Paul Mutton of Netcraft gives Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman an hour of wisdom, experience and stories about items we can worry about less because he and Netcraft are on the case. If you care about cybercrime, phishing, malware, or any of the many vulnerabilities that afflict us all online, this episode of FLOSS Weekly is for you—especially if you operate web servers.
Hello everyone,
The third release candidate is now available, containing again mostly
zink fixes, and a handful of patches for everything else.
Please test it and report any issue here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/new
Issues that should block the release of 21.3.0 should be added to the
corresponding milestone:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/milestones/27
Cheers,
Eric
The latest weekly test release of Mesa 21.3 is now available ahead of the anticipated stable debut in November.
Mesa 21.3-rc3 has amassed nearly 40 changes, but nearly half of them amount to Zink fixes for that Gallium3D code implementing OpenGL over Vulkan. A variety of different fixes were queued up for this milestone.
After three years without a full release, X.Org 21.1.0 has finally landed with new features and a lot of bug fixes. While the next-generation for all Linux systems will eventually be Wayland, plenty still default to to it.
Developer Povilas Kanapickas announced the release on October 27, noting that they expect issues to come up once more people start using it with a 21.1.1 version patch being planned to arrive in the next few weeks rather than their usual time of a few months. For a reminder: XWayland, the project that ensures backwards compatibility with applications on Wayland is now released as its own thing.
As a good sign ahead of the important Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release in the spring, Ubuntu 21.10 further ups the 64-bit ARM (AArch64) performance. Here is a look at some of the gains in going from Ubuntu 21.04 to the recently released Ubuntu 21.10.
Similar to the improvements seen on x86_64 and especially the much better RISC-V performance, Ubuntu 21.10 is doing real well on AArch64 too. Ubuntu 21.04 already tended to be measurably faster than Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while now with Ubuntu 21.10, the performance continues increasing ahead of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Issue tracking systems cover a few different types of computer software applications which help to manage and maintain lists of issues in a number of ways. One of the most common types of an issue tracker is the bug tracking system. This system tracks issues by helping software developers keep on top of reported software bugs and acts as an aid in quality assurance. The other main types of issue tracking systems are service desk and help desk management software which help firms create, update, and resolve reported customer issues.
Issue tracking systems play an important role for any development project and collaborative venture, enabling developers and corporate project teams to concentrate on identifying issues and tasks, ensuring that they are resolved, and at the same time to stay focused on what is important.
netstat is a command-line tool used to monitor network statistics. It enables you to view network data such as the ports in use, active connections, packets that have been transferred, etc.
It’s interesting to note that this very utility is available on Windows Server editions and is very similar in usage to that on Linux.
Follow through this article to see how you can use the netstat command on your Linux system.
OSSEC is an open source host-based intrusion detection system that can be used to keep track of servers activity. It supports most operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Solaris and much more. It is used to monitor one server or multiple servers in server/agent mode and give you a real-time view into what’s happening on your server. OSSEC has a cross-platform architecture that enables you to monitor multiple systems from centralized location.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure OSSEC to monitor local Ubuntu 20.04 server. We will also install OSSEC Web UI and test OSSEC against any file modification
Welcome to part 2 of Bash Shell Scripting at a beginner level. This article will dive into some more unique aspects of bash scripting. It will continue to use familiar commands, with an explain of anything new, and cover standard output standard input, standard error, the “pipe”, and data redirection.
If we are talking about Javascript then it is very likely that we will also find AngularJS somewhere. Today, in this post, you will learn how to install AngularCLI on Debian 11, and with this tool, you will be able to create AngularJS projects smoothly and quickly.
GIMP is free, open-source raster graphics editing software primarily used for image manipulation and image editing, transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and many more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
Swift, often referred to as “Objective-C, without the C,” is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Apple. Swift is a general-purpose programming language built using modern safety, performance, and software design patterns. The Swift project aims to create the best available language for systems programming to mobile and desktop apps, scaling up to cloud services.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Swift Programming Language on your Fedora 35 system.
Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory key-value data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis also provides high availability with Redis Sentinel software logic, creating automatic partitioning across Redis nodes with Redis Cluster.
You will know how to install and configure Redis on your Fedora 35 operating system at the end of the guide.
Memcached is used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM. This reduces the number of times an external data source must be read, which lowers overheads and speeds up response times. The memory caching software is a free, open-source project that anyone can use.
At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to install and configure Memcached on your openSUSE Leap 15 operating system.
Elasticsearch is a highly scalable open-source full-text search and analytics engine. It is generally the underlying engine/technology that powers applications with complex search features and requirements. The software supports RESTful operations that allow you to store, search, and analyze significant volumes of data quickly and in near real-time. Elasticsearch is well-liked and popular amongst sysadmins and developers as it is a mighty search engine based on the Lucene library.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Elastic Search on openSUSE Leap 15.
The reputation of the various Linux operating system distributions speaks for itself. These prime operating system environments continue to be secure, open-source, open to frequent software updates, and are embraced by a growing user community and developers’ support.
However, these Linux OS attributes and stripes do not guarantee a bulletproof status. Sometimes you do not have control of what happens or what will happen to your Linux OS filesystem.
A Linux filesystem tends to get damaged or corrupted due to unavoidable circumstances like the unsafe removal of a media or drive hosting the Linux OS, instantaneous system crashes, and unexpected power losses.
Tor, also known as The Onion Router, is open-source, free software that enables anonymous communication when using online services such as web surfing. The Tor network directs the Internet traffic through an accessible worldwide volunteer overlay network with over six thousand relays and continues to grow. Many users want to find more ways to keep their information and activities anonymous or at least as private as possible, which has led to Tor Browser growing quite popular in recent years as it conceals a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.
The Tor network is intended to protect the personal privacy of users and their freedom and ability from conducting communication without having their activities monitored, and data were taken without their consent and used to sum it up.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest Tor Browser on openSUSE Leap 15.
By default, openSUSE does not come with Snap or Snap Store installed as this is a feature that was built by developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, and Snap packages are installed from a central SNAP server operated by Canonical.
Snap can be installed and, for the most part, work with most packages on openSUSE-based systems that are currently actively supported. There are a few conflicts with specific packages. The issue with snaps VS zypper package manager is that Snaps are self-contained, resulting in an increased .snap due to having all its dependencies included and various degrees of slight performance degradation compared to a natively installed application. In contrast, the zypper is much lighter than its snap counterpart because it doesn’t need to bundle dependencies.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Snapcraft and have the ability to use this feature going forward in openSUSE Leap 15.
Those who are not comfortable with the command line can use the graphical user interface in Linux Mint 20.2, latest or previous versions to create users’ accounts and add them in particular groups. Here we show the steps on how to set up a new account in Linux Mint.
When it comes to bash scripting, all the scripts are mainly focused on the command-line operation. Whether you need input from the user or display some messages, everything is done through the terminal. Most people writing scripts using Bash have no idea there are a set of GUI tools available. In this article, we are going to see about one such tool called Zenity - a simple program that enables you to create graphical (GTK+) dialog boxes in command-line and shell scripts.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GCC on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) is a collection of tools used to compile different programming languages’ source code into binary, executables, or libraries. GCC supports a lot of programming languages like C, C++, Java, Objective-C, Go, Fortran, Ada, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of GCC Compiler on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup Rsyslog on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Rsyslog is an open-source software tool for Unix-based operating systems used for collecting log messages from multiple network devices. It helps system administrators to keep an eye on all servers from the central point. Rsyslog works in a client/server model, it receives logs from the remote client on port 514 over the TCP/UDP protocol.
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 Rsyslog 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.
If you are using Zabbix to monitor your infrastructure you might want to receive email alerts from your local domain somewhere on a public internet domain, even if you don’t own a valid registered internet domain name with a mail server which you can configure on your own.
Cacti is an open-source web-based network monitoring and system monitoring graphing tool. It is a frontend to RRDTool - a Time Series Database (TSDB).
Using Cacti you can monitor servers and network devices such as servers, routers, and switches. It gathers and monitors network traffic using the SNMP protocol. It can monitor various system metrics such as CPU, memory disk space, and bandwidth utilization among others. You can also set up alerts so that you receive email notifications in the event of a system outage. Furthermore, it enables a faster response time when a problem arises.
You can use LAMP stack to install Cacti on Linux Distribution. It also supports Nginx and IIS Webserver. The data collected is then stored in a MySQL or MariaDB database. The Data Collection framework is fully distributed, fault-tolerant and scalable.
Every server which is accessible from the Internet is at great risk of brute-force and malware attacks. Hackers try to use brute-force attempts to get access to applications that are accessible on public networks.
Fail2ban is a tool that is used to protect Linux-based machines from automated attacks by improving their security. It monitors the logs for any malicious activity and allows the user to temporarily or permanently block remote IP addresses
This how-to guide will explain how to install, configure and set up Fail2ban on a Debian 11 based system.
Yay – Yet another Yogurt is an AUR Helper written in Go. It’s objective is providing an interface of pacman with minimal user input, yaourt like search and with almost no dependencies.
Yaourt has been discontinued in favour of yay. Yaourt (Yet Another User Repository Tool) is an advanced command line tool for installing packages on Arch Linux. It is a powerful wrapper for Pacman, the standard package management utility for Arch Linux with extended features and remarkable AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) support.
If you have multiple folders and files to hide on Linux then we can do that just using a text file, here we will know how?
Well, we can hide folders and files in Linux using a traditional method that is adding periods in front of their names. For example, if you rename the “Documents” folder as “.Documents”, it will disappear from view. The same as if you do it with any other type of file, it will be hidden.
Moreover, this method is the default on all Linux to hide folders and configuration files. To see hidden items the user can use the “Ctrl + H” key combination and the same to hide them again.
I grew up playing Sonic on the Sega Mega Drive, so this looks like an awesome bundle for me. Humble Bundle has put up a small but nice collection with the Sonic 30th Anniversary Bundle.
A group of 29 NFT developers and technology advocacy groups, including digital rights-focused nonprofit Fight For the Future, is asking Valve to reverse its ban of blockchain games on Steam. In an open letter, they write, "In the spirit of [Steam's] pioneering vision, we ask that you take a chance on this rapidly growing technology."
That technology was more or less banned from Steam earlier this month when Valve added a rule prohibiting applications that "issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs." Valve hasn't publicly explained its reason for the decision, but according to Age of Rust developer SpacePirate, Valve doesn't want "items that can have real-world value" on Steam.
We continue seeing lots of quick fixes coming into Proton Experimental, the special testing version of the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer with another release up now. This is the software that enables you to run Windows games and applications on Linux with Steam. If you wish to know more about Steam Play and Proton do check out our dedicated section.
Ready for your next super-sweet casual adventure? Alchemic Cutie is set to finally see a Steam release with native Linux support on November 12.
Alchemic Cutie is a wholesome relaxing RPG set on colourful Wimba Island. While taming wild jellies, you’ll meet villagers, enter jelly competitions and uncover the secrets of the island. With a style a bit like Stardew Valley and a setting that looks just as lovely, it's got plenty for you to do. The jelly raising system sounds like a lot of fun with each being given unique stats, plus there's over four thousand visual styles for them. You get to tame, breed and raise whatever you want.
The platform will run on the company’s custom Linux based operating system called Tizen.
Escuelas Linux 7.2 comes two months after Escuelas Linux 7.1 with updated internals and applications. It’s based on the Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa) point release and derived from Bodhi Linux 6.0, using the latest Moksha 0.3.4 graphical desktop environment.
Being based on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS, this release comes with the Linux 5.11 kernel series by default, but it also lets users install the latest and greatest Linux kernel 5.14 using the offline script provided in the default installation.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is the successor of the Raspberry Pi Zero W board and the third model in the Raspberry Pi Zero series, which has sold nearly four million units worldwide since its launch six years ago.
Powered by the same Quad-Core 64-bit Broadcom BCM2710A1 ARM Cortex-A53 processor as the first version of the Raspberry Pi 3 board, Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is bundled into a single space-saving package with 512MB LPDDR2 SDRAM, 2.4GHz IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN, Bluetooth 4.2, and OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 graphics.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the third successor of Zero series - Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, costing you just $15. We round up the announcement.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation today is launching the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W as their newest single board computer succeeding the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is a form-factor-compatible, drop-in replacement to its predecessor but now sports a 1.0GHz quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor as a big upgrade over the original 1GHz single-core in the original Zero W. There is 512MB of RAM like its predecessor. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is using a Raspberry Pi RP3A0 system-in-package with BCM2710A1 die that can result in 40% faster single-threaded performance and around five times better multi-threaded performance thanks to the single core to quad core jump.
8 new GNU releases in the last month (as of October 24, 2021): automake-1.16.5 gdbm-1.22 gnuastro-0.16 gnuastro-0.16.1-e0f1 gnupg-2.3.3 mygnuhealth-1.0.5 nano-5.9 parallel-20211022
A September 2021 study on the economic impact of open source software and hardware concluded that open source technologies injected EUR 65-95 billion into the European economy. This study is timely given the current rollout of the European Union's EUR 750 billion recovery investment, which has allotted 20% for digital transformation. Growing political efforts to understand and quantify the importance of open source in realizing EU digital sovereignty accentuate the study's significance. The European Union sponsored the study, which was written by Fraunhofer ISI and OpenForum Europe.
During the February 2021 EU Open Source Policy Summit's keynote, EU Commissioner Thierry Breton emphasized the European Union's leadership in using open source software (OSS) across all technical, political, and economic domains. This study provides yet more hard economic evidence to support the commissioner's assertion that using and contributing to open source is vital to European economic recovery—not only in terms of bolstering public sector adoption but also for industrial strategy.
SolidRun unveiled an “i.MX 8XLite SOM” and “Hummingboard i.MX 8XLite” dev kit that run Linux on NXP’s new i.MX8X Lite SoC with up to 2x -A35, Cortex-M4F, and a V2X accelerator for automotive vehicle communications.
Earlier this month, NXP announced a headless i.MX8X Lite (or i.MX 8XLite) system-on-chip SoC for automotive telematics, V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything), and IIoT applications. Now SolidRun has followed up with a Linux-driven i.MX 8XLite System-on-Module (SOM) and a compact Hummingboard i.MX 8XLite development kit built around the SoC.
My OS: One core can run 10 million random I/O operations per second and minify JSON at 6 GB/sec.
Also my OS: Firing up a new terminal gives a one-second delay where the shell reads its 24 MB history file, and getting ten new emails makes my mail reader reflow all threads ten times, giving jank of several seconds.
First, some cred€it is due: these are all restate€ments of sev€er€al Perl::Critic poli€cies which in turn cod€i€fy stan€dards described in Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices (2005). I’ve repeat€ed€ly rec€om€mend€ed the lat€ter as a start€ing point for higher-ââ¬â¹quality Perl devel€op€ment. Over the years these prac€tices con€tin€ue to be re-ââ¬â¹evaluated (includ€ing by the author him€self) and var€i€ous authors release new pol€i€cy mod€ules, but perlcritic remains a great tool for ensur€ing you (and your team or oth€er con€trib€u€tors) main€tain a con€sis€tent high stan€dard in your code.
With that said, on to the recommendations!
Project Wakefield formally got off the ground in September with its focus to provide native Wayland support. Given Linux distributions continue moving away from X.Org Server based sessions by default in favor of Wayland, OpenJDK developers are working to get their Wayland desktop support in order. Initially they are working to provide good support for JDK running on Wayland within the X11 compatibility mode while the ultimate goal is to offer complete and native Wayland client support. OpenJDK developers have acknowledged this will "take years to fully complete and deliver" their native Wayland support.
As ProPublica has reported, cybercriminals are flooding the internet with fake job ads and even bogus company hiring websites whose purpose is to steal your identity and use it to commit fraud. It’s a good reminder that you should vet potential employers as closely as they vet you.
Here are ten tips on how to spot such scams:
Manifestoes, as a genre and a form of communication to spell out party ideologies, existed long before 1921. But it is perhaps over the decades of the twentieth century that we see a growing production of manifestoes in the artistic community. We have Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist Manifesto (1918), the manifestoes of the Guerrilla Girls (1985-1990), Le Corbusier’s Three reminders to architects (1931), Marina Abramović’s An artist’s life manifesto (1997) and many more.
While manifestoes differ in length and style, a manifesto feels like a manifesto when it is written in the staccato style, single sentences capable of declaring desires, intentions and visionary needs.
Did you know that you can scan the entire Internet in only 30 minutes or even five? You probably thought I was joking because the Internet is as vast as our Universe. But I am serious âËâ you can obtain any information in a few minutes if you arm yourself with the Masscan tool.
The countdown has begun. We are now 100 days from the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and pressure against staging the Games in China is mounting around the world. The reasons are myriad: from Tibet, to labor issues, to the treatment of the Uyghur people.
Scientists have known since the 1960s that there are two seemingly separate radio structures — which are defined in astronomy as any object that emits strong radio waves — that can be definitively detected by Earth's technology. Known as the North Polar Spur and the Fan Region, the new study posits that these radio structures resemble long ropes and are approximately 1,000 light-years long, as well as roughly 350 light-years from our planet.
The research by scientists at Penn State University also suggests that, in addition to being near Earth (relatively speaking), the two structures are connected to each other and, as a result, essentially surround us.
Less than 1 per cent of the tens of thousands of sessional staff at Australian universities have benefited from legislation to shepherd long-term casuals into permanent employment, figures suggest.
The data emerged as 60 per cent of Australia’s public universities were being scrutinised over “systemic” underpayment of casuals.
The Build Back Better Bill started out as a great, sprawling€ piece€ of legislation comprising the most ambitious set of social programs since the Johnson Administration. It is an attempt to actually€ implement a major portion of President Joe Biden's campaign program. Such an attempt is itself a rarity in American politics where the usual practice is to relegate the presidential campaign program to the archives long before inauguration day. Even more rare is the fact that the Bill keeps the promise of the compromise reached between the winning Biden faction and the losing faction supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders at last year's Democratic Convention.
Right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro should be criminally charged for offenses related to his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic—ranging from crimes against humanity to quackery—federal lawmakers who voted to approve an inquiry commission's report said Tuesday.
"This period will sadly be remembered as Brazil's greatest civilizational regression. The atrocities committed by this government will not be forgotten."
The head of the World Food Programme is urging U.S. billionaires to give just .36% of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death.
The remarks from WFP executive director David Beasley, who singled out the fortunes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, came in an interview that aired Tuesday on CNN's "Connect the World."
The UK now has one of the highest per capita infection rates in the world: 4 times higher than Germany, 9 times higher than France, and 25 times higher than Spain. Last Thursday the UK recorded more than 50,000 infections in a single day, a higher number than the figure for Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal combined.
The government delayed vaccinating secondary school students, and by the start of October 1 in 20 UK schoolchildren were Covid-positive. The majority of UK Covid cases comprise unvaccinated under-18-year-olds.
This article was funded by the Marvel Cooke Fellowship.€ Read more€ about this reporting project and€ make a contribution€ to fund our fellowship budget.
In the months since COVID-19 wreaked havoc inside California’s 35 prisons and claimed 240 incarcerated lives, practically nothing has been done to address the crowded and poorly ventilated housing units that have helped the virus spread.
In September 2020, Netflix was in turmoil as the company battled its most significant PR scandal to date. Earlier that year, the streaming platform had acquired the worldwide rights to the French film Cuties after its lauded premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Director Maïmouna Doucouré had made the movie as a commentary on social media and the hypersexualization of young girls. But the poster Netflix released to promote it didn’t have that same self-awareness. Instead, it displayed the actors, some of whom were only 12 years old, in booty shorts and crop tops, striking provocative dance poses.
Sometimes you see a story that you just have too talk about, this Missouri governor literally thinks that opening up inspect element and looking at HTML on the webpage is the equivalent of hacking and should be investigated as such.
Ethical hackers then report vulnerabilities to the organization and suggest ways to remediate the issues.
The paper begins by providing an explanation of the two main technologies that are used for image scanning: perceptual hashing and machine learning. From a security viewpoint, they share common problems: both can be evaded by knowledgeable adversaries, and both methods can be subverted. The experts point out that moving from the current server-side scanning of material to CSS “opens new vantage points for the adversary”. In particular, attacks that already existed on server-side scanning systems can now be executed by more actors, and on less-secure infrastructure (users’ devices rather than corporate servers). In addition, new on-device attacks become possible.
“The distinction between “real-time” and “ex-post” is irrelevant when it comes to the impact of these technologies on fundamental rights. Ex-post identification carries in fact a higher potential of harm, as more data can be pooled from different sources to proceed to the identification,” said Francesco Ragazzi, associate professor at Leiden University and author of the study.
The study, published on Monday (25 October), was commissioned by the Green group in the European Parliament, a vocal proponent of a total ban on biometric recognition systems in publicly accessible spaces.
Facebook has confronted whistleblowers, PR firestorms and Congressional inquiries in recent years. But now it faces a combination of all three at once in what could be the most intense and wide-ranging crisis in the company's 17-year history.
On Friday, a consortium of 17 US news organizations began publishing a series of stories — collectively called "The Facebook Papers" — based on a trove of hundreds of internal company documents which were included in disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel. The consortium, which includes CNN, reviewed the redacted versions received by Congress.
The past several weeks have been difficult for the social media behemoth Facebook, with a series of whistleblower revelations demonstrating that the company knew its signature platform was exacerbating all manner of social ills around the globe, from human trafficking to sectarian violence.
The Financial Times, which cited four people familiar with the discussions that led to the deal, said concerns were likely to be raised about a single American company hosting such a huge percentage of the UK's secret data.
The FT story comes about a fortnight after AWS was certified as one of four cloud firms which could host Australian Government data, despite having connections to a Chinese-owned data centre.
Executives from TikTok and Snapchat on Tuesday sought to distance themselves from Facebook during their first appearances at a Capitol Hill hearing, as senators pressed them on the impact of their platforms have on young users.
Snapchat is designed around temporary posts, and unlike Facebook and Twitters its messages and posts disappear after set times, Snapchat Vice President of Global Public Policy Jennifer Stout emphasized.
An executive at TikTok faced tough questions on Tuesday during the video-sharing app's first appearance at a U.S. congressional hearing, saying it does not give information to the Chinese government and has sought to safeguard U.S. data.
“Regionally, the news of the (PJD) failure was greeted with jubilation,” Magdi Abdelhadi wrote on the BBC English website. “Commentators regarded the fall of PJD as the final nail in the coffin of political Islam,” he added.
Missing from such sweeping declarations is that those who greeted the defeat of the PJD with ‘jubilation’ are mostly the very crowd that dismissed political Islam even during its unprecedented surge following the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011; and the same intellectual mercenaries who unashamedly continue to sing the praises of such dictators as General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt and the various Arab monarchs in the Gulf.
Nuclear disarmament campaigners and other peace advocates on Wednesday welcomed an Iranian official's announcement that his country would rejoin talks aimed at reviving the Obama-era nuclear agreement unilaterally abrogated by former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2018.
Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran's new nuclear negotiator, tweeted that he "had a very serious and constructive dialogue" with Enrique Mora, a leading European Union diplomat, and that they agreed "to start negotiations before the end of November."
This May, the Pentagon asked Congress to fund a $715 billion budget for Fiscal 2022—an increase of $10 billion over the previous year. Together with another $38 billion requested for military-related programs at other government agencies, this would bring total U.S. military spending to $753 billion.
But from the standpoint of most Republicans and many Democrats in Congress, this was not enough. In September, by an overwhelming margin, the House passed a $768 billion military spending bill. When the Senate votes, it is likely to raise that figure, for two Senate committees have already approved $778 billion for U.S. military programs—a five percent increase over the preceding year. These actions were taken despite the fact that, except for military spending at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, current U.S. military spending, after adjusting for inflation, is the highest since World War II.
In dominant capitalist-imperialist media, America’s imperial crimes are airbrushed out of historical memory, like they never took place. Thus it is that CNN can without the slightest hint of irony show a clip of the late Colin Powell saying this last year: “the one word I have to use with respect to what [Donald Trump] has been doing for the last several; years is a word I never would have used before, I never would have used for any of the four presidents I have worked for: He lies. He lies about things. And he gets away with it.”
MSNBC approvingly reported the following judgement from Richard Haass, president of the US Council on Foreign Relations: Powell was “one of the most intellectually honest people I ever met.”
An investigation by HEATED and Earther revealed Wednesday that fossil fuel industry advertising in some of the most popular U.S. political newsletters "has exploded" as Democrats in Congress prepare to grill leaders of oil majors and trade groups about their contributions to climate disinformation.
"News outlets are using their own quality reporting to sell advertisers on opportunities to spread misinformation."
In recent weeks, the airwaves have been full of inflammatory rhetoric over Taiwan, increasing the risk that tensions over the island’s status could provide the spark for a military conflict, even a catastrophic war, between the United States and China. On October 10, President Xi Jinping of China called on the Taiwanese to merge with the mainland in a peaceful fashion, but warned of unspecified dangers if they chose otherwise. “Those who forget their ancestors, betray the motherland, or split the country are doomed,” he said of Taiwanese “separatists.” A day later, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan avowed that her country must “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty,” and would negotiate with Beijing only “on the basis of parity”—a stance wholly unacceptable to the Chinese leadership. On this side of the Pacific, politicians from both parties were quick to condemn Xi’s foreboding threats and to offer support for Tsai’s uncompromising posture. Many Republicans demanded an ironclad US commitment to defend Taiwan in the event it was attacked by China, and President Biden, when asked by Anderson Cooper of CNN whether the United States would defend Taiwan under those circumstances, said, “Yes, we have a commitment to do that.”
The “Revo”€
On March 13, 1979, the leaders of Grenada’s New Jewel Movement overthrew the hated and feared neocolonial puppet, Prime Minister Eric Gairy, setting in motion a memorable revolutionary experiment in Caribbean history. Those who lived through the 1979-83 Grenadian Revolution were forever transformed.€
Our conversation got me thinking about what my trolls might be seeing on their social media feeds. I wanted to see whether social media algorithms are pushing more misogyny to accounts similar to those that abuse women online. So I created a fake online persona called Barry and signed him up to the five most popular social media platforms in the UK.
All the main social media companies say they don't promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. They each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we've posted, liked or watched in the past. But it's difficult to know what they push to each user.
John Eastman, the former Trump lawyer who authored the infamous "coup memo" on how to overturn the 2020 election, was caught on camera saying his coup plan would have worked if it wasn't for former Vice President Mike Pence.
Lauren Windsor, a progressive activist who is known for posing incognito to draw out revealing statements from Republicans and conservatives, spoke to Eastman at an event hosted by The Claremont Institute, Eastman's employer.
Pretending to be an outspoken Trump supporter, Windsor tells Eastman, "I read your memo and I thought it was solid in all of its legal arguments. And I was floored that Mike Pence didn't do anything. Why didn't he act on it? You gave him the legal reasoning to do that."
Democrats were quick to react to Rolling Stone’s report that some Republican members of Congress or their staffers were “intimately” involved in planning the Jan. 6 events that turned violent. As for the Republicans who were implicated in the story … not so much.
The report features interviews with two anonymous organizers of the rallies who told Rolling Stone’s Hunter Walker that Stop the Steal organizers worked with members of Congress, including representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX). “We would talk to Boebert’s team, Cawthorn’s team, Gosar’s team, like, back to back to back to back,” one of the organizers told Walker.
The purported membership of the Oath Keeper membership rolls — obtained in a hack and leaked to the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets — include more than 38,000 names. The vast majority of alleged members are enrolled in a way that leaves them somewhat anonymous: Their registrations are associated with a gmail or other private email address.
But a review by Rolling Stone identified nearly 40 memberships linked to public-sector work emails, from domains like nasa.gov, dmv.virginia.gov, and city.pittsburgh.pa.us. Rolling Stone then matched these individuals to public-source information — from LinkedIn accounts, government websites, public salary databases, etc. — to compile a list of everyday Americans who appear to have been dues paying members of the notorious right-wing organization.
Sweden's banking authority has closed an investigation into alleged European Union regulations infringement at Swedbank, with no comment issued. Swedbank's Estonia branch was earlier linked to a large-scale money laundering scandal involving the now-defunct Tallinn branch of Danske.
The film, a creative science-fiction tale in which a mad scientist (played by Lyford) tries to bring peace to the world through climate-changing science, was shot in and around Seattle, its filmmaker just 20 years old. Though “As the Earth Turns” sat forgotten for many decades, it resurfaced through a serendipitous encounter: Seattle-area musician/composer Ed Hartman met Lyford’s grandniece Kim Lyford Bishop — the mother of one of Hartman’s percussion students — a few years ago. After watching a YouTube video in which Hartman layered his own music track on a Buster Keaton silent scene, Bishop mentioned that she was the estate owner of a film by her uncle and needed to do something with it.
This story is part of a Covering Climate Now reporting series on climate migration called “Flight for Their Lives.” CCNow is a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
“TIGERALERT: GET IN, GET DOWN, COVER UP. Stay where you are and stay away from windows.”
This column is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration cofounded by Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
This story originally appeared in Scientific American and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
We speak with one of the group of five climate activists who have entered their eighth day of hunger strike demanding President Biden pass the full $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan to combat the climate crisis and expand the U.S. social safety net. The climate programs drafted in the bill face opposition from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, who has made millions of dollars from coal companies in his home state of West Virginia since taking office. ”I’m on hunger strike for my family and my future and the promises that the president made to young people who put him in office,” says Kidus Girma, who is on the eighth day of the hunger strike. He argues the reconciliation deal President Biden is said to have cut with Manchin “is simply not enough,” and calls Biden “too much of a coward to fight for the people who actually put him in office.”
A group of Republican members of Congress are traveling to Glasgow, Scotland, in order to attend COP26, the United Nations’ international climate negotiations meant to galvanize global action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Several of the GOP House members, however, have a long track record of climate denial as well as of accepting large donations from the fossil fuel industry.
A review of campaign donations reveals that collectively, the five Republicans have received more than $2.5 million from the oil, gas, and mining industries throughout their elected careers. And voting records show limited support for climate legislation.
COP26 will kick off next Sunday 31 October, following a one-year delay due to the pandemic. The past weeks have been filled with attention-grabbing demonstrations, including a sit-in outside the Dutch parliament in The Hague and a harbour blockade of Shell's refinery in Rotterdam. The urgent underlying message from civil society to world leaders remains the same: stop talking, start doing!
With the United Nations climate-change summit (COP26) in Glasgow less than a few days away, the prospects of forging a global consensus on transformative mitigation strategies to the climate emergency don't look any more promising than they did in previously held rounds of international climate diplomacy.
Upon the release of the latest dire report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (8/9/21), the Washington Post (8/10/21) published a strongly worded editorial under the headline, "Climate Doubters Lose One of Their Last Remaining Arguments."
It is not too much to spend on our military, however. The US will spend more than twice that on the military over the next decade.
When it comes to government spending, no amount of money is too much to prop up the American Empire.
When world leaders gather in Scotland next week for the COP26 climate change conference, activists will be pushing for drastic action to end the world’s catastrophic reliance on fossil fuels. Consciousness about the climate emergency has skyrocketed in recent years, while government responses remain meager. But one aspect of extreme climate jeopardy—“nuclear winter”—has hardly reached the stage of dim awareness
As critics warn the U.S. government is very much on the verge of showing up to next week's U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland with little or nothing to show in terms of new levels of ambition to reduce its planet-heating emissions, new reporting shows how the fossil fuel industry has ramped up its political spending over recent months in order to diminish any chance of real progress on the issue.
"We can't allow corporate influence to drive public policy. That's the people's job."
The infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills moving through Congress are a€ mixed bag when it comes to health care, income support programs, and the care€ economy.
Jørgensen said that the government would do everything it could to support Esbjerg – Denmark’s oil and gas hub – as the oil and gas industry eventually grinds to a halt.
Meanwhile, the government recently co-launched the new Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance (BOGA) initiative – an international campaign aimed at encouraging other countries to also phase out fossil fuel production.
The BOGA initiative will feature heavily in Denmark’s efforts at the forthcoming COP26 climate summit in Glasgow next week.
In the first years of my life, while my parents worked full-time jobs, I was looked after by my Lolo (Tagalog for “grandfather”). Handsome and charming, Lolo had immigrated to the United States from the Philippines as a young civil engineer, bringing along his wife and small children. I was his first grandchild; we were inseparable from the moment we met. My earliest memories are backdropped by the smell of his cooking and the sound of his laugh. Home videos show us just hanging out: him telling stories, me babbling in response.
Progressive lawmakers and other advocates of economic justice welcomed new legislative text for the Billionaires Income Tax unveiled Wednesday by Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden as part of Democrats' Build Back Better Package.
"The Billionaires Income Tax will begin to tax income from wealth like income from work."
"The Corporate Profits Minimum Tax would end corporate double-dealing...so that we can raise essential revenue needed to invest in families and our economy."
New York City taxi drivers have entered their second week of hunger striking outside City Hall to demand that the mayor grant debt relief for thousands of drivers impacted by the taxi medallion price crash. Many drivers purchased taxi medallions, the permits required to drive a taxi, for upwards of $1 million. After the incursion of ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, as well as more recent plummeting demand for taxis due to the pandemic, they are now only worth about $100,000. Faced with massive debt and financial ruin, at least nine drivers have died by suicide. Taxi driver Augustine Tang, who has been on hunger strike for six days and personally knew one of the drivers who committed suicide, says that he is striking for medallion owners who “went into financial ruin” and saw that “there was no way out.” We also speak with Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assemblymember who joined drivers in the hunger strike. Mamdani says, “It’s important for us as legislators to bring to light what it is that people are suffering from out of view of those in the political elite.”
Whatever talents these so-called “leaders” may have, competence in governance is not one of them.
Attorney General Knudsen went€ way off the legal and ethical rails last week by seriously interfering in the treatment of a hospitalized COVID patient€ in Helena. As reported: “St. Peter’s Health can confirm that several providers were contacted by three different public officials last week regarding the treatment of a patient in our care. These conversations were deeply troubling to our physicians and staff because they were threatened and their clinical judgment was called into question by these individuals.”
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal on Wednesday stressed a need for the "transformational investments in programs" that her party's Build Back Better package stands to make and said House progressives wouldn't "be fools" by agreeing to a vote on a pending bipartisan infrastructure bill until the legislative text for a larger social spending package was finalized.
"If we're 90% there on the legislative text, which is what I keep hearing from the Speaker and others, then let's finish.. and we can get both bills done," Jayapal (D-Wash.) told MSNBC's Hallie Jackson.
This morning at 9:00 am, an "Open Letter in Defense of Democracy" was published, simultaneously, by The€ New Republic€ and€ The Bulwark€ (see€ here€ and€ here).
I was reminded of that long ago time because of what’s happening in the Biden administration, which appears to be losing steam as it chuffs and spins its wheels against an obstructionist Trump party and some of its own stubborn conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
If President Joe Biden wants to get somewhere with his far-reaching for-the-middle-class agenda and, most importantly, with resisting voting rights being stolen by Republican states, he’s got to play hardball. He needs to “stop the GOP steal.”
The meaning of “growth” in this context is pretty obvious: Zuckerberg’s company makes a lot of money, and he wants it to make even more.
The meaning of “safety” is somewhat more nebulous. Facebook spokeswoman Dani Lever refers to “difficult decisions between free expressions and harmful speech, security and other issues” before going to a place that should chill the blood of anyone listening:
With so much doom and gloom from pundits and most national reporters making Virginia’s state elections next week seem like a lost cause for Democrats, maybe a little counterprogramming is in order. Yes, Terry McAuliffe is in a tight race for governor with shapeshifting, fleece-vested Republican Glenn Youngkin, and the Democratic House of Delegates 55-seat majority is up for grabs. There are at least six vulnerable Democratic incumbents, and if all of them lose, Republicans would take back the majority.
The company released a study last Thursday finding a “statistically significant difference favoring the political right wing,” when it comes to which tweets are amplified. There is nothing more sacred to any social media algorithm than engagement, which means a tweet from Ted Cruz is more likely to come across your timeline than one from Dick Durbin because Twitter thinks you’re more likely to engage with it.
Civics for the Culture is running an eight-part video series, with a video dropping [sic] every two weeks through the end of 2021, focused on voter education and engagement targeting young Black and brown people across the South before, during, and after an election. In the second episode, premiering today with Teen Vogue, Reid and Civics for the Culture creator Chelsey Hall walk viewers through the process of making a bill become law. Think Schoolhouse Rock, but Gen Z edition.
The dispute the Department of Justice has with Microsoft shouldn't be judged only by antitrust regulations. It should be influenced by the unprecedented security risks to our information-based civilization. The safety of our society, not just the fortunes of Sun, Apple or Netscape, is at stake. The Microsoft defense that the company was only maximizing profits using common competitive methods is unsupportable. Business practices that may be tolerable for a small competitor are perilous when scaled up to security-threatening proportions on a national scale.
I digress, but even if my assessment above is wrong, prominence is all that matters, and Microsoft isn’t a national security threat, individuals and organizations alike are still better off abandoning the Microsoft ecosystem on any scale in favor of more modern alternatives for the foreseeable future. Although Microsoft gets a lot of criticism for the low quality of their products, hence the persistent updates (552 in 2021 thus far) and a revolving door of CVEs, few seem to see the genius behind them. Microsoft doesn’t need to maximize quality or even compete on that field of play when they can render entire organizations dependent on products of less quality.
Because of this, organizations relying on Windows will have a hell of a time migrating away from Windows and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem which means that they’re naturally going to drag their toes in doing so; the bigger they are, the slower any attempt at a migration will go. In turn, this means that there is plenty of time for those that can easily migrate away from the madness and insecurity of the Microsoft ecosystem as a means of sheltering themselves from a barrage of attacks safely in the shadow of Microsoft for the time being.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is looking into disclosed Facebook documents that indicate the company may have violated its 2019 settlement with the regulatory agency over privacy concerns, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Staff at the agency have reportedly started looking at internal Facebook research that identified ill effects of the company’s products, and whether it violated the settlement agreements, according to the Journal.
Facebook’s formula made it so posts that people reacted angrily to were given more weight in what users would see than posts that users reacted to with just a simple push of the “like” icon, according to documents seen by The Washington Post.
The documents showed when Facebook introduced new reaction emojis to their platform, it changed what content was more heavily promoted toward users.
A big open question regarding Rep. Devin Nunes' never ending series of lawsuits against the media has been who is funding those lawsuits. As a watchdog group highlighted last year, House rules require certain steps be followed if a Member is receiving free legal services, and it did not appear that Nunes had followed those steps, and if Nunes were actually paying for those legal services, House rules required that he not be receiving a discount for them, which the watchdog group noted was worth investigating.
Another set of plaintiffs insisting social media platforms have it in for "conservative" users have lost in court. The hook for this lawsuit is the (specious) claim that government officials' statements saying social media services should do more to curb the spread of misinformation (COVID, elections, etc.) somehow transformed these private companies into state actors. So, when they did decide to moderate the conspiracy theorists' accounts, it was ACTUAL CENSORSHIP.
For reasons I don't fully understand, over the last few months, many critics of "big tech" and Facebook, in particular, have latched onto the idea that "the algorithm" is the problem. It's been almost weird how frequently people insist to me that if only social media got rid of algorithmically recommending stuff, and went back to the old fashioned chronological news feed order, all would be good in the world again. Some of this seems based on the idea that algorithms are primed to lead people down a garden path from one type of video to ever more extreme videos (which certainly has happened, though how often is never made clear). Some of it seems to be a bit of a kneejerk reaction to simply disliking the fact that these companies (which many people don't really trust) are making decisions about what you may and may not like -- and that feels kinda creepy.
Summary:€ A major challenge for global internet companies is figuring how to deal with different rules and regulations within different countries. This has proven especially difficult for internet companies looking to operate in China — a country in which many of the most popular global websites€ are blocked.
The environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger joins us just before he is ordered to report to jail today, after a years-long legal battle with the oil company Chevron and 813 days of house arrest. In 2011, Donziger won an $18 billion settlement against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 Indigenous people in Ecuador for dumping 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral land in the Amazon. Since the landmark case, Donziger has faced a series of legal attacks from Chevron and a New York federal judge, who has employed a private law firm linked to the oil company to prosecute him. Earlier this month, he was sentenced to six months in prison for contempt of court, and his request for bail pending his appeal was denied. Amnesty International and United Nations human rights advocates, along with several U.S. lawmakers, are calling for Donziger’s immediate release. “Chevron and these two judges, really allies of the fossil fuel industry, are trying to use me as a weapon to intimidate activists and lawyers who do this work,” says Donziger. “I need to be prosecuted by a neutral prosecutor, not by Chevron.”
Thank you all for your work in support of Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and press freedom. It is an honor to be included in this weekend’s events. There are few causes that deserve more attention than the case of Julian Assange, for freedom of the press, and the public’s right to know, which is paramount to most all other concerns in purportedly free societies. Project Censored stands with you and with Julian Assange in support of a truly free press, always uncensored, and one that reports in the public interest.€
In 1791, in an attempt to stop the publication of the first part of Thomas Paine's seminal work, The Rights of Man, the British government tried to buy up the copyright.
Assange’s extradition was denied in January of this year when District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that ordering his extradition would put him at such high risk of suicide so as to be “oppressive.” The U.S. is appealing that ruling to the UK’s High Court on the grounds that, it argues, the judge misapplied evidence as to Assange’s mental health, and the U.S. government can assure the court that Assange wouldn’t be held under the worst and most isolating conditions if sentenced to a U.S. prison.
"The U.S. government's unrelenting pursuit of Julian Assange makes it clear that this prosecution is a punitive measure, but the case involves concerns which go far beyond the fate of one man and put media freedom and freedom of expression in peril."
"Journalists and publishers are of vital importance in scrutinizing governments, exposing their misdeeds, and holding perpetrators of human rights violations to account," Callamard said. "This disingenuous appeal should be denied, the charges should be dropped, and Julian Assange should be released."
Both actors damaged private property. Jessica Reznicek was labeled a domestic terrorist that is, “dangerous to human life.” Even after the courts deemed Bayou Bridge’s property destruction illegal, the company received no criminal charges and the company was ordered by the district court to pay a mere $150 to each objector. To understand why these two actors have received such different consequences in response to their private property destruction, we must examine their current places within existing power structures.
In July 2017, Jessica Reznicek and a friend from the Des Moines Catholic Worker community held a press conference and admitted several acts of civil disobedience which damaged the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline across Iowa. “We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructures which deny us our rights to water, land, and liberty,” they said. No one was harmed as a result of their actions.
The increasing reliance on tech by law enforcement means the increasing reliance on private companies. It's inevitable that tech developments will be adopted by government agencies, but a lot of this adoption has occurred with minimal oversight or public input. That lack of public insight carries forward to criminal trials, where companies have successfully stepped in to prevent defendants from accessing information about evidence, citing concerns about exposed trade secrets or proprietary software. In other cases, prosecutors have dropped cases rather than risk discussing supposedly sensitive tech in open court.
Four years after the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a federal civil trial charges the organizers with an unlawful conspiracy to commit violent acts. Defendants include Jason Kessler, the main organizer, and Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who spoke at the event. Neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, who slammed his car into a crowd of antiracist counterprotesters during the rally and killed activist Heather Heyer, has already been sentenced to life in prison. Plaintiffs in the case cite the careful advance planning done in online chatrooms to wreak irreparable harm. We look at the details of the case with Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick, who lived in Charlottesville during the 2017 rally, and also its relation to the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse now starting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the judge has ruled the three protesters shot by the white teenager during racial justice protests last year cannot be labeled “victims.”
We were (cautiously) optimistic, but we didn’t kid ourselves: the same bad-idea-havers who convinced the EU to mandate over-blocking, under-performing, monopoly-preserving copyright filters would also try to turn the DSA into yet another excuse to subject Europeans’ speech to automated filtering.€
We were right to worry.
The DSA is now steaming full-speed-ahead on a collision course with even more algorithmic filters - the decidedly unintelligent “AIs” that the 2019 Copyright Directive ultimately put in charge of 500 million peoples’ digital expression in the 27 European member-states.
A coalition of Amazon warehouse workers in New York City have officially filed a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board on Monday.
Kayla Blado, the press secretary for the National Labor Relations Board, confirmed to ABC News on Monday that the union petition was filed in the NLRB's Region 29. The petition must now go through the NLRB's formal representation election process before a vote will be held.
The trial of teenage gunman Kyle Rittenhouse begins next week, but the fix is already in. Rittenhouse, who is being tried as an adult, shot two people dead in the street in Kenosha, Wis., during the protests that followed the shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. That he killed two people is undisputed, but Rittenhouse claims the homicides were justified acts of self-defense.
In the global sting, organised crime gangs were sold encrypted phones with software called ANOM that law enforcement officials could monitor. Authorities said in June that it had led to more than 800 arrests and the confiscation of drugs, weapons, cash and luxury cars.
Europol is to be allowed to carry out ââ¬Å¾discreet“ manhunts and request large amounts of data from private companies, using ââ¬Å¾artificial intelligence“. In addition, the police agency coordinates special units and cooperated with foreign secret services.
The 10-month Operation Dark HunTOR targeted vendors who operated on the DarkMarket site, which was taken down by police in January, the insider told DW.
German prosecutors at the time said DarkMarket came to the fore during a major investigation against the web hosting service Cyberbunker, located in a former NATO bunker in southwest Germany.
Police earlier this year alleged murder plots, weapon purchases and mass drug trafficking were openly discussed on the encrypted online platform, called ANOM, by Australian crime figures and reality TV stars alike.
But unbeknownst to them, their alleged dodgy dealings were being covertly monitored by the US FBI through an app that they all thought was encrypted.
Not only was it not encrypted, ANOM was developed by the FBI - and in a terrible irony for alleged bikies, the mafia and Asian crime gangs, they even paid the FBI a subscription fee to maintain the app that would ultimately destroy them.
Women in the professional, scientific and technical services industry face a pay gap of 22% compared to their male counterparts, an advocacy group for professionals says following a nation-wide survey.
Earlier this year, we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that "big tech" gets a "free ride" on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband expansion. Carr's argument, that companies like Google and Netflix somehow get a free ride (they don't) and should "pay their fair share," is a fifteen year old AT&T lobbyist talking point. AT&T's goal has always been to "double dip"; as in not only get paid for bandwidth by consumers and businesses, but to get an additional troll toll simply for, well, existing.
Being a full participant in the world will eventually depend on access to gigabits of broadband capacity. That capacity will depend on fiber optics. Over the years, EFF has researched and advocated for policy changes at the local, state, and federal levels—all towards the goal of delivering universal fiber to everyone in the country. Part of that work has required us to look back at the mistakes made in the past, how they’ve led to the problems of today, and how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.€
One of the biggest mistakes has been overly relying on large, publicly-traded, for-profit companies to deliver universal access. For decades, policymakers have given billions in subsidies to the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon to build out their networks, with the goal that the existing companies serve everyone. These companies were gifted with countless regulatory favors designed for and often by the largest corporations. Their lobbyists were given front-row status in guiding policy decisions in Congress, state legislatures, and the Federal Communications Commission. In return for nearly two decades of favoritism, still more than half of the country lacks 21st century-ready broadband. Millions in the United States remain unserved.
A new study, funded by EFF, explains why that is and how we can reorient our public investments into broadband infrastructure able to connect all people to the gigabit future. Put simply, the biggest mistake in broadband policy has been in subsidizing broadband carriers, hoping they would build infrastructure, as opposed to focusing directly on future-proof infrastructure development. As a result, when we spend $45 billion—and counting—on supporting any service reaching a bare minimum metric of 25/3 Mbps (the federal definition of broadband), we fail to build long-term infrastructure, while squandering resources on dated copper, cable, and long-range wireless solutions. With another $45 billion potentially getting queued up by Congress, now is the time to rethink how we spend those new funds, and focus not on getting just any service to people, but on getting infrastructure to them that will sustain us for decades.
For more on community broadband:https://www.eff.org/document/community-broadband
"The [Internet] should be open and available for all. That’s what net neutrality is about," Rosenworcel said in an October 2020 statement. "It’s why people from across this country rose up to voice their frustration and anger with the Federal Communications Commission when it decided to ignore their wishes and roll back net neutrality."
She added that she views the rollbacks to net neutrality as a way to "make it easier for broadband companies to block websites, slow speeds, and dictate what we can do and where we can go online."
Positron Access President and Chief Technology Office Pierre Trudeau discusses the current “fiber frenzy,” why multiple-dwelling units sometimes suffer because of uncertainty surrounding the costs of building and some of the solutions available to get better broadband to MDUs.
In this interview with Broadband Breakfast Editor and Publisher Drew Clark, Trudeau also explains how Positron Access provides fiber-builders with a solution to serve otherwise costly or difficult to deploy fiber infrastructure, through a device they refer to as “Gigabit Access Multiplexer,” or a “GAM” for short.
The European Commission has opened a formal competition investigation into Nvidia’s acquisition of chip designer Arm. The deal, which would see Nvidia purchase the UK-based company from SoftBank for $40 billion, was announced in September 2020.
In a press release, the EU’s Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager said that Nvidia buying Arm could make it harder for other manufacturers to access Arm’s technology, hurting much of the semiconductor industry (which is already facing supply problems). At the heart of concerns is Arm’s neutrality. Arm licenses its chip designs to a broad range of companies including Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm, many of which compete with one another and Nvidia. There are fears that having Nvidia control Arm may result in Nvidia’s competitors being put at a disadvantage.
The Microsoft advertisement is deceptive on three counts: Microsoft, with only 0.19% of the GDP, shouldn't represent that damage to itself could potentially injure the entire economy. Microsoft shouldn't claim for itself the accomplishments of the entertainment industry. Nor should Microsoft claim that IT is somehow responsible for 25% of the nation's economic growth based on fictional metrics when that number -- on a cash basis -- is much lower.
Microsoft now sets its sights not only on the control of local computing but also on the sources from which all program code and data originate. Upgrading Microsoft software has been a logical choice for customers who wished to keep up with changes in technology. The risks of an integrated family of operating systems running all global computers, a declared Microsoft objective, make selecting a Microsoft platform more than a purely technical choice. An all-encompassing operating system bares itself to hostile exploitation of paralyzing security flaws. The presence of a fatal defect is unavoidable as the complexity of Microsoft systems expands to bizarre proportions with each new release. It is the search for such a fault that occupies the minds of some of the brightest computer experts. Finding a crack through which one could induce mayhem with only a few keystrokes would be worth a great deal of money, especially when supporting an act of terrorism.
It's only a question of time before the ubiquitous presence of Microsoft operating systems, supported by a software-updating network, reaches a level of interconnectivity that makes a universal systems crash feasible.
I hope you never get sued by a troll but if you do, take a deep breath. Realize you're not powerless. The more we all realize that and the more we band together, the more they go away.
So how does this end? For the troll? Badly. Unified Patents’ IPR [sic] is extremely likely to succeed in invalidating one of the troll’s two patents. Mycroft’s IPR [sic] is likely to succeed in invalidating the relevant claims of the other. In the meantime the trolls have to pay their counsel ( assuming their “counsel” are actually “counsel” and not investors/directors/officers of the shell company ) and associated fees and costs for defending the IPR. [sic] But that’s not the end of it. Mycroft is pursuing damages against the trolls under a Missouri statute designed to defend Missouri companies from trolls. And the dismissal of the troll’s infringement case? It makes Mycroft’s case for damages extremely strong.
The US Copyright Office is expanding a legal shield for fixing digital devices, including cars and medical devices. This morning, the office submitted new exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bars breaking software copy protection. The resulting rules include a revamped section on device repair, reflecting renewed government pressure around “right to repair” issues.
The Register of Copyrights recommends Section 1201 “anti-circumvention” exemptions every three years, a process that has offered legal protections for everything from unlocking cellphones to ripping DVD clips for classroom use. In addition to renewing these and several other exemptions, this latest rulemaking adopts repair-related proposals from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, iFixit, and other organizations. The Librarian of Congress adopted the recommendations in a final rule that will take effect tomorrow.
Some cops play copyrighted music while you record them so that it gets taken down by YouTube or Facebook.
Copyright groups regularly criticize Cloudflare for shielding the hosting locations of pirate sites but in a rebuttal the company paints a different picture. Organizations such as the RIAA and MPA are part of Cloudflare's "trusted notifier" program through which they can get information about accused sites within hours, including IP addresses. However, not all rightsholders treat this privacy-sensitive information with care.
After filing a lawsuit in the summer against the operator of IPTV services including Area 51 and Altered Carbon, last month several Hollywood studios, Netflix and Amazon, demanded $16.35m in damages. In a judgment handed down this week, the movie and TV show companies were awarded 'just' $272,500 and recovered just a fraction of their claimed legal costs.
