests. “Senator Manchin and the rest of our congressional delegation has never represented the people of our state,” says Smith, who ran for governor in 2020, placing second in the Democratic primary. “Politics in West Virginia has never been left versus right, red team versus blue team. It’s the people who are suffering and dying and surviving versus the people who are trying to profit off of that pain.”
President Biden acknowledged Thursday his Build Back Better agenda is in jeopardy due to two Senate Democrats: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Both senators have pushed Biden to slash in half his $3.5 trillion proposal that would be spent over 10 years to vastly expand the safety net and combat the climate crisis. We take an in-depth look at the two lawmakers, starting with Sinema. “Unfortunately, Sinema really reads as a cautionary tale of what happens when political ambition becomes a be-all and end-all,” says Branko Marcetic, Jacobin staff writer, who describes the political evolution of Sinema, who ran in her early career as a socialist and has moved “rightward and rightward every step of the way.”
The whistleblower also reportedly alleges that Facebook’s Public Policy team, led by former Bush administration official Joel Kaplan, ran a whitelist for publishers including the rightwing Breitbart News that exempted them from platform policy against spreading misinformation.
The body of research consistently found Facebook pushed some users into “rabbit holes,” increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. People radicalized through these rabbit holes make up a small slice of total users, but at Facebook’s scale, that can mean millions of individuals.
The findings, communicated in a report titled “Carol’s Journey to QAnon,” were among thousands of pages of documents included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by legal counsel for Frances Haugen, who worked as a Facebook product manager until May. Haugen is now asserting whistleblower status and has filed several specific complaints that Facebook puts profit over public safety. Earlier this month, she testified about her claims before a Senate subcommittee.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association on Thursday in submitting comments to the FCC on Thursday in opposition to a proposal that would charge regulatory fees to users of unlicensed spectrum.
The CCIA was joined in its opposition by the Internet Association, Digital Media Association and Incompas.
In their statement, the US, Germany, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden called for a “just and speedy resolution to (Kavala)’s case”.
The 10 envoys were summoned to the Turkish foreign ministry on Tuesday.
Erdogan sounded incandescent with rage in a conversation with Turkish reporters on board his return flight from a tour of Africa.
The US Treasury Department on Thursday announced reaching a compromise with five European countries after a dispute over taxes on American tech giants.
The digital services taxes have primarily affected large US corporations, such as Google and Facebook.
Washington had called for abolishing those taxes, saying they were unfairly targeting US tech giants for tax practices that European companies also use.
A college has done something dumb and unconstitutional. Not all that surprising. Neither is the response, coming from Adam Steinbaugh and FIRE (Foundation for Rights in Education).
With a score of 49.2 out of 100, Mexico ranked 16th out of 22 countries included on the Inter American Press Association’s Chapultepec Index 2021. It ranked 11th last year with a score of 55.
The only countries below Mexico were Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.
For just $4.99 a month, culture vultures can view a collection of randy works by Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani and other artists whose works were previously banned on social media, NBC reported. As the museums note, many of these pieces aren’t sexual in nature.
Meanwhile, those who subscribe early to the “ViennaTouristBoard” OnlyFans can get a free ticket to view the racy pieces “in the flesh” at one of the city’s museums, per the tourism board site.
The migration to the subscription service comes amid rampant social media crackdowns on museum accounts, which saw Vienna’s Albertina museum’s TikTok suspended and eventually banned in July, according to NBC, for showcasing art by Nobuyoshi Araki, whose photographs often depict nude women.
It's posting some of the city's historical 18+ artwork on the subscription service, including pieces by Egon Schiele and Amedeo Modigliani that depict nude or partially nude people.
The board and some of Vienna's museums had previously posted images of the artwork on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for promotional purposes, but the images were removed and in some cases, the accounts were closed, according to Helena Hartlauer, a spokesperson for the Vienna Tourist Board. That's when it made sense to move to the less restrictive OnlyFans.
Open-minded OnlyFans subscribers are eligible for a free Vienna City Cardor a free ticket to the featured museums (Leopold Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Naturhistorisches Museum Vienna and Albertina) where the uncensored works of art in question can be seen in the flesh. Check out the terms and conditions on our OnlyFans channel.
Facebook apologized, but other instances of social media platforms banning artwork followed over the years. So Vienna’s tourism board is trying a different approach — showcasing museums’ art on OnlyFans, a subscription-based website most closely associated with sex work. For $4.99 a month, subscribers to the tourism board’s page can check out “explicit” works held at four of the Austrian capital’s famous museums.
The entire situation brings up messy questions about the nature of art and censorship. Where do these social media platforms draw the line between what’s considered art and what’s porn? And, at the end of the day, does anyone have the right to do so?
Regardless, it’s an innovative and unique take on the OnlyFans platform, which is typically used by sex workers to sell X-rated images and videos of themselves. However, the introduction of an established “fine art” organization might open the doors for others to follow suit. At the very least, it’ll provide another avenue for folks to take in some fine — albeit NSFW — art during the time of lockdowns and social distancing.
However, it seems Omar is less of a free speech advocate when it comes to the press criticizing her.
This weekend, she shared an open letter that attacked the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s editorial board for republishing an op-ed by New York Times writer Bret Stephens, in which he condemned Omar for voting against United States funding for Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system in September.
Because fixing the real, underlying wrongs of society inside, or through the social media of today is like working in an office where everybody must yell as loud as possible, as quickly as possible, while everybody else is doing the same, all the time. It’s not technically impossible, but is a really, really dumb and inefficient way to get any real work done.
Within just a few days, the United States will once again make its case in a UK court that it has a right to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be tried under the Espionage Act, in what remains this century's most dangerous attack on global press freedom.
The Pentagon's offer of "condolence money" to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan—originally declared righteous and necessary—bears a troubling connection to the government's ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.
Many might think that alienation today is signified when iPhones control our lives – we no longer control them – as many still believe. While the iPhone connects people to the Internet, one of the founders of the Internet, Berners-Lee warned of the loss of control of personal data.
Very likely, the hallucination of Internet privacy has always been an oxymoron, as Edward Snowden has shown us. Yet, processing our data has even worse implications as data centre contributes 19% of total carbon footprint using 30 billion watts and wasting 90% of the energy they use. Perhaps, some might better think twice about this when carelessly checking tonight’s cinema schedule again, watching an online video, and reading a newspaper half-way around the world.
Content warning: This article discusses torture and sexual assault in prison and includes graphic descriptions.
Progressives on Friday denounced Israel for classifying six Palestinian human rights groups as "terrorist organizations," a move that effectively criminalizes them.
"There must be immediate consequences from the U.S. and the international community for this brazen act."
In an authoritarian and repressive move, the Israeli regime has issued a military order designating six leading Palestinian civil society and human rights groups as “terror organizations.” Citing expansive and characteristically anti-Palestinian terror legislation, the Israeli Defense Ministry accused these organizations of being affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and of plotting “the destruction of Israel.” News of the move, which took place on October 19, began spreading earlier today.
For decades, I kept a poster on my wall that I’d saved from the year I turned 16. In its upper left-hand corner was a black-and-white photo of a white man in a gray suit. Before him spread a cobblestone plaza. All you could see were the man and the stones. Its caption read, “He stood up alone and something happened.”
Although the U.S. Supreme Court once again refused to block a restrictive Texas abortion ban on Friday, the justices agreed to hear arguments against the recently enacted law on an accelerated timeline—a development welcomed by defenders of reproductive rights.
"Lack of access to safe abortion care is harming our families and communities and will have lasting effects on Texas for decades to come."
We are deeply grateful for the many years Gilmore gave to EFF as a leader and advocate, and the Board has elected him to the role of Board Member Emeritus moving forward. "I am so proud of the impact that EFF has had in retaining and expanding individual rights and freedoms as the world has adapted to major technological changes,” Gilmore said. “My departure will leave a strong board and an even stronger staff who care deeply about these issues."
John Gilmore co-founded EFF in 1990 alongside John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor, and provided significant financial support critical to the organization's survival and growth over many years. Since then, Gilmore has worked closely with EFF’s staff, board, and lawyers on privacy, free speech, security, encryption, and more.
In the 1990s, Gilmore found the government documents that confirmed the First Amendment problem with the government’s export controls over encryption, and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v DOJ, which resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. The decision made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites, and software like PGP and Signal to use the encryption of their choice.
One judge said she believed the testimony of a Bronx defendant’s 64-year-old mother more than that of the two New York City police officers who arrested him.
Another said she didn’t buy the testimony of an officer and his colleagues, concluding that they had stopped a car not because they’d seen its occupants break any laws but because it was driven by “three young men of color.”
Humanists, atheists, and non-religious people in Sri Lanka face discrimination and persecution every day, especially if they come from a Muslim background. Even though Sri Lanka is not a Muslim country (the majority of the population is Buddhist), the strong presence of Islamic militants, fundamentalists, and extremists is still very powerful and dangerous.
Derafshan, who has represented several high-profile political prisoners, is the latest victim of Iran's crackdown on human rights lawyers, activists say. Prominent lawyers who have defended dissidents, women's rights defenders, and political activists have been subject to state harassment, imprisonment, and forced into exile in recent years, they say.
In many cases, the lawyers have faced the same charges that the authorities have brought against their clients. "The goal is to scare others and warn them not to be the voice of the voiceless," Dehghan, who is currently based in Canada, told RFE/RL's Radio Farda in a telephone interview.
The 1,807 sexual assaults during Lyft rides in 2019, the most recent year for data in the report, were a 64 percent increase from 2017, the company said. But because the number of rides rose even faster, safety improved overall, Lyft said, with the incident rate of sexual assaults declining 19 percent during that period.
Four people were killed during physical assaults in 2019, and 49 were killed during motor vehicle accidents, Lyft said in the report.
So for years I've noted if you really want to understand why U.S. broadband is so crappy, you should take a long, close look at Frontier Communications in states like West Virginia. For decades the ISP has provided slow and expensive service, routinely failed to upgrade or repair its network, and generally personified the typical bumbling, apathetic, regional monopoly. And its punishment, year after year, has generally been a parade of regulatory favors, tax breaks, and millions in subsidies. At no point do "telecom policy leaders" or politicians ever try to do much differently.
A damning new report shows that one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have played a role in restricting access to those very vaccines. The report, “Pfizer’s Power,” published this week by the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, examines Pfizer’s contracts with the United States, United Kingdom, European Commission, Albania, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic and Peru. They offer a rare glimpse into the power Pfizer has to silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the middle of a public health crisis. We speak with Public Citizen researcher Zain Rizvi, author of the new report.
A copyright infringement lawsuit over Nirvana’s use of a C.W. Scott-Giles illustration from a 1949 English translation of Dante’s Inferno on merchandise has been dismissed. Per court documents obtained by Rolling stone, Judge Dale Fischer ruled that the United Kingdom was a more appropriate jurisdiction because the plaintiff, Jocelyn Susan Bundy — granddaughter of Scott-Giles — is a British citizen, and because the illustration is covered by a U.K. copyright. The dismissal, however, was contingent upon the defendants agreeing to a jurisdiction change if Bundy filed another lawsuit in the U.K.
Internet provider RCN has asked a New Jersey federal court to dismiss the piracy liability lawsuit several filmmakers filed a few weeks ago. According to the ISP, the movie companies are part of a well-known web of copyright trolls, which failed to plead proper copyright infringement claims.
Yout.com sued the RIAA in 2020 seeking a declaratory judgment that its stream-ripping service is lawful. A second amended complaint filed in September was supposed to provide more detail but according to the RIAA, Yout has failed to describe how its service operates. As such, Yout fails to state a plausible claim so the action should be dismissed with prejudice.
In ‘Empowering Digital Creators’ our panel has a dynamic conversation celebrating paths to supporting creativity and innovation online. There are so many resources available for digital creators to thrive. Hear directly from creators and those steering the platforms that support them.
Eddy Grant, responsible for the banger Electric Avenue, has made it onto our pages a couple of times in the past, most recently over a copyright spat with Donald Trump. At issue in the lawsuit was the Trump campaign sending around a video of a "Trump/Pence" train zipping by, with a Biden hand-car chugging behind it. While there were lots of references to Biden sniffing people's hair (seriously, what is that?) and other silly jabs, the real problem is that the entire video has Electric Avenue playing as its soundtrack. Eddy Grant didn't like this, of course, and sued over it. Trump tried to get the suit tossed on fair use grounds, arguing that the use of the song was transformative... but that isn't how it works. Simply using the song in a way the author didn't intend doesn't make the use transformative. Were that the case, every commercial advertisement out there would feature copyrighted songs as backgrounds to selling all manner of things. Again, not how it works and the court refused to toss the suit in response to Trump's Motion to Dismiss.
The talks between the Venezuelan government and the extreme-right wing opposition had been going well. There are still outstanding issues to be resolved, like ending the economic war, but the discussions held in Mexico led to concrete electoral developments. The European Union agreed to send an electoral observation mission. The United Nations decided to send a panel of electoral experts. (Both institutions refused to observe the 2018 presidential and 2020 legislative elections, despite invitations from the government.) Thousands of opposition candidates registered to run in the mega-elections, which include voting for governors and mayors, as regional and local legislators.
